Splintered Sunrise

I don’t know whether Norman Geras or Eve Garrard speak Yiddish. My guess would have to be not, as neither of them has much of a sense of irony. For proof, simply take a look at this document over on Normblog. Norm and Eve, writing in a cod-philosophical style for reasons that escape me, are replying to the recent (and entirely welcome) formation of Independent Jewish Voices.

The article is entitled “Just because you’re Jewish, it doesn’t mean you’re right”, and opens with the statement that “There are people who seem to think that if a certain kind of view is held by a Jew, this gives it special authority… The fact that someone happens to think something as a Jew, or to hold the same opinion as a Jew, is neither here nor there in establishing its cogency.” Are Norm and Eve criticising the attempts by their Engagenik buddies to suppress criticism of Israel, or their assumption that goyim (except for reliable “friends of Israel”) have no moral authority to speak on the Middle East, because criticism of the Israeli state is a sure sign of anti-Semitism? No, they are not. As is par for the course with the Euston crowd, their strictures do not apply to themselves.

What the article seems to be about – and the tautologies and logical leaps don’t make it easy to follow – is that Norm and Eve are worried that the IJV people, because they are Jewish and vocally so, will be taken seriously when they have a dig at Israeli policy. This involves a lot of meandering around hypothetical questions of whether it is possible for a fierce defender of Israel to have a clearer view than a fierce critic (Norm and Eve do not say so, but they strongly imply the fierce Zionist to have a priori a clearer view); the issue of whether critics of Israel are succumbing to goyishe social pressures (although Norm and Eve disclaim the term “self-hating Jew”, here it is in essence); that critics of Israel are obsessed with striking a high moral tone (concern with Jewish morality takes second place to tribal solidarity); and that nobody can legitimately criticise Israel without giving pre-eminence to Israel’s security concerns.

While Norm and Eve put some effort into psychoanalysing the IJVniks, they skirt around the main point. That is, Israel claims to represent the entire Jewish people, and bodies such as the Board of Deputies – a self-perpetuating oligarchy – are usually assumed by the goyim to represent British Jewry in toto, although at least 90% of British Jews couldn’t tell you how the Board of Deputies is elected. It would make sense, then, for Jews who object to Israeli policies to say, “Not in my name”. This is precisely what annoys Norm and Eve, hence their designation of the IJVniks as “Self-Appointed Jews”, their apparent euphemism for “self-hating”.

For a serious look at what Norm and Eve really mean, it is worth returning to the Open Letter to Jews for Justice for Palestinians co-signed by Norm, Eve and Shalom Lappin last August. This is more revealing in that its language is less diplomatic, JFJFP being a less respectable body. The most striking thing is that Norm, Eve and Shalom rip into their antagonists for claiming that Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians violates traditional Jewish values. Of course, it depends which brand of traditional Jewish values you mean. One might expect Norm, for instance, to identify with the universalist humanism of Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg.

But no – our scientific materialists, who I am certain rarely darken the doors of a shul, cite as a moral and political authority the fucking Talmud! Specifically, they harp on some dictum of Hillel’s from Pirke Ovos about Jews who “separate themselves from the community”. Vos nokh? Is Norm growing a beard? Is Eve shaving her head and putting on a sheytl? Where do these jokers, who have no serious connection to the religious or cultural life of the Jewish community, get off telling other Jews that they have separated themselves from the community?

The answer of course is the Israeli state, the ersatz religion of many Jews who have abandoned Judaism. According to this standard, by siding with those oppressed by fellow Jews, a Jew does not fulfil a basic moral obligation but, in breaking tribal solidarity, “separates herself from the community”. Thus we have the full implication of Norm and Eve’s “Self-Appointed Jew” – those Jews who deviate a millimetre from what the Engagenik milieu determine to be legitimate criticism of Israel – and that’s a very narrow spectrum indeed – forfeit their right to be called Jews. Meanwhile, atheists of Jewish background can assert their membership of the “community” by obeisance to the Zionist golden calf.

Well, I have held my nose and procured Nick’s little book. From first impressions, it’s even worse than I feared. This is sad in a way, because a lot of Nick’s latter-day comrades are people I would expect no better from. Nick, on the other hand, has quite an illustrious history and used to be downright brilliant on domestic politics – Cruel Britannia was probably the best analysis of Blair’s Britain, and Pretty Straight Guys was a good read too, although the incongruous chapter on Iraq, which gave all the signs of having been added at the last moment, pointed the way to his current position. Foreign policy was always Nick’s weak point, so it was probably inevitable that his downfall would come from that quarter.

So, what are we to make of What’s Left? Well, as I say, there are people from whom nothing better could have been expected. Kamm’s book was utter bilge, but then we all knew what Kamm was like. To find Nick, sometime one of my favourite journalists, writing something like What’s Left? is deeply depressing, and it gives me no pleasure to say that he has been digging ever more frenziedly since publication, probably encouraged by good notices. It seems to me that Nick is completely losing his grip, and one thing we don’t need is a lefty Britney Spears (or, perhaps more accurately, David Icke) on our hands.

The best way to approach this book is in chunks. Nick’s previous books were after all collections of his journalism, and What’s Left? carries this on by being a series of disjointed little essays – and the essays are bad enough singly without Nick’s desperate attempts to make them fit an overarching thesis. So, when Norn Iron commitments allow, I will be blogging a review of Nick in instalments. Since the good folks over at Aaro Watch are finding the book too depressing to cover in much depth, the Sunrise will step into the breach.

Reviewing What’s Left? will also give us an opportunity to look at the phenomenon of the Decent Left as a whole. Since most of the book, those bits not recycled by Nick from his old columns or springing out of his fertile imagination, is lifted from his mates’ books and articles, and sympathetic blogs and websites, some examination of Nick’s sources will be in order. Just look at the rogues’ gallery in the acknowledgments at the back for a veritable Who’s Who of Decentism.

So, readers may expect to be regaled with occasional looks at Nick. Feedback will as always be welcome; and, unlike Nick’s composition of his dire screed, the reviewing process will involve some homework and concern for factuality.

PS. This rather intemperate review by my old friend Ian Birchall in Socialist Worker may be of interest. Not that I am likely to be more temperate, but Ian does have the advantage of concision.

The other night I was flicking channels and happened to come across the party election broadcast by the Workers Party. I will say this for the WP, after the almost unbearable paddywhackery of the Sinn Féin Nua broadcast, theirs was pleasingly low-key. Mostly it consisted of the WP’s most prominent Northern honcho, John Lowry of Twinbrook, speaking direct to camera about various issues of the day.

What Lowry actually said was an unexceptionable run through of various worthy positions the WP has taken. There was nothing there to frighten the horses (especially since Lowry isn’t what you would call a riveting speaker in the Eoghan Harris mould) and the message might even have been attractive to some naïve person who doesn’t know much about the kind of organisation the WP is. There was some stuff about non-payment of water charges, opposition to privatisation and building an anti-sectarian socialist alternative. Which would all be fair enough, if one had any faith in capacity of the Workers Party to build such an alternative.

Rather jarringly, Lowry dropped into the middle of his oration a call for the restoration of the Assembly and Executive, and pledged the Sticks to building the anti-sectarian left alternative within Stormont, in the vanishingly unlikely event of them getting elected. How they proposed to use the structures of Stormont to do this was opaque to say the least.

And yet – this may have been pie-in-the-sky stuff, but Lowry the unreconstructed Stickie has a slightly firmer grasp of reality than the main representatives of Trotskyism in the North. The SWP’s standard-bearer in West Belfast, Andytown teenager Seán Mitchell, has two posters up. One says, “Vote for me and stop water charges! Yo!” while the other says “Vote for me and stop the Bush/Blair agenda! Yo!” (Of course I’m paraphrasing here, but I have got the essential gist. As always with the SWP, the exclamation marks and Yo should be taken as implicit.) This I suppose is the minimum/maximum programme in action.

Such ambition is not for the SWP’s deadly enemies in the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland, who not only eschew Yo politics but keep their maximum programme strictly for internal consumption and polemics with others on the far left. The SPNI’s literature concentrates on the water issue to the exclusion of virtually all else. SPNI proprietor Peter Hadden, the Oblomov of Northern politics, has divined in water charges the magical talisman that will finally slay the sectarian dragon and unite the proletariat behind the SPNI, and Peter’s trusty serfs have been beavering away in accordance with this perspective.

There is something missing here. The Sticks at least mention it, even if they don’t understand it. The Trots ignore it. I refer of course to the restoration of Stormont.

To a superficial thinker, of whom there are many on the far left, this will not appear as a problem. “Oho,” says our superficial thinker, “but the bourgeois sectarian politicians are trying to mislead the workers by making this election a sectarian headcount. We’re trying to bring working-class issues to the fore.” If the superficial thinker is a pretentious wanker, he might even say this is counter-hegemonic.

It’s a seductive argument on the face of it, and the fact that the left lacks the forces to impose its agenda is no reason for not trying. But our superficial thinker misses the point. The point of the election is to restore Stormont, and ideally to cobble together a Paisleyite-Provo coalition government. That is its function. The fact that the election will be a sectarian headcount is not the fault of Machiavellian politicians – it’s built into the process.

Our scientific materialists might do well to take note of empirical reality once in a while. That is, unless their thinking is, as I suspect, not materialist at all but a deviated spawn of mediaeval scholastic thought. And that might explain a thing or two about the economist mindset.

Just a brief stopgap post today, flagging up things that should be in my pending tray but are having to wait behind the flurry of local news. I may or may not get back to them later, but here are some useful links in the meantime.

Courtesy of the estimable Louis Proyect, we have a critique of the Euston Manifesto by Paul Flewers of New Interventions. Obviously there is a huge amount that could be said about the Decent Left, but Paul deals with Euston much more calmly and concisely than I could manage.

Like I suspect most of its readers, I read the Weekly Worker for the gossip, not the political analysis. When they try to write for themselves, the Conrad Party of Great Britain can often be a bit ropy – this steaming pile of Matgamnite horseshit is a case in point. But I was impressed by this very good piece by Anne McShane, on Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs and how the SWP have taken it up as an excuse for their retreat into rightist puritanism.

Finally, this argument on the British left blogs about whether socialists should be in the Labour Party. The latest round can be found here, here, here, here, here and here. And probably a few other places that I haven’t happened across.

Never let it be said that Northern nationalists have lost their knack for street politics. Although they have been fairly quiescent of late, Northern nationalists have a long and not easily forgotten history of voicing their discontents, on occasion inscribing pithy slogans on placards and gathering together in numbers to give off. Thus we see a mass rally being organised for West Belfast next Saturday.

So what is the subject of the rally? Are the proletariat protesting against the restoration of Stormont and the prospect of Big Ian becoming prime minister? No, as far as can be seen most people cling to the vain hope that some deal will be done. Are they, as the left hope, all riled up over water charges? No, although nobody actually wants to pay the charge the non-payment rallies have not been growing – rather the reverse. In fact, the masses are due to rally in support of the promised Irish Language Act.

This is rather revealing of how the peace process works. At the St Andrew’s talks, in exchange for agreeing to whatever Big Ian demanded, the Provos were fobbed off with various small commitments from the Brits, the most visible of which was the promise of legislation to give Irish some sort of official recognition – the details remain vague. There’s nothing wrong with that. It should be a basic democratic position that Irish should get no less official support than Welsh does. And it’s basically a feelgood measure – it gives nationalists the illusion of having their identity recognised without undermining the basis of the Northern statelet. (“Parity of esteem” is the Humespeak term, now widely adopted by all sorts of people.)

But that isn’t how unionists have seen things. Any official recognition of the Fenians, no matter how innocuous, is guaranteed to get unionist backs up. The OUP have got stuck into the DUP for letting this dangerous proposal see the light of day. The Orange Order have taken the headstaggers and included the Language Act as part of their long list of grievances. The DUP, whose position in the past has oscillated between “English Only” and the odd semi-serious attempt to demand parity of esteem for Braid Scotch, have belatedly woken up to the fact that this small gesture to the Fenians is going down like a lead balloon with the Prods. And, while the Brits seemed to have made an ironclad commitment to the legislation, suddenly the proposal finds itself back on the table and gradually sliding off the table. Such is the dynamic of the peace process.

This in turn has started to sink into the nationalist psyche, and a march and rally are necessary to demand something that was supposed to have been a done deal. It’s also interesting that there are two overlapping constituencies involved here. There are in West Belfast many serious and devoted Gaeilgeoirí who are genuinely annoyed about the Brits’ vacillations. But there is also the luvvie wing of Sinn Féin Nua, many of whom know no Irish except “Ba mhaith liom deontas”, but whose beady little eyes lit up like Scrooge McDuck’s at the prospect of a well-funded Gaelic subsection of the grantocracy. Parity of esteem is one thing, but the prospect of those juicy grant cheques vanishing concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Am I being unduly cynical? Possibly. After all, the Language Act is a worthy cause no matter the motivation of the march organisers. It wouldn’t make much practical difference, but Gaeilgeoirí with some experience of activism behind them appreciate the value of even a small victory. But it’s worth noting nonetheless that imperialism can give and take away with equal facility. It’s the old old story – the only rights you have are the ones you can win for yourself.

Or rather, it doesn’t. One has so far failed to detect a wild upsurge of electoral enthusiasm from the broad masses of West Belfast. Nonetheless, the parties are well into the swing of things, and Grizzly’s mug beams down in Big Brother style from every lamppost.

In fact, if Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney is running in six constituencies, one might say that Grizzly is running in all eighteen. This time more than ever, the Provos are running a determinedly presidential campaign. So, although they are standing a five-person ticket in West Belfast – they should have four safe seats out of six, and last time out weren’t far off a fifth quota – the other four may as well be anonymous. Of course, Sinn Féin Nua do have a slight problem in that their other proven vote-getter, Twinbrook’s Michael Ferguson, is inconveniently deceased. Plus, putting Sue “Shell Dockley” Ramsey on a poster might actually lose them votes.

The main problem the Provos are facing in the West is apathy. Those who bother to vote still vote more or less monolithically for Gerry and his crew, but turnout has been plunging in recent years. Such has been the problem that, when it turned out a few months back that thousands of West Belfast residents had dropped off the electoral register, the Provos flew into a panic and launched a registration campaign that extended to free registration forms being given away with copies of the Andytown News. Now the registered electorate is back up to healthy levels, but the “Who gives a toss?” tendency is growing markedly.

Republican Belfast has been much easier for the Gerryites to control than those restless areas out in the sticks, and mooted republican challenges haven’t gained much momentum. Early moves to draft Brendan Hughes as a candidate ran up against Brendan’s poor health, so the only republican challenger in Belfast is RSF’s Geraldine Taylor, who has a certain profile in her native Poleglass. Geraldine is a tough old lady and necessarily so for somebody who annoys the Provos to the extent she does. But I suspect if Geraldine does manage to pull in some votes – and the odds are against her – it will be less because of her dogmatic republicanism and more because of her hard line against the hoods. Everyone in West Belfast knows that the place is a den of criminality, and this is unlikely to be improved by Gerry’s endorsement of the RUC. In fact, the Provos joining policing structures would just make the West an even closer approximation of Sicily. West Belfast people are fairly pragmatic folk, and there is a substantial body of opinion in favour of beating the shit out of the hoods.

This will not help the South Down and Londonderry Party, who are struggling to hold onto their single seat although, with heroic optimism, they are putting up two candidates and will have to rely on super-efficient transfers. The SDLP’s major pitch is that they were right to endorse the cops in 2001 rather than 2007, and the voters should be thanking them for blazing the trail the Provos are now following. Alex Attwood should ask himself whether that pitch has worked in the recent past. Trouble is, the classic Provo mix of crony capitalism and low-level vigilantism was remarkably popular for a long time, and, while there used to be votes to be had in being the anti-violence party, vying with non-violent Provos on the grounds of being fanatically in favour of the rule of law puts the SDLP on a hiding to nothing.

On the other side, the DUP’s Diane Dodds will monopolise the Shankill vote and be in strong contention to retain her seat. The OUP are running some anonymous numpty and the PUP, despite Hughie Smyth’s years of service at City Hall, aren’t running at all.

Which leaves the odds and sods. I’ve written about the SWP – sorry, People Before Profit’s Seán Mitchell already, and I’ll return to the far left presently. But there is some morbid interest to be had in the Workers Party’s masochistic participation. Every election, you think the WP’s once substantial vote can’t sink any lower, and every time you’re proved wrong. Is it physically possible for the long-suffering John Lowry to get fewer votes than last time? Will we actually see him dip into negative figures?

Amidst all the excitement of the Stormont elections, one barely noticed footnote has been the appointment of Professor Paul Bew of Queens to the House of Lords. Lord Bew of Trenchcoat can thus swank about in an ermine robe and sit next to his latter-day patron, Lord Trimble of Garvaghy. He can enjoy the company of great thinkers of our time like, well, I suppose Jeffrey Archer and Conrad Black. And this is a fitting way for Bew to end his political trajectory.

These days Bew is best known as one of Ulster unionism’s small and hardy band of intellectual boosters. He was of course a long-time member of Trimble’s kitchen cabinet. Today he is a bigwig at the neoconservative Henry “Scoop” Jackson Society, a body whose patrons are a motley assortment of Cold War loons and whose journalistic farmhands include towering intellects like the oleaginous Kissingerite Oliver Kamm and the howling Croat nationalist Marko Attila Hoare. This marks him out as an honorary member of Nick Cohen’s Decent Left. But ‘twas not always thus. For most of his career, Bew was an early Althusserian Stalinist, and had some claims to be one of Ireland’s leading Marxist intellectuals.

It has to be said, though, that this was Marxism of a very peculiar kind. Bew was a member of the Workers Party, a group that managed to marry Irish Republicanism with Stalinism and replicate the least attractive features of both. Indeed, Bew adorned the WP’s ard chomhairle for many a year. His Marxism was therefore geared towards the practical needs of his sect. In doing so, it reached a level of sophistry wondrous to behold.

The best example can be found by simply turning to the seminal book The State in Northern Ireland, 1921-72: Political Forces and Social Classes (1979), by Swami Bew and his disciples Gibbon and Patterson. Don’t bother with the book as a whole – what you need to know is in the introduction. Therein Bew, Gibbon and Patterson declare that they have produced the first Marxist analysis of Norn Iron – all that has gone before is not Marxism but “Connollyism”. The three stooges dispense with this unscientific doctrine and restore Marxist orthodoxy by stripping out all that bollocks about imperialism (Leninist or otherwise). Instead, the Orange Bantustan was declared to be a normal bourgeois state, where sectarianism was a mere excrescence. In fact, there was a class struggle between “reactionary” and “progressive” wings of unionism, and the job of socialists was to support the progressive wing in its project of reform. Totally absent was any reference to the nationalist working class, except insofar as this imaginary progressive unionism had to be defended against the “Provo fascists”. Bew simply followed the logic of his ideology by becoming an advisor to David Trimble, the leader of unionism’s progressive wing.

But even before Bew made the break to unionism, this gobbledegook became part of the official theory of the Workers Party, and served to mislead the many thousands of workers influenced by that group down the years. It also influenced whole generations of politics students at Queens, where Bew acted as mentor to leading intellectuals like Austen Morgan (hagiographer of Connolly’s opponent Walker), professional red-baiter Anthony McIntyre and, er, Ian Óg Paisley. And goodness knows how many young socialists had their radicalism knocked out of them by exposure to this provincial variant of Stalinism.

So now Bew, alleged “expert on the Troubles”, scourge of any socialist who claimed imperialism had any relation to modern Ireland, has joined the appointed house of British imperialism’s legislature. In his rightward gallop, he now figures as an analogue to the late Gerry Fitt, only without the working-class background and instincts. And his former disciples must be green with envy that they haven’t been elevated alongside him. Having done just as much damage as Bew, surely they deserve a pleasant little sinecure on the red benches.

Still on the theme of the candidate lists for Stormont, there is a tale almost as odd as that of Bob McCartney’s ability to be in six places at once. (Eat your heart out, Padre Pio!) That is the intervention of the Socialist Workers Party. Readers with even a fleeting experience of the SWP will be aware of their addiction to setting up front groups, so much so that it’s a bit of a surprise these days when they do anything under their own name. But this time around, in deploying two fronts simultaneously, they are really spoiling us.

Since Eamonn McCann has been polling respectable if not earth-shattering results in the city-state of Derry, it was inevitable that he would run this time in Foyle. Eamonn’s candidacy is in the name of his established vehicle, the Socialist Environmental Alliance. One might, then, have expected that any other candidates would run as SEA, as with the SWP’s unsuccessful foray into the Belfast Corporation elections a few years back.

But no! Let me introduce you to 19-year-old Seán Mitchell, who is standing for election in West Belfast. Seán, a most articulate and likeable young fellow, is an active member of the SWP. He is not however a candidate of the Socialist Environmental Alliance. He is the candidate of the People Before Profit Alliance.

Huh?

The PBPA (or PB4P for the Indymedia trendies) is of course the electoral front being mobilised by the 26-county majority of the SWP for the upcoming elections to the Free State Assembly. Why then is it being extended to the North, when the SWP already has a perfectly serviceable 6-county electoral front? I spent quite a long time in the old SWM, and consider myself reasonably well-versed in the Zen of Kieranism, but this has even me scratching my head. Maybe there was a plan to extend People Before Profit across the North, but Derry parochialism vetoed the move. Or maybe it’s simply another example of the unthinking left. Just when you think these bozos can’t get any dafter, they prove you wrong.

It takes me back to the early 90s, when the Socialist Party bore mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device Militant Labour. There was quite a grand launch in Belfast for Militant Labour, which had been formed, so we were told, from the fusion of Militant, the Labour & Trade Union Group, the Young Socialists and Youth Against Sectarianism. In other words, a group that had spent 20 years pretending not to exist and three of its fronts. The proletariat, who I assume were supposed to be impressed by this blatant sock puppetry, greeted the historic fusion with an enormous yawn.

Such, I fear, is likely to be the fate of People Before Profit on its first electoral outing. Eamonn will probably do all right, but young Seán is almost certain to make no impact at all. The most he can hope for is to get more votes than John Lowry, but that isn’t exactly the same as striking a chord with the masses.

The Electoral Office has announced the line-up of candidates for the Stormont poll, and the most immediately striking fact is that Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney, leader of the UK Unionist Party, is running in six of the eighteen constituencies. Not the UKUP in six constituencies – the party is running in thirteen, in six of which the Cream Bun will be the standard-bearer. Under the Good Friday Agreement, it is not quite clear what will happen if Bob gets elected more than once – would he have to give one of his seats to a substitute, or would he have more than one vote in the Assembly? Nobody seems to know. This may seem par-for-the-course egomania from the man whose political vehicle used to appear on ballot papers as the “United Kingdom Unionist Robert McCartney Party”. Or possibly one may speculate that Chairman Bob has invented human cloning. But it’s the latest unpredictable move in Bob’s long and colourful political career.

I remember, back in the late 80s and early 90s, when Bob broke with the Official Unionists and began proclaiming a “new unionism”. This “new unionism” (it sometimes went by the name of “civic unionism”) would be stripped of the old conservatism of the OUP – this was when Smiler Molyneaux was running the show – and have no truck with the DUP’s religious fundamentalism. Rather, it would look to the dynamic, multicultural society across the water. Bob hammered the message home in endless articles in the Telegraph, the News Letter and Fortnight, and lots of bien pensants took him seriously. So much so that a certain type of cerebral unionist viewed Bob as the prince over the water.

It may seem strange now, but when Bob first got into Westminster, then set up the UKUP, he drew much of his kitchen cabinet – notably his aide-de-camp Jeff Dudgeon – from the far left, and specifically from the milieu influenced by the British and Irish Communist Organisation, who Bob had worked with in the Campaign for Equal Citizenship (although he later fell out with Brendan Clifford, and the BICO has since returned to a republican position). The BICO connection would also explain Bob’s close links with the small neo-unionist coterie in the British Labour Party which at the time was going under the banner of Democracy Now. This included Kate Hoey (still an MP on the extreme right of the party), Leo McKinstry (who has since left the party, ate all the pies, and become a why-oh-why pundit for the Daily Express) and Gary Kent (a key point-man in the Labour Friends of Iraq/Unite Against Terror/Euston Manifesto nexus). And these links would explain why Bob chose to declare himself a soulmate of Mr Tony Blair, and told the startled proletariat of Cultra that he would take the Labour whip in the Commons.

Nothing came of that, and, although Bob made lots of “modern” and “civic” noises – and, mind-bogglingly, managed to recruit the Cruiser – the essential logic of unionism still came through. Even when the UKUP was in its first flush of success, a careful examination of its candidate lists would have revealed a surfeit of headbangers who at various points had been slung out of the OUP, the DUP or both. Eccentrics like Dudgeon and the Cruiser, while they lasted, played an ornamental role rather than setting the tone. And so it worked out that, while the PUP/UVF provided Trimble with muscle, Chairman Bob provided the DUP with a brain. Punters in North Down who thought they were getting a moderate realised that what they in fact had was a Paisleyite minus the Bible.

Apart from that, Bob’s tactlessness and poor man-management skills have told against him. He lost himself a wheen of votes on publicly describing the nice people of Holywood as “rent-a-mob”. Holywood people, who will still gripe about having a Belfast telephone code, did not take kindly to being insulted by this buachaill cúinne and turned out en masse to put Lady Sylvia Hermon into Westminster. Dudgeon lost the faith and defected to Trimble; the Cruiser retired back to the warm bosom of the South Dublin neo-democratic chattering class. Most famously, five of the six UKUP Assembly members – that is, everyone bar Bob – walked out to set up the Norn Iron Unionist Party. It must have given Bob some satisfaction that his treacherous comrades all lost their seats at the last Stormont election – scant consolation, since he was out of Westminster, only scraping back to Stormont, and his main political achievement has been to gift the DUP a base they never had in North Down.

This then poses a problem for Bob, as in the upcoming election he seeks to challenge the DUP from the right. The trouble is, most of the people he might seek to recruit to his dissident unionist slate have long experience of working with him, and are none too keen to work with him again. Bob has obviously hit on the brilliant scheme of circumventing his lack of allies by simply running himself multiple times. Why be a general without an army when you can be your own army?

If you haven’t already seen it, I urge you to read this article by Stuart over at Indecent Left. This is, by far, the best review I’ve yet seen of Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? – it really obviates the need for me to write one, although I probably will by and by. Nick is too tempting a target to miss, and from the look of it his book has enough howlers, tendentious assertions and jarring logical jumps to keep a critical reader busy for months.

While on the subject of the Euston Manifesto crowd, I note this precious little piece from Norman Geras favourably quoting his pal Oliver Kamm on the question of whether blogging is good for democracy. Norm and Ollie conclude that it is indeed a good thing to let a thousand flowers bloom, but unfortunately “blogging debate… includes a lot that isn't conducive to deliberation, in a good meaning of that word, or to open-minded consideration of the views of others”. Norm argues that what is needed is “to improve the culture of Internet discussion”.

I need hardly point out that Norm and Ollie promote open discussion by running blogs that don’t allow comments. Physician, heal thyself, I think is the phrase.

Update 21.02.07: For another cracking review of Cohen, check this out.

A wee while back I did a review of the republican press. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that I left one journal out, and deliberately so. That’s because it isn’t strictly speaking a republican journal – in fact, it’s exceedingly difficult to categorise. I am of course referring to the Hibernian, the monthly magazine edited by Gerry McGeough, which I find compulsive reading for all the wrong reasons.

A glance over the back issues of the Hibernian, which are conveniently available online, will confirm that this is hair-raising stuff. The magazine manages to be wildly eclectic while at the same time having a consistent worldview. A lot of this is related to the personality of McGeough, who is a fascinating character. He’s a long-standing and very tough republican, and one of the most articulate critics of the Grizzlyite peace strategy, while at the same time being an extreme Catholic traditionalist, of the sort that Seán Sabhat might have recognised.

So to read the Hibernian is almost to be transported back to 1942 and the heyday of Ailtirí na hAiséirighe. There is trenchant commentary on the peace process, combined with historical articles on past republican struggles and martyrs, plus a rather worrying – due to its sectarian overtones – fixation on native struggles against the Plantation. One also finds the usual clericalist bugbears of abortion and homosexuality. It’s interesting that the February issue describes the Sexual Orientation Regulations as an anti-Catholic measure, while the Orange Order, as noted below, thinks them an anti-Protestant measure. The only charitable thing I can say about this stuff is, anyone who can call SDLP and PSF Assembly members “rapscallions” can’t be all bad.

But it gets odder still. The Hibernian goes big on Masonic conspiracies – the latest issue has a lengthy piece on the Bavarian Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group. This feeds into the regular denunciations of the “Liberal/Masonic Agenda”. You will find acres of stuff on the arcane socio-political philosophy of Fr Denis Fahey, which would appear to provide the Hibernian’s programmatic basis. The February Hibernian also has quite an interesting essay on TV as a mind control device, so I’m hoping that future issues will carry some bizarre pseudo-science as a regular feature.

What’s interesting here is that we have the development of a kind of ultra-Catholic nationalism, without any encouragement whatsoever from the hierarchy – on the contrary, the magazine is full of digs at the “useless” bishops, as well as puffs for the dangerous idea of reintroducing the Latin Mass. The genesis of this is a source of bafflement to me. Maybe McGeough shares the same literary interests as Mel Gibson. Or maybe he’s listened to some of Kieran Allen’s speeches on “Catholic nationalism”, and decided it sounds like a good idea.

The other interesting point is McGeough’s candidacy for Fermanagh/South Tyrone at the upcoming Stormont elections. Word from the area is that he might poll quite well. I would guess, or at least I would hope, that this has more to do with his stance on policing than a public approval of his more esoteric interests. The key question is, will he run a republican campaign or will he rant and rave about the nefarious influence of the Jewmen and Freemasons? If his speech at the dissident conference in Derry is any guide, probably a bit of both.

So there you have it – the most articulate standard-bearer for dissidence is a howling Ultramontanist reactionary. I am depressed.

You often hear these days about the modernisers and pragmatists in the DUP. Chief among these are the husband-and-wife team of Cllr Peter Robinson MP MLA, the party’s deputy leader, and Cllr Iris Robinson MP MLA. Like most of the DUP “pragmatists”, how they got this reputation boggles my mind, although it doesn’t take much to be relatively pragmatic in comparison to Papa Doc.

Although he has been a Westminster MP since 1979, Robbo has never really taken to the Big House – his real love is his little fiefdom of Castlereagh Council. What he would like Castlereagh to be known for is having year on year the lowest rates in the North, a result of the money-spinning Dundonald Ice Bowl combined with services pared to the bone. What it’s actually better known for is being a kind of loyalist North Korea. Council meetings are marked mainly by non-DUP members squirming as Peter and Iris coo at each other across the chamber. The recent trend for Robinson children to get onto the council only promises to make this worse. And then there’s Peter’s egocentric crusade to get every street, public building and edifice in Castlereagh named after himself.

In recent years the Robinsons have been portrayed by the media as being on the “pragmatic” wing of the DUP. This seems to come less from their actual politics – they have faithfully served Big Ian for decades and have given no sign of changing their minds on anything – than their style. The Belfast-based Robbo faction is much less likely to Bible-bash than rural Duppies like “Singing” Willie McCrea. Plus, there are the makeovers, suggesting that Trinny and Susannah might have had a quiet word with them.

Peter has had laser eye surgery, removing the steely glint of his specs. He’s also replaced his traditional cowlick with fashionably tousled hair, and developed a taste for loud ties. Can designer stubble be far behind? Iris, meanwhile, has ditched her wee hard woman look in favour of cultivating a softer image, and has been styled and coiffured to within an inch of her life. She has been sexed up to the point where she now, I suppose, counts as the resident milf in a notably glamour-starved party – so much so that I would only be mildly surprised to hear she was doing Playboy.

Given Iris’s carefully cultivated soft-focus image, it seems to have come as a shock to come people that she would stick the boot into integrated education, following direct rule education minister Maria Eagle’s refusal to consider funding Rowallane College, a new integrated school in her constituency. It has certainly annoyed the Rowallane parents, who, like many parents in similar circumstances, have invested a lot in giving their kids a non-sectarian education. Plus, Norn Iron is full of dopey do-gooders, many of them in the Alliance Party, who believe integrated schools are the key to the Province’s future. How could Iris be so uncharitable to these perfectly harmless institutions?

Anybody who is shocked by this obviously hasn’t paid much attention to the utterances of the DUP’s education spokesman, Sammy “The Streaker” Wilson. Sammy has consistently and articulately defended the traditional DUP position of support for the status quo, or better still the status quo ante. That means retaining the 11+, defending the grammar schools, keeping “vocationally” oriented secondary schools for the great Prod unwashed, and allowing Catholics to have separate development. And it remains important symbolically that the state sector should stay “Protestant”, as Iris herself has been saying for ages. Integrated schools, which rock the boat in a very mild way, annoy the hell out of political unionism, the OUP as well as the DUP.

In fact, anybody with a progressive bone in their body should be arguing for a unified and secular education system in the North. Since the days of the old Stormont, this has been one of those issues where unionism can find common ground with the almost equally unlovely forces of Catholic reaction. Doing down both would be a cause worth fighting for, and if it exposes the very real sectarianism of “modernising” unionism, so much the better.

I know this has taken a while, but it’s difficult to know what I can add to the acres of discussion about the O’Loan report – the Police Ombudsman’s report into Mount Vernon is available here (pdf) and readers might also be interested in this article by Liam Ó Ruairc of the IRSP. Although I’m not in total agreement with Liam – among other things, I’m dubious about his description of Henry McDonald as a “reputable journalist” – he gives a good overview of the situation.

The first thing to say is to pay tribute to the courage and tenacity of Raymond McCord, without whose determination to see justice done for his son the investigation probably wouldn’t have happened. Also this represents good work by Mrs O’Loan herself, in the face of persistent and long-term obstruction by a force in which RUC officers still rule the roost, and where the prevailing culture is that the cops are under no obligation whatsoever to be accountable to anyone for anything.

What’s disappointing about the O’Loan report – at least the published part – is that it doesn’t fundamentally tell us anything we didn’t already know. Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knew that the peelers were running gangs of loyalist killers for decades. What the O’Loan report does, though, is lay out enough evidence to make the strategy impossible to deny – not that that has stopped unionists from trying.

What transpires is that, during the dozen years that Mark Haddock was a police informer, he was involved in at least 16 murders, 10 attempted murders and scores of other crimes that we know about. And over these years the cops gave him £80,000. Now bear in mind the Mount Vernon death squad was one small section of the UVF – an investigation into Robin Jackson and Billy Wright’s activities in Portadown would almost certainly reveal the same scenario on a bigger scale. What this means, in effect, is that for decades on end the Brits had a small army of Fred Wests and Dr Shipmans running around, doing their dirty work on the state payroll. And in fact the state actively covered up for them, as O’Loan details when describing the phoney interviews and destroyed evidence. This of course is totally consistent with Jonty Brown’s description of the Special Branch modus operandi.

Now let’s look at the “security” justifications. This comes into play because former RUC Special Branch boss Chris Albiston, latterly head of the colonial police in Kosovo, stated in the Telegraph that mere laypeople (and implicitly, especially not uppity Catholic women) couldn’t judge operational decisions. But the main justification for running informers is to protect the public from worse crimes that might be committed – allowing informers to commit mass murder is hardly consistent with that. Again, the relationship between handler and informer means that any informer can be called in at any time and ordered to turn Queen’s evidence, but that seems never to have occurred to Special Branch. Not to mention that the Mount Vernon UVF was so riddled with informers that it could have been closed down at will.

The affair also points up the key difference between republicans and loyalists. It is true that informers in the Provos, some at a very high level – and who really thinks Scap and Donaldson are the end of that story? – were left in place for a long time and allowed to get away with all sorts of murky deeds. But the Provos were ostensibly a revolutionary movement aiming at the overthrow of the northern colony, which is why informing was a capital offence. The loyalist gangs, on the other hand, saw themselves as a “gloves-off” extension of the state forces, and it is clear that the feeling was mutual.

Probably more interesting is the political reaction. Unionism has reacted in the predictable way – Jeffrey Boy Donaldson referred to a handful of bad apples, and that view was echoed by the DUP’s Policing Board representatives under the leadership (I use the term lightly) of Ian Óg Paisley. The OUP, meanwhile, in the persons of Lord Ken Maginnis and Dirty Dave Burnside, has been even deeper in denial, protesting about the apparent “witch-hunt” against Special Branch. This is of a piece with the OUP’s recent and not entirely unsuccessful efforts to outflank the DUP on the far right.

Nationalism, meanwhile, has proclaimed that “that was then, this is now”. The SDLP of course is covering it ass, pretending that its membership of the Policing Board since 2001 has forced radical changes. The Provos, on a parallel track, have argued that the O’Loan report demonstrates why they should join policing structures in order to, um, force radical changes.

Here’s why I think this approach lacks credibility. The sealed part of the O’Loan report is probably much more interesting than the published part. Most commentators’ guess is that this part deals with the role of MI5 and its influence over Special Branch. People with any kind of attention span will have noticed that MI5 is due to take over anti-subversion responsibilities in the “Province” later in the year. To this end, it is building a whopping great new headquarters outside Belfast, which should itself cast doubt on the Gerryites’ boasting that British withdrawal is on the cards. Not to mention that MI5’s Norn Iron operation is stuffed full of, you’ve guessed it, former RUC Special Branch officers.

That was then, this is now? More like plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

One of the debates running through the Irish left in recent years has been on the question of “democratic centralism”, which is alleged to be a system of organisation derived from the writings of VI Lenin. Actually I think Lenin’s approach to the matter is very poorly understood, but let’s run with this a while.

There are on the Irish far left several organisations claiming to be Leninist and adhering to democratic centralism. Most leftists who aren’t in these groups are deeply anti-Leninist, not usually because they have a worked-out critique of Lenin’s political thought but rather because they don’t think much of the organisations that claim to adhere to it. A good example is the vociferously “anti-Leninist” Irish Socialist Network. Most of the ISN’s members have a background in the Workers Party, and they have a few younger activists who come from the SWP. Well might one protest that those groups are not democratic centralist but simply centralist – the experience of ISN members leads them, quite understandably, to react against loud proclamations on the virtues of “democratic centralism”.

I have my doubts about the ISN – especially about their great claims to having no leadership – but there’s something to their position. Groups like the SWP and the Socialist Party do have a tendency to treat “democratic centralism” as a magical fetish, and anyone who has been on the rough end of those groups’ regimes will know how much democracy is involved. My view is that if you strip down democratic centralism to its essential elements – you take a decision democratically, the majority rules, you carry out the decision in a unified way and minorities are given room to loyally collaborate – it has a lot going for it. Certainly there is nothing intrinsically evil about it. And you’ll notice that the form of organisation doesn’t necessarily correspond to a revolutionary Marxist party – you could just as easily run a cricket club on the basis of democratic centralism.

Nor, and this is important, does the idea contain any intrinsic political virtue. This may come as a shock to, say, SWP members who are immensely proud of their “Leninist” regime and believe that it guards them against political sin. But Fianna Fáil is organised on the basis of democratic centralism, and it has no fixed political principles at all. What’s more, despite a pronounced cult of the Infallible Leader, FF is a good deal more democratic than the SWP.

Consider this. If you want to be on the FF National Executive, all you need to do is get some party body to nominate you, and then do the rounds of the cumainn and comhairlí ceanntair trying to drum up some votes. It isn’t easy to get elected, but it’s easy enough to get nominated, and once nominated, you have as fair a crack of the whip as anyone.

By way of contrast, how does the SWP elect its Political Committee? What happens is that at the annual conference – usually right at the end of proceedings – the outgoing PC will nominate a “slate” of 10 or 12 names to be the new PC. Most of those names don’t change from year to year, but there are normally a couple of new faces to give the impression of fresh blood.

It’s important to realise that the slate, once proposed, can’t be amended. If you, the conference delegate, would like to remove Kevin Wingfield and substitute Paul O’Brien, you can’t propose that. You have to vote for or against the slate as a whole. Or else you can put forward an alternative slate, meaning you have to twist people’s arms to see if they’ll put themselves forward against the existing leadership. Given the SWP’s absurdly draconian restrictions on members associating with each other, which make it impossible to organise opposition outside the conference, actually getting an opposition together over the 48 hours of the conference itself is beyond any but the most energetic factionalist, and almost certainly more trouble than it’s worth. Not to mention that any member suspected of being an oppositionist will quickly find herself an ex-member.

This anti-democratic procedure explains how a group of “leaders” with scarce any experience in leading anything but their own small sect get to hold seats on the PC on a more or less permanent basis, sometimes for decades on end. There is no fresh blood except for a select few promoted by the permanent leadership, who invariably become clones. There is no fresh thinking except that coming from the papal curia in London, which itself is “elected” on the same basis, and with the same results. I know most of the Irish SWP leadership reasonably well, and while there is undoubtedly talent there, there is nothing that justifies anyone holding a leadership position for 25 or 30 years unbroken. In a proper political party, many if not most of these people would have been out on their ear years ago.

SWP members who are interested in the health of their organisation – and they do exist – might be well advised to ponder whether the slate system, which is also used for such purposes as electing conference and NC delegates, is really all it’s cracked up to be. They might also consider the question of term limits or compulsory rotation for leading members. A spell at the grassroots might do some people good, especially Kieran.

Shortly the massed ranks of the DUP’s Assembly candidates will gather to have their candidacies formally ratified by the party and to receive the benediction of their Supreme Spiritual Leader, Pope Ian. But what will surely be played as a triumphant event has been a little overshadowed by well-sourced reports about the “contract” prospective DUP candidates are having to sign, which looks more like a contract on the candidates. It certainly sheds some light on the mafia-style tactics Papa Doc uses to rule the misnamed Democratic Unionist Party with a rod of iron.

The fines are a case in point. It has been reported that fines up to £20,000 may be imposed on MLAs who vote against the party whip. Various Duppies have protested that fines are a well-established part of their party’s disciplinary system. This is true – one often hears of DUP representatives having to fork up fifty or a hundred quid for missing a meeting without a good excuse. But, even bearing in mind the generous salary package for a Stormont MLA, twenty grand seems a bit steep.

Then there are the pre-signed resignation letters. This is the silver bullet – any MLA who seriously incurs Big Ian’s displeasure can simply be divested of their Assembly seat. Apparently the tactic has been used on at least two previous occasions, and at least in part explains the DUP’s impressive disciplinary record. I have a sneaking feeling this scheme may have been borrowed from Ross Perot – in his book Better Than Sex, the late Hunter Thompson relates how in the 1992 presidential election he wanted to be a Perot delegate to the Electoral College, though he didn’t plan on voting for Perot. The little weasel sent HST an undated resignation letter to sign before he could be considered as a delegate.

The background to this is the emergence of candidates trying to challenge the DUP from the right, analogous to the dissident republican challenge to Grizzly. Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney is the leading light here, although his habit of losing friends and alienating people tends to militate against a united slate. Nonetheless, challenges to the DUP there will undoubtedly be.

I suppose the DUP could be considered a victim of its own success. During the late 90s the party’s electoral gains came at the expense of the flotsam and jetsam of independents and micro-parties abounding in unionism at the time, the wreck of the McCartneyite Hesperus. Then a few years back it cleaned up as the Donaldsonite wing of the OUP defected wholesale. This, as it happens, has simply relocated the OUP’s internal contradictions into the DUP. And now the other wing of the influx is turning around to bite Ian’s bum. Who says there’s no such thing as poetic justice?

Update 10.02.07: The twenty grand fine seems to have been a bit of an embarrassment for the DUP. MLAs now face a fine of a mere £2000 for breaking the party whip.

Last Friday night, Orange Order bigwig Drew Nelson gave an oration to the broad masses of Newtownards on how, to use loyalism’s favourite phrase of the moment, Norn Iron was becoming a “cold house” for Prods. In other words, the Fenians are getting everything and we are now the oppressed people. (Not, of course, that the Fenians were oppressed in the first place, and, even if they were, it’s no more than they deserved.)

Unfortunately, the News Letter’s website isn’t the most navigable, so I haven’t yet been able to find a link to the big spread the Voice of Bigotry did on Saturday morning on the theme of how God’s Wee Ulster was being steadily de-Orangeised. Bro Nelson’s main complaint, among many, was that the DUP had failed to secure as part of the St Andrew’s talks the Loyal Orders’ statutory right to have coat-trailing marches in areas where they weren’t wanted. And that really is what the Orangemen mean by the “right to march” – anybody with the misfortune to live in a Protestant area will be well aware that Orange marches are far from being an endangered species.

Bro Nelson, though, had a few other strings to his bow. There was an entirely predictable gripe about the promised Irish Language Act, which the Prodocracy seem to think will be the end of civilisation, while conversely the luvvie wing of Sinn Féin Nua are almost orgasmic with expectation. I do wish people would have a look at what the Welsh Language Act has (or hasn’t) achieved before getting their knickers in a twist about legislation which could well be a good deal weaker.

One notable thing was that Bro Nelson got fairly stuck into the new Sexual Orientation Regulations. Unionism is on a bit of a homophobic binge over this harmless bit of legislation, which for some perplexing reason it sees as specifically “anti-Protestant”. In the debate on the regulations in the Transitional Assembly it was noticeable how the 39-39 tied vote broke down. In favour of equality were the SDLP, the Provos, Alliance and the late David Ervine. Opposed were the DUP, the OUP and, with supreme bathos, Paul “Sports Massage” Berry. Not a single representative of mainstream unionism was prepared to accept that the gay community had a right to equal treatment. This was carried over into the House of Lords debate, where the assault on the regulations was led by the DUP’s Maurice Morrow (surely proof that Mr Tony will dish them out to anybody).

There has been some discussion on this blog about whether unionism is necessarily sectarian. This poses the interesting question – is unionism capable of comprehending the concept of equality? You see, it is possible to imagine an ideal non-sectarian unionism. The “civic unionism” touted around the op-ed pages by the Cadogan Group and Cream Bun McCartney, with its copious references to the “modern” and “multicultural” UK state in opposition to the “backward” Banana Republic, is of this ilk. But when you take a look at actually existing unionism, the picture is a lot less pretty. Bro Nelson’s view that equal rights for gays is anti-Protestant seems of a piece with Cllr Ruth Patterson’s statement after the anti-Chinese pogrom in South Belfast that the Chinese were compromising the “Protestant character” of the area.

I also look forward to seeing what Steven King and Jeff Dudgeon have to say on the matter. After all, it’s not for nothing that these boys have propagandised so fervently for “civic unionism”. Speak up! All those closeted gays in the Orange need all the moral support they can get.

I don’t intend to make a habit of bigging up the Daily Mail, but I think readers may well enjoy this excellent article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Blair’s faith-based premiership. On this evidence, I would guess that Geoffrey’s forthcoming book, Yo Blair!, will be quite the read, and certainly a lot more fun than Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? Of which you can read much informed comment over at Aaro Watch.

Many thanks to the White Queen for helping to plug a bit of a gap. I promise, the O’Loan report is coming soon.

I’m extremely gratified that my old friend Splinter has chosen to broaden out the Sunrise by inviting in guest contributors. At least, he says it’s a broadening and an attempt to bring in different perspectives – I suspect there may be some slacking going on. Anyway, I’m indebted for the platform and will endeavour to live up to the high standards of this blog.

I am an occasional reader of the Socialist Democracy website, having found that, despite a rather dour style, the Grumpy Old Men of Irish Trotskyism do produce consistently useful material. One thing that caught my eye recently was this article by Andrew Johnson on the Moriarty Report into Charlie Haughey’s corruption. It’s actually not a bad article, giving a decent recap of the essential points and trying to put the whole corruption issue in some sort of historical context. This makes a welcome change from the history-by-character-assassination practiced by yahoos like Stephen Collins, who would have you believe Charlie was the root of all evil in Irish politics.

The article, however, and this is what I don’t like about the left press, is marred by quite a bit of schematic dogmatism. This seems to be the SD house style – they don’t make many concessions to the reader who isn’t immaculately versed in their politics, and there is a tendency to conclude with their entire programme. What I would particularly take issue with is Johnson’s historical account of “the rise of corruption”, which is written in a telegraphic manner that fails to take into account some of the nuances of 26-county politics. Perhaps that can be forgiven in somebody writing from the vantage point of Belfast, but for the southern reader it’s a little jarring.

For instance, Johnson makes big play of the “de-republicanising” of Fianna Fáil in response to the explosion in the North in 1969. But FF didn’t simply ditch the First Aim of its Córú and proceed in a political vacuum. Rather, the old policy, laid down in the New Departure of 1926 which established FF as the constitutional republican party, was replaced by a new policy, enunciated by Jack Lynch in 1970 and endorsed at the 1971 Ard Fheis. This new policy, which Lynch passed off in typically opportunistic fashion as the old policy retooled for new conditions, was in fact the old Cumann na nGaedheal policy from the 1920s.

Johnson is also more than a little hazy on the divisions within Fianna Fáil in those years. It is true that, in the 1960s popular imagination, Charlie was the exemplar of Homo Mohairicus, but things were more complicated and much more interesting than that. Neil Blaney was often characterised in those days as a Mohair Suit Man, but Neil may have been, along with my mentor Kevin Boland, one of the last honest men in Fianna Fáil and a good traditional republican. Conversely, if there was one man in the FF leadership who took the lead in ditching the party’s time-honoured ideology, it was the ostentatiously old-fashioned George Colley. The events surrounding the Arms Non-Crisis are usually and correctly held to be a precursor to the 1985 split (and it was no coincidence that the “retired” Jack Lynch became the Desocrats’ éminence grise), so a more in-depth analysis would not go amiss. The politics of Ireland in recent decades has been ill served by radical historiography, and may provide more fertile grounds for research than yet another paper on 1798 in Roscommon.

I have genuinely mixed feelings about Charlie. Of course he was a shocking old reprobate and I wouldn’t want to defend his crookery for a second. But there was no doubting his extraordinary ability and I’m in no doubt that the tofu-eating South Dublin neo-democrats (© Splinter) hated him not for his failings but for his better points, most notably his populism and his residual (in fact largely rhetorical) republicanism. This I think is why so much of the spiteful commentary on his decline and fall leaves a bad taste. Charlie probably deserved a spell behind bars, but he didn’t deserve to have his epitaph written by those who never did the nation any service at all.