The Flexibility of Harris is Inspiring. Indeed.

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.