John-Paul McCarthy: One man's moral clarity: a shining beacon
Aengus Fanning's deeply held beliefs on Northern Ireland did a great service to the nation, writes John-Paul McCarthy
SeAn O'Rourke spoiled an otherwise moving tribute to Aengus Fanning on RTE radio last week when he accused him of vilifying John Hume in 1993.
Like many other young men tramping along the highways of exchange, I owe an enormous debt to Aengus, not least for inviting me to interview Tony Blair in 2010, and I think I can make some small attempt to settle up with him by showing the absurdity of O'Rourke's charge.
Far from constituting some lapse in an otherwise glittering career, Fanning's withering editorials on the Hume-Adams' 'dialogue' in 1993-1994 were landmark contributions to the modernisation of Irish society. In subjecting Hume's embrace of the Provisional IRA to the strictest kind of moral scrutiny, Fanning and Eamon Dunphy had the courage to air publicly a whole series of doubts and ambivalences that successive Taoisigh could only ventilate privately.
Put simply, every Irish Taoiseach since Jack Lynch has had their quarrels with Hume, and many came to see him as ideologically unyielding, especially when mentally slotting unionism into his 'agreed Ireland'. Lynch saw power-sharing within Northern Ireland as more important than Hume's ambitious north-south agenda. Liam Cosgrave also came to resent Hume's attempts to re-open the partition question in the mid-Seventies. And though he invoked Hume mercilessly in public, Garret FitzGerald was privately vexed at Hume's embittered attitude towards unionism after Sunningdale.
In 1982, FitzGerald refused Hume's plea to exclude unionists as a matter of policy from the New Ireland Forum. These abrasive instincts as regards his unionist neighbours had also alienated Hume's closest SDLP colleagues, especially Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin. Some other colleagues thought that Hume missed a trick by dismissing as 'partitionist' William Craig's tentative plan in the late Seventies for an 'emergency' coalition between the SDLP and the UUP. Fanning's tough-minded editorials on the Hume-Adams convergence in 1993 rendered a signal service to our Republic in reminding people that Hume had even less allegiance to Dublin than he did to London. And Fanning's sense that Hume was feasting with panthers was surely vindicated the day Adams' paramilitary charges killed two of Hume's own constituents mid-'dialogue'.
If Hume was an ideological hard-charger who acted on occasion like an Irish prime minister in exile, then he was also guilty of amazing hubris during the period Fanning put him under the magnifying glass. I say this because during his 'dialogue' with Adams in 1993 and 1994, Hume publicly arrogated to himself the right to discuss border changes with the self-appointed leader of a sectarian military conspiracy that killed more of its 'host' community than all the security forces combined.
Hume tried to hide this fact with incomprehensible prose. For a spell, Fanning seemed to be the only major newspaper editor who was willing to say this. Look again at what Hume and Adams said on April 24, 1993. Firstly, they said "we accept that the Irish people as a whole have a right to national self-determination. This is a view shared by a majority of the people of this island though not by all its people". Then they said: "We are mindful that not all the people of Ireland share that view or agree on how to give meaningful expression to it. Indeed, we do not disguise the different views held by our own parties." As someone who valued clear prose Fanning sensed instinctively that this was waffle.
O'Rourke seemed to imply this week that Fanning's unwillingness to be intimidated by this language of "self-determination" was tantamount to "vilification". The fact is that Fanning's wariness here was no different from that expressed privately throughout the Seventies by Cabinet Secretary Dermot Nally, the mandarin who told Cosgrave in 1975 that Hume's tentative embrace of the 'troops-out' slogan was not to be indulged.
Just like Fanning would do in 1994, Nally wrote then that the interests of the Republic, even, perhaps, of the entire island, "diverge markedly from the interests and policies of the SDLP and a reasonable degree of progress for the three million people living here is more important, no matter what Northern interests think, than power sharing, if the choice comes to that". If this is "vilification", then Fanning was in the best of prime ministerial company. I was still in school in Cork city when the polemical heavens opened over Fanning's head, and when that already ample moral space that separated Cork from Belfast became less a gap than a howling chasm.
Since then, I've never been able to read Seamus Deane or Tom Paulin's attacks on the Republic's partitionism without thinking of Fanning in 1994 and asking myself why northern nationalism acts like it has only two postures, that which puts it at our feet or, alternatively, at our throats. RTE's emphasis on the "vilification" of Hume will never quite eclipse the relevance of Fanning's central insight in 1994, namely his belief that we can only tolerate what will tolerate us. This is why Fanning's moral clarity will remain a beacon to follow, and a hope to attain.
- John-Paul McCarthy
Originally published in
