No Brainer

The release of 1984  official papers in London shows that an Irish politician said , presumably to somebody who seemed to matter, that I “was the brains behind the republican movement”.

I was flattered by anyone thinking I had either the brains or the ability to be any such thing, but  the statement is nonsense.

If I had received an invitation  to write speeches for Gerry Adams as this politician asserted, I would have been flattered by that request also, and would have responded with the same courtesy as Gerry Adams has always shown  me. But being aware of both the literary and the political abilities of Gerry Adams I  know  that my contribution would have been not only pedestrian and unhelpful but unnecessary.

However, a serious aspect of this assertion is that it is one of many  made to governments in Dublin and London through the years some of which were  nonsense. We know of some of them, there must have been many we don’t know about. The result of such stuff must be that these governments are willingly fed with misinformation which can only hinder those who are looking for rational solutions to problems. The damage done if this means a war is lengthened, must be considered when one is considering the contribution, responsible or otherwise, of those who made the assertions. And their motive for doing it. Another important aspect of the matter is that a simple phone call could have shown how nonsensical and false the statement about the brains was.

Interestingly, a statement of much the same kind was made at, I believe, much the same time by another person, this time a journalist whose sympathies would be rather different from those of the Irish politician  mentioned above. The fact that Dublin and government officials and such people accepted statements of such a character is one of the most frightening things about what they did during the years when people were suffering in Ireland’s northeast. The responsibility  of Irish and British officials both here and abroad for  the lengthening of the conflict in Ireland has yet to be examined , probably because no-one is willing to take the risk of showing what really happened. The idea that nothing good can come from a certain class, or a certain person or party is very much alive in politics , so the official line has to be  that if a good speech is produced it must be a ghost writer who wrote it and if  votes are obtained in elections, it is all due to  impersonation. It used to be said that until poets and other writers took an interest in modern republicanism it would be second class. Then the poets and writers and  artists  did , and suddenly it did not matter any more. It was an interesting reminder that the tactic is as old as the hills – remember the question in the Christian Gospel, can any good thing come from Nazareth?