Category: National and International Affairs

It’s not about “cold fish” or “wet fish” – it’s about people’s lives, stupid

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

What a breath of fresh air this sober analysis is after the rantings of Paul Krugman  and utterly blinkered wishful thinking of Lara Marlow in the Irish Times and her other platforms.

Liberalism’s Glass Jaw by ROSS DOUTHAT in today’s New York Times calmly and coolly exposes the bubbly substance of everything that Obama stands for and shows us that the real problem with all this is not Obama himself but the fragile ideology he stands on. We can only hope that while he has been able to fool a majority of the people to get  one term in office he will not be able to fool enough of them to get a second.

As Doubthat reads it, all of Obama’s signature accomplishments have tended to have the same weakness in common: They have been weighed down by interest-group payoffs and compromised by concessions to powerful insiders, from big pharma (which stands to profit handsomely from the health care bill) to the biggest banks (which were mostly protected by the Dodd-Frank financial reform).

It may have been an empty rhetorical gesture, but the fact that Romney could actually out-populist the president on “too big to fail” during the last debate speaks to the Obama-era tendency for liberalism to blur into a kind of corporatism, in which big government intertwines with big business rather than restraining it.

Doubthat does not mention his social policy “evolutions” and the concessions he has risked making to the gay lobby on marriage, the ease with which he has slipped into assuming that Christian consciences on sexual morality issues can be tossed around the ring like so many rag dolls. But he might have done. These were the cotton wool compassionate gestures which Obama has allowed to distract him from really grappling with the more difficult challenges of getting the country back on its feet.

One hopes that the American electorate will get well beyond the preoccupation which some in the media have tried to focus on – whether it is Romney as a “cold fish”, or Obama as a “wet fish” – and look at the real issues of substance which Doubthat summarizes here.

Do we really deserve this?

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

The “silly season” seemed to start early this summer – not even waiting for our revered political assemblies to take their well –earned breaks. A month ago the newspapers were already scraping the bottoms of their troughs of choice. Time spent on them in the morning got shorter and shorter as the weeks moved on. America excepted. While the political battle being engaged in there over the next few months is not promising to be very inspiring, it is, however, offering some food for the politically curious among us.

This, from an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post by Anne Applebaum, makes an astute but somewhat dark observation on the prospect ahead of us there – and like it or not, it is a prospect in which we all have a stake.

“You know the stereotypes already. Both Obamas come from what might loosely be called the intellectual/academic meritocracy, the “liberal elite,” the post-WASP Ivy League, easily caricatured as the world of free-trade coffee, organic arugula, smug opinions and Martha’s Vineyard. The Romneys, by contrast, belong to the financial oligarchy, the “global elite,” the post-financial-deregulation world that is just as easily caricatured as one of iced champagne, offshore bank accounts, dressage trainers and private islands.

“The two groups have some important overlaps. Although Romney got some attention for holding a fundraiser in the Hamptons last week, Obama has raised more money in the Hamptons overall (the president scored particularly well in Sagaponack, by one account, where the median home price is $4.4 million)….

“They also have some important differences. The financial oligarchy, as we learned from the Barclays scandal in London last week, is happiest when it operates in deep secrecy, where it can manipulate interest rates, package derivatives, hide its profits and shelter its taxes as it sees fit. The liberal meritocracy prefers to operate in the glare of publicity, where it can give lectures, write books, make documentaries and generally promulgate its own views as loudly as possible. Aged 34, Obama wrote his autobiography. Aged 37, Romney founded Bain Capital.

“But while you might think one or the other group more preferable or more offensive for reasons of politics, culture or taste, you certainly cannot argue that either of them is in close touch with “average” or “ordinary” or even “middle-class” people, however those terms might be defined. And although they and their supporters may shout about “radical left-wing professors” on the one hand or “Gordon Gekko” on the other, neither Obama nor Romney can plausibly claim to leading a populist revolution against the “elites” who are allegedly destroying America.

“Which is just as well, because the political success of both Obama and Romney proves that radical populism in the United States has failed spectacularly. For all of the attention they got, neither Occupy Wall Street nor the tea party has a candidate in this race. Neither found a way to channel inchoate, ill-defined public anger — at the deficit, at the banks — into electoral politics or clear alternatives. Whoever wins in November, we’ll therefore get the elite we deserve.”

Did the Irish electorate deserve the “elite” it has been landed with for the next several years – with not another prospect in sight for at least a decade? One wonders what cataclysm we will have endure before we can escape from the politically correct mediocrity we are now crippled with.

The Elephant At the Polling Station

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International Affairs4 Comments

There’s no question about it. There’s an elephant in the room and there is a massive conspiracy of silence to say nothing about it among in the mainstream Irish media covering the general election set to take place there on February 25. But hell hath no fury like an animal such as this when roused to anger by being ignored. Some are just now beginning to prod this one into action.

Admittedly Ireland’s continuing struggles to escape the clutches of the biggest recession, probably in its history, preoccupies both the electorate and the politicians in this campaign. But other issues are also at stake and these are the one the politicians are furtively seeking to avoid. Proposals to legislate for abortion, for gay marriage and limiting choice of schools to parents are all there in the small print. Like small print everywhere the hope of the printer is that it might not be read. On these issues it is Ireland’s own version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The first mainstream flagging of the abortion issue came last week in David Quinn’s weekly column in Ireland’s biggest broadsheet, the Irish Independent.  www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/david-quinn-any-vote-for-the-labour-party-is-a-vote-for-abortion-2535719.html . He spelt out the reality confronting the Irish electorate on these issues and effectively asked them to wake up to it.

These questions have become important because the final composition of the Irish parliament will most likely leave the two centre right parties (Fianna Fail and Fine Gael) without overall majorities. They will then have to look for government partners among the left-liberal groupings, Labour and the Greens. The polls currently suggest that the new Irish government will be formed from a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour. It is the familiar story of the tail getting to the position where it can wag the dog on social policy while the centre right gets on with the economic business. That is what happened in the outgoing parliament where the liberal Greens got their pound of flesh in the form of civil partnership legislation for homosexuals. For all those who campaigned on this issue, this was only a half-way house. The same groupings are now going all out for full gay-marriage legislation. That is no surprise, nor would it be seen as much of a threat by those opposed to these changes if these groupings were not in danger of getting an influence in the new parliament far beyond what their actual electoral support would warrant.

Quinn put his finger on the heart of the problem in his column when he pointed to the failure of the electorate to waken up to this danger. As he sees it – from his reading of the traditional sector of the electorate “a lot of them haven’t the first clue about Labour’s position on abortion. Amazing, but true. They don’t know, for example, that Labour wants to legislate for (a court) ruling of 1992. That ruling allows for abortion, and furthermore, it permits abortion simply on the say-so of a medical practitioner – it doesn’t have to be a doctor or psychiatrist – who is willing to say that his or her patient is suicidal.

In addition, Eamon Gilmore (Labour Party leader) favours abortion where the ‘health’ of the mother is in danger. In practice, this would replicate in Ireland the British abortion law. In Britain, abortion is permitted where a woman’s life or health is at risk. Health includes mental health. In practice, this translates into abortion-on-demand.

Gilmore favours this policy despite the fact that Ireland is the safest place in the world for a woman to have a baby, according to World Health Organisation figures.

And from a Catholic and Christian point of view, it is not only Labour’s stance on abortion that is problematic. It favours same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption. Its attitude towards denominational schools is also a problem.”

Quinn then deals with what he sees as the failure of the sector of the electorate for which traditional values on these issues are important.  He sees two categories of error being made by some of those who might be thinking of voting for Labour. The first category of are those who just don’t know the party’s position on abortion; the second category  somehow manages to rationalise away the Labour position, to say that it doesn’t matter, or that there are more important issues to be considered. Some, he finds, seem to think Labour doesn’t really mean it. “Sorry, it does. If it gets a chance – and that will be up to Fine Gael – we will have abortion in this country.”

 

The response to Quinn’s column seemed to bear out his point – so far. There were just three letters in the paper the following day and the politicians in the two main parties themselves studiously avoided the issue. I say “so far” because there are some signs that the Labour Party is now coming out more clearly on these issues. If it does so it may force the electorate – or the sizeable sector of it which, if awake, would be concerned about these matters to ask the main parties’ prospective members of parliament where they stand. They might then ask them fair and square whether, if in power with Labour, will they give their backing to health social legislation which denies the unborn their rights, denies society the marriages it needs to maintain the family as a meaningful institution, and denies parents the right to a choice of school without penalizing them financially.

The day after Quinn’s column appeared the paper’s deputy political editor, Michael Brennan, reported that the “Labour Party is making a pitch for the ‘gay vote’ by calling for a same-sex marriage referendum – but it risks alienating more conservative voters. Leader Eamon Gilmore yesterday said the party wanted to push ahead with a referendum to allow gay people the same right to marry as straight people.”  And on abortion he said “Labour is still maintaining its policy on another divisive social issue – it wants to introduce legislation which would copper-fasten the right of women to access life-saving abortions.”

However, Brennan warned, Labour’s social policies could cause divisions with its likely coalition partner Fine Gael, which is opposed to holding an abortion referendum and has not publicly backed same-sex marriages.

Fine Gael’s leader, and the man most likely to be Ireland’s next prime minister, is still less than forthright on exactly what terms he will enter coalition with Labour if he fails to gain an overall majority for this own party. Campaigning in Galway last week one journalist observed him as follows: “Enda has a word for everyone and looks like he’ll stand talking to anyone for as long as his aides will tolerate it. He engages in extended impromptu discussions about abortion, Shell to Sea (a local controversy in the West), the pubic service, and each time sets out his position in full.” Really?

The electorate knows he is “personally” opposed to abortion and considers marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. But but they have also heard him acknowledge that “there are other points of view”. What those seemingly tolerant words will mean if and when he come to form a government with those of that other point of view is what the traditional electors of Ireland do not yet know. The elephant is still in the room.

Bertie Ahern bites the dust. Did it have to be this way…?

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

It was probably inevitable, and perhaps it was the best outcome given all the circumstances. Nevertheless there was something vaguely shameful about the way Ireland disposed of one of its most capable prime ministers since it made itself independent of the United Kingdom nearly 100 years ago. Mr. Ahern – Bertie, as he was familiarly and generally affectionately known to one and all – fell on his sword on April 2nd, succumbing in the end to the relentless attrition surrounding the investigations of his financial affairs by a judicial tribunal.

 

The uneasiness generated about all this stems from two sources. Firstly there is the sense of loss at the demise of a man perceived by most – nationally and internationally – to be good, capable and worthy of respect for what he has achieved for his country and for the European Union of which his country is a part. The resignation of no prime minister in Irish history has attracted the kind of international press coverage which this one did last week.

 

Secondly there is the realisation that this is a victory not for a judicial process but for a relentless media-driven pursuit of the biggest scalp campaigning journalism could ever hope to capture, the prime minister of the country.

 

Ahern protests his innocence. “I know in my heart of hearts I did no wrong,” he asserted in his press conference when he announced his intention to vacate his office on May 6 next. Whether he did or didn’t remains to be clarified by the tribunal in question. The gut feeling of many people is that whether or not he should have resigned was something that could only be answered after due process had been completed and the tribunal judge had pronounced judgement having heard all the evidence and counter-evidence.

 

The problem for the country and for the government of which Mr. Ahern was leader was that in tandem with the work of the tribunal, the media was conducting its own investigations. Day after day, at whatever function – public or private – he or his government colleagues attended, the media tribunal was in session and the interrogation was constant. Culpable or not, in those circumstances, he could no longer sustain his role as leader of the government and saw clearly that the public – whether or not it felt he was guilty – was going to suffer if the work of government continued to be interfered with in this way. He knew he had to go and made what he saw was the responsible decision. I think most people see it that way. I also think most people feel it was a pity it had to happen like this. On the day after the dramatic and surprise announcement the Daily Mail (Irish edition of a London paper) carried the headline which seemed to have a slight tone of remorse about it: “DID IT REALLY HAVE TO END LIKE THIS?”  That was the lead into 18 pages of reports, comment and analysis.

 

The unease is of course double-edged. We know the value of a free press. We need a free press and a press which has the right to ask questions and keep asking questions until it gets answers. However, there does seem to be a conflict of processes. Is there not some better way in which we could manage the parallel running of these processes and if the ultimately more refined process – from the point of view of natural justice – is the judicial one should the other not suspend its activity until the latter has reached a verdict?

 

What is being investigated by this tribunal is of course a real can of worms, opened up several years ago as a result of revelations made in the media that generous donations had been made by businessmen to politicians in sensitive public office. Once the tribunal, established by the parliament, began to ask its first questions the statements being made to it under oath led to more and more allegations. More and more politicians seemed to have received gifts which might or might not be deemed corrupt or corrupting. Eventually Mr. Ahern himself was discovered to have received gifts which had not been publicly declared. This was back in the early 90s when he was Minister for Finance. He maintained that these were received at a time when regulations relating to the declaration of gifts by those in public office had not yet been brought to their current standard. His enemies maintained that this was irrelevant, that he was a government minister and that basic ethical principles were being disregarded by him when he accepted such gifts.

 

Initially he had public sympathy because the gifts were given to help him through a difficult personal situation when he and his wife were separating and the costs involved in this were proving crippling for him. But as often happens in these cases, questions kept being asked and answers given were never fully satisfactory. The issue of tax payment was raised and his negotiations with Revenue to regularise his tax affairs became public knowledge.

 

The whole tribunal process is now a seemingly permanent part of the Irish political system – costing the tax-payer hundreds of millions of euro. The cost is horrendous but by and large the public values something which may help raise ethical standards among its public servants and representatives. One such tribunal is investigating corrupt behaviour within the police force. We are all aware that were it not for media investigations this task would never have been addressed and low standards in high places would continue unabated. Nevertheless, the fall from grace of a man who has done the sate some considerable service – including that of helping bring peace to these islands, is felt by many to be a sad and regrettable event.

 

Spurious Apologies and False Guilt

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

Last week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement notes the comments of British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott on how Alex Haley’s book Roots was such a curative agent in helping African Americans cope with the lingering trauma of slavery. Mr. Prescott was speaking to The Guardian newspaper and the TLS goes on to quote the paper telling us that members of the evangelical Christian group Lifeline have been touring the globe in chains, wearing T-shirts with the logo “So sorry”. Lifeline members have “apologized to the vice-president of the Gambia and to a descendant of Kunta Kinte, the slave made famous in the Alex Haley epic Roots” (Guardian, March 24). 

The TLS finds it all a bit dodgy and not really serving anybody’s interests that a book like Haley’s should be used as a basis for anything. “Haley’s non-fiction saga, at the end of which the author travels to the Gambian village of Juffure to be reunited in spirit with Kunta Kinte, has long since been exposed as fraudulent. In 1978, Haley paid $650,000 in damages to Harold Courlander, having admitted that large passages of Roots were copied from his book, The African. Allegations that the genealogy linking him to Kunta Kinte was false were never rebutted by Haley, who died in 1992, nor were suggestions that the African griot who outlined the family tree had been coached.”“The case for a retrospective ‘apology’ for an abhorrent trade that ended 200 years ago is not bolstered by being backed up by a dodgy book,” the TLS commentator concludes. 

 Indeed. What we need is good history and with the honesty which good history will reveal in all of us there will be no need for these spurious apologies. However, there is a bigger problem here than a dodgy book. We regret the sins of our fathers but we are not responsible for them. We should learn from them – as we have – but to apologise for them is meaningless. This year in Ireland we commemorate an event in 1607 known as the Flight of the Earls, when some of my ancestors, having been defeated in the war they launched against the English to try to preserve their Gaelic culture, fled to the continent to avoid their final humiliation. We are not looking for any apologies – I hope. It is sufficient that the truth be recalled.

Today’s New York Times carries a feature on what it calls “the climate divide” in which it observes that there is a growing consensus that the first world owes the third world a climate debt. Of course it does. But it owes it on the basis of our common humanity. To seek to generate this sense of indebtedness on the basis of a guilt which all do not accept in the first place is to undermine the truth which should be the basis for the powerful actions we need to take.

These two examples of guilt-inducement – one using a dodgy book, the other using a shaky scientific theory on the causes of global warming – will do nothing to restore the balance which humanity needs. Spurious apologies and false guilt will only blunt true consicence and dull the motives for right action.

A New Dawn on the Island of Ireland?

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

It might be the end of a 30 year war, a 400 year war or an 800 year old war. But whichever it is it was about as muddled an end as you will find in many a war as far as winners and loser are concerned. We are all winners – because it is over – and we are all losers because it should never have started in the first place. Dr. Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, yesterday’s men par excellence, finally met and agreed to let the forces of normal – well, fairly normal – political life fall into place in the six Ulster counties which make up the political entity of Northern Ireland.

Some would say it all began a little over 800 years ago in the distant feudal past when a disgruntled king of an Irish province asked Henry II of England to help him in his row with one of this neighbours. Others might put the key date at exactly 400 years ago when the leaders of the last great rebellion of Gaelic and Catholic Ireland came to an end with the flight of its leaders from the shores of Donegal. It was essentially a tragic event, recorded in Irish history as the Flight of the Earls. It is not a little ironic that this event is being commemorated nationally in Ireland this very year. For others it is a 30 year war of unfinished business left over after the Anglo Irish settlement of 1922.

Whatever it was, Irishmen on both sides of the so-called “Border”, Irishmen across the Irish Sea, English, Scottish and Welshmen on either side of the same sea – the largest single group of non Irish-born residents in the Republic of Ireland are British – have longed for this peace. They do not mind too much that it came in the end, not with a bang but with a whimper. This kind of peace comes better in this way.

Now ordinary men and women can get down to work and think about the ordinary needs of normal people. Dr. Paisley – with his phantom-dread of a united Ireland ruled from Rome – and Gerry Adams with his equally grotesque myth of a tyrannical British State occupying the sacred land of Ireland and oppressing its innocent people can now fade into the shadowy past where they belong. Nevertheless, some gratitude is owing to them in their later incarnations: they helped create two monsters but in the end they came good and have successfully chained them up again. Hopefully they will stay there. Real and unqualified credit, however, must go to the Prime Ministers of the two states which have had to suffer the consequences of the terror unleashed by these two monsters on their respective island jurisdictions – Tony Blair and Bertie Aherne. Both should surely be high on any short-list of contenders for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Their efforts have not only been supremely skilful but also truly heroic.

The business of containing death-inflicting terror on the island of Ireland can now be left behind. Sadly for Britain, no sooner has one source of terror gone than another raises it ugly head. However, the peoples of these two islands can now get together again to pursue their common economic interests and the business of life, sharing their common heritage of language and literature, institutions and laws,  and in the mutual enjoyment of their glorious differences – sport, music, native languages and customs.

While the undoubted event of the week was that “Meeting”, there were a few other events which seemed to contain a not-unrelated symbolic significance, pointing to the reality of our shared culture. The first was the investiture – if that is the right word – of Bono of U2 with a knighthood by Her Majesty the Queen of England. In Ireland, if you say “the Queen”, some will ask you, “which queen?”

For the other event we have to go all the way across the Atlantic and down to the shores of the Caribbean. There, in Guyana, the English cricket team faced the Irish (that is, island of Ireland) cricket team in the World Cup. Unsurprisingly England won – although as one of Ireland’s first cricket players, the Duke of Wellington, famously said of the Battle of Waterloo, it might have been “a damn close run thing”.

The irony and symbolic significance of the event runs right through it. The Irish team consists of a mixture of native born Irishmen and British Commonwealth citizens living and working in Ireland, while the English team consists of native born Englishmen, not a few from the same Commonwealth and probably the best cricketer Ireland has ever produced – well, at least since the Duke of Wellington – Irishman Edmund Joyce.

If all that doesn’t give us a glorious confusion of identity to rejoice in what will? But it is not confusion. It is what we are that matters and gives us our true identity. The truth is that what the people of these two islands have in common far outweighs our differences – differences about which we sometimes share a joke but which in the end we really value. Narrow nationalistic preoccupations with what we think we were, should be or might have been is – as sad experience shows – the stuff of poison cocktails.

– Michael Kirke

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.