The Editing Process

The blogs are going to be a bit thinner on the ground for the next while, as I have to set aside time for my forthcoming radio documentary on the Waterford Quakers.  Forthcoming sounds a bit grand actually, Harry Potter sequels are “forthcoming”, mine is more a “documentary what I made”.  The interviews were recorded between February and May and I’m now in the midst of the editing process, which is without doubt my favourite part.  My least favourite part, for the record, is completing the red tape necessary to secure the funding. I’d like to describe it as a Kafkaesque experience but it’s no way near as pleasant as that. Anyway, the editing process seems to hold the key to meaning and narrative drive in prepared broadcasting, and even more so in film.  It always makes me think of the position of the Director in film culture.  It’s taken for granted that the director has authorial ownership of a movie, but where would a director be without his or her editor? Or cinematographer? Or composer, set designer, art director, scriptwriter or even actors? What does a director do anyway? Are they chancers? Editing is one of the most basic – and therefore important - tricks in the trade. While you might need a full orchestra for the score to work or expensive lighting and locations for your tasteful cinematography to cover up the fact the film is no good, every movie needs editing and it’s still the most effective tool in the box, as Georges Méliès understood at the inception of the art form.  Most editing is of course tastefully done, but it lends itself quite easily to the brutal didacticism of low budgets and left-wing politics, hence the revolutionary montage techniques of Soviet cinema in the twenties: one shot of striking workers being attacked intercut with a bull being slaughtered –  Workers!?, Bulls!? GET IT? I don’t want to be dismissive though; it was revolutionary at time, highly influential and remains powerful.  Weird juxtapositions are huge fun in editing, so much fun in fact that you have to be careful not to wreck your story on the rocks of hyperbole while pursuing the siren-like cleverness of an arresting edit.  You should be careful of metaphors too. Fun edits are one of the less celebrated elements that’s made Citizen Kane such a film nerd’s favourite, I’m not quite sure why Orson Welles wanted to cut to a scary Cockatoo, but I’m glad he did.  Welles loved the solitary process of editing, his portable moviola a constant companion in his exile years.  As if to prove the point, his last film F for Fake was largely made up of bought second-hand footage he edited into a masterpiece.  I love Orson Welles. Of course F for Fake was a mock documentary which means it was a fiction film and he could do what he wanted.  I make factual programmes which means there’s an ethical element to the editing process: I can’t interview someone in good faith and then edit that interview with the sound of a bull going to the toilet (although, note to self, that would be brilliant).  The edits have to be a fair representation of what was said to you, but cut together in such a way as to tell a half interesting story.  That's how you have to make documentary.  Unless you don't.  Unless you’re doing a Michael Moore style polemic where your own subjectivity and point of view is made obvious to the viewer.  I don’t think I want to do a Michael Moore about the Quakers though. I leave you with a final irony; this blog isn’t very well edited.

During the course this blog being written, journalism as we know it has gone into a possibly terminal collapse. I did think I should write something about it but I can’t really think of anything original to say.  There is just one question that’s been bothering me: which Australian became big in Britain first, Rupert Murdoch or Paul Hogan? And can the Northern Hemisphere hand back Rupert Murdoch in exchange for Paul Hogan and the fella with the crooked mouth?

Pride of Place

There are few political creeds more enduring, powerful and ugly than nationalism.  That an accident of birth should instill someone with such misplaced pride and inform the political decision making process is plainly irrational. Yet despite being thoroughly discredited in two world wars, nationalism retains a powerful hold on modern political debate, eschewing universal principles in favour of chauvinism and creating unities amongst groups who really ought not to have that much in common.  In 2002, Gerhard Schroeder - Germany’s own “Tony Blair” - having failed to make much reformist headway in four years as Chancellor, fought the Federal Elections on anti-Iraq war, kind-of anti-American ticket and won himself another three years of ineffective rule.  George Bush wore a stars and stripes collar pin while cutting taxes for a relatively small section of the wealthiest Americans and got himself re-elected with the support of most of the poorest states in the union.  In Ireland we had nationalism real bad.  So pleased were we with winning independence from the British that we spent most of the first forty years or so of self-rule ignoring the socio-economic progress that was being made elsewhere in western Europe, so pleased with being a republic our political leaders had no difficulty allowing a foreign monarchy vet social legislation as long as it wasn’t the British.  Even when I was a kid, Charles Haughey was flogging nationalism every chance he could get to gain advantage over the liberal Garret Fitzgerald.  Historians continue to debate the relative merits of his premiership, but there’s no doubt that one of his main political planks was that he kind-of didn’t like the British , a policy which did exactly nothing for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed in the country who lived an impoverished lifestyle that his corruption had insulated him against.  He didn’t like the British and sometimes wore a fisherman’s hat; therefore he was a man of the people.  Nationalism says we are all of one tribe, we are all the same and in its ugliest form insists we all should think and act the same with any breaking of the ranks suspect at best, treasonous at worst. It’s simply not rational to invest pride, honour and meaning in the place you happen to be born in.  But then, if reason defines us humans, so too does our sometimes endearing, sometimes terrifying ability to abjure it.  Georges Clemenceau said a patriot loves his country, while a nationalist hates everyone else’s (to be fair Clemenceau spent most of his career hating the Germans). I think political nationalism with its flags, marches, drums and demagogues is often predicated on hating another place, but love of locality is much more of a simple fondness for home, less heralded but ultimately more keenly felt.  Loving your home town comes down to the mundane and banal everyday of life; the way people speak, the way people work, the way people insult.  It doesn’t depend on being the biggest or most beautiful place, just that it should have something unique only you truly recognize.  That uniqueness is usually formed by a combination of shared history and humour, and, from time to time, shared pain.  So when this everyday place you live in pulls off something extraordinary, when it does a good job, the most satisfying aspect is the opportunity to feel proud of something you take for granted a little bit too much.  To indulge in some of that more strident nationalistic pride in the place you love in a much quieter way every other day.  Waterford put on a great party last weekend, the oldest city in Ireland looked youthful, happy and optimistic, and all our visitors agreed - to which I always think “and they haven’t even seen the county yet!” It’s not important for me believe that Waterford is the greatest place on earth: you know, I’ve heard New York is pretty cool.  It just has to be the most Waterford place on earth but the weekend showed us just how great that can be.  I leave with the words of the great Kirk Douglas in Spartacus.  As the gladiators, resplendent in their homo-erotic shortened togas, and even more homo-erotic Brooklyn accents, debate where the best wine in the world comes from, Kirk interrupts and tells them that they’re all wrong: “the best wine in the world is from home, wherever home is!” The group then break into hearty laughing and back slapping, which is what Waterford should now do.

Hating liberals

There seems to be two dominant political persuasions on Facebook.  One is liberal; the other is “very liberal”.  I take liberal to mean liberal, but very liberal, generally followed as it is by an exclamation mark, seems to be more of a sexual innuendo, a saucy seaside postcard rather than political ideology. To each their own.  Last week, David Norris spoke to Waterford City Council in the hope that the august body would support him in his bid to become President; they may or may not but the warmth of the reception he received – despite the heat he’s drawn in the press in the last few weeks – testifies to the elevated place this committed liberal has in Irish public life.  Its political critics labeled Liberalism a dinosaur in the 20^th Century, no longer relevant in the era a mass politics and total state mobilization.  The demise of the ethos in Britain was marked by George Dangerfield’s seminal 1935 work The Strange Death of Liberal England, a book that proved to be almost as a big a gift to sub-editors as the film Sex, Lies and Videotape.  Liberalism’s problem was that it wasn’t tribal.  The Right had the flag and patriotism, the Left class resentment, but Liberals? They just had reasonableness, a belief in education and middle-class guilt. And yet, liberalism (with a small L) is all triumphant in the early 21^st Century. As the Right dropped its interest in things like military dictatorship and corporal punishment for naughty boys, what was the liberal clarion call of Free Trade became the cornerstone of the Right’s economic viewpoint, one increasingly accepted on the Left.  Meanwhile the Left, finding the idea of a centrally directed economy a little bit completely unworkable, and with even the state’s control of public services increasingly eroded found itself turning to liberalism of the individual kind.  It’s a lot easier to decriminalize homosexuality than to nationalize the banks (the banks, sorry, bad example). And indeed the Left’s efforts in areas like gay rights and secularization have helped create this political oxymoron the “liberal-left”.  Socialists of the old school would be horrified by the hybrid, having regarded liberals as dangerous compromisers in the good old days of revolutionary politics.  There it is though, liberalism if not Liberal Parties won in the end.  So why is there so much vitriol directed at liberals?  Why did Matt Stone of South Park once say “I hate conservatives, but I really f**king hate liberals”.  How did the word come to be a term of abuse? Why is it that, if journalistic impartiality allowed me to put a political affiliation on Facebook, liberal is the last one I’d choose even though I probably am, like every one else, a bloody predictable boring bloody liberal?  Dreaded political correctness has an obvious culpability: yes the N-word is wrong, but banning Christmas?!!! That makes me so angry!!! So angry that I haven’t even noticed Christmas hasn’t actually been banned.  I remain convinced that most “Political Correctness gone mad” stories are fabricated but the strictures put on expression by political correctness can be tiresome, the assumption for example that someone who says “non-national” instead of “foreign-national” is in some way a covert racist is just old-fashioned condescension, not liberalism.  There’s more to it than that though.  There’s modern parents.  Child-centred parenting is a sixties liberal innovation.  Before Doctor Spock children knew their place, which was somewhere up a chimney.  I think Doctor Spock’s take on bringing up children is spot on to be honest, but the tendency he created has led to annoyingly self-righteous parents, self-righteous parents who may only exist in our imagination but who in that imagination give us a right going over for letting our kids watch telly, eat chocolate and conform to gender stereotypes. There’s more to it than that too though. Why do we hate liberals? I mentioned that the Liberal parties in the past were stranded without a tribal base.  The tribes of the Left and the Right may have adopted liberal values, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.  Many former socialists feel a sense of shame, or worse, humiliation, that the old policies have been abandoned.  It’s not a coincidence to me that right-wing anti-liberal commentators like Eoghan Harris and Peter Hitchens are former Trotskyites. Conservatives meanwhile know they need to be right-on and tolerant but resent the liberal orthodoxy that commands them to do it, and indignantly interpret that as some form dictatorship.  Much of the prejudice and bile that was once directed from the Right towards racial minorities is now used to describe racially neutral groups like the poor, single mothers and single fathers, who some on the Right like to say act as a drag on the liberal free market.  Tribes always have their prejudices and bigotries, for example I’ve enjoyed a lifelong hatred of modern jazz.  My musical tastes have branched from rock to include country, reggae, classical, electro-pop, folk, hip-hop even world music (only joking, I don't listen to world music).  This of course seems like an expression of liberal open-mindedness but it’s only possible by religious devotion to a disdain for jazz – it’s okay to listen to anything as long as I know it’s not jazz, because I hate jazz. These prejudices, some harmless like hating jazz or loving a football team, some ugly like sectarianism and racism can often be the cornerstone of a person’s self- identity. And an important cornerstone for anyone who doesn’t have much in the way of money, a nice house, and (sophisticated) foreign holidays. Liberalism can be a robust, crusading ideology but it feels too often like the voice of someone who knows better because they’ve never known any worse, the voice of someone who’s a nice person largely because they lead a nice life.  I think that’s why people hate liberals, and why liberals hate liberals.

End of Optimism

There’s a game we used to play during the World Cup in the days before saturation football coverage made every player drearily familiar.  We would look at the foreign players and try to decide where in the city they would most likely be from if they had been born in Waterford.  Some players might have the look of a neighbor in Central Avenue, some might have a Ballybeg head, some Larchville or Arbour Road (it tended to be very Saint Paul’s centric).  I particularly liked the hypothesis my brothers came up with in relation to Hristo Stoichkov and Gheorghe Hagi, that they looked like two partially employed flat mates staying in a run-down Shortcourse house full of empty cans and the odd lack who would go to their mother’s house every Sunday to get fed and have their overworked underpants washed.  Gheorghe Hagi was one of the greatest players of his generation, but when I think of him, I think of that.  When Ratko Mladic appeared at the War Crimes Tribunal last week in a borrowed suit and hair too small for his head, I thought he looked like an old guy on his way out of a bookies on Mayor’s Walk, with a rolled up copy of The Star under his arm. Such is the banality of evil.  He didn’t look like that in 1995.  Then he was leaner and, underneath his Serbian Šajkača cap, was the world’s most famous mass murderer.  The footage of him speaking to the refugees in Srebrenica is almost obscene – what is it he’s thinking? He’s bending down listening to these people, furrowing his brow in concentration, his eyes meeting theirs with apparent honesty and all he can be thinking, surely, is: “we are going to kill you, all of you, and the cameras bearing witness to this conversation will not save you”.  It’s still chilling sixteen years later.  Mladic was a dark spectre for all of Europe in the 1990’s but by pure random chance the benign, decent liberal democracy that fate singled out to be particularly humiliated by him was the one I happened to be living in at the time, the Netherlands.  The day I arrived in Amsterdam, Ireland was on the front page of every newspaper in Europe: the IRA had just declared a ceasefire.  The centuries old Irish conflict was about to be resolved and every newspaper editor in Europe thought that was front page news.  As an Irishman, the interest was gratifying, although that soon wore off with months of people asking me what was happening in the peace process – I was ecstatically happy to be living in Amsterdam and didn’t care about the peace process, but when I said that to my European friends they always seemed disapproving.  The English were much more understanding.  There was optimism that the problem could be fixed however, it was an optimistic time.  Just five years before people power had overthrown communist dictatorship and there was already plenty of East Europeans living in Amsterdam, most of them taking to life in Western democracy as if they had been born to it. The transition seemed to suggest no more dislocation from forty years of communism than someone missing the starter at a dinner party.  The problems of the world were falling like nine pins.  Nelson Mandela, for years just a photograph over the left hand shoulder of a newsreader, emerged from prison a far more impressive leader than anyone had a right to hope for, and led South Africa out of Apartheid.  It was an optimistic time.  With the end of the Cold War, the CIA decided to lift its boot off the neck of South American democracy – somewhat – and people were free to vote for politicians who didn’t necessarily have the approval of the United Fruit Company or the Pope.  It was an optimistic time.  Iraq invaded Kuwait and the world acted in what seemed to be – if you ignored the oil-shaped elephant in the room – the first example of the kind of collective security that the UN was designed to deliver.  It was an optimistic time.  Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands!  Optimism? Anything was possible!  Historian Francis Fukuyama declared that history was over, that it was clear everyone in the world wanted to live in free market liberal democracies and, at varying paces, it was to this goal every nation on the planet was embarked.  Of course there would be difficulties along the way.  The break-up of Yugoslavia appeared unnecessarily messy, but it was sure to sort itself out, and Europe would be there to show the bright path forward for the emerging democracies to join our civilized club. But Yugoslavia didn't sort itself out, the siege of Sarajevo dragged on and on, the killing became relentless.  It was then we were introduced to the double act of Mladic and Karadžić.  Mladic was a very different kind of general to Rommel and Patton.  His goal was to skirt around the people who actually had weapons (sometimes known as "soldiers"), find the civilians and kill as many as he could until someone stopped him.  The horrible realization – thrilling though to Mladic – was that Europe couldn’t stop him; it didn’t have the will or the means.  Fukuyama was wrong; history, in all its cruelty, was back.  By 1995 I was living in the Netherlands when, in one of the final acts of the war, Mladic decided to swoop on one last group of Bosniak civilians before a peace deal was struck.  It was the Dutch army who had conveniently gathered the victims in Srebrenica; it was the Dutch who had to see their conscript soldiers brushed aside by this self-confident Evil so it could carry out genocide.  It could have been any of us, Irish, Finnish, Spanish, it just happened to be the Dutch.  The revelations surrounding the muddle which put this Dutch battalion in such an awful situation led to the collapse of Wim Kok’s government in 2002 and I’m not sure Dutch politics and the Netherlands have been the same since.  Could Holland’s recent falling out of love with its liberal traditions be traced back to the day these traditions were trampled on by Mladic?  In the years after Srebrenica, it was clearly a matter of national shame in the Netherlands, this wonderful country whose soldiers should never have had to face this Evil alone.  What I found sometimes, if in the company of Dutch and Serbs, and some alcohol had flowed, the Dutch could round on the Serbs: “What’s wrong with you?” “Why are you people so murderous?” “Why did you do this?”  Sometimes I would chip in an explain the atrocities meted out to Serbs during the war (Mladic’s father died trying to bump off a fascist Croatian leader in 1945) but that doesn’t really explain it; after all, these people had lived happily together for generations after the war and still love to dish out twelve’s to each other come the Eurovision.  It was comforting to think that there was just something monstrous about the Serbs that put them beyond the liberal democratic Pale, in the same way some people liked to view Arabs or Muslims after 9/11.  It’s nonsense.  In Amsterdam I worked with people from Peshawar which is Taliban Central and they were normal, hard-working, decent and fond of fart jokes, just like me.  Indeed it was 9/11 that for many people marks the end of post-Berlin Wall optimism but for me that happened with Mladic.  I’m back on Mayors Walk thinking about Mladic coming out of that bookies and it’s not a fantasy to imagine that a fella like him could be from Waterford.  He could, he could be from anywhere, that’s what made him so frightening.

R&H Hall

The people of Ferrybank are upset by a new proposal to site some sort of waste transfer facility on the North Wharfs.  I’m not sure what waste transfer is.  There are two chief objections to this proposal, the first being that it might smell.  Surely, you may think, it couldn’t be that bad, but Ferrybank has a history of bad smells emanating from the meat processing industry that was traditionally banished to the north side of Waterford city.  The smell from some of the meat plants was legendary, a rotten combination of wet dog, dirty nappy, vomit and what I imagined to be burst, decomposing intestines.  That’s in the past now but people in Ferrybank are entitled to be sensitive about odours.  The other concern is the effect such a facility will have on the city centre because the North Wharf, isolated and barren though it is, is a city centre location and this waste transfer facility (still don’t know what that is) will be visible from Waterford’s shopping and tourist districts.  The city council has said the facility (?), if it gets permission, won’t create these problems, so we’ll see.  But all the comment on the issue got me thinking about our North Wharfs, which are routinely described here as an urban blight, an embarrassment in urgent need of redevelopment.  Now I don’t deny that Waterford could make better use of the north side of its river and if by some miracle a private sector investor (Donald Trump is at a loose end at the moment) comes in with a plan rip everything out of the North Wharfs and put in whatever combination of conference centre/hotel/casino/gym/equestrian centre/wax museum they think appropriate, that can only be considered a good thing and I’m all for it.  It’s just that…I kind of like North Wharfs as they are.  And I particularly like the R&H Hall Flour Mills, probably the biggest building in Waterford City Centre, and, for many, the ugliest. I can’t really dispute that it’s ugly, but it’s the kind of ugliness that fascinates rather than repels.  Every time I walk past its decayed vastness, the tiny broken windows on the plain imposingly grey walls, the grain silos packed together like an October display of Soviet nuclear missiles, its sheer emptiness, I’m transfixed.  Get closer and you see that the site is served by an abandoned rail track and the only thing more evocative and cinematic than a rail track is surely an abandoned rail track.  Industrial decay isn’t pretty but I can look at it for hours, to the point that once while taking a train across the Pennines from Manchester to Leeds I remember being disappointed by the absence of slag heaps, disused factories and abandoned smokestacks (there were some, just not enough).  Yet we don’t have a habit of celebrating our industrial heritage in Ireland; we’re the land of saints and scholars, rebels and poets and farming.  Not industry and business.  In our imagination we appear to have skipped the Industrial revolution and gone straight from subsistence farming to IT, financial services and web design.  But dotted around the country we do have some imposing monuments to an industrial past (the cotton mill in Portlaw employed more than one and half thousand people at the time of the famine).  These were not usually buildings designed for prettiness.  The stately 18^th century Georgian mansions and town houses that we always think of as our built heritage were designed with one eye to the past and the other to posterity, based on Palladian Roman models they were built to reflect the imagined values of an older age, to herald not change but stability.  The later Victorian age was marked by an intellectual backlash against itself, as the dominant Romantic trend in intellectual life reacted in horror to industrialisation.  The reaction against functional industrial buildings included a rejection of the classical forms of the Georgians, considered by Victorian intellectuals to be part of a Godless complacency that informed this modern uglification of cities.  John Ruskin was the great champion of this dual rejection of both modern and classical forms, with an imagined medieval gothic aesthetic considered a more natural and pure form of architecture.  Now in Waterford we have a few fine examples of that manifesto, the Presentation Convent – now the Waterford Health Park – designed by Augustus Pugin (Pugin and Ruskin had similiar attitudes to architecture but like good intellectuals detested each other, Ruskin in particular demonstrating a pettiness that would make an eight year old proud).  It would be an act of insanity to claim that the R&H Hall building is as impressive as the Presentation Convent – it isn’t – but bear with me.  The capitalists of Ruskin’s age didn’t care too much for the  views of bearded Oxbridge aesthetes and while some functional buildings may have been designed with a nod to beauty, most were, and are, functional.  However when a building is built with posterity in mind, like our Georgian and Gothic masterpieces, it has a monumental quality which changes little with or without human activity.  The industrial decay of a highly functional building like R&H Hall immediately suggests the passage of time, forgotten lives, or, in a word, stories.  It’s cinematic.  One day it will be torn down, hopefully to make way for something better but until that day I’ll continue to enjoy its monumental ugliness which contrasts nicely with our Georgian thoroughfares and Gothic towers.  After all, every great beauty needs a blemish.  Until it finds a better use, our North Wharfs are to me a gritty reminder of an industrial and maritime heritage we should be proud of.  

Auntie American

Followers of this blog may have noticed an affection for the USA which pre-dates President Obama’s visit on Monday.  To be honest, Johnny Cash’s voice is enough of a contribution to the world to warrant the celebration of the United States, but Johnny Cash’s voice AND the out-take reels featured at the end of Burt Reynolds movies?  What a great country.  Added to many people’s list of things to love about America in recent years is the oratory of President Barack “we like you much better than the last guy” Obama.  This week we were treated to our own Irish helping of the great man speaking, a beautiful oral monument both to American optimism and Presidential avoidance of detail.   Yes, in the end he didn’t say much but unless he was prepared to pick up the tab for the country as well for the pints at Ollie Hayes’ pub, there wasn’t much to say.  Hopefully his trip will encourage him to think of us when next he meets with the IMF.  Instead we were given some American optimism and self-belief and we were reminded that of all the nations on earth we have a stronger claim to share in that American identity that most, and that’s enough for me.  It goes without saying we need to feel good about ourselves, so thanks Pres.  Did you know though that Obama is actually the Warlord of the US Empire?  This is what I’ve been told by a number of Waterford City Centre lampposts in the last week, through the intermediary of the Socialist Workers Party.  Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party (not to be confused with the Workers Party or Socialist Workers Party, keep up) said last week that he has nothing against the American people, just their political leadership, but as Americans keep electing Presidents he doesn’t like, he must find that a little bit annoying?  So I’ve been thinking about what this sometimes popular European youth activity known as anti-Americanism is.  Well, let’s reflect on that pejorative term: Warlord of the US Empire.  That’s basically correct.  He’s the commander-in-chief of the greatest war machine the world has ever seen which projects its power with the help of a network of alliances; some, such as NATO, based on common values and interests, some, such as Turkmenistan, based on retainers and free Dallas DVD box sets.  This second set of allies closely resembles the “informal empire” model pursued by the British in early part of the 19^th Century . That power was misused on an epic scale in Vietnam, poisoning generations of Left inclined people against US foreign policy.  Worse in my opinion was the refusal of successive US governments to countenance democratic wealth redistribution in Latin America, because while Vietnam was a misguided application of the relatively sound Truman doctrine, overthrowing democrats like Allende and Árbenz had no justification whatsoever. In other words, for every Johnny Cash and Burt Reynolds for whom we should thank America, there’s always a Lady Gaga for whom we should not.  Is there any innocence in US military might or must it always be regarded as aggressive and imperialist?  Well, America was the world’s biggest economy for more than forty years when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, yet it had a tiny army by the standards of the day (admittedly, the navy was pretty big).  Over the course of the next four years it tooled up and successfully destroyed the urban infrastructure of Japan and Germany - which is what war is all about – but then invested enough US taxpayer’s money in both countries for them to join the US in the top three world economies within twenty years.  I’m not sure if that’s unique in world history, but it’s certainly atypical.  Since then, America’s military muscularity has remained intact, embedded, in a European context, within NATO.  NATO is commonly regarded as an absolute evil by the anti-American lobby here - bogeyman threatening our neutrality - but it never fired a shot in anger for its first fifty years.  When it did, it did so to detach Kossovo from Yugoslavia.  That war was possibly unnecessary, probably illegal but certainly in no one’s economic interests.  NATO was established to counter a communist threat which generated such hysteria in the US in the 40’s and 50’s that our cultural memory of that threat is that it was irrational and fictional.  It wasn’t, just ask any of your Polish friends in Ireland today.  Another way of looking at the military power of the US is to make a comparison with the countries that come just behind it according to Jane’s Defence Weekly: France, Russia and China – who would you prefer was number one?  America is not always on the side of the angels, but I’m not sure if it’s the evil empire either.  The real problem is that it’s always on one side or the other, when you have the world’s most powerful military you don’t have the luxury of neutrality – who did Europe turn to end the Bosnian War? Clue: it wasn’t Ireland.  And the other root of anti-Americanism perhaps has more to do with Johnny Cash and Burt Reynolds.  The cultural, economic and military reach of the US is such that everyone has an opinion about the place.  Americans, to be fair, don’t always have an opinion about everyone else (but think about it, when is the last time you expressed strong views on Bhutan?).  They do have an opinion of us, and it’s generally a benign opinion.  I don’t know if that will do anything to get us out of our mess, but it can’t hurt.

Old Man in a Hurry

That went well. Of course our attitudes to the British Royal Family have softened under the influence of Northern power sharing, increased pluralism in Irish society, historical reconciliation and most of all, Hello! magazine.  For the most part the country enjoyed having the Queen over, and rediscovered an affection for the Royals that was taboo for the last one hundred years.  But it was there.  There’s still a Queen’s Terrace in Waterford, and a Kings Terrace, tucked in behind the Garda barracks.  Most of our bigger thoroughfares were renamed after independence in favour of Irish patriots, with Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell and Wolf Tone being the main beneficiaries, and my own favourite Michael Davitt not doing too badly.  The rebranding must have run out of steam before the local authorities got the Queens Terrace.  It’s remarkable though that a significant city centre street adjacent to our O’Connell Street retains the name not of a British Royal but a British Prime Minister. A Prime Minister who started his long political career as a High Tory, opposed the catholic emancipation, electoral reform and the abolition of slavery. It seems that Gladstone’s conversion to Free Trade in the 1840’s was the catalyst for a gradual move to Liberalism that would end with giving the vote to the working class, supporting trade union recognition for London dock workers, opposing imperial expansion at the very height of the British Empire and finally walking away from politics over the establishment’s refusal to allow the Irish govern themselves (hence the Waterford street name).  Liberal has become a dirty word for many commentators today, characterized as nothing more than a craven surrender to reaction under the guise of multiculturalism, a middle class combination of irrational distrust for the West and an inexplicable embrace of world music.  The Liberalism of Gladstone was a robust, evangelical and very effective creed.  Imagine winning an election in Britain in 1880 by suggesting that perhaps Zulus and Afghans had as much right to protect their homes from attack as an Englishman had? Suggesting that the solution to the Irish Question was to ask the Irish? While his support of striking London dockers in 1889 (when he was in his late seventies) was greeted with the kind of shock normally reserved for those who broke wind in front of the Queen.  He remained a dedicated Free Trader however and was opposed to the socialism-light tendencies of the new Liberals who revered him.  In a country where the main political parties are (or were until February) the  “Soldiers of Destiny” and the “Family of the Gaels” its hard sometimes to identify the conservatives, monetarists, liberals, and social democrats on the Irish political landscape, but this week we undoubtedly said goodbye to our own Liberal colossus, Garret Fitzgerald.  Gladstone’s Free Trade ideology was alive and well in Garret Fitzgerald’s belief in the European project and there was a Gladstonian sense of fairness at work in his attempts to deVaticanise the country in the face of fierce conservative opposition. Liberalism also informed his attitude to the north, the simple belief that northern unionists couldn’t be ignored, the traditional position of southern nationalists who impotently shouted “united Ireland” from their armchairs for sixty years.  Like Gladstone however he was pragmatic and was prepared to pursue his policy of not ignoring northern unionism by ignoring northern unionism to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement.  He had his critics and the country’s economic crisis hadn’t improved hugely when his defeat in 1987 seemed to signal the failure of his project.  Like many Liberals from the French Revolution onwards, his battles with conservatism did nothing to endear him to the Left for whom market freedom can be as offensive as social freedom can be to conservatives.  Life is tough in the middle, just ask Nick Clegg.  Gladstone’s growing radicalism in old age earned him the title of an Old Man in a Hurry.  Garret Fitzgerald too was full of enthusiasm for his new projects when I got the chance to meet him in March.  Being in possession of that kind of intellect at the age of 85 must have a hurrying effect.  Anyway, may be rest in peace, and may history show that he had a bigger impact on Irish life than Hello! Magazine.