I

The English language is a rented tool; this could be viewed as a problem, as the Irish elite know that they can be well understood if anyone elsewhere is paying any attention. In fact they have turned this situation into an opportunity, acting at all times to appease the imagined observer in London, New York or Washington. Those amongst the lazy local elite who have fantasies about obtaining international roles—academic, political, journalistic—write out their job applications over the course of years (annoyed at all times that their work has to be put before a domestic public that the writer is not concerned with). 

This explains much about the anti-national extremism of the leaders of our Nation; working within the English language, these representatives of the Establishment are already recruited to the cause of Imperialism. Macdara imagines the bosses at the CIA or MI6 asking which of the extravagantly pro-US, pro-UK, pro-Nato shills in the Irish media and politics are on their payroll. He pictures their surprise and confusion when they learn that these idiotic opinions are being aired without an exchange of cash. The Irish voices of international Anglophone orthodoxy undertake the task of policing the natives totally mindlessly, understanding instinctively that they must align themselves with the highest representatives of Late Capitalism. 

There is a little hope when it comes to the public more broadly. Even those who vote for the Partitionist Party, for example, do not actually believe that it was wrong for Irish people to fight Imperialism rather than sending a short pleading letter in the best English to a potentate in London before lying down to die. Those in power from the Party remind us constantly that the founders of the State (and their Party), a generation of women and men of the greatest will and generosity, were barbaric thugs and common criminals, blind to the opportunities for crafting excellent letters to the editor that would surely have ended the whole ghastly business of fighting Imperialism. It is a mystery to this writer why the plain people of Ireland accept this behaviour from their elected representatives.

II

Of course there is one respect in which local elites are very clearly bought and paid for: Irish journalists love to get some Pounds Sterling or Dollars for their completely unbiased output, explaining to a half-interested foreign readership that things in Ireland are exactly as these clever readers would assume (or worse). Though to be honest your correspondent assumes that Irish hacks would not presume to ask for payment for being permitted to publish in the Imperialist Press…

Let us look at an example odd enough to have stuck in Macdara’s mind for several years, a collection of words by Una Mullally, a patron saint of the Irish Times set, who has leveraged being in favour of marriage equality and reproductive healthcare—landslide majority opinions, remember—into an opportunity to opine weekly in a conservative newspaper about conservative Ireland. Given the opportunity to explain to English readers in 2016 why our abortion laws were so inhumane, the approach she took can best be described as eccentric, though Macdara will find a little more to say than that.

The headline: Irish women need British help to change our abortion laws. She may not have chosen this wording, but it exactly reflects Mullally’s piece. Spivak writes about “white men saving brown women from brown men”; here the English are begged to step in to save Irish women from Ireland. Of course she is careful to refer to “both parts of Ireland”: an attentive reader will recall that one of those parts is in fact under colonial administration, and yet still somehow lacks the civilising force that Mullally expects Empire to lavish upon its colonies. But let us read on.

Many things led to the ban on abortion in Ireland. But those factors – Catholicism, misogyny, an obsession with controlling women’s bodies – sound more archaic with each passing year.

No mention of colonisation, even though the law making abortion illegal was a colonial law—and even though it was a colonial context, in the post-genocide period, that permitted the further colonisation of Irish minds and bodies by Catholicism. In fact the list, lacking a reference to something as concrete as colonisation, has had to be filled out with second-order factors: surely misogyny and an obsession with controlling women’s bodies are, firstly, the same thing, and secondly, are results of something, and require explanation, and are not first-order phenomena in themselves.

But what Irish governments really dislike is being embarrassed from abroad. As a nation, we are insecure, obsessed with our identity and what people think of us. So if politicians don’t have the guts to tackle this issue then they need to be shamed into action.

She is right about the embarrassment and insecurity, which she then however goes on to display in extraordinary form.

A strip of sea separates us, but we are just like you. We watch EastEnders, shop in Topshop, cry at Bake Off and drink gin. Your football teams are our football teams. We don’t earn enough and are sick of the rain. We are not “other”.

[…] we need Britain to do more. We are so intertwined; by language, by history, by culture, by geography. Our lives and lifestyles are to an outside eye so similar. So imagine if what we’re dealing with was your reality? It is as unfair and heartbreaking to us as it would be if it were you. We need your help.

How in the name of Marx did this shite get published? She is erasing Irish difference in order to beg for—for what, exactly? Recolonisation? For this graduate of a gaelscoil to say that we are intertwined by language is sinister enough, but she makes the same claim for history and culture too, as if Empire is a neutral process, perhaps even positive: some kind of mutual sharing event, like a bake sale, but bigger, or a world cultures day in your office. As for geography, this writer is entirely certain that Ireland is its own island, so how exactly it can be described as intertwined geographically with Britain, a separate island, is unclear.

This is the work of a representative of a self-consciously Native elite: insisting on the humanity of the natives while also begging for protection, protection from what we are doing to ourselves; she is so recruited into the Imperialist system that she is attempting to recruit the Imperialists. Can there be another European country in which the elites are so concretely set against the Nation, and so weird about it?