Don't mind me, I'm stupid and know nothing about anything
Thursday July 19 2007
LOOK, I don't mind being wrong about the peace process. It's absolutely fine that the people who made hell on earth for the citizens of Northern Ireland with their mutual hatreds are now declaring how wonderful it all is.
I have no problems whatsoever that I have written thousands and thousands of words forecasting the inevitable death of the peace process because of this historic force, or that one. It's all splendid. Indeed, it's Wonderful! Excellent! Sublime!
Only I don't understand any of it. It's not just that I don't understand a little bit of it. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand how the leaders of the IRA, who tortured people to death, and buried them secretly, who blew up buildings and burnt people alive, who lined up Protestants and machine-gunned them, are now in government with the granddaddy of the Troubles, Ian Paisley.
It's all right - I do really understand that the problem is mine: it is my intellectual and emotional immaturity which is the cause of incomprehension, and that the settlement in the North is one of logical and moral coherence. Believe me, I know this latter bit to be true, yet I just don't understand it.
Viewing the pictures of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley avidly viewing one another at the North-South meeting like a pair of Linda Lovelaces, I felt a panic-inspiring vertigo.
It was like Pope John Paul snapping awake at a Papal Banquet in the Vatican and finding a nude Mother Teresa cavorting with an equally naked Ayatollah Khomeini, while the Mormon Tabernacle choir sang Seven Drunken Nights and the Dalai Lama harpooned koala bears.
Resolved
Maybe, the issue isn't Northern Ireland at all, but human nature. Maybe all conflicts in the world could have been, and can be, resolved by taking the two extremes, and having election after election for decade after decade; and once you have thus exhausted, demoralised and annihilated the centre ground, the two extremes will fall happily into one another's arms.
Could that be it?
Don't ask me. I clearly don't know. In fact, I don't even know what I'm doing here. Talbot Street outside looks like it could do with a good sweeping: maybe I could get a job as a window-cleaner, or perhaps become a tatey hoker of the less intellectually gifted variety. Certainly, I have no place as a columnist.
You see, aside from my profound stupidity, I actually thought these characters were men of honour. When Ian Paisley said NEVURRRR, NEVURRRR, NEVURRR, to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, I thought the word he was uttering was 'never'. I didn't know NEVURRR actually meant, 'We want to be in office with the Shinners.'
Forgive me: I will leave the room now. You grow impatient with my stupidity. But before I go, could I just say, I thought that when Martin McGuinness's lads put Pasty Gillespie into his car and sent him on Northern Ireland's first suicide-bombing, that they were living up to the IRA promise to keep the war going until the Brits were out. I didn't have a clue that what they had in mind was a power-sharing executive with the orangies.
I didn't think that Peter Robinson and Ian Paisley could sit at the same table as all these Shinners, while the congealing blood of thousands puckers and shimmies around their feet, and smile at the photographers and chuckle agreeably at one another.
Look, I'm going in a mo, so just bear me out and don't get impatient.
Remorse
But do any of the main characters in this jolly little Feydeau farce kneel at the end of the day and say: "Dear Sweetest Jesus Christ Almighty, Son of God, Redeemer of All Mankind. Forgive me all those dead, the thousands of them. And the tens of thousand wounded, and blinded and paralysed. The men without genitals, the women without faces. And RUC-man Sean Hughes: incontinent, paralysed, blind all the years of his life. Our people did that, and I'm sorry. I really am." Do they? Or is guilt something that is solely found on picture frames, and remorse merely a second helping of dot-dash-dot-dash?
The Christian Brothers are looking for recruits; likewise the Norbertines - so maybe the religious life is for me.
But perhaps some less worldly order, enclosed, remote, eremitic, would suit my cretinous lack of understanding of human nature. Maybe alone on Rockall, I can commune with kelp, and exchange epigrams with wise seagulls
FOR clearly, I cannot discuss Northern Ireland; and if I cannot do that, having spent my youth in the damned place, what can I speak about? My toenails, perhaps?
Do you want to hear about my toenails? I have known my toenails all my life.
And at least I have them, unlike scores of people in Norther . . . Oops. There I go again. Wandering into an area about which, like all areas, I know absolutely nothing.
Sorry. I'll shut up now. Shall I sing a song? Yes? All right. There were three soldiers, three Scottish soldiers
