Eire of sorrows

It doesn’t matter who wins the Irish elections – the country will remain an outpost of Brussels

Dublin

There is something tragically irrelevant about the elections taking place this weekend in Ireland. In recent months, Ireland has felt less like a country and more like the first acquisition of the Reborn Frankish Empire, after the Central European Bank and the IMF in effect took over day-to-day management of Irish affairs. The effect of this is to so reduce the significance of the general election that it’s more like appointing the staff of a small post office, in which the Taoiseach is actually just a shop steward negotiating tea breaks. The incoming Irish government will be merely administering the country as a satrapy of Brussels and the European Bank.

The timing could hardly have been more exquisite. Over recent weeks, local groups across Ireland have been celebrating the anniversary of various IRA ambushes of British forces in 1921. That the so-called ‘British’ were usually Irish police officers, who were slaughtered in carefully planned assaults, does not seem to have diminished the grisly frivolousness of these celebrations. The outcome of the violence was Irish independence — which was going to be granted anyway, once the Irish had stopped killing one another.

So, just as Irish self-destructiveness was the prelude to Irish independence, so was it also the prelude to the formal end of that self-government, when Irish banks borrowed billions from the world in order to buy and rebuy from one another what they already owned. Budding empires like the European Union have seldom found would-be colonies with such an agreeably suicidal disposition.

The architects of this idiocy, Fianna Fail (a cod-Arthurian title meaning ‘warriors of destiny’) are widely expected to face electoral ruin under their new leader Micheál Martin, although they might well take a quarter of the vote. This is more a matter of tribal loyalty than of intellectual choice; atavistic circuitry takes over the brains of Fianna Failers whenever they enter a polling booth. Regardless of what they’ve told the pollsters, no matter the destruction wrought by the party’s insane governance, their quivering hands automatically put the numbers 1, 2, 3 against the Fianna Fail names, in the multiple-seat PR system by which Ireland chooses its 165 TDs (MPs).

The current main opposition party Fine Gael (Family of the Gael) will certainly be the core of the new government: it might even form the new government outright, which it has not managed since 1932. Its leader Enda Kenny is affable and unconvincing, resembling a Thunderbirds puppet trying to make the Gettysburg address. Enda is the name of an Irish saint whose feast day falls on 21 March. And there is something indecisively equinoctial about the Fine Gael leader as he sits on the fence at twilight, and grooms his handsome, almost Heseltinian locks.

His partners in government (if he needs any) are likely to be from the Labour party, which is not Labour in the British sense, for it attracts few working-class votes, has no clear principles, and is largely a platform for the careers of its senior members. Some of them are ex-IRA men or supporters of the USSR, over which a discreet veil is being consensually drawn. In the Border constituency of Louth, the former Sinn Fein MP for West Belfast Gerry Adams is trying to do the same. He is not succeeding, for Louth is where the bones of the most famous victim of the IRA — the widowed mother-of-ten Jean McConville — were found 21 years after she was abducted from her home on Adams’s orders in 1972.

Adams now maintains that he was never in the IRA. The English language, alas, lacks the verbal plutonium required to convey the thermonuclear dishonesty of that assertion, or the obscenity of his seeking to become the elected representative of the very county where poor Jean McConville was buried. Aided by an anti-Adams campaign led by McConville’s daughter Helen McKendry, many Louth people are revolted by the man’s brutishness, and he might well fail to be elected.

No matter. Whoever wins the Irish general election — Kenny, probably — will have to doff his cap daily to the neatly suited ECB/IMF inspectors (‘Germans’, as they are generically called) who now cruise Irish government corridors. His glorious prime ministerial duties will largely consist of him licking EU stamps, and asking if the staff can have Saturday afternoon off, bitte. He will also default on the repayments of Irish debt, because it is impossible for Ireland to meet the multi-billion-euro demands of the European banks and bond-holders. No one can rescue Ireland now, save the empire to which it has so abjectly surrendered its soul.

Kevin Myers is a columnist for the Irish Independent.