Ireland

On a Sunday in the summer of 1970, we were all herded up to the little church in Cúil Aodha for Mass. We were city kids sent to this small and remote village in County Cork to learn Irish from the native speakers. Their little chapel was gray, pebble-dashed, with no steeple, more like a […]

The post Ireland’s Coming of Age and Mine appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

His false claims about the withdrawal agreement reveal an utter lack of interest in Brexit’s consequences for Belfast and Dublin

The difficulty for other governments in dealing with Boris Johnson is to figure out whether he is lying or merely ignorant. There was so much weirdness in the general election campaign that it was easy to miss a moment that would have once caused something of a sensation. But in this new era, it was barely remarkable that a friendly foreign government had to intervene to say that important statements by a British prime minister were patently untrue.

In 2011, in what seemed like a laying to rest of the mad ghosts of Anglo-Irish history, the Queen was cheered to the rafters in Dublin.

But the building in which this celebration of amity took place had its own rather haunting presence. It was the spanking new Convention Centre, a glamorous, ultra-modern monument to the optimism of the Celtic Tiger years. By the time of the Queen’s visit, it looked out on a landscape of shattered dreams. From the top floor, you had a panoramic view of abandoned building sites on the other side of the Liffey, testaments to the folly that created a spectacular banking crisis, vicious austerity and deep disillusion with the political system that had brought such pain.

The Catholic church in Ireland lost power by flouting the morals it prescribed. The Tory government risks a similar fate

It is not news that Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings treat rules with contempt. But there is one rule even they might be expected to obey, because it is crucial to the maintenance of power. Never, ever, make the people who place their faith in you feel like fools.

Or, to put it another way, never let the people who think they are making a sacrifice realise that in fact they are the sacrifice. Before breaking this rule so flagrantly, Johnson and his consigliere would have done well to consider the fate of what used to be one of the most powerful institutions on these islands: the Irish Catholic church.

Almost 50 years ago, in the early hours of 2 February 1972, the British embassy in Dublin was gutted by fire. This was not an accident. A huge crowd had gathered in protest outside the lovely Georgian terrace in Merrion Square all through the previous day. They cheered as young men climbed across the balconies and smashed a window. They threw in some petrol and lit it. A fusillade of petrol bombs was unleashed from the crowd. People chanted the slogan they had learned from the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965: burn, baby, burn. The police did nothing to stop the attack.

Brexit has devoured its unionist children, helping to deliver the sense of an ending for Northern Ireland as we know it

In 2021, a hundred years after the creation of Northern Ireland, Boris Johnson tweeted: “Let me underline that, now & in the future, Northern Ireland’s place in the UK will be protected and strengthened.” Since the word “not” has to be inserted automatically into every positive statement Johnson makes, unionists ought to have taken this as fair warning: Year 101 of Northern Ireland’s existence would be its equivalent of George Orwell’s Room 101, where you are confronted by your own worst nightmares.