Feckers (29 page)

It is assumed that this now worldwide manifestation of buckleppery has its origins in Ireland, but in fact it began in the contorted imaginations of the exiled Irish in America and spread outwards from there. Although outsiders who take their understanding of Ireland from the global celebrations of our national feast day seem to imagine that Irish citizens go about every day, sporting green pantaloons and emitting ejaculations like ‘Top o’ the morning to ye all begorrah and but faith it’s a fine day we do be having I do declare to me God’, the truth is that this version of the Irish personality is a very recent import into the home country and is primarily the fault of St Patrick.

Everything about it is fake. ‘Paddy’s Day’ is a day when there is no escape from the grotesque and monstrous abomination called ‘The Craic’, which, like almost everything else about our ‘authentic’ Irish identity, has been recovered from the cultural skip of our next-door neighbours. There is no Irish word ‘craic’ – the word is ‘crack’ and it is pure Anglo-Saxon. And this hints at what each one of us knows already at heart – that all of the things we parade on St Patrick’s Day are grossly distorted versions of imported notions of who and what we are supposed to be like. The shamroguery and the buckleppery derive not from anything in Irish tradition or the national character, but from the grief-distorted sentimentalism of the Irish-American diaspora. But the native Paddy, with his finely tuned sense of how to relieve foreigners of their hard currency, has thrown himself into the exercise of self-caricature with relish and abandon.

Until a few years ago, certainly until the commencement of the increasingly unspeakable period formerly known as the Celtic Tiger, the native Irish on St Patrick’s Day sported a discreet sprig of shamrock, and otherwise displayed no outward signs of what is nowadays called ‘Irishness’. For those Irish who remained in their home country, St Patrick’s Day was among the most dismal days in the Irish calendar, a day to endure before the onset of spring, a final penitential rite before shaking off the gloom of winter and embracing the hope of Easter.

But, feeling somewhat abashed as a result of watching televised reports of the parades in New York and Philadelphia, we decided, around the turn of the millennium, to get in on the act. Now we go about the place on our national feast day acting as if we ourselves have swallowed the most gruesome version of ourselves and turned a sickly green. The rest of the year we feel free to be outraged if some foreigner calls us Paddies, but on St Patrick’s Day we are determined to indulge in a self-mockery that, were it inflicted on us by others, would result in a class action for mass ridicule and racist provocation, and to disport ourselves in public as the People that Taste Forgot.

On reflection, it seems obvious why Saint Patrick went to his grave a worried man. Perhaps he had come to realize the impossibility of the task he had set himself and had caught a glimpse, in some distracted vision, of what his well-intentioned endeavours had inflicted on the world to the end of time. Even worse is the prospect that, when he finally gets to challenge Paddy with the sins committed in the name of national celebration, he will be told that the whole thing was done in his own honour. Paddy, as usual, will hope for a fool’s pardon and that will enable him to stagger through the pearly gates wearing a green hat and an orange beard, shouting ‘Top o’ the mornin’’ to the Almighty.

HM Queen Elizabeth II

I
n May 2011, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England came to Ireland on a four-day visit. It had promised to be the most toe-curling event in Irish history, and so it proved. It was worse than the time back in 1995 when Prince Charles came and the sitting Taoiseach had declared the occasion ‘the happiest day of my life’. For this time, it was the happiest day of everyone’s life.

Or so at least it seemed, if you had the misfortune to be listening to the radio or could not avoid passing in the vicinity a television set. All day long they kept the seats in the broadcast studios warm for one another as they came to speak about watching the Queen of England in Dublin with tears in their eyes. You would think it was the first time a British monarch had caused Irish people to cry. They called her ‘The Queen’. They talked about their humility in the face of this great occasion. They talked about how surprised they had been by their own emotions, about how tolerant they felt, and humble. They talked about the way she had smiled at them, and they had clapped her to the rafters for smiling at them. They said it was a historic moment, a sign of ‘our maturity as a nation’, how it marked a new point of departure in our ‘shared history’ with ‘our nearest neighbour’. It showed, they said, that we had ‘finally transcended narrow nationalism’ and taken our place among the nations of the Earth.

But it was not just one day, or even two. For four long days there was no rest and no escape from it. They talked about the way she had waved at them, as though waving at people was not her job and she had not been doing it for nearly seventy years. They parsed and analysed her laying of a wreath in the Garden of Remembrance, comparing it to the way she might normally have laid a wreath in a different place on a different occasions. Had she bowed lower than usual? Definitely, they thought.

Dozens of witness, humble and tolerant, came forward to tell how some relative of theirs, an aunt or uncle, had gone to England in the 1940s or 1950s and been given work there, or encountered social democracy, or got a smile from a passing man in a bowler hat. The implication was that there were no jobs, social democracy or bowler hats to be found at home. Everyone was too humble and tolerant to observe that the reason for there being neither jobs nor social democracy at home was because our bowler-hatted ‘nearest neighbours’ had stamped all over Irish civilization for eight hundred years.

Half of Dublin was closed off and inaccessible for the duration. The ‘ordinary’ people were not invited, although some of them turned out anyway to give the Queen someone to wave at. One woman on the radio told how her sister was out jogging with friends in Phoenix Park and the guards had asked them to wave at the Queen as her Land Rover drove past because there was nobody else around to do it.

The only visible dissent was from the toothless irredentists from Eivigi, who rampaged briefly, dressed in Man-U T-shirts, displaying their indifference to royalty and irony in equal measure.

In Cork, Elizabeth, buoyed up to find herself in a place once called ‘Queenstown’, broke away and spoke to some ‘ordinary’ people. The commentators in Dublin wept and wailed. What humility everyone was showing. What maturity!

At a State dinner in her honour in Dublin Castle, the Queen of England spoke about the ‘painful legacy’ affecting Ireland and Britain. She spoke about ‘the complexity’ and ‘the weight’ of ‘our history’. She spoke, too, about the importance of being able ‘to bow to the past but not being bound by it’.

She said that it was ‘a sad and regrettable reality’ that through history ‘our two islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss. The events have touched us all, many of us personally, and are a painful legacy. We can never forget those who have died or been injured, or their families.’

‘With the benefit of historical hindsight’, she said, ‘we can all see things we wish had been done differently or not at all’.

It was as though the eight hundred years had been a minor prang at the traffic lights and both parties had shaken hands and agreed to do their own repairs.

The Dublin elite, speaking for the whole country, cooed and oohed. They talked about the way the Queen of England had pronounced five words in the Irish language, ‘A Uachtaráin agus a chairde’, ‘like a native speaker’ causing the President, who was normally a sensible woman, to go ‘Wow!’

It was as if they had always suspected Queen Elizabeth’s great love for the Irish language and, now, here was the proof of it for all to hear! Listen! She is speaking our awful, unworthy language, the one we hate and which once her predecessors had tried to persuade us to abandon in our own interests! What tolerance! What humility! No one was impolite enough to remark on the fact that Queen Elizabeth had avoided using the word ‘ocras’.

One newspaper carried the headline, ‘Friends and Equals’, seemingly oblivious to the possibility that ‘equal’s’ feel no necessity to declare themselves as such, but nobody voiced such an intolerant thought.

Everyone went home, tired but happy, self-confident, humble, tolerant and mature. How wonderful it was that, after eight hundred years of our insubordination and disrespect, the Queen of England had come to forgive us.

The Cromwell family was not represented.

Master James Flynn

J
ust a few short years into the long-running Irish obsession with the tribunal of inquiry, one James Flynn, in his role as Taxing Master of the High Court, caused a volcanic eruption of sanctimony in Irish politics. Awarding costs to the Haughey family for their legal expenses in challenging some decisions of the Moriarty Tribunal, Master Flynn described tribunals as ‘Frankenstein monsters’ and ‘Star Chambers’.

The leader of the Progressive Democrats, Mary Harney, in her capacity as Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, declared the comments ‘clearly offensive’ to the Oireachtas and judges presiding over tribunals. The Attorney General, Michael McDowell, conveyed the government’s ‘deep concern’ to the President of the High Court. Master Flynn was pistol-whipped to his knees and compelled to utter an abject apology.

At the time, some people thought Master Flynn might have a point. As the Moriarty and Flood tribunals meandered on, and the Irish people muttered into their pints and cappuccinos about the costs to the public purse and the dizzying enrichment of leading members of the legal profession, it seemed not improbable that the nation might yet come round to something along the same view. Little did anyone know then that the tribunal farce was really only beginning.

Notwithstanding Master Flynn’s observations, it was stretching credulity somewhat when, some years later, the businessman Denis O’Brien emerged to complain that the Moriarty Tribunal was trying to stitch him up. O’Brien and the former Fine Gael communications minister Michael Lowry stood accused of having readied-up the 1995 process for allocating the second national mobile phone licence, controversially awarded to O’Brien’s company, Esat Digifone.

O’Brien protested to anyone who would listen, and many who would not, that Moriarty had made up his mind on the issue before his deliberations began. The public vacillated between half-supporting the tribunal and half-believing O’Brien. This was this widespread strange doublethink whereby it was permissible to grumble about the lawyers’ fees and the slowness of the process, and yet not to consider that any deeper criticisms might be valid. Many people thought O’Brien was engaging in a PR stunt to prepare the public mood for the worst when Moriarty delivered his final report. But more than a few were impressed by the vehemence with which he made the case for his innocence of any wrongdoing.

Several times, as the apparatus of the tribunal lurched and creaked its way to a final conclusion, Justice Moriarty was forced to acknowledge significant errors in his preliminary findings. With the investigations coming to a close in 2010, it seemed likely that, arising from the evidence of a Danish consultant called Michael Anderson, the tribunal might be in serious difficulty. Anderson had radically challenged some of Moriarty’s key preliminary findings. And, since Anderson had been a key observer and overseer of the licensing process, it was difficult to see how his evidence could be circumvented.

In March 2011, the Moriarty Tribunal at last delivered its final report. It had been 14 years in gestation and, depending on which figures you adopted, had cost something between
€
150 million and
€
300 million.

The tribunal report told the Irish people, albeit at considerably more length (more than 2,400 pages) that, well, we know what we know. Lowry and O’Brien were deemed guilty as charged. In substantiation of its allegedly damning central conclusion in respect of the most serious charge it had to deal with – that the 1995 awarding of the country’s second mobile phone licence to Esat Digifone resulted from an intervention by Michael Lowry – the report suspended a flimsy thread of logic between public prejudice and the known circumstances, padding out its case with rhetoric and speculation. The report got around the seemingly intractable difficulty of Michael Anderson’s evidence by the simple process of ignoring it.

The report’s conclusions were in many instances no more than the tabulation of suppositions and suspicions, assembled, often selectively and tendentiously, as though with a view to seeking a successful prosecution. It was not really a judgment – more like the opening statement of the prosecution in the court of public opinion.

The centrepiece of Moriarty’s logic was an interpretation of what had occurred at a meeting between Lowry and O’Brien in Hartigan’s public house on Leeson Street, Dublin, on 17 September 1995. Both men denied they had discussed Esat Digifone’s licence application in that meeting, but the tribunal decided that they must have done, so therefore they did. In this complex edifice of contention, there was a discernible tent-pole reliance on the somewhat dubious reputation of Michael Lowry, who had previously been caught out in tax evasion and other matters.

The Moriarty Report, however, plopped readily into a condition of public opinion which had latterly become rampant with rage on account of a general sense that politicians, bankers and business people were all ‘at it’ and that, therefore, any allegation of graft or corruption was likely to be true. Moriarty and his report were guaranteed an easy passage in the court of public opinion, which was prepared to overlook all previous reservations about tribunals now that another pair of targets had been dragged to the stocks.

In terms of general public attitudes to tribunals, this outcome was somewhat against the run of play. Some months earlier, the Supreme Court had issued a strong reprimand to the former chairman of another long-running tribunal, Mr Justice Flood, on account of his selective editing of the evidence of a key witness, James Gogarty. Overturning Flood’s decision to disallow the costs of two businessmen, one of the judges said that Flood had concealed ‘without justification’ important evidence relating to Gogarty’s credibility. ‘It is chilling’, Mr Justice Hardiman said, ‘to reflect that a poorer person, treated in the same fashion by the tribunal, could not have afforded to seek this vindication’.