Author: Michael Kirke

Michael Kirke was born in Co. Donegal and attended St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, 1957-1962. In 1966 he graduated from University College Dublin (History and Politics). In 1966 he began working on the editorial desk of The Evening Press in Dublin and in 1968 went to the newsroom of the Irish Press group of newspapers – contributing news and features to the group’s three titles, The Irish Press (morning paper), The Evening Press and The Sunday Press. In 1969 he went to Belfast and covered the initial unravelling of the Unionist hegemony in the province. Later that year he became the group’s education specialist. In 1973 took leave of absence to pursue postgraduate studies in education in Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1976. In 1978 he left journalism and moved into teaching. In 1981 was appointed headmaster of Rockbrook Park School in Dublin (www.rockbrook.ie). In 1994 resigned from that post and moved to live in the West of Ireland (Galway) where he began working part-time in media again. He is now back in Dublin working, among other things, as a freelance writer. His main interests are in political, cultural and educational affairs – as well as issues related to religious faith.

The Times and the BBC both report (Monday 26 Febru…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

The Times and the BBC both report (Monday 26 February) that the British Council is cutting its budget for work on the European mainland to allow it to put more into its work in the Arab and Muslim world. Surely this is a good idea? There cannot be much more that Europe needs to know about British culture than it knows already – at least not much more that an organisation like the BC can help with. With the language as dominant as it is and with the BBC so far ahead of any other broadcasting organisation in terms of quality and penetration, all the BC can be doing in Europe is preaching to the converted.

The Muslim world is really the critical frontier. But as the experience of living with Muslims in Britain seems to show, it will not be easy. It is fashionalble to laugh off the idea of a clash of civilizations. Don’t be fooled. There really is a clash – and the BC’s initiatives are likely to exacerbate it in the short term. In the longer term, hopefully, it will be resolved.

The problem of course is not the mainstream of Islam. The problem is the radical fringe which will see any effort to introduce the faithful to Anglo-Saxon-Western values and way of life as a corrupting exercise – and they are right. Radical Islam cannot go to bed with Western values and survive. This is a fight to the death for the radical Muslim. This is what is going on in Afghanistan and in many other places. The outcome is pretty certain but there will be casualties and the resolution will take a long time. More power to the British Council.

In the same issue of the London Times I see that AA Gill is declaring that “gayness is not a sin. It’s not even a faux pas”. Is this more of the deliberate muddling of Christian morality which we get so much of from the “liberal” wing. I do not know any serious moral teaching that says “gayness” is a sin – no more than being hot-tempered is. Sin has to do with willful acts, acted out or otherwise. It comes only with surrender to tendencies which are contrary to an ordered human nature.

The Catholic Church shocks some people when it describes gayness as a disorder. We find lots of disordered tendencies in our nature – greediness, laziness, anger – but we do not get offended when it is suggested to us that we deal with these appropriately. Gays who deal with their gayness will be on the right track when they do the same – just as I will be when I deal with my laziness by getting out of bed in the morning when I don’t feel like it.

Christopher Howse in the Daily Telegraph a few weeks ago put his finger on the problem of course, writing in the context of the pickle which the Anglican Church has got itself into on this matter. The moral confusion, he suggested, all stems from the rejection of the moral principle that sexual acts are sinful if they are radically dissociated from the act of procreation. In other words, if deliberate contraception is not sinful, then no consensual or individual sexual act is sinful. Is it fair to say that the great moral divide of our time is the gap between those who believe this and those who don’t?

Finally, on a more uplifting note: what a special weekend we had here in Dublin.
The papers are full of historic musings about how our two islands, our two nations which share such an overwhelmingly common culture as to be really only remotely two nations, came together paradoxically in a great act of reconciliation on the battlefield of rugby. Needless to say our equivalent of the Taleban, continuity, real – or whatever they want to call themselves – IRA were hanging around the fringes of our celebrations. Mercifully, their day is gone at last and never did “tiochaid ar lá” sound more foolish.

We all wanted to put the past behind us – and we did. Whether or not we thought the 1916 rebellion was a wrong turning in our history, diverting us from the legitimate path to self-determination which we had hopefully entered on a few years earlier, we put those thoughts aside. Perhaps the long and painful saga of our invention of a false and forced national identity as “anything but British” might finally be petering out and we will be able to get on with genuinely being ourselves, accepting all those elements, Irish and British – to name but two – which make us what we are.

Saddam is gone – and what conflicting reactions ab…

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International Affairs6 Comments

Saddam is gone – and what conflicting reactions abound. Many supporters of the war which overthrew him still cannot bring themselves to reverse their judgements – and I number myself among them. Some of those judgements have clearly been undermined as the law of unintended consequences unfolded. However, new ones have taken their place and on balance these still support the intervention. But we are clearly in the minority. Is it pride, desperation or right judgement that keeps us sticking to our post?

The reality of our position now – whatever rational arguments we may still be prepared to entertain and advance in its support – is more that of the desperate victim who has walked into a trap and has to fight for his life to get out of it. The enemy has been engaged, the engagement has opened a Pandora’s box of indescribable complexity but now has to be closed. They cannot leave it open. They have no choice but to fight to the end and hope against hope for an ultimately positive outcome.

The anti-war faction is of no help. The sterility of their “I-told-you-so” stance – spoken or unspoken – offers nothing. Whatever might be said for the misgivings on which they based their original opposition to the military action they now have nothing to say that is positive.

The unpalatable thought for those who supported the action – in the belief that it was protecting the world from an imminent threat (nuclear chemical WMD) which turned out to be no threat in fact, and in the belief that the volatility of Iraq under Saddam was something that could be removed with his removal – is that death and destruction have come in its wake along with the creation of an apparently more threatening instability than was there before.

The most painful truth of all that may have to be faced is that the just war basis which had been held to support the action has been fatally compromised by the apparent calamity that has ensued. On the basis that some kind of proportionality should apply and on the basis that a hope of a successful outcome with a minimal suffering and death should ensue, the case for this being a just war seems no longer tenable.

And yet a lingering suspicion persists. All this may be necessary, all this may be an unavoidable conflict in the interests of avoiding an even greater conflict and catastrophe. Had there been a political will prepared to face up to the perceived threats of Nazi Germany in the 1930s which would have been prepared to engage militarily with the monster at an earlier stage of its development, would millions, tens of millions of lives been saved?

There is a Middle East scenario which is potentially as disastrous as any of the two great world wars proved to be. Millions have already died in a conflict between Iraq and Iran. In this case the majority who died were military personnel. Sadam was not going to live forever and one might have anticipated his death – from either natural or unnatural cause any time over this decade. What was likely to happen in the aftermath of that death is probably a pale shadow of the conflict now raging there. The Rwanda massacres for which the world still feels guilty would probably even have been a pale reflection. The world’s greatest military machine is grappling with a situation which by now would be a quagmire of blood were it not in the place to help contain it.

A militant fundamentalist Islamic nuclear power is a far more frightening prospect than a nuclear Communist power ever was. Iran still threatens to become one. Had Sadam become one Iran would certainly have done so. Had Saddam’s regime collapsed into a vacuum then Iran would almost certainly have gone to war to protect the Shia community and Saudi Arabia to protect the Suni. The rest of the world could not have stood aside and watched the oil on which its entire economic structure is based run into the sand. A war bringing unimaginable suffering and death and of unimaginably disastrous consequences would have followed.

Hypotheses? Perhaps. But politics of any kind, national or international has to take account of hypotheses, weigh them up and act. Had the hypotheses of the few in the 1930s been acted upon there would doubtless have been death and destruction and many would have excoriated the few responsible. But had that happened the greatest evil that the world has ever seen would have been prevented.

America and Britain have to stay the course in Iraq and in Afghanistan. It does not mean they have to conduct themselves on this course in the way they have to date. The reality is that there is a monster lurking in the fold of Islam. It is not Islam itself but it will destroy Islam the world as we know it unless it is removed.

These are the conflicting thoughts lingering in the mind of one who in 2003 thought that the Coalition which invaded Iraq was going in to do good job quickly. Guilty of naivety? With hindsight, yes? But if he was guilty of naivety once he may be even more determined not to make the same mistake twice.