HERE'S TO WHOM, MRS ROBINSON?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft sees

the destruction of distinctive Irishness embodied in a secularist president

DUBLIN at present is in a mood of excitement bordering on exaltation. It began with the election of Mrs Mary Robinson as president early in November. She is not only the first woman to be elected to the Irish presidency. She is the first president since the office was intro- duced who has not been a nominee of Fianna Fail, the party which came to power in 1932 and has with only occasional and quite short interruptions ruled the country until today.

More than that, 'Mrs Robinsonism' seems to have challenged the pieties of old-fashioned nationalism. Last month the Dublin parliament debated articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution with their irredentist claim on Northern Ireland, a claim which Mrs Robinson rejects. She is critical also of the laws which uphold the traditional teaching of the Roman Catholic Church by proscribing divorce and homosexuality. And now (to the surprise of those who have forgotten what a nimble political operator he is) Mr Haughey has promised to review those laws. So Ireland has woken up. It is moving away from 'civil war politics', the sterile contest between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, the heirs of the Free Staters and Republicans who fought each other in 1922-3. It is moving away from confronta- tion with the North and an overbearing (if rather theoretical) threat to the Ulster Protestants. It is moving away from the clericalism which made it, by repute, the last priest-ridden theocracy in Europe. No wonder progressive Irish people are ex- ultant.

Their exultation may be understandable. It may also be misplaced. Look at this by way of three different Irish political pers- pectives, epitomised, let's say, by Mrs Robinson, Mr Haughey and Mr Gerry Adams. The question is, not which of these is the nicest, but which is the most logical. And what does their logic say about Ireland?

Mr Adams and the IRA represent an old Irish tradition, or two of them, 'physical force' and the platonic republic. The two both have a certain inner logic. If Ireland is already a platonically united nation, then there's no need to recognise the 'actually existing' institutions of either Six Counties or 26.

Nor is there any need to bother about the fact that the majority in Northern Ireland don't want to be ruled from Dub- lin. If they don't, then they ought to. In any case, Ulster is conquered territory to be liberated. Speaking in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the then president Eamon de Valera spoke of Uls- ter as 'the land of the O'Neills, the 0 Cathains, the MacDonnells, the Maguires and the MacGuinnesses' — and thus, as the historian Mr R. E. Foster puts it, `platonically Gaelic and ripe for reunifica- tion'.

It was de Valera who said that whenever he wanted to know the wishes of the Irish people he had only to look into his own heart. Why should Mr Adams not claim as much? In practice, Mr Adams and his colleagues apply a different logic. A Re- publican was asked once if it was really possible to bomb a million Protestants into a united Ireland and replied, 'Maybe you can bomb them out of it.' That logic has been rigorously applied by the IRA, at its most rigorous in the regular killings of Protestant farmers and shopkeepers in isolated and predominately Catholic bor- der areas.

This may not seem to us very attractive, but who is to say that it — or the IRA's more general campaign of terror — is foolish in its own terms? The official rhetoric of Irish nationalism looks illogical by comparison.

Mr Haughey could also quote de Valera, the creator of his own party. But that party's position — de Valera's and Mr Haughey's — is shakier, not least when confronted by the IRA. The rhetoric of official, constitutional nationalism is like- wise that Ireland is one country. This is symbolised in the Irish tricolour, on which Green and Orange are linked by the White of peace.

The rhetoric is put at its most fatuous by de Valera's hagiographer, Lord Longford: the Northern Unionists 'were all Irishmen and equally dear accordingly'. To be fair to Mr Begin and Mr Shamir, they have never claimed that the Palestinians were all Israelis and equally dear accordingly. Norris the 'official republicanism' of Mr Haughey's ruling party in a very strong position when denouncing IRA violence. We tend to forget the genesis of Fianna Fail. It originated in the first Sinn Fein party which was closely linked to the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the first IRA. These fought for their cause by physical force, in 1916, in the 'war of independence' of 1919-21, and then in the Civil War.

In other words, Fianna Fail began life with three armed insurrections, against not one but two constitutional, democratic states, the United Kingdom and the Irish Free State. When Mr Adams claims that he and not Mr Haughey is the rightful heir of the tradition of 1916, it isn't entirely easy to refute.

On the question of partition Mrs Robin- son is more honest and logical. She and others like her entirely — and what is more to the point sincerely— abhor Republican violence, and recognise the rights of the Northern Unionists. But more generally, it may be that Mrs Robinson's position is the least logical of all. For the question she raises, is, what is Ireland?

If the laws imposing the teaching of the Church are to abolished; if the Roman Catholic Church itself is fast dwindling as f,

'Bloody body-builders!'

the central social force in Irish life (and, with about one Dubliner in ten now a regular church-goer, that city will soon be as pagan as London); if the evil of own- ership by an alien class was resolved generations ago when the landlords were bought out; and if the one true mark of a distinct culture, the Irish language, is on the point of extinction — if that is true, as it is, then what was it all for?

What was the point of the Irish national movement, and what is the point of an independent Irish state in the first place, 26-counties or all-Ireland? The brutal truth is that Irish nationalism has failed in its own terms, and that the election as presi- dent of a 'modern' secular woman, a progressive civil rights lawyer who is indis- tinguishable from any counterpart in Lon- don except by gentle accent, is part of that failure.

Visiting Dublin recently, Mr Richard Ingrams made a number of accurate and pertinent observations about 'the way it has come to resemble any other European capital', before coming to the wonderfully perverse conclusion that this 'makes a nonsense of the Unionist case [that] the Republic was a priest-ridden, poverty- stricken backwater of which they wanted no part'. It is certainly true that, 70 years after independence, Ireland is not less of a cultural dependency of England but far more. The one thing which 'unites' Ire- land, South and North, Green and Orange, Catholic and Protestant, is a common culture — the Anglo-American mass cul- ture of tabloid and television. The young of Ireland are entirely rootless and detribal- ised. The Madonna they know about is the one who sings in bizarre underclothes rather than the one honoured in church.

And in her cultivated, civilised way, Mrs Robinson is part of the process of detriba- lisation. The strange truth is that she, and 'modern Ireland', make a nonsense of the Irish nationalist case. Has so much blood ever been shed for so little?