Why I would support a Sinn Fein revolution in the North
IN THE past week, four media moments proved the proposition that the prophet has no honour in his own country, or to put it another way, that we can't see things clearly when we are too close to them. In fact, as Brecht argues, to see the familiar with fresh eyes, we first have to make it strange.
I learned that lesson as long ago as 1968 when I first saw Sean O Mordha's film Stone Mad, on the sculptor Seamus Murphy, transmitted again last Tuesday. Back in 1968 Sean and myself were both fresh off the RTE television producers course: he from Dublin, me just up from Cork. So why was it Sean and not me, who went down to Cork and made a fine film about Seamus Murphy?
The answer is that I was too absorbed at the time by high national politics which now seem pointless. A provincial sculptor like Seamus Murphy did not seem a suitably exotic subject. Because I saw Seamus all the time - on Patrick St,at the Cork film society, coming out of the Palace Bar - I could not see him as clearly as Sean O Mordha saw him from afar.
Sean O Mordha's luminous film taught me a tough lesson which I have tried to pass on to film students ever since. To make a work of art you must, in Brecht's phrase, "make strange".
This means looking long and hard at the things you take for granted, particularly your prejudices. And that applies to art, to politics and to people we think we know, but do not know at all.
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Bertie Ahern is such a person. It takes someone from outside our society to see him clearly and cherish his skills. As Alastair Campbell did in his diaries
'In the North, Sinn Fein looks like a powerful party of the mainstream: down south it looks like a sidebar party of the powerless'
when he put Ahern on the same pedestal as Bill Clinton.
Actually he is selling Ahern short. Clinton's charm conceals a poor record in American domestic and foreign policy. Ahern has charm too, but it is only one of the many political skills he deployed to deliver an epic economy and peace in Northern Ireland.Not that this matters to a middle class media obsessed by the Mahon Tribunal. None so blind as those who think higher education took the wool from their eyes. Actually it only put another set of blinkers in place.
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Among the things the blinkers conceal is the media's inbuilt bias. Last Sunday, the lively Karen Coleman of Newstalk's Wide Angle, gurgled with what seemed to be genuine amazement when Constantin Gurdgiev seemed to say the BBC could be biased. But Coleman is only reflecting a consensus common to almost all who work in Irish media.
Karen told us that when she covered Kosovo the BBC would go to great trouble to "balance" a pro-Kosovan report by looking for a Serbian. But this misses the point that prejudice comes long before it is time to balance anything. It comes from choice of subject and angle of attack, and deficiencies cannot be remedied by a belated numerical balancing. How many Orangemen would it take to "balance" the Pope on a panel, before an Irish Catholic audience?
A recent BBC report which admits bias, shows the problem starts with staff who wear their liberal prejudices like a a skin they no longer notice. Instead of subjecting their own ideas to scrutiny, the BBC report reveals a "tendency to 'group think', with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone."
These shared liberal assumptions are not likely to be challenged by anybody who works for the BBC or RTE. Like a second skin a liberal view is the norm and is only noted when absent. The bias is built in long before the camera rolls.
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Finally, and far more important for the future of Ireland, is Sinn Fein's failure to step outside its skin. Because if it could step back, stripped of illusions, it would see clearly that it should cut its losses in the Irish Republic and retrench on to its real organic roots, and its real historic project, which are in the North.
The fact of life is that Bertie Ahern has done for Sinn Fein in the south forever. My prediction that Ahern "would rather take a chainsaw and cut off his legs than give a cabinet seat to Mary Lou McDonald" has been proven to the hilt. Far from staging a comeback, Sinn Fein in the South should face the fact that Fianna Fail will take their remaining seats at the next general election.
Accordingly, Sinn Fein in the South is left with the lumpen-proletarian scrapings of socialism, and the trendy obsessions of a few bourgeois Bohemians such as the Shell to Sea campaigners. And the increasingly anarchic agitations of these lumpens and Bohemians will alienate more and more working people who want a modern social democratic party.
In sum, the fiction of an all-Ireland party, far from supporting a positive Northern project is now only an albatross around its neck. As we can see if we compare the two states. In the North, Sinn Fein looks like a powerful party of the mainstream: down south it looks like a sidebar party of the powerless - not a numerous class in the Irish Republic. In the North, Sinn Fein is moving towards the social-democratic centre: down south its armchair commissars are reverting to socialist shibboleths.
In the North, Sinn Fein is spreading itself into the centre ground of politics, making concessions to the unionist tradition, and building a mass Blairite party of social-democracy. At the same time Sinn Fein in the Republic is retreating to the far left margins of political life and becoming a powerless party of protest.
If Sinn Fein in the North wants a noble project it should give up the pseudo-socialist revolution in the Irish Republic and start a real revolution in Northern Ireland. This is the task of making peace with the people who fear it the most. And if this strikes you as naive, I have two reasons for believing that Sinn Fein in the North could carry this project to a successful conclusion.
First, in a long political life I have learned that the only reliable rule is that anything can happen. Second, I agree with the Methodist minister, Rev Harold Good, who took the familiar image from May 8, when Dr Paisley and Martin McGuinness went into Stormont through revolving doors, and made it strange as follows:
"Remember the hand of one gently navigating the other? The offering of safe passage by one and acceptance by the other? For me this was the 'hand of history' and worth more than a thousand choreographed handshakes." We all 'saw' that moment. But of course we didn't really see it until Rev Harold Good made it strange and fresh. In doing so he demonstrated that progress in art, politics and civilisation depends on stepping out of our own skins and into the skins of others.
[Correction: Tom Carew reminds me that although he was active in Chris Hudson's Peace Train project, he has never been a member of the Labour Party, or indeed of any other party.]
Eoghan Harris
- Eoghan Harris
