The Cedar Lounge Revolution

“Strange that you should single out the deaths that can by any stretch of the imagination be laid at the door of the British Army and brush aside the far greater numbers of deaths caused by the IRA….How about printing a tally of deaths caused by the IRA just to even things up? It’ll be a long list…”

An excerpt from one of the tedious internet debates about the Northern conflict? A letter from the Belfast Telegraph or the Irish News taking issue with a Sinn Féin supporter?

Actually no, it’s taken from the current issue of An Phoblacht, where it appears beneath the headline ‘Stop blaming the poor British peacekeepers!’. Admittedly it appeared in the paper’s letters page but it is still so surreal an experience to see a letter like that published in the Sinn Féin party newspaper I had to read it two or three times to make sure I wasn’t missing some ironic twist. I still haven’t ruled out poor editing. One of the other letters in this week’s edition is written by an Independent councillor, Peter McAleer, who resigned from Sinn Féin and is given the opportunity to berate the party’s deal with the Labour party, accusing them of abandoning the T&G’s Mick O’Reilly.

It’s a bit GUBUesque to be honest but it’s also not entirely out of character for the paper, or at least as much of it as I have been reading recently. I started buying the Phoblacht again after reading on Slugger that there was a major internal debate about the party’s performance in the recent election campaign going on in the pages of the paper. Over the course of a number of weeks about a dozen or so party members, activists, candidates and officials wrote letters or articles about the election campaign with the overwhelming majority critical, in some cases extremely critical, of the party leadership.

It even printed a letter from me taking issue with one of the more foolish arguments advanced by a supporter of the party leadership who claimed the party had only moved to the centre on economics, but had moved to the left in every other policy area and therefore, the party has not moved to the centre. You don’t need to be an economic reductionist to find that particularly silly to read. There was also a flurry of discussion around a claim from one activist that Ógra Shinn Féin was basically useless, and responses from other correspondents, Ógra activists in the main, taking issue with it.

So why is a political party’s newspaper giving space to the party’s own membership to accuse its leadership of incompetence and misrepresenting policy? Why are they printing letters from former Sinn Féin councillors and people who see the British Army as peacekeepers?

As with many aspects of Sinn Féin, you can take the negative position or the positive. The negative one is that it is a cunning plan by Adams, a latter day Baldrick for cunning, to allow the Southern membership to blow off steam about the election result without actually having to change anything and to identify possible future dissenters and trouble-makers while portraying the party paper as open for debate. This week’s letters page is nothing more than an attempt to drum up controversy in the silly season by printing material An Phoblacht’s readers will be infuriated by.

The positive position is that one of the more Stalinist political parties in the country is being just a little more open. A bit of Glasnost, so to speak, is being allowed in as part of the party’s efforts to ‘find itself’ again after a fairly poor election result. The leadership is now, in a post-IRA phase, no longer immune to criticism. People from outside the party, even people who in McAleer’s case would have one time been accused of betraying the party, can have their say.

Optimistic? Very much so. But at the same time I suspect it is unlikely that I will ever pick up a copy of the Socialist Worker criticising the party’s links to Islamic Fundamentalists and accusing Kieran Allen of being incompetent. It will be an even colder day in Hell before The Socialist prints letters from readers arguing that Peter Hadden is, when you get down to it, badly wrong on pretty much everything and that it is Kevin O’Loughlin’s fault they lost Dublin West.

It is to be welcomed when a political party shows a willingness to publicaly debate the mistakes of the party leadership and to allow other views to be published, especially one so tightly managed as Sinn Féin. I doubt this means An Phoblacht is going to open its pages to every Tom, Dick and Harry, but as the newspaper of a political party, it could hardly be expected to and perhaps we should simply acknowledge this as something positive and maybe even somewhat innovative in party political publications today.

Just to echo Mick Hall’s excellent reminder which can be found here with details…
Not before time some might say…

Another week, another column from John Waters [sub req'd]. Now, I don’t intend to make a habit of parsing his thoughts. I’ve got a few of my own on a range of other issues, from the bizarre introduction by Ed Moloney to the biography of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh to puritanism on the Left. But today’s is well worth at least a slight consideration.

Under the heading “Depressing new take on sadness” John, for it is he, steps fearlessly into debates on depression…

An Australian psychiatrist, writing in the British Medical Journal , has said something many of us think but are nervous about expressing out loud.. .

‘Nervous’? Surely not. And who is this ‘us’?

Prof Gordon Parker believes that the concept of “depression” has got out of hand. Doctors are diagnosing as depressed people who are merely “unhappy”. A low threshold for diagnosing clinical depression risks treating normal emotional states as “illness”, he argued. Prof Parker was challenged in the same edition of the publication by a fellow Australian, Prof Hickie, who said that diagnosis and treatment of depression had led to a reduction in suicides.

Okay.

But it must be obvious to most 10-year-olds that Prof Parker is talking sense and Prof Hickie talking through his hat. The number of prescriptions issued for anti-depressants is growing in the UK at the rate of about 6 per cent per annum, while suicide rates have remained static at a high level for at least a decade. The same is undoubtedly true of this country.

Unfortunately, this very day, figures released show that it is not true of this country. In a disturbing article in the Irish Times new research suggests that the suicide rate is probably higher than hitherto thought due to methodologies used in categorising them, and that:

These latest figures show suicide rates in the State have risen from nine per 100,000 people in the five-year period 1980- 1984, to 15 per 100,000 in the five years 2000-2004.

and that:

The researchers found that in 30 of the 47 cases the victim had experienced depression at some time in their lives. And fewer than half of suicide deaths could be attributed to alcohol.

In any case, there is, to my mind, something a tad distasteful about making a judgement on ‘depression’ from the suicide figures. The pressures and dynamics involved in suicide are radically different - albeit parallel on some axis - to depression in the population. This doesn’t deter Waters, and as we shall see arguing from the extreme to make a point about the general society is a tack he will take again…

Virtually every newspaper report about suicide nowadays cites depression as a major cause, implying that those who take their own lives do so because they suffer from some perhaps unrecognised clinical condition.

Some years ago, the leading Irish psychiatrist and then chairman of Aware, Dr Patrick McKeon, spoke about the nature of what is called depression. “Human beings, to live with themselves,” he said, “actually have a natural infusion of positive perspectives on things, and that enables us to keep going in life. When that’s taken away, that’s actually called depression . . . if anyone is really involved in life they are going to get depressed at some stage or other in their life. To anybody who says they don’t get depressed . . . I say, are you really that switched off.”

But McKeon is not saying that there is no such thing as depression. He’s saying that people do get depressed and that people must expect that in a life. And if one is willing to accept the likelihood of depression then one must also be open to the idea that there are means through counseling or medication that can alleviate that depression. What Waters is doing is subtly different as he continues…

Life can be tough. Bad things happen. We feel let down, sad. Sometimes we feel sad for no apparent reason. St Thomas Aquinas defined sadness as “the desire for an absent good”. In a society that persistently seeks to deny a higher meaning, it is not surprising that more people feel more and more sad, but we dispose of the evidence of our vacuity by defining them as “depressed”.

Waters is saying that depression isn’t depression, it’s merely sadness.

This is astounding stuff. Waters appears to be trying now to diminish depression as an aspect of our society and rework it as ’sadness’, and a sadness which is the result of not having a ‘higher meaning’. And those who eschew ‘higher meaning’ are… the guru has spoken… vacuous. Look, I’m all for politics, but it’s not for everyone. Most people prefer to knock along doing their thing, and while that may put the project back I’m not given to whinging about their fecklessness.

Problem is that there is such a thing as clinical depression. To be honest I suspect much larger numbers of people are prey to it than the statistics demonstrate. I’m not really surprised. It’s not that ‘life can be tough’, it is that life is tough. It’s a struggle in this society or any society.

(Incidentally, on a slight tangent, the evidence seems to lean towards those who have convictions - whether atheistic, or theistic - as being those who, for example when facing death are best capable of dealing with it. Those like myself in the agnostic, not entirely sure, mode, are the ones who get it worst - natch)

But, as so often in the discourse presented by our centre right media the point is not the supposed primary issue of depression or the treatment of same, but instead a means of getting a good lash in against…why post-modernism of course!

There may be a moral dimension also, which again I require to cite an expert in order to outline. In The Frivolity of Evil, one of the superb essays in his collection, Our Culture? What’s Left of It, Theodore Dalrymple addressed the matter of what our societies term depression, which he argues has eliminated “the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life”. Dr Dalrymple worked for 14 years as a psychiatrist in British prisons and mental institutions, retiring in 2004.

“Of the thousands of patients I have seen,” he wrote, “only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said they were depressed.”

Get out of here! They’re in prison and they ‘claim’ to be depressed? Who knew?

This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.

Okay, even noting that Dr. Dalrymple worked ‘as psychiatrist in British prisons and mental institutions’ it seems to me that that environment might not necessarily give the most complete picture of depression as it relates to the broader society, nor might the environment lead one to be - shall we say - as sympathetic as one might otherwise be.

Moreover, the semantic shift is irrelevant. If a patient presents saying that they are ‘unhappy’, or ‘depressed’ the function of the doctor isn’t to beat them rhetorically around the head for their temerity in not accepting that life is a vale of tears and in this instance most specifically a corrective institution, but instead to determine the severity of the depression and whether the person is suffering from clinical depression, a recognised disorder or from a more transitory depression of mood and do something about it. These are real and potentially serious conditions and disorders that blight lives.

And incidentally, for anyone who has any actual - as distinct from rhetorical - experience of depression of either flavour or those who have had depression it will be well known that the goal is not actually to be ‘happy’ but to achieve some balance where by ‘unhappiness’ doesn’t flood the day to day experience. That balance may not actually include ‘happiness’ to any significant degree. This has nothing to do with a ‘right to be happy’, nor is it about being the ‘opposite’ of depressed. There are many intermediate stops on that journey. But hey, why allow the complexity of the situation spoil the reality?

It gets worse.

He wrote about one patient, a woman who had lived a life of, to any objective assessment, outright misery. Having been raped as a child by her mother’s boyfriend “with the mother’s full knowledge”, she had herself chosen as lovers a succession of highly violent men, who had left her with three children. As a psychiatrist, he met many such women, who had chosen men “who had their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos saying F*** Off or Mad Dog”.

So… these are ‘choices’ made as easily as I go into the canteen at work and choose between the Innocent smoothie or the unpleasant “Summer fruit” fizzy juice drink?

The woman is most likely in a prison or mental institution, John. That suggests that her problems are greater than the question of whether we concern ourselves if the unhappiness/depression she experiences is unhappiness or depression.

Incidentally, there are a host of potential reasons why a woman in such a position might indeed be attracted to an individual who was seemingly ’strong’ or ‘impervious’. I know it’s a bad choice, but it is an understandable one. And I want to move onto a different aspect of this because Water’s argument flies very very close to the idea that those within abusive relationships are somehow to ‘blame’.

There is a glibness here that is quite - well reactionary actually.

Such horrors, according to Dalrymple, are the inevitable consequence of a culture of ideas in which the notion of personal responsibility has been eliminated. An “unholy alliance” between left-wing liberals and right-wing free-marketeers has made “a long march though the minds of the young”, elevating non-judgmentalism to the highest value and dispensing with ideas of personal responsibility in favour of total “freedom to choose”. When the individual chooses badly and encounters unhappiness, we decide she has become ill. Dalrymple’s only cause for optimism “has been the fact that my patients, with a few exceptions, can be brought to see the truth of what I say: they are not depressed; they are unhappy and they are unhappy because they have chosen to live in a way that they ought not to live, and in which it is impossible to be happy”.

So, by examining the extreme - a prison population - it is possible to build up a seamless theory of the broader society? Doesn’t seem like the best way to move forward - as well consider that the human dynamics in the Apollo 13 capsule as it fought its way back from the moon give a good insight into school organisation

And one has to ask, what is this ‘culture of ideas’? Where is this non-judgementalism? If any thing I see much the opposite. Unlike some around here I’m no fan of Big Brother. But one thing that it appears to promote, apart from a nebulous infantilism, is a sense that there are indeed red lines of personal responsibilities, that one must try to get along, not to upset others, etc, etc. Big Brother is explicitly judgemental when it comes to those who criticise core attributes of individuals, such as gender, race or sexuality. It just so happens that Waters doesn’t want to recognise that judgementalism may not be his judgementalism. And that’s at, as it were, one end of the market.

Yet again the straw man of non-judgementalism is dragged kicking and screaming out of the place where straw men are kept. One can ask, with all due respect, what on earth is Dalrymple talking about when he suggests that ‘they are not depressed; they are unhappy and they are unhappy because they have chosen to live in a way that they ought not to live, and in which it is impossible to be happy’ ? Without context such a statement is essentially meaningless. Taking the woman who was attracted to violent men. The social linkages created by the children would be such as to permanently embed her within a matrix that would make movement beyond it difficult, if not impossible. Educational, social and other issues would also impact. And she is, I reiterate, most likely in a prison or mental institution.

Of course she’s made bad choices, and of course it is broadly speaking impossible to be ‘happy’ in such a context, although institutionalisation brings for some a degree of acceptance, in itself a serious problem. But what on earth has that to do with people outside prison whose life choices have been circumscribed by many other factors which have left them depressed? What relevance does this column have to them? Because one very significant distinction between someone in prison and having their life experience and someone outside of it who has suffered catastrophic distress comes down to ‘meaning’.

For those who commit crimes the possibility of prison is at least an element of their mental horizon. But for someone in the broader society where ‘life is tough’ events can unfold with appalling rapidity, events that are entirely beyond personal control. Yeah, that might just lead to depression above and beyond how “they have chosen to live in a way they ought not to live”… But then we’d need a whole different column, making entirely different points and coming to a significantly different conclusion.

And here the argument is almost a mirror image of something that Michael Shermer of Scientific American has noted in a recent column on self-help manual The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. The Secret is, as Shermer writes:

… the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts,” we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren’t such pessimistic sourpusses. The film’s promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as “Everything I touch turns to gold,” “I am a money magnet,” and, my favorite, “There is more money being printed for me right now.” Where? Kinko’s?

The advocates of the Secret argue that:

“Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” But in magnets, opposites attract–positive is attracted to negative. “Every thought has a frequency…. If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency.”

But as Shermer points out:

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell’s equations any electric current produces a magnetic field…The brain’s magnetic field… quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth’s magnetic field … which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

And Shermer notes that:

Ceteris paribus, it is undoubtedly better to think positive thoughts than negative ones. But in the real world, all other things are never equal, no matter how sanguine your outlook. Just ask the survivors of Auschwitz. If the law of attraction is true, then the Jews–along with the butchered Turkish-Armenians, the raped Nanking Chinese, the massacred Native Americans and the enslaved African-Americans–had it coming.

And they didn’t have it coming, anymore than someone who is suffering from depression, or clinical depression or whatever has it coming - even for the sake of a newspaper article.

So what’s the difference? Self-help gurus suggesting that positive thoughts will get you everything your heart desires or journalists suggesting that depression is really ’sadness’ because that slots neatly into a discourse about responsibility and how those who say they’re depressed are really unhappy because of some existential angst caused by lack of responsibility and the inability to judge.

There is no real difference because each is built upon an avoidance of fact or knowledge in favour of ’something many of us think ‘.

Think again.

Thought this might be of interest to some of our regulars considering the comments on the BICO and SP threads dealing with Marxism, Leninism and the role of democracy and the party in such.

According to an IRSP email bulletin an organisation called Red and Black Publishers in the US has published a book entitled ‘Non-Leninist Marxism’ (Available on Amazon), including the works of Dutch Marxists Hermann Gorter and Anton Pannekoek, the English Left Communist Sylvia Pankhurst, and the German Council Communist Otto Ruehl. I’ll be honest. It’s not my cup of tea and I’d only vaguely heard of ‘Council Communism’ prior to this but I thought some of our Marxist scholars might be curious. Lengthy excerpt from the review follows:

“The book begins  with Gorter’s excellent, systematic refutation of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder, which was penned against the Council Communist tendency and includes Gorter’s essay on why a Communist Workers’ International was needed.

“The one weakness of the book is its selections by Anton Pannekoek, perhaps the greatest astronomer ever produced by the Netherlands and one of the most intelligent exponents of Council Communist. It offers his 1908 article on The Labour Movement and Socialism, which while a worthwhile critique of the reformist tendencies of the trade unions pales besides his master work, The Workers’ Councils, which is not offerred here. Likewise, Pannekoek’s 1918 article, The German Revolution: First Stage, is well worth reading, but his book Lenin As Philosopher would have been a more welcome (if much longer)
offering.

“Sylvia Pankhurst is represented by her seven-part article Communism and Its Tactics, which provides a wonderful breath of fresh air amidst the meager politics of reform that passes for Marxism today.

“The book concludes with two pieces by the all too rarely seen German Council Communist leader, Otto Ruhle. The first of these is his The Revolution is Not a Party Affair, which provides an excellent critique of the party as the means for working class revolutionary organizing and then finishes with his powerful Report From Moscow, which is precisely that–a report to the German Communist Workers’ Party regarding his trip to Moscow to attend the third Congress of the Third International, which marked the KAPD’s break from the Comintern in defense of a revolutionary vs. a opportunist line to be pursued in Western Europe. “

It is believed that 20th Century Fox are bidding for the movie rights.

Interesting little comment in an article in today’s EU Observer. The bulk of the article deals with an ICM poll for the Daily Mail which suggests 24% of Labour supporters might not vote for Brown if they do not get a referendum on the proposed revised EU Constitution. Slightly dubious about that to be honest.

The controversy centres on a pledge Blair made to put the proposed EU Constitution to a referendum. Brown now claims, in direct contravention of reality, that the new so-called ‘Reform Treaty’ is substantially different to the proposed EU Constitution and hence does not require a referendum. The Tories, lovers of democracy that they are, have been arguing a referendum is essential.

But it’s the tail-end of the article I find most entertaining where it raises the terrifying spectre of not simply a British ‘No’ vote, but that by even agreeing to hold a referendum, the British might, inadvertently, put pressure on others to follow suit.

“This,” says the Observer, “is exactly what politicians on other member states were hoping to avoid.”

One of them, German Christian Democrat MEP Elmar Brok (Crazy name, crazy guy), felt moved to comment further. “It would be very unfair of the UK if, having more or less got what it wanted in the new treaty, it would then turn round and put this to a popular vote,” he added, saying it would “undermine” the talks on the treaty.“

Outstanding stuff. Marvellous. Let’s examine this in a little detail. Firstly, the suggestion that there is some sort of trade-off at the level of negotiations where a government chooses not to bother the people with these complicated issues and in exchange wins benefits at the negotiating table. Secondly, that giving the people of Britain a right to a voice in how the EU should be run would ‘undermine’ the proposed revised Constitution. In other words, democratic decisionmaking is contrary to what the EU is trying to achieve. And all of this is ‘unfair’.

It’s all the more entertaining, in that darkly surreal way that so much of what the EU does is entertaining, that Brok is one of the European Parliament’s representatives in the negotiations. One of the representatives of the only elected institution in the EU’s structures, and they’re never shy about reminding the other parts of the EU about this democratic mandate they are so privileged to possess, is warning against letting voters have a say. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

But the most astonishing thing for me about this entire process is not the utter contempt the EU has, and has always had, for it’s citizen-subjects, but that such open displays of arrogance and disdain for democratic decisionmaking are largely ignored by both the media and the body politic. And when commented on, is often done so in a positive light as we are told that the EU is too complicated to be left to the people. It should instead rest in the capable hands of people like Charlie O’Connor, Ivor Callelly, Willie ‘Free Shannon’ O’Dea, John Ellis, Martin Brady, Michael Ring, Shane McEntee, Eoghan Harris and so on.

Don’t worry children, they’ll see us right.

It’s funny. Last week while I was listing those who had been influenced by Joy Division I was aware that I was leaving groups off. What’s surprising to me is the names of those groups. Most of them would actually be in the higher tier of successors.

I’m thinking of Disco Inferno, whose first album In Debt was explicitly Joy Division in sound, but whose later EPs and CDs went on a completely different tangent, part New Order, part Post Rock. If anyone has an MP3 of their Summers Last Sound EP, and in particular The Last Dance, I’d be very very grateful seeing as the original purchase copy was robbed on me a decade ago. A fantastic group whose second album D.I. Goes Pop (cover above) is one of the most remarkable blends of guitars and synths I’ve ever heard.

Then there is Killing Joke. Their mid-period, with singles like “Love Like Blood” and albums such as Nighttime and Brighter than a Thousand Suns were again a sort of commercial nod to Joy Division and New Order. But even the early material utilised a sparse simplicity which was contemporaneous to Wire (whose later 1990s incarnation was very New Order-like) and Joy Division.

Or what of Nine Inch Nails, who married Industrial to the Joy Division sound, and even covered “Dead Souls” on the soundtrack to The Crow. Successfully it must be said.

Then there’s Moby, who covered “New Dawn Fades” for the movie Heat. Again, successfully.

Post-rock being a couple of steps over from the Joy Division sound produced such luminaries as Trans-Am whose instrumentals were very very close in tone.

Going way back we have Josef K and their “It’s Kind of Funny” which was specifically about Ian Curtis.

Donagh over on Dublin Opinion has even more on this…

Of course, as interesting in its way is who were the influences on Joy Division and New Order?

Being otherwise preoccupied I missed this article by Neil Clark on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site (incidentally splinteredsunrise has a post on a similar issue and it’s well worth reading the link to Johann Hari, who while irritating provides at least some sort of analysis on the pro-war left). And in a way I’m glad I missed it first time around because I think the response to it is very revealing and demonstrates some aspects of the left that the “Decents” have tended to ignore in the past.

What does Clark suggest? Under the heading Keep these quislings out he proposes that:

A group of pro-war bloggers is playing a prominent role in a campaign to grant asylum to Iraqis who have been working as translators for the British forces in Iraq. Not all who back the campaign were in favour of the war, but some of its most strident supporters are.

It seems the Iraqis in question live in real fear of their lives in their newly “liberated” country. Surely, this can’t be right. Weren’t we told five years ago by the same pro-war bloggers that the Iraqi people were simply baying for a US/UK invasion, and that the “liberators” would be greeted with bouquets of flowers and cucumber sandwiches? Now the cakewalk brigade is telling us those who collaborate with - oops, sorry, work for - the liberators may not actually be the most popular guys and gals in town.

One has to love the ‘It seems’… and indeed the way in which the translators suddenly become meat to an argument.

Then there is the contention that:

If more Iraqis had followed the example of the interpreters and collaborated with British and American forces, it is likely that the cities of Iran and Syria would now be lying in rubble.

This, to my mind is just an inversion of the neo-con argument. Here a people is asked to assume superhuman attributes and qualities in order to fulfill a political objective. For the neo-cons that ran along the lines of ‘Iraqi’s will pay the price of invasion and occupation in order to establish democracy and forestall the spread of Islamism across the Middle East’. For Clark it runs along the lines of the Iraqi’s sacrificing themselves on the alter of the resistance in order to forestall the US from waging war across the Middle East. Both ask others to do the heavy lifting. Both ignore the human cost implicit in their viewpoint.

Still, if we want to get to the heart of the argument consider one of his parting shots:

Before you rush to condemn Iraqis who feel ill disposed towards the interpreters, ask yourself a simple question: how would you view fellow Britons who worked for the forces of a foreign occupier, if Britain were ever invaded? History tells us that down through history, Quislings have - surprise, surprise - not been well received, and the Iraqi people’s animosity towards those who collaborated with US and British forces is only to be expected.

Isn’t this the know-nothing school of political and historical analysis? The use of the word Quisling - is so specific as to render the point he makes meaningless. Is he seriously suggesting that an interpreter for the US or UK military is a Quisling, i.e. akin to a fascist who directly aided and abetted in the occupation of a democratic country by a National Socialist regime? Well actually he doesn’t exactly because he suggests that they are also “self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain”. Now Quislings may well have been mercenary, but the truly appalling aspect of them was that they were for the most part entirely sincere in their beliefs.

No mention of the fact that Iraq is effectively an imperialist creation in the first place, a crushing together a host of differing nationalities, at least one of which - the Kurds - has achieved something close to de facto nationhood. Are Kurds collaborators against ‘Iraq’ because they accepted US help against the Saddam regime throughout the 1990s? It’s a nonsensical proposition, particularly from a self-described ‘democratic socialist’. Then looking at the Sunni-Shia, we see how the phrase ‘Iraqi peoples’s’ loses all meaning. Iraq was a profoundly divided society, remains a profoundly divided society and in all likelihood is going to be a profoundly divided society into the foreseeable future. In that context, one of submerged civil war throughout much of it’s recent history the concepts of ‘Quisling’ and ‘collaborators’ become moot.

This is before we even examine the motivation of those who would work with the US and UK in this situation. No mention of the dictatorship prior to the invasion and how this might just conceivably colour the view of an Iraqi who sought a democratic future and mistakenly put his or her trust in the US. No mention of the host of personal, political and other reasons a person might decide to assist, perhaps even to ameliorate the Coalition presence.

It is this lack of balance, nuance or depth that makes me think that this is this simply rhetoric, some handy stick to beat Bush and Blair and beyond that is representative of a personalised conflict between Clark and pro-war bloggers. Because it is difficult not to see the hyperbole, the stretching or ignoring of fact as part of an argument which has little relation to actuality.

Which means that this is effectively a toytown political analysis, in other words an analysis produced simply to berate one’s political opponents ignoring the actuality of the impact such an analysis has. And Clark isn’t shy about the implications of his thesis:

If that means some of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war, and not those of us who tried all we could to stop it.

For those of us who came up through parties with even the most tenuous connection to Republicanism and Socialism the glibness with which Clark makes such pronouncements are redolent of the certainties of another era. One of the worst periods of the conflict in the North was when the list of those who were viewed as legitimate targets was extended out to encompass cleaners, sub-contractors and others. The reason was obvious. The security forces were reasonably well protected, but these ancillary groups were not, so they provided a convenient proxy. But the North wasn’t Vichy France. The IRA wasn’t the Resistance. And many of those cleaners and sub-contractors belonged to a Unionist community which had a national identification with the British Army and the British state. To attack them was to de facto attack that community. That was a tactic almost nihilistic in it’s stupidity.

What Clark proposes is no better, perhaps even worse. Iraq isn’t Vichy, those fighting the US and UK and the Iraqi government aren’t the Resistance. And that government isn’t a Vichy government either. The situation is far too complex for a simplistic template drawn from the Second World War to be applied to this. Take the Mahdi Army. By Clark’s lights they must be effectively part of the Resistance since they fought the US some years back…but wait, they have allied MPs in Parliament and they haven’t fought the US since. Doesn’t that make them collaborators as well? Or what of the Sunni parties, some of whom have links to the insurgency. Collaborators or Resistance? Both or neither?

Where does he draw the line? Where could anyone?

And what of the left, of which he is nominally a member…

What of the Trade Unions who have fought the US backed oil law? Does not their engagement make them ‘collaborators’? Some in the ‘resistance’ appear to think so to judge by the continuing attacks on them. What of the Iraqi Communist Party which suffered grievously under Saddam and has engaged with but been entirely critical of the US and UK? They too have been under assault. What of ordinary Iraqi’s who voted in flawed democratic processes. Does not their engagement mark them down for the bullet or the sword?

I mentioned that the response was very interesting. Almost overwhelmingly it was negative, and this from those, as I would expect, who were against the war in the first place. The basic retort was that these are human beings, that the US and UK, whatever Clarks protestations have a duty of care even just as employers to people who they used and this must be upheld. Nick Cohen - who sadly has been something of an inverse of Clark, has argued that the left has lost its bearings. I see no sign of that. I see a left which is confused on the issue and unsure as to the best possible way forward. One that was bitterly conflicted over the war, and rightly so. But I also see a left which is innately decent and while not prepared to support the war is prepared to support those who are victims of it from whatever quarter.

Decency, and a common humanity isn’t the preserve of the “Decents”. Far from it. In some respects it is the aversion to epochal transformative projects which symbolises a more decent approach than that pursued by the keyboard warriors. Their view of all on the anti-war left as being appeasers or cheerleaders for the most revanchist elements of Islamist thinking is simply incorrect. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Cohen is wrong because he wants everyone to accept that there was no principled argument against the invasion and war. Everything he writes is a justification of that position, even as the war and its aftermath are now clearly a complete disaster. And it’s not that there were no principled arguments in favour, simply that cooler heads on the anti-war side were more broadly correct in their analysis. Clark is wrong because he wants to implicitly put all to the fire whose actions might suggest that the situation is more complex than just the result of an US/UK intervention. But Clark is representative of very very few people. Far far fewer than Cohen and others on the ‘decent’ left would like to suppose and also far far fewer than Clark might like to think.

Continuing the trawl through the archives this week I turn to the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist Leninist). And never was a hyphenated two word suffix so important in political terms. Because you see the CPI (ML) were not like other parties. Others might organise in constituencies, others still might harbour utopian dreams. But for the CPI (ML) the thought was as important, indeed more important, than the deed. Their publications were important but the membership was more important. Some might be Marxists, others might be Leninists, but only the CPI (ML) members were true Marxist-Leninists. Sure, first in 1965 they rejected Kruschev, but rejection became addiction as they then claimed to be Maoists, in 1978 they rejected Mao, then turned to Albania and Enver Hoxha, and all the while retained a startling fondness for Stalin. Quite how this translated into practical activity was never entirely clear. There was the “Spirit of Freedom” group which I seem to recall giving talks broadly supportive of the IRA and after that? Not much really. They had long long before I encountered them, contested elections in the North, but I never saw much evidence of any serious political activity by them outside of student unions.

To be honest - and I dislike saying this about any left organisation - I found the members of the CPI (ML) an unlovable bunch. The words arrogant and conceited spring most readily to my mind. And this was peculiar because for a group with a membership as small as theirs they had no real reason to be either. Tommy Graham wasn’t so bad, and I never knew Doris, but others I found extremely antagonistic.

Now granted, being more or less the sole Stick in SU politics at the time didn’t help - but it wasn’t directed personally at me but rather a diffuse antagonism to all beyond the party. Where ever one or more would gather there was a point when the talk about ideological purity became wearing. Usually that point was sooner rather than later. And with no disrespect to them, at the time hearing about the joys of Marxist-Leninist thought in relation to Albania (Albania!) always seemed a bit sort of — well twee. On the theoretical side they never amounted to much. I may be being a little unfair here, but I can’t think of one fresh idea they brought to the feast and in a way that was quite predictable. They weren’t about fresh ideas. Instead - with a steadfastness that would have been recognised and admired by Archbishop Lefebvre - they maintained a steely adherence to stale stale ideas centered around a reductionist Marxism.

And in a way it’s important, but probably impossible at this remove, to convey just how profoundly odd they were. Modernity had seemingly passed them by. Graham was blessed by what seemed initially to be the great good fortune to look rather like someone from the 1930s Supreme Soviet - the only problem being that that someone happened by a further somewhat more careless accident of fate to look rather similar to one L. Trotsky. That he - and others assumed the demeanour of those same members of the Supreme Soviet was hardly coincidence. I could never quite work out whether they were in any real sense serious. Why would one join them? What was the attraction of one of the most utterly and rightly discredited strands of left thought in history? After all Stalinism wasn’t exactly a pretty word in the political environment of the 1970s and 1980s, whether it was dressed up in Maoism or the thought of Enver Hoxha. The CPI and WP - for all their admitted faults - were more engaged on a critical level and had taken on board the idea that the Stalinist period was not an unalloyed good. And if one were that picky, the SWM or Militant offered brands of Marxist Leninism entirely untainted by Stalinism. Or coming at it from the direction of Republicanism why not just join SF rather than acting as a cheerleader? So the question was, and to some degree still remains, was this all some sort of elaborate hoax, or art performance or just a rather middle class endeavour?

But a greater part of any antipathy I had to them was simply due to the enormously sectarian approach they took to all other elements on the left. Everyone else was a ’sham’, a ‘lackey’ or part of a ‘clique’. All had sold out but them. One might think it impolitic to lift your political discourse almost wholesale from the rhetoric of the 1930s show trials but woe upon anyone foolish enough to suggest that Stalin might be not be all they cracked him up to be…

Actually all the blood and thunder about Stalin and Hoxha always seemed to be a facade. They were always trailing around on PSF’s coat tails, in a sort of exaggeration of the SWM’s fetish for all things Republican and militant. And their vehemence about the national question or Marxist-Leninism tended to seem detached from reality. Their periodic visits to Albania raised hilarity more than admiration - one wonders what the Albanians made of them. Although one suspects that as with many of these groups the fact that they didn’t have an ‘army’ meant they didn’t really count.

Curiously though on a day to day level they garnered a lot of respect in the strangest places. Perhaps it was because Doris had been head of USI, or Graham and another guy had been Presidents of the SU’s in the DIT, or perhaps it was the sterness of purpose they projected, but I saw otherwise intelligent people nod approvingly at some fairly asinine pronouncements simply because of the source they came from. And always, always that tendency to overstate.

John Sullivan once wrote of their British comrades:

The CPB(M-L) from the beginning adopted an ingenious device to avoid the danger of being torn apart by the political disagreements which were destroying their rivals. The party deliberately confined itself to making very general statements of opposition to imperialism and support for the working class. The only exception to this was support for guerrilla warfare, such as had brought Mao to power. The British labour movement’s adaptation of Mao’s tactic was to consist of localised strikes which were not to make the mistake of linking up and making generalised demands. To do so would be equivalent to the peasant masses lining up in massed formation to oppose an imperialist army, instead of taking to the hills. The strategy went down well among Reg Birch’s right-wing colleagues on the AEU executive where he was comfortably ensconced. They had always wanted to avoid fighting the employers, and as they lacked the power to stop local shop stewards leading a fight, Birch’s ideas suited them nicely.

That might have been as a result of belonging to such a minority strain in Irish (and Lord knows) global leftism. A typical speaker from CPI (ML) would assume a declaratory mode much in the style of Lenin addressing the most recalcitrant of Bolsheviks even when making the most minor of procedural points on some student union matter. They didn’t tend towards the old trick of much of the student based left of assuming a Dublin or working class accent. Probably for the fairly sensible reason that few enough of them were working class, indeed in my recollection there was more of a tendency to adopt a very slightly faux Northern tone.

A close friend of mine at the time - very much not a WP supporter - expressed a passing interest in the CPI (ML) and for years after would have members arrive at his door unannounced to hector him about their policies. His partner happened to be English and both he and she were extremely upset by the vehemence of the rhetoric used by the party when discussing the North to the point that on one occasion they were asked to leave and never return.

Anyway, enough impressions. Here cpi-ml.pdf is a copy of their journal Red Patriot from 1976 (note how the year punk broke passed them by!). This was I think just before the Sino-Albanian split, but already the primacy of Hoxha is evident. I can’t help but admire the excuse on the back of the journal for the absence of No. 42 which ‘was due largely due to obstacles which the Red Patriot Editorial Staff cannot avoid but must deal with by revolutionary means…’ or the apologia for Lysenko and his enormous achievements through the correct application of dialectical materialism.

But it is the language that is most telling. Some of the articles appear to have been written in a fairly level headed fashion, but between them are pieces presented in an almost enraged discourse that for those who knew them in the flesh is all too recognisable.

According to wiki the Irish party folded in 2003, but as a postscript John Sullivan writing of their fraternal comrades across the water;

The CPB(M-L) then (in the mid-1980s), abruptly and without explanation, altered their world view and declared that the Soviet Union, previously described as an imperialist state ruled by counter-revolutionaries, was a bastion of socialism. Did this mean that they were bidding for the Moscow franchise? It was not as simple as that, and an understanding of the party’s reasoning demands a grasp of dialectical thought. Stalin had established that there could be socialism in one country. Therefore, there had to be a country for socialism to exist in and Russia’s claims were the longest established. The ‘Tankies’ in the CPGB hoped that the CPB(M-L) would dissolve its separate organisation and return to the fold to assist in the fight against the ‘Euros’, but it was already too late. Secrecy has become an obsession with the CPB(M-L), and members have taken to denying that their organisation exists, or that they know anything of its history! How can a non-existent party be dissolved? Members do not divulge either their membership or the party’s existence to colleagues at work. Their journal, The Worker, still exists, but is no longer sold openly. Sociologists of religion are familiar with this phenomenon through the study of the revolutionary sects of the seventeenth century, some of whom survived for a very long time by adopting passivity and a secretive way of life. The CPB(M-L) may be slowly disappearing from view: if you are in touch with any of its members, it is essential that you do nothing to alarm them, as it would be a loss to science if they become so secretive that they can no longer be studied.

Could it be? Could they still be here, underground, still producing and distributing copies of Red Patriot? I wouldn’t put it past them…

It seems to sneak up on me every year. Fumbling with take-out coffee and the morning’s paper while waiting for the bus I turned to the headlines and there it was: ‘Leaving Cert results’. The story, on all the frontpages, dealt with declining results in some maths and science subjects but for me, and probably anyone reading it who had sat through the exams, it was a reminder of what we were repeatedly told was the most important event in our lives.

To this day my short walk along the corridor to the School Secretary’s office to collect my results remains one of my most terrifying and nauseating experiences. Since then I’ve been in a couple of unpleasant situations where serious physical harm was a possibility, but generally there was no time to be scared and I have always been blessed with the instinctive coward’s ability to know where the proverbial fire exists are located in any room. This was different, the culmination of months, years, of work and steadily building tension.

For me, perhaps more than most, the results that morning were serious for it was the second time I had taken the exams. I had done a negligible amount of work the previous year, spending my time reading books that had nothing to do with the school curriculum and had missed out my first choice by some distance. I was offered instead a degree in public administration somewhere outside the pale. The road less travelled I suppose. Had I taken it, I’d never have met Mrs Little, never have ended up working where I am and I suspect wouldn’t have got so involved in politics being too busy administering people.

But instead, I chose to give it one more try and transferred to a new school. After the first day of classes I walked out to discover my father had, unusually, taken time off work to give me a lift home. On the way, he pulled into a lay-by and we had what was probably our first serious conversation as men. There was no lecturing or pleading or commanding, as marks the relationship of father and son for the first two decades, more a quiet conversation about the year ahead and how important it was for my future.

And so, after a summer of sleepless nights and ever-increasing anxiety after the exams were over I looked forward to the day when the results would be there to be collected. This was long before the post Leaving Cert celebrations consisted of a week in Ibiza, or wherever it is the young people go these days.

It was about half ten when we pulled into the carpark. There were a couple of other cars around, a few students going in or coming out. I ran into a girl I knew who was struggling to restrain her excitement as she came out. We exchanged a few words but it was clear her mind was on what she had achieved and the need to tell her family. She wished me luck and in I went.

The corridor from the main entrance to the secretary’s office was relatively short. Industrial, dark green carpets and cream walls dotted with religious imagery. Cushioned backless benches along the right hand side and a short queue of nervous men and women, boys and girls, waiting for their results. Curiously, I can’t remember faces. Those of the people I queued with and must have spoken to, or the school official who handed me my results, yet everything else that morning prior to the results is extraordinarily vivid even today.

I remember sitting on one of the benches with the calculator to hand adding up my scores. Astute readers will note the fact that it took me three attempts, despite my fine electronic adding device, to get my final results and accurately conclude that neither Maths nor Physics were where I was hoping to get my points.

It was enough. Not enough to be comfortable. A sudden spring in popularity for my first choice course and I might still lose it, but I thought it was enough, and so it proved. I don’t remember walking out of the school or telling my parents or friends. I don’t remember what we did later that day though I suspect it was a quiet family dinner someplace.

I do remember the two people credited with getting me through it. Ma Little was, and still is, a great believer in St Martin de Porres. Despite my atheist leanings at the time I had carried a St Martin’s medal into every exam, feigning reluctance as a good atheist should, but drawing comfort from rubbing the smooth surface of it with my thumb throughout the examinations nonetheless. I kept the medal up until my third year in college, a lucky talisman of sorts. This, and a couple of rosaries from my Mother, is the case for St Martin’s support.

It was my fanatically Marxist friend, whose committed Stalinism had a formative influence on my political development at the time, who argued that my success had been an example of an ‘historical inevitability’, assuring me that he had had as much confidence in me getting my results as he had in the inevitable collapse of capitalism. He attempted to make what I can only assume through a hazy recollection were spurious efforts to put my examination results in a Marxist context. In his defence, and mine for taking him seriously, we were both very drunk at the time.

This morning, around 50,000 young people will collect their results. Some will go straight to work, others to university and many to something in between.  For some, blighted by poor opportunities, today’s results will make little or no difference to their lives. The collection of the results is in itself an academic exercise. For others, it has the potential to be a defining moment shaping the rest of their lives for like most of us the career we take or the friends we make are to a large extent shaped by the university opportunity we had.

And for me, every year, it is a reminder of how a young person can be so utterly convinced that one’s entire future is contained in a series of letters and numbers spelling out the rest of my life.

An interesting piece by John Waters in yesterday’s Irish Times about Eoghan Harris. In it he attempts to rebut the charge, or rather to refine the charge, that Harris has been flexible to the point of destruction.

Waters opens by arguing that:

At the time [Waters first met Harris] I was, I think, a post-nationalist existential pluralist, but I hadn’t gotten around to labelling it, so I just said that I had only recently come up from the country. He understood and laughed. I liked him a lot. He was brilliant, funny and passionately engaged with reality. He declined my offer and we ate our lunch.

I think he misses out, in all this ‘boys together’ stuff, just how personally hurtful certain actions and allegations by those who cleaved to the Harris line could be. Anyone who has read of the poisonous relations in RTÉ in the mid to late 1980s will attest to that - and for same Fionnuala O’Connor’s book “In Search of A State” is an excellent starting point.

Waters suggests that:

The response to Harris’s appointment to Seanad Éireann, undoubtedly the most exciting and interesting appointment of recent years, has stirred up similar elements of churlishness. Indeed when I called to congratulate him on hearing the news, we pretty much wrote the script there and then. The general tenor of commentary has centred on his journey from left-wing radical to alleged buttress of the establishment. In the past week, several letters along these lines have been published on the page opposite.

Well, some of us might beg to differ that it is the most exciting and interesting. However, ‘most contentious’ might be more appropriate. Then there is the ‘alleged buttress’. Really. Surely the very definition of ‘establishment’ is to argue for the retention of the status quo. If one casts an eye across his career this has, to some degree, been central to his position.

It is intriguing that, in a society that has changed out of all recognition in the past decade, we still implicitly regard consistency to a singular viewpoint as exhibiting the highest ethic of personal conviction. Why is this? Everything is changed utterly and, in our moral evaluations of this, we almost invariably present these changes - prosperity, peace, freedom - as virtuous. Very well: somewhere beneath these changes, there must have existed some strong dynamic of thought, guiding and propelling them forward. And yet, when we come upon an example of a thinker who has exhibited in public the characteristics that most readily resonate with the seismic shifts in our cultural conditions, we decide there has been something suspect about this person’s willingness to change horses.

There is no doubt that changing horses is a probable inevitability in any political life. Most people I know who are active politically have been through one or two political formations. Some many more. Most have changed or amended their opinions as time has progressed. That is entirely reasonable. Yet there appears to be an ideological incontinence when so many horses have been changed, although the trajectory of those changes has been broadly predictable. It is one which has tracked towards the center of political power within our society - the ‘establishment’ if you will. That is why Harris is a profoundly conservative figure - for all the seemingly youthful indiscretion of joining Sinn Féin.

And is it true that everything has changed utterly? Really?

To my mind what is most notable about the present period is that in political terms it is not radically different from pre-existing periods if we look at the 26 counties. Fianna Fáil hegemony is reiterated… etc, etc. The North of course is different. But, even then it is possible to argue that what we see there is a return to a generalised societal calm after the irruption of the Troubles, perhaps (although I doubt it) a calm that might have evolved much more rapidly in the absence of armed conflict.

And is it even true that Harris is in some sense a totem of ’seismic’ shifts in the body politic, or the culture? How does one read his proposition of the “Necessity for Social Democracy” to the Workers’ Party in the late 1980s? Did that make any sense at all and did it have either predictive or empirical worth? Hardly. The WP actually did better after he had left in high dudgeon prior to the 1989 Election by cleaving to the tried and tested line of slow reformism. That it imploded some years later is a different matter. Then what of his prophetic alliance with Fine Gael and the astuteness of bringing Twink to a gobsmacked FG Ard Fheis? Since Fine Gael has yet to win outright an election in the intervening time one might wonder did that too ‘resonate with seismic shifts’? And Mary Robinson? His advice was good in parts, bad in others… Did it win the Presidential election? Highly highly unlikely. More accurate to say Fianna Fáil lost it. And note the political positions that Waters omits. Nothing here about his somewhat detached support for the PDs, or his identification with neo-conservative thought. How do they fit into the great picture?

Waters makes great play about Harris advising Trimble.

He was there for the Robinson moment, and again when David Trimble made those first faltering steps towards reconciliation.

Here too one wonders. Trimble is an interesting figure, but whether Harris was there long enough to have any significant impact is questionable. And whether ‘reconciliation’ as we currently understand it was the goal of Harris is another question entirely.

Commentators, because they envy him, often miss the extent of Harris’s intuitive understanding of the feeling of his people. This, I think provides the only real map of his journey. He has been right about many things, as he was right recently about Bertie, because he listens to his own tribal pulse, sometimes going with it and sometimes realising that it needs to be denied.

Now we are into the realm of the unknowable. “His people”? Who precisely are they? Me? You? That person over there? What exactly is this “tribal” pulse? As for ‘the real map of his journey’… what sort of map is provided by the vagaries of public opinions and feelings? The sort that when one jettisons ideology of any sort retreats to populism - because what else is left?

Some years back I saw Harris on the Late Late Show on an edition about crime. Harris is enormously watchable, perhaps because he can be so unpredictable on the micro level. But I was disheartened to hear a litany of emotive populist nonsense about crime in Irish society, a populism which seemed to be a deliberate play to a certain…well.. yes, ‘establishment’ mindset. The perception was more important than the reality. Those who had put forward any counter argument were ‘bleeding heart liberals’ of the worst stripe, etc and indeed etc. And this from a man who is palpably intelligent, who is aware that the issue of crime demands a higher level of discourse than the old ‘people know the ‘real’ truth’ trope.

I didn’t see the Harris/Waters double act earlier this year on the Late Late. But Waters is keen to reprise that particular moment of going with the grain of the zeitgeist.

I was with him on the Late Late that night in May, and knew instantly that what he had done was remind people what they felt in their hearts and told them that it was permissible to express it. Harris personifies what has happened in this society in our lifetimes, not only because his personal journey has reflected a broader collective odyssey, but because he was present at the scene of more than one or two key incidents along the way.

Yes… but no. While I too considered that FF support was probably stronger than many thought, and I posted that possibility prior to the election here, it seems almost monstrous to argue that this in some way links into a mystical notion of knowing ‘instantly that what he had done was remind people what they felt in their hearts and told them that it was permissible to express it’ or that Harris in some sense personifies what has happened in this society in our lifetimes, not only because his personal journey has reflected a broader collective odyssey, but because he was present at the scene of more than one or two key incidents along the way. And let’s be clear, Fianna Fáil won 40% of the vote. Not a majority, just 40%. I don’t for one second denigrate that. It was a fantastic political campaign. But to reify it in the way Waters implicitly does is to return us to a discourse on politics which smiffy has more accurately and forensically deconstructed than I can.

In any event, surely many many people can fit that bill? One or two key incidents? Off the top of my head I’ve been at a few more than that, and I’m pretty sure I don’t personify anything much to write home about.

He did much to keep nationalist Ireland honest through it all. Observing Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness laughing at each other’s jokes, we must surely realise that such a transformation would not have been possible if dogged flat-earthism remained the primary political virtue.

But this is politically meaningless. Waters surely is aware that the mind-set which Harris represents is one which considers the Paisley/McGuinness transformation as a near abomination, that it in fact symbolises the polar opposite of the project which he and they worked towards, and that the interventions from the quarters he was close to were as near to ‘dogged flat-earthism’ as it might be possible to make.

Still, read the final paragraph - or rather the final sentence and a half - and suddenly one wonders is Waters just toying with us big time…

A weak man’s changing is of no consequence, but a strong man’s change is an inspiration and a reassurance. The changes that have happened in Ireland in the past couple of decades could not have been accomplished by moderate minds, but only by extremists capable of yielding when the occasion called. Nobody represents better than Eoghan Harris the qualities that brought us from where we were to where we are now.