No Trouble

One trouble about Ireland is that we never get to describing properly what is happening in and to it. We talk about The Troubles when what we  really mean is revolution. We talk about inter- religion hatred when what we mean is antagonism used as an instrument of government. Put it all together and what you get is that  in the northeast corner of Ireland  bad government using racism as an instrument of control led to a revolution.

With that  as a starting point we may reasonably hope to get somewhere , but it is doubtful if Dr Haass will even be directed towards it. He will be told, and will accept that the Irish problem is one of Protestant versus Catholic hatred. It is nothing of the kind. The problem is thoroughly bad government and has been  for centuries. Indeed the Protestant and Catholic populations were so successful in integrating and burying hatchets and living together that artificial antagonisms and pogroms had to be arranged on average every 12 years for a couple of centuries, as one of our perceptive friends, Andrew Boyd has pointed out.

Commentators on most conflicts  tell us  who benefits militarily , financially, socially, culturally from a particular situation . Not so about Ireland, where commentators  lazily or with intent declare that inter-community hatred is the cause of  the problems.  Ireland, particularly the northeast, has suffered  always from that false description . The world was told about the great Protestant-Catholic  blocs wrapt in struggle as if the Jewish people , the Muslims, the Humanists and about 60 different religious groups did not even exist. The result has been an interpretation of Ireland which has very efficiently prevented rational thought about it internationally.

It is time for that nonsense to cease but there is not the slightest possibility that Dr Haass will cause it to cease. From what he has said in public it seems he is locked into the old tired, inefficient model  of sectarian conflict in which what we have to do is get Mrs Mac Awilly to agree with her next street neighbour Mrs O Filigan and all will be well. No word of bad government leading to revolution, as any American commentator would be glad to notice if it were in a  Latin American country. No word of how the Humanists and the Jewish people and so many others have been left out of the thinking as blocs were petrified or if necessary created to suit the only model of  description allowed by government and press.

Control of flags and emblems can be dealt with locally in any society by clear laws and honest policing. Without those all the talking in the world is in vain. The past will be dealt with in time as it has been in other European countries , given  people’s need to survive with dignity and with an adequate sense of the realities of their life but the best way to ensure that happens is to guarantee good government and if good government is not possible in a Irish six county context which was  specially designed to create undemocratic  government then that context has to be changed. The shape of an ungovernable area may have to  be changed to suit modern  reality, rather than imperial needs of the past.

All that needs thinking – and doing – something rational about, but  is a matter not for  a visiting monitor but for a local and international  process of rational analysis and politics.   It is high time we had it.

New York Stops

Do cities ever  get so cluttered they just stop ?  A friend in New York foretold  that  would happen  – “One fine day”, he said, New York will just stop. Dead” . He imagined  a  policeman standing  lonely at a corner in  Fifth Avenue  patiently disentangling car after car in a city which had at last given in,    getting fatter and slower and finally giving up.

Could  cities really stop ? Get so big  they become unmanageable?  A “garbage” strike or even a garbage glitch in New York  now can  be not only inconvenient but disastrous. Or   a  power failure, freezing elevators, machines, traffic lights, when   for a few frightening hours citizens  realise how much they depend on electric current  and  make frantic resolutions never to let it happen again, wondering  what kind of shop  sells generators cheap, then remembering  that unless you keep a tankful of gas ready for action, which most people don’t,  dead pumps will not help much.

A city grows  , so it needs more money to look after more people, so more people are encouraged to come in and pay more rates and taxes . People need shops and cinemas and theatres and  sports arenas and then they need  more people to fill them  because of rising costs and profits and they all need trams and roads,underpasses and overpasses, roundabouts and swings .  That means frayed nerves and irritable complaints that you can’t even get a road mended without a traffic pile-up  half a mile long, appointments are missed and road rage is no longer an affection of speeders but one afflicting those who can only move slow metre by agonising metre. Cities  get  over-crowded,some  thrive on it for a while ,  thrive in spite of it  – and some seize up from it. That has always been the way ,we human beings just must have cities, crowded cities, and yet  no people on earth have found the secret of managing the growth of cities so that they don’t seize up on them.

The Roman emperor Nero, nearly 2000 years ago,  was blamed for solving the problem of over-crowding, pollution, traffic congestion , bad housing , refuse pile-up and much else in Rome in his time – by sending out his slaves one day to burn down about half the city. Guilty of arson or not,  he blamed the Christians for the fire  , played a tune on his lyre, recited a poem or two  and rebuilt the city to a fine plan which would have done credit to a sane man but  was miraculous for an irrational  one like him. 

So when crawling along in slow moving tailback queue  on a city approach road , let’s be glad and rejoice – if we lived in ancient times, things could be a lot worse.