Neutrality is a luxury you can no longer afford
We will fight them on the beaches,
We will fight them on the streets,
We will fight them in the media
And every time he Tweets
(With apologies to Churchill)
I didn’t want this first column to be about Trump. In typical Irish defiance, I wouldn’t give him the pleasure.
So it’s not about him, it’s about you. You and your blessed neutrality. Or more correctly I should say us and our cursed neutrality. Our neutrality. Irish neutrality.
Contrary to popular convention, it is not enshrined in the Constitution either. It is referenced in the Constitution but more robustly guarded in legislation and the ‘triple lock’.
Neutrality is one of those words. It’s one of those words which fulfils an emotional ideal as much as a policy disposition.
Nuclear is another word like neutrality. More about emotion than reality. A comfort blanket of intellectual wisdom. We can’t even have a calm conversation about nuclear energy because all the time everyone in the room is thinking about the nuclear option, not of a power plant, but of a bomb.
Try telling the Jews, for instance that we were neutral to their plight as Hitler’s Third Reich gassed their children in Auschwitz. Try telling it to the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we were neutral to their children being incinerated. We were neutral!
It is easy enough to be neutral when you are distant and detached. It’s far more complex when it gets personal and closer to home.
We have a great tradition in our country of helping and sending money out to the missions and what we were allowed to refer to as ‘the black babies’ when I was going to school. We are still a nation with a big heart but it can be a slightly different matter when those ‘black babies’ grow up and show up in person. That’s when we are asked to practice what we preach.
We are justifiably very proud of our Irish Navy, out in all sorts of hazardous conditions on far flung waters saving the lives of refugees fleeing the blood thirsty beheading butchers of ISIS. But it gets a bit trickier when confronted with what to do with these latter day boat people. We can’t just toss them back in the water like pinkeens. We too were boat people, crossing the Atlantic in ‘coffin ships’.
It is also easier to be neutral if we are anonymous. If we can’t put a face, a name, then it doesn’t reach us or reach out to us in the same way. The problem for the people in Auschwitz and Aleppo is there are too many of them; too many to remember.
Mothers don’t like it though. They are less neutral. Like Mrs Gallagher in Ballaghadereen, she knows that boy, Alan Kurdi, washed up on the beach in Turkey is some mother’s son. Alan Kurdi made it personal.
The problem for the rest of those kids in Aleppo is we don’t know their names.
In our national psyche our neutrality dates back to DeValera (another typical Irish name) and the Second World War. For all the scorn poured on Dev, not least due to his later day sleeveen portrayal at the hands of Neil Jordan and Liam ‘I am going to hunt you down’ Neeson, in the film that simultaneously canonised Michael Collins, he probably called this one right.
While it might seem like small potatoes now, we were in the middle of our own economic war and the general rule of thumb, the enemy of our enemy was in the mix at the time. In truth we were neutral, but on the side of the Allies. And in any event it may have been the only call open to Dev as our fledgling and fragile state could not have survived a Blitz or invasion from either side.
While there are those who gleefully beat up on the EU, its indecision, incompetence and impotence, it is a damn sight better than what went before it. If history has one annoying habit, it’s that it tends to repeat itself.
The parallels with the emergence of unbridled nationalism, fascism, racism and despots; restrictions of movement, misinformation, the rolling back of hard won rights, populist propaganda (aka #fakenews), and the hardening of borders between now and the 1930s is undeniable.
If truth is the first casualty of war, we are already at war.
Children, doctors, nurses, women, the wounded, sick and infirm, (journalists) are no longer offered sanctuary or safe passage. There is a new order, somewhere even beyond the Orwellian dystopia of 1984.
But this is not 1930s Ireland. Neutrality is not merely refusing to take sides, to be independent, impartial, fair minded, an honest broker, to keep out of it to protect our sovereignty and national interests, to protect our fragile and fledgling nation.
Today, neutrality has a different meaning. It is to turn a blind eye, to ignore injustice, to abandon others like Alan Kurdi to their peril, their fate.
It has nothing to do with us?
We don’t have to go to war, but we should be taking sides. Neutrality is a luxury you can no longer afford.
