Spring Us A Change!

On Sherkin.

Fiona and I flew home to a cool though dry Ireland, but then over Easter the sky cleared and the Auld Sod stretched her limbs to the bliss of Spring. After some frantic work to prepare Horseshoe Cottage, thankfully helped by Ger from Cork, we were able to welcome two daughters and their eleven children, and inaugurate the new sun-room, unfinished but

Backgammon

serviceable. For this weekend we have come together with more of the family in West Clare, to christen our John and Andreea's new daughter, Iris.

This week I am taking a break from the autobiographical stuff, to post a comment on the political situation in the north-west of Europe, particularly the off-shore islands and France, what with the election there and the forthcoming one in Blighty, and the problems on this island, especially in Ulster.  

The English Problem (and the French, Irish and Scottish ones....)

The Irish may have the better part of Ireland, the Scots and the Welsh sort of have Scotland and Wales, but somewhere along the road to Empire, the English kind of lost England. Scratch most so-called English people, and you find that few of them are really English at all. Pace the ‘we got our country back’ crowd, this process barely involved the EU at all. It’s just that when one was effortlessly superior and busy being British, it was unnecessary and even slightly embarrassing to refer to the English bit. Nowadays, with even the Scots threatening to jump ship, one is having to ask oneself whether after all there might be any mileage in simply being English?

One used to be able to refer to one’s ‘kith and kin’, but this implies a rootedness in place which has largely gone by the board. This is a process which has been going on for a matter of centuries. Before the great scattering, one knew the people one was involved with from childhood, or at least one knew their families. Wider connections tended to be carried on the back of these personal ones. With the breakdown of this set-up, a lot of things in the line of religion, tradition and morality broke down. Into the gap galloped ideologies of Left and Right, but much good they did! Yet clearly, it is impossible to simply go back to that old rooted society. On what basis, then, can authentic identity and community be reconstituted?

This is no esoteric problem. It has often been pointed out that to have a democracy, one must have a demos, a ‘people’. The contemporary crisis of democracy translates into the question, what in fact constitutes a people? Since neither physical place nor race is adequate any more, as society has become more complex and multicultural, the problem has become sharper.  For a hundred and one reasons that the reader will be able to call to mind, it is of the utmost urgency to rebuild the sense of community and social solidarity, at every level; this calls for genuine participatory democracy and social solidarity. The alternative is ever more manipulation and exploitation.

How are we to discover in ourselves the ability to respond to our fellow citizens, to be response-able, to take ownership of our lives, and commit them as appropriate? One way or another, the big structures of society have to be re-rooted in personal relationships; this is how the Catholic idea of solidarity relates to that of subsidiarity. Somehow the macro-world has to be replanted in the micro, the bigger structures grow out of the more basic, and people have to prove themselves in practical, inter-personal and face-to-face community building before they are let loose on a more amplified level. This is all very well in theory, but how might it work in practice?

We have to get away from a winner-takes-all, confrontational style of politics to a consensus-building one where everyone’s voice is heard, every story taken into account. This in turn calls for the maximum degree of personal encounter and involvement. In practice local authorities have in recent years been increasingly emasculated in both Ireland and Great Britain. This may have been driven at least in part by the inadequacy of local authorities to deal with the complexity of modern life. The regional level of political power, between local and national, can help here. It has been neglected and needs to be revivified. In England’s case, four regions come to mind: the South-East or Greater London, the South-West, the Midlands and the North.

In Ireland too, greater regional authority would help. Of course, it would have to be in Ireland that the most northerly bit finds itself in the ‘South’. The present Irish border is a gerrymander, and a good place to start building a stable political set-up would be to reconstitute the province of Ulster; when faced with a blockage, it’s a good idea to start by clearing away lies and anomalies. In this case it would be easier to recognise a genuine physical and cultural entity in a restored nine county Ulster. The other three provinces of Ireland could also do with their own regional authorities, and the Scottish dimension comes into the equation as well.

In England it is unlikely that the Tories will go along with this kind of thinking. They are too heavily invested in the status quo. They fail to see, as career politicians focussed above all on retaining power, that their authority and effectiveness would actually be enhanced in the context of effective subsidiarity in both directions; that is, at both the regional and the continental level. As things stand, they are exhausting themselves trying to do everything themselves, and doing nothing well. They are indeed well into the classic formula for dodgy regimes: that of blaming Johnny Foreigner and looking for a good enemy, thus to distract the people. It is a sorry situation, and perhaps it is time for a Celtic Federation of Ireland and Scotland (and Wales and Cornwall, Brittany and Galicia?) to find an alternative way!

Subsidiarity is indeed a two-way street, with the various levels both informing and empowering each other. Only by all levels effectively ‘firing’ together can the challenges of a globalised world be met, and action really be taken to secure our tattered world with respect to sustainability, globalisation, automation and unemployment, climate change, ocean management, refugees, calling international finance to account, war and peace, etc, etc.

Chess.

Photographs (of better games than politics) by Ger Kavanagh and Fiona.