Round and Round the Garden.

One day I was banging nails into the Anna M in Nazaré, Portugal; soon after I was at a book launch in Westminster, London, then again working in the garden here on Sherkin Island; the possibilities opened up by modern travel are all very wonderful. However, it does rather makes the head whirl; how can they possibly fit together? No wonder we are sometimes tempted to think that all this freedom is a bit over the top, and though we do not admit it, some of us undoubtedly actually fear it.

It is very nearly half a century since I had been involved in such an event as that book launch in London, and how life has whirled along since! Young bright sparks like me, who had been brought up in the mindset of the British Empire, were struggling to come to terms with the new realities. Just to think, of all the weird little implications, that in the world which was passing away, gentlemen did not type! Was it considered demeaning, or could they not be expected to catch up with such newfangled gadgets, or what? Anyway they all had female secretaries with neat little hands to do it for them.

The book was ‘On Governing Europe’, subtitled ‘A Federal Experiment’, and it was launched by its author Andrew Duff, a Cambridge based retired Liberal MEP and 'distinguished commentator'. It is a good, clear book, telling the story of the birth and development of the European Union. What a complicated and tortuous process it has been, which Brexiters think, or rather thought, they could so lightly cast aside! The quotations at the chapter heads tell a lot. From Barack Obama, ‘They’ve got 17 countries that have to agree every step they take. So I think about my Congress, then I start thinking about 17 congresses and I start getting a little bit of a headache.’  What was driving them on? From François Mitterrand we have ‘Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre’. From John le Carré’s character George Smiley, ‘If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.’ From Jean-Claude Juncker, ‘We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.’

So there we have it! At the book-launch I commented on hearing Messrs Cameron, Johnson and Farage talking before the Brexit referendum, and thinking it was the Brexiteers who won hands down when it came to finding some bit of resonance that the great British people might get their imaginations round. Even still the twilight of Empire lingers, and the truth is that nothing much appears to have taken root since except weeds, like our garden in our absence. Fortunately in Ireland one is inclined to hear the other side of those echoes from the past, which is perhaps the principal reason why I came to live here; but whether the Irish would actually vote in full awareness to be part of a federal Europe is doubtful in the extreme, yet, as Andrew Duff demonstrates, that is the logic of where we are going, despite the farce of Mr Farage solemnly standing up in the European Parliament and hectoring them about 'their project being over', while he draws his fat salary from them and even hopes for the pension!

If the federal Europe is to be attained, it will have to find its heart; no amount of mere rational discourse will get us there; the numinous will have to be revisited, but actually this can enhance rational discourse rather than destroy it, though I reserve my belief as to how the numinous and reason may be reconciled. Let the world get there in its own time, if it can. Meanwhile religion is eschewed by some as a cause of division, but in fact it is so only when it has been corrupted by idolatry. Those springs of life must be revisited; and there is a surprise in store for those who do so, for a lot of work has already been done by believers, struggling to refine the gold from the dross of falling empires. ‘Assemble, come, gather together, all you who have escaped from the nations!’ (Isaiah 45:20)

It is not however my religion or anyone else’s religion I am insisting on. We can agree that God is always beyond any finite human possession; and probably we can agree that the deepest requirement of a human being, which everyone is looking for, is love, even poor Mr Farage. We cannot come straight to the end, the consummation, but we can start wherever we have an opportunity to take responsibility for each other and for the world, to care and to communicate about all those things that some mystery causes us to recognise as true and good. How could this possibly mean pulling up our drawbridge, lowering our portcullis, and hoping we can have a reasonably enjoyable party before things go to Hell altogether? No, it means getting out of our bolt-holes and doing whatever we can to take those opportunities. It's a pity my particular little way of doing it has such a long way to go before we can set sail again, but we have to learn patience, and we even have to learn what it was about empires that held many people's imaginations for so long, and why in the aftermath of their collapse there is so much carnage, with surviving nations tending to be thoroughly dysfunctional. Hey-ho, there's something for another post!