Templars Hall

I’d like to thank everyone who commented on yesterday’s report on WLR from Templar’s Hall in Waterford.  Of course it was nice to have so much positive feedback, and those who expressed reservations about the piece have given me food for thought in the coming days. I have to admit, the confrontations with drunken revelers were kinda fun (and what you heard was pretty much what happened, I don’t believe in stitching people up in the editing room), but the thought of anyone trying to bring up their family in this environment was profoundly upsetting.  I went to Templar’s Hall on Monday night to see just how bad the anti-social behaviour engaged in by some of the students in rented houses there is. Context is everything.  This is a demographic mis-match. If there were no families living in Templars Hall I suppose the behaviour would fall under youthful joie de vivre and they’d left to their own devices. Although students who go to college primarily to study (they do exist) might still have cause to complain.  However the fact is that families do live in Templar’s Hall.  Many moved out as it became apparent just quite how many houses had been sold to landlords intent on renting to students.  Often those moving out sold to landlords thereby intensifying the problem.  With the property market in Ireland now moribund, those left behind no longer have the option to sell out.  Besides, their children are going to local schools, many of them work locally so why should they?  The main problem I witnessed on Monday wasn’t so much individual behaviour (although some of that was pretty bad) but it was the scale of the problem.  One or two parties in a residential estate are hardly anything to worry about, but loud 4/4 beats coming from every third or fourth house two or three nights a week?  There’s nothing worth commenting on in a group of boisterous twenty year olds walking the street, but when these groups traipse up and down an estate or 50, 20 or even 10 yard intervals all night, filling the air with incoherent laughter and clinking bags, it’s not surprising a family might feel trapped. In that case there is no cruel intention but the effect remains upsetting.  A bottle might be broken on any street, but every corner, every green space, every nook and cranny of an estate where a child might be expected to play out their childhood? Then there’s the simple fact that these are young people, not perhaps best adept at keeping their properties clean, an inadequacy that will extend to the garden, and then the street. Having scant regard for the properties they live in, this lack of respect is, I think, extended to the estate as a whole, and to the people trying to make a life there.  Because the rationale of the partying renters in Templar’s Hall tends to put the blame back on the families living there – “What do they expect?” “Students are going to party, they shouldn’t have moved here”.  Even if this reasoning were sound - which it isn’t - it doesn’t actually absolve them of responsibility for their behaviour. I know he never went to trial, but if he did, I don’t even think Fred West would have argued in court that his victims had it coming “I am Fred West after all”.  It seems to me perfectly true that families and students are not ideal neighbours, but that’s not the fault of the residents, and it doesn’t absolve people from their responsibilities to one another.  There may also be a seperate issue with young men.  While girls were prepared to at least attempt to explain themselves to me, the response of the drunken young men I came across was either “no comment” (a statement which many seemed to believe carried legally binding powers) or “fuck off” (which again was a request I had no legal obligation to comply with).  Drinking in their own groups, the men were loud and raucous, but I couldn’t help thinking that these young men, brought up in the internet age, walked into this estate sober and without the social skills to engage with their neighbours in a way that might create some understanding and report.  This is a highly contentious and subjective statement, but here goes: I think there are many young men whose social skills operate on two settings: morbid shyness and drunken exuberance. Add to that the inevitable herd mentality and primacy of the peer group, and there is a sense in which these men don’t perhaps believe that society exists.  Mrs. Thatcher is often misquoted on this issue of  society. She wasn’t advocating naked individualism (which isn’t to say that’s not what her policies created) but her argument was that “society” came down to the good will, or not, of individuals. There are perhaps too many individuals surrendering their innate decency to a headless, rudderless herd intent on having a “good time” at all costs.

Bad News

A few months ago we were covering a story on WLR about the takeover of US pharmaceutical firm Genzyme by French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.  Exciting eh? The thing is of course, Genzyme is a major employer in Waterford and one of the few in the last three years that didn't appear to have a question mark hanging over it, but takeovers make people nervous.  And so they should, takeovers are one of the times when the naked ruthlessness of capitalism is exposed, on show for all to see. Sanofi appeared to be smiling at Genzyme through shark's teeth.  Besides, as the good people in Talk Talk management proved this week, profitability and a good workforce is no reason not to close a factory. In order to make sense of the Genzyme takeover – which was safely outside the power of my mind - I got in contact with Meg Tyrell, a Bloomberg correspondent who knew the sector inside out and was very helpful.  She seemed to think everything would be okay in the short and medium term, as for the long term, well, capitalism doesn’t really do the long term.  I told her afterwards how glad I was not to have relay any more bad news to people in Waterford, “I hear you on that” came the response from the American accent on the other end of the line. It’s truly horrible to have to report on job losses, not as bad as having to endure the lost job itself, but it is depressing and working as I do for a business that depends on local spending power, it’s not hard to see personal consequences down the line.  Last week’s news that Talk Talk was closing its Waterford operation with the loss of 575 jobs left me and many like me nauseated with worry as to how this will affect my city and family; meeting the workers affected left me angry and upset with how ordinary, decent working people in Waterford were being treated by the principles of international capitalism.  Of course, as I say that I have to acknowledge that the jobs wouldn’t have existed in the first place without international capitalism – you get no answers off me folks.  None of the emotions I’ve just described have any place in the reporting of this story, one can only hope that feeling upset, angry, scared might bring you closer to the factual truth of how the workers are feeling, but I don’t advise going all Peter Finch.  Over the weekend we also marked the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  That was a bad news day.  The attacks started just before two in the afternoon Irish time.  I was reading the news that day but was still pretty new to the job.  I knew a plane had hit the tower when I went to read the news at two o’clock, but I no had real idea what was going on, or the size of the aircraft.  As I was getting towards the end of the bulletin, I was told a second plane had crashed into the other tower, confirming not only was it not an accident, but a coordinated attack.  While I was reading the news on WLR at three o’clock, still not fully understanding what the hell was going on, I was given a message on air that the first tower had collapsed.  At the time I wasn’t used to broadcasting off the cuff, I clearly remember my throat contracting and mouth drying up but most particularly a dizziness as my brain started to issue emotional responses, as if on reflex, while I was live on air.  With the collapse of the tower I knew that thousands of people had just been murdered and that something terrible was going on.  The most frightening thing was not knowing where this was going to end. What happened was bad enough, but at the time, as the news got worse and worse and events built up with a brutal speed, we wondered what was next. It seemed so many people were involved in the attack and intent on so much destruction that I remember thinking a nuclear explosion had to be next. For a half an hour, as the towers were collapsing, I wondered whether this was the end of the world.  It was hard to deliver news that day. New York being the world’s greatest city, its destruction felt a bit like the end of the world. The fact that so many of those emergency personnel had Irish surnames made the whole thing a lot personal to us.  But that wasn’t my worst bad news day.   That was the day when Waterford’s end of the world came.  When receivers pulled the plug on Waterford Crystal in January 2009, the national press spoke about hundreds of job losses, quite right too.  In Waterford though, the closure, and the brutal way it was handled, and most of all the desperate defiance of the workforce, went beyond figures and lost incomes.  It was a spiritual and existential crisis for every single individual in the city.  Each person had to come to terms with the trauma caused when a Dublin accountant decided one cold winter morning to end my city’s sense of itself.  It wasn’t easy to report that one in a detached manner.  I find maintaining impartiality in politics easy, enjoyable even, but when the sit-in started at Waterford Crystal it was the only time I remember wanting to shout, get angry, man the barricades.  I didn’t, and no doubt I would have had little useful to say, but being a reporter was never harder than that day.  And yet, life goes on.  New York is still New York, and Waterford will still be Waterford.  I think a man (or woman) picking themselves up from the ground with a bloody nose, and dusting themselves off while making a black, black joke has always been our self-image.  We’ll pick ourselves up; I just wish we didn’t have to do it so often.

Sympathy for the Devil

Somewhere in Tripoli tonight a man is facing an almighty reckoning.  The ghosts of 42 years of repression have come to hunt Colonel Gaddafi out his bunker, proving yet again how fragile a hold on power the most brutal dictators have.  Hard but brittle, the façade crumbles when enough people expose it for what it is, a façade.  As Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones put it “Ain't talking big what makes a man big, s'long as he makes folks believe it?” Talking big – if by big we mean Mad - is what Gaddafi was good at; I’m not so sure about thinking big. The hunted dictator holed up in a castle of sand powerlessly waiting for the tide to come in is a compelling subject for the dramatist, from Shakespeare to O’Neill, but I don’t think the Colonel is all that interested in reflection. Not that he isn’t smart in his way, but while I haven’t read The Green Book, I imagine it’s a piece of self-serving incoherent Mein Kampfism. The question he now faces is how to go out, as a Hitler or a Mussolini? Detached from reality in Romantic self-pity, Hitler had no interest in life after the Reich and committed the suicide he should have carried when he lived in the obscurity from which he should never have emerged.  Mussolini on the other hand was different, however much he enjoyed being Il Duce, he was also a man, and an Italian man at that.  The dictatorship hadn’t worked out but if he could just make it to South America, there would always be skirts to chase.  It didn’t work out; he was nabbed just outside Milan and strung up with piano wire. Colonel Gaddafi was behind some of the worst atrocities of the last thirty years, was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people in Ireland by paying for the IRA to become Europe’s number one terrorist organisation and his rule in Libya was a particularly noxious blend of corruption, personality cult and indoctrination.  But the people were also kept on their toes by a taste for the surreal that would rival Vic and Bob.  That’s one of the problems with tonight’s events.  Hitler remains entirely odious, but it’s now possible to joke about Mussolini, and Gaddafi? Who hasn’t had a laugh about Gaddafi? Whether it was farting at interviews, making clearly illogical pronouncements (Libya is the only democracy on the whole planet) and, let’s face it, baiting America in the eighties, for most of us Gaddafi was an entertaining nutter.  If everything goes according to plan, democracy will emerge and a Libyan Enda Kenny will take the helm, and there may be moments when we miss Gaddafi on the world stage, just for entertainment value (Hugo Chavez just isn’t quite mad enough for me). So will his end be the final act of a lifelong nutter? Instead of a Hitler or Mussolini, will he choose the MacBeth route of fatalistic defiance “Why should I play the Roman, and die on mine own sword? While I see lives the gashes do better on them.” The rebels have clearly won, but a word of advice, if any of them hear the words “Say Hello to my Little Friend!” in the Bab Al-Aziziyah compound, duck.

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.