Comment: The tankies were right. (We always are)

Last night I got the venue for Clare Daly in conversation with Bernadette McAliskey wrong and ended up in St Dominic’s Grammar School on the Falls Road. I’ve always thought the school gave Van Morrison the title for one of my favourite songs, St Dominic’s Preview, despite Van’s insistence it came to him in a dream and that it refers to a St Dominic’s church. (“And everybody feels so determined not to feel anyone else's pain,” he sings in the second verse.)

I made it over the road to St Mary's University College in time for the chat, part of Féile na Carraige’s Harry Holland Lecture and introduced with the reminder that the festival is informed by Antonio Gramsci’s belief of “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. 

And there were both, up north in the six, the colonial entity that’s “terminally ill”, said McAliskey, a statelet that will die and be mourned by a certain kind of Free Statist down south. 

Daly said during her unsuccessful campaign for reelection to the European Parliament she’d experienced a level of vitriol, often personalised and sexualised, she’d never encountered before. It came from, what she called, these Free State “rugby dads”. McAliskey said she’d come across a few while out canvassing on the campaign. They were, she said, “half affluent but certainly arrogant, wearing pullovers that weren’t quite exclusive but maybe better than most people’s”. 

They seemed ambivalent about McAliskey, recognising her as a public figure, but neither understanding her politics nor remembering the causes she’d fought for. “Bernadette, is it?” they’d say and ask what had her in Dublin. “Canvassing for Clare,” McAliskey would say. “Clare Daly? Jesus, Bernadette, do you know what she thinks about…” they’d ask her in response, choosing one of the attack lines so favoured by the Irish (and British) media during the last few years. (No comment for the Irish Times?)

I can imagine the kind, the men with brains still battered from the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, who had decided, actually, they kinda like war, embraced the invasion of Ukraine, made it part of their personalities – Slava Ukraini! The type of man who’d be arrogant and ignorant enough to think he’d need to inform and warn someone like McAliskey of Daly’s politics. How could she have known?

‘They’re overrepresented in the political classes’ 

Daly spoke of the Europhilia these men hold, which carries with it an embarrassment of Irishness and the state’s neutrality. It reminded me of a chat we’d had for a Ditch podcast this year.  

“There is a huge section in Irish society who are Europhiles. They’re overrepresented in the political classes, definitely in the media and in sections of academia as well. They think that anything European is automatically better than anything that comes from Ireland and being Irish and being different is somehow shameful. So the idea that we would be neutral and different is a bad thing,” she said in the Sugar Club earlier this year. 

“They were always embarrassed that the Irish people returned Euro-critical MEPs. They were devastated when the people of Ireland rejected Lisbon and Nice. Oh my God, the mortification, they had to go and explain to their European peers how infantile and silly the Irish public were,” she said. Against this shame came the war in Ukraine, as well as “all of the jingoism” said Daly. “They saw their chance to silence that Euro-critical voice that had always been there.” 

Away from these guys’ Europhila, the EU’s continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a “mask off” moment for most, said Daly. It happens. “Once the experience of evil has been endured,” wrote author Natalia Ginzburg, who spent a period living in exile during Mussolini’s reign in Italy, “it is never forgotten. Someone who has seen a house collapse knows only too clearly what frail things little vases of flowers and pictures and white walls are,” she wrote in The Son of Man.  

There are those of us for whom that house has collapsed (or never stood); others, in positions of power, see it still standing. Last summer tánaiste Micheál Martin held his consultative forum on Irish neutrality. It was a serious endeavour for him. 

Micheál Martin was right. Just not how he intended 

Before the forum Martin, a man radicalised by his time as taoiseach during the early days of the Ukrainian war – how easy it was for him to play the role of serious statesman alongside the leaders of imperial countries the Irish ruling class so desperately wants to emulate – learnt the word binary: “the discussion will not simply be a binary one”; “these questions must not be reduced to a simplistic binary choice”; “we wish to avoid a binary issue.”

He’s right but not in the way he intended. 

A discussion of Ireland’s neutrality shouldn’t be binary, with the implication the currently neutral state could, with the flick of a switch, integrate itself into EU, US and Nato “defence” structures, the military wing of our tax haven economy. It’s a big world, led by a decaying American empire, with the prospect of some level of multipolarity predicted to be on the way. There are choices.

But that isn’t what Martin was talking about. He was trying to assure critics of the forum that it didn’t have a preordained outcome – a recommendation that switch would flick and Ireland would, as Martin and his class wants, side further with imperial powers.  

There was a word for people who articulated this concern about the forum. President Michael D Higgins, who considers Origins of Totalitarianism author Hannah Arendt his intellectual hero, was a tankie. The Trotskyist People Before Profit were tankies. Maybe only the most pedantic prescriptivists would take issue with the term, first applied to British communists who supported the Soviet Union's use of tanks in Hungary in 1956, now being used for people who opposed an increase in military spending, but these people were now tankies too.

The tankies were right though – we always are – because any encroachment on what’s left of Irish neutrality that swings in favour of the imperial core is met with indifference or cursory condemnation. 

Only a version of the Occupied Territories Bill

Over the last couple of months at The Ditch we’ve published reports about how a minimum of 90 tonnes of explosives for the IDF were illegally transported through Irish territory. We’ve reported how other flights undertaken by major airlines like the national carriers of Israel and Germany, El Al and Lufthansa, as well as Delta Airlines and FedEx, have also brought munitions of war through Irish airspace on their way to the IDF. Some of these flights date as far back as three years. The Irish public had been repeatedly assured they weren’t taking place. 

In April Micheál Martin told People Before Profit’s Bríd Smith that Irish airspace wasn’t being used to transport weapons to Israel. “People should stop trying to muddy the waters in that respect, which is what is going on,” he said, either incensed or just irate, can be hard to tell with him. Though he was exercised enough to suggest the issue was important to him, when presented with evidence he hadn’t told the truth, the matter was no longer as significant. 

Government could maybe look at telling the airlines, which had brought weapons over Ireland to an army committing genocide in Palestine, they couldn’t come through Irish airspace again. "And that's about all we can do,” he said. 

At least two of these illegal flights made their journeys after the IDF pointed the barrel of one of its tanks at Irish peacekeepers in Lebanon. “Israeli troops have attempted to intimidate and threaten the young Irish men and women at 6-52 by positioning Merkava battle tanks on the perimeter of the post, with their 120mm main armaments aimed directly at them,” wrote senator Tom Clonan in the Guardian. 

The Irish state received some level of international glory by association with these troops. The soldiers were left there – and government refuses to take meaningful action about these illegal flights, which it can no longer claim it didn’t know about. 

It has also, for six years, refused to take action on the Occupied Territories Bill. If passed the bill would outlaw the sale and import of goods from territories illegally occupied by Israel, but government, knowing it doesn’t have the votes to defeat the legislation, has cynically used a constitutional provision known as the money message to block its passage. Though government hasn't been able to speak in plain terms about its use of this provision, instead trying to argue its invocation has been for sincere concern about public funds, during a “confidential call” with his Israeli counterpart, then finance minister Paschal Donohoe assured Israel that Ireland would “block” the bill. 

“We understand that during a confidential call on 13 February between the Irish Minister of Finance and his Israeli counterpart, the Irish minister confirmed that the Irish government will be using a procedure known as "money message" to seek to block the progress of the draft Irish legislation,” wrote Hadie Cohen at the Israeli Ministry of Justice, the emphasis on confidential call her own. 

Donohoe says the call didn’t take place. His party leader now says he’d like Ireland to finally pass (a version of) the bill. 

‘Let’s further ingratiate ourselves to empire’

"Ireland now, in the context of the ICJ advisory opinion of July, will not wait for everybody in Europe to move on the issue of trade in the occupied Palestinian territories," taoiseach Simon Harris said in Brussels before an EU-Gulf Cooperation Council meeting. He also however said, “I’m not here to have controversial confrontation with anybody” – a bad sign. Another bad sign was Micheál Martin’s assertion, “The existing bill would need to be redrafted and amended very substantively.”

Senator Frances Black, who introduced the bill, thinks differently. “I’ve said consistently, since I first tabled the Occupied Territories Bill in 2018, that Ireland can do this. The ICJ ruling in July has simply put the legal question beyond any reasonable doubt,” she said. 

You can believe Black or you can believe the state. Either way the bill has been left aside for six years. There’s only now talk of some version of it being passed with an upcoming general election and huge popular support, from the people of Ireland, behind it. 

The Irish Examiner suggested the reason for the lack of urgency on those illegal flights from our ruling parties could be the “institutional political contempt” we’re held in at The Ditch. Maybe. It could be simpler than that, that these flights and that confidential call are – as far as Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party are concerned – moves in the right direction, towards global power rather than justice. Let them continue, they think. Let’s further ingratiate ourselves to empire. 

The state’s economy is already built on empire’s investment. In those hacked Israeli Ministry of Justice files, a Ministry of Economy official was quite explicit about these economics and how they could be weaponised against the Occupied Territories Bill. Yossi Ackerman, writing to colleagues to suggest ways they could influence the passage of the bill, spoke of how Israel would seek “to make influential companies and corporations act actively against the law”.

How long we continue 

And so the state allows what Michael D Higgins called this “dangerous drift” to continue; it indulges what Albert Camus called man’s strongest temptation. 

“Man's strongest temptation is the temptation of inertia. And because the world is no longer filled by the victims' cries, many people may think it will go on as usual for a few generations more,” he said in a 1946 speech in Brooklyn College. “And because it is easier to do one's daily work and wait peacefully for death to come one day, people believe that they have done enough for the good of man by not killing anyone directly, and by trying to lie as little as possible.” Those leading the Irish state haven’t killed anyone directly. 

Considering the movements for defending Irish neutrality and extending solidarity to Palestine – how these movements are connected, the forces that stand in opposition – it can be easy to be fatalist. How long we continue to lose. 

How long we continue though. 

Camus said, “The first Christians used to call the great movement sustaining them ‘the Folly of the Cross’. What we need today is a folly of man. A great folly, which thinks ahead, solid and built upon the immense hope, the silent determination, which in the past has sustained and will continue to sustain European spirits in a world they have confronted without the benefit of illusion.”

There remain some who resist the urge, which Van sang about, to disavow the pain of others.

McAliskey said, signing off the evening in Belfast, “The only time we were bate was when we didn’t show up."