Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain - Fintan O'Toole

good evening everybody thank you so much for coming this dreary weather thanks a million said Mary for the invitation and to Fiona for this wonderful room I'm sorry about people standing at the back but I'm if you if you want to sit down I won't be insulted or the South ways make yourself as comfortable as possible some of you I've not many of you I think are maybe old enough to remember sign files and remember central so the kind of groundbreaking sitcom about nothing but there was an episode which was all about sort of arguing over who invented the brush-off line it's not you it's me and watching the extraordinary implosion of not just British politics but perhaps of the British polity last night I think we have to remind ourselves it's it's not you it's me it's not the European Union its Britain the strangest most paradoxical thing about Briggs's perhaps is that the last thing it's about is the EU it's not even perhaps fundamentally about Britain's relationship to the European Union it's much more about Britain's relationship to itself and the fundamental unfinished business of belonging and identity within the United Kingdom and particularly within England I think we have to understand brexit largely as being driven by the rise of an English national consciousness and in itself there's nothing at all that's you know historically unusual about us and there's nothing uniquely reprehensible about it England is as much entitled to its sense of national identity as anybody else's the problem with it is it that it's a it's a poorly expressed and rather inarticulate nationalism it dare not speak its own name and therefore it has resulted in an appeal which is itself inarticulate and really unclear about what it wants of itself it's very striking and in the you know last 1224 hours that the response of the European Union to all of this has been to come back and just keep saying tell us what you want you know and but in order to tell somebody what you want you have to know it what she wants and also know what you want you have to kind of know who you are so I just wanted to talk for the next three hours or so about about some of the some of the fundamentals of the collective psychology Abraxas as has worked I never imagined myself going into the process of trying to psychoanalyze a nation but but I probably end up trying to do that a little bit I hadn't really intended to write a book about Briggs at all because it's not really capable of being written yes you usually want to know what the story is nobody knows what the story is nobody knows what stories as it's being unfolding so journalistically it's one of the strangest stories ever recovered usually as a journalist you always think maybe it's the delusion of journalists but you always think somebody knows what's really going on you know and that if only you could find that person you wouldn't you would really understand it and it actually took quite a while to practice so in that sense you know it's not really a great thing to write a book about but also in just another sense that obviously our our historic notion of what a phenomenon is is very much shaped retrospectively by where it ends up and we still have no fundamental idea as to what that might be but I thought there was a different kind of book to be written there are different kind of thing to explore and it really I was I was down in the Berlin supposed to be on holidays and Boris Johnson resigns from the British Cabinet as he was always going to do once the vague prospect of taking responsibility for anything might even hold on to the horizon and is it in his resignation letter he took to resume he said the brexit dream is dying and it just occurred but you kind of one of those moments I start thinking what's the dream what's the dream world of brexit what's its unconsciousness of work and so what I kind of started writing was an attempt really to just explore that unconscious and I recently came across just a couple weeks ago hadn't seen it before I wish I had poem written by the very distinguished Scottish poet Douglas dumb and I was written in 1969 so even before Ireland's Britain joined the European Union and it's called a poem in praise of the British it's quite a long poem but I just like to call it a little bit of I says where did all that power come from the wish to be inert but rich and strong to have too much where does glory come from and when it's gone why are old soldiers sour and banks empty but how sweet is the weakness after Empire in the garden of a flat safe country Shire and a different Park the pharmacist the archivist wears a sword and clipped mustache he files our memories more precious than light to be of easy access to politicians of the right who now are sleeping like Undertaker's and black cushions thinking of inflammatory speeches and the adoring mob so obviously what Don was trying to get out this is really only a quarter of a century after the end of the Second World War and I suppose just right in the aftermath of the breakup of the Empire you know what memories are being filed in this archive that will in future be of use to inflammatory politicians of the right and what I want to suggest really is that that brexit really can't be understood unless we think about it in relation not to British history so much but to a particular British idea of history an idea of how history unfolds and so so brexit is driven partly by sort of you know filed away memories of the Second World War and the Empire but but framed in a way which which also sort of tries to engage with the idea of history itself and the fundamental problem of pregs it is the problem of Ireland of course Ireland is the not so much the backstop as the the doorstep of which breaks it stumbles on its way out can't leave so it in one of the early chapters of Ulysses James Joyce's great novel his alter-ego Stephen Dedalus goes to collect wages that he's due he's been doing some part-time teaching and the opinionated headmaster mr. Deasy talks at him a lot and one of these he talks at them about his history he keeps talking about history history Stephen replies is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake and then you know it's done from Stephens perspective in his mind from the play fields the boys raised to shout a queering whistle Gould what if the nightmare give you a back kick so the great difficulty of brexit as we know here was always going to be Ireland it's the return of the repressed they didn't talk about it they didn't articulate it they didn't deal with it they had no plan for us and now they're surprised that it's become a problem but it's not just because of the obvious things the enormous practical problems of dealing with the border which we know about and I'm not going to go into here it's not even to do with the fact that the border itself is as we also know very well from our own history an impossible border the impossibility is is obvious from just two numbers 137 which is the entire number of border crossings on the entire eastern flank of the European Union 208 which is the number of official border crossings between the north and south in Ireland the Irish Army did a survey after just before Christmas and they found about 310 I suspect the number is actually infinite it was Mandelbrot the great mathematician who invents kind of fractal geometry one of the questions that he'd asked to try to explain fractal geometry thanks be to God somebody tried to put it in terms that people like me could understand but he said it you asked the question how long is the coast of Britain and of course you pointed out is that the more you measure it the longer it gets the better your measurement is you go into every nook and cranny and the Irish border is exactly like that of course the more you look at it the bigger the bigger it gets the more crossings there are the more porous it becomes so we now are lap so we know very much about the practicality of it and the way in which it was always going to be impossible to configure it as an international frontier which in a sense it's never being and of course there are different jurisdictions of the islands but it's never been anything like a border between a block of 27 countries and an outside country so all of that was always going to be problematic but what I want to really talk about is the the deeper question that separates Ireland from Britain and where we are and it's the question about that Stephen Dedalus raises about the nightmare of history and history being a nightmare for which you're trying to awake what we're looking at really in the crooks of Briggs's has come to is too utterly incompatible ways of trying to escape in history we all in some ways desire to escape history to imagine a future which is untroubled by the uncertainties we've inherited from the past Stephen Dedalus is expression of this desire raises two questions one implicit the other explicit firstly what do you awake from the nightmare into secondly what if the nightmare of history kicks back in the text do you awake to reality or do you merely escape into a kind of dream time and if so with what consequences the deeper problem raised is not just that Ireland on the border are the great spoke in the brexit wheel it's that there is another kind of border a line separating one way of thinking about the trajectory of history from another very different one in Ireland we've been trying to awake from the nightmare of history but we've been trying to awake from the epic into the ordinary from the gloriously simple into the fluidly complex from the once and for all moment of national destiny into the openness and contingency of actual experience with all its uncertainties and contradictions in the England's of brexit on the other hand the process is working in Reverse the imagined movements has been from the ordinary into the epic from the complex to the gloriously simple from the openness and contingency of real life into the once and for all moments of national destiny the 23rd of June 19 2016 as Independence Day in Nigel ferocious terms a day from which a new history begins a day you could never turn back from now this is a thing that emerging nationalisms do for we we know all about us of course ourselves since recent history is always full of compromises complexities and contradictions emerging nationalisms seek out the past a past order that is not history but in fact myth Irish nationalism did this for well over a century for English nationalism June 2016 we can read Irish nationalisms Easter 1916 but the point is that Irish nationalism was eventually forced by suffering to return from the land of myth to compromises complexities and contradictions the question for England now and it's the question at the heart of the brakes of crisis is how much suffering do you want to endure before you make the same journey that we've made in Ireland from pursuing epic dreams to making peace with complex realities so the problem of brexit is to borrow from TS Eliot that history is now and England but this promise turns out to be false the moment of the referendum in 2016 does not in fact have a clear meaning it is lost in contention and confusion neither does England that idea of England's have any kind of real clarity either it emerges as we've seen so spectacularly last night as a divided thing bitterly split not just between levers of remainders but between the England of the big multicultural cities on the one side and the England of the villages and towns and the other perhaps this is always so with national revolutions they are promised on a sacred unity of the people but have a habit as in Ireland of course of morphing into civil wars brexit must does find a way to exit its own messy historical condition into mythological time this escape from history can be achieved by three particular mental manoeuvres those three particular ways in which they've tried to deny the reality that actually England is a very complex place and that it's it's relationships with the rest of the islands with the with the European Union with so history is full of ambiguity the simplicity that's required for brexit as a national revolution has to be as we're enforced through three different maneuvers that they try so the first of these maneuvers is one that revolutions often use which is Year Zero you know we're starting afresh right now this is this is the beginning bread's us with the horrific exception of the murder of the Labour Member of Parliament Joe Cox is a bloodless revolution and in this it could claim to be characteristic in some ways of English and British history it lets any recent history it could in principle be imagined as the fourth in a series of bloodless revolutions the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the replacement of the Stuart's by William of Orange in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 catastrophic leave islets in Ireland of course but largely peaceful in England itself and the creation of the welfare state after 1945 which in many ways achieves a kind of redistribution of power of privilege that we tend only to see with violent revolutions of course there was violence in its background which is the violence of the Second World War of Jamaica fed into it but in itself it is a bloodless revolution now these first three bloodless revolutions each had a different distinctive character their respect respectively a restoration of a previous regime which was the restoration of monarchy in 1660 the replacement of a governing elite in 1688 and the redistribution from the elites to the masses in 1945 so which of these does brexit most resembled all of them and one of them and this is maybe why it's so incoherent it wants to be a restoration so part of its claim is you know take back control we're going back we are restoring something which has been lost [Music] there's the idea of restoring Britain as a great power and of an England as it used to be implied of course overwhelmingly white with fewer foreigners but of course neither of those things is really possible Britain is not going to be restored as a great world power and England is never going to become the white country that it used to be it is a kind of elite transfer of power if we if we think about the Glorious Revolution of 1688 but what a negligible one you know replacing a Catholic monarchy with a Protestant monarchy in the seventh century was a very big deal it was a really kind of fundamental shift in the nature of the elite replacing David Cameron with his own Home Secretary who liked him after all have voted remain doesn't have those epic reverberations to put it very mildly Briggs's has rhetorically hinted at being a recommitment to the welfare state so the third of the bloodless revolutions the welfare state one it seems to sort of want in some way to connect itself to that the famous claim of the 350 million a week for the NHS mendacious as it was was very effective because it spoke to something and of course if you remember it's hard to remember now but Theresa May you know her first speech on on taking power you know standing outside Downing streets you know she talked about burning and justices not burning and justices of the European Union but burning and justices internally within within Britain which it was her mission to try to resolve but the 350 million was a lie of course and there was no chance that May was going to be the new Clement Attlee so the historical models of peaceful transformation that the British are working off just don't actually function the only recourse then was to a great as if to behave and this is real irony to behave as if the bloodless revolution of brags that have actually been bloody this meant in delicious irony imagining the English revolution as if it were the French Revolution so a month before the referendum Nigel's Faraj told the BBC that it's legitimate to say that if people feel that they have lost control completely and we have lost control then violence is the next step and of course this remains that's threats that's kind of bubbling up again you know if we don't get our breakfast just just you watch but the problem is that the European Union whatever you think it's false might be it's not the ancien régime and the fundamental problem of brexit is that it it it is a response to imaginary oppression so in order to create the energy for Briggs's you have to imagine yourself as being in tolerably oppressed you have to imagine that the European Union is you know the French aristocrats and that the English people are the sort of among suffering passes or you have to imagine like I deal with this in the book where I won't really go into too much now but you have to imagine somehow that Britain lost the Second World War and that the Germans really wanted but they tricked us into something this is you know there's lots of writing lots of movies lots of thriller is about reimagining this the Second World War as we lost we surrendered and the Germans really took over so that's kind of one part of this self-pity but in this in this idea you have a big problem right so that the next step in the overthrow of imaginary oppression has to be imaginary violence it's a kind of costume drama in which Teresa Mays government pretended to be the Committee of Public Safety guardians of the people's will against traitors and colonists normally what happens in revolution is the person that leads the revolution takes power because of the sorts of camp performative game playing nature of Gregson it's much more like the sort of medieval carnival where people sweep up the village idiot and make him king for a day or a week maybe and the King for I didn't even manage a week was Boris Johnson you know but but Johnson was so incompetent even though he just won the largest Democratic vote in the history of Britain he couldn't take power and so this little F it's this enormous problem in in revolutionary terms you have a difficulty to take power in the place of the actual leader of the revolution Johnson may have to embrace a literal but entirely phony populism in which the marrow and ambiguous majority who voted for brexit must be reimagined as the people this is not English conservatism it is pure jean-jacques rousseau the people expressed the general will freely in a majority vote and after that dissent is treason within a few months of the vote on a radio phone in Faraj was cheerfully trashing the only real principle of the british constitution arguing sovereignty does not lie with Parliament's sovereignty lies with the people so you get sort of brexit posing as a restoration of power to Parliament but then because of this sort of phony French revolutionary stick it has to imagine the people in this sort of French revolutionary way and therefore has to imagine everybody who doesn't like it as as as traitorous the general will have been established on that sacred referendum day and it must not be defied or questioned so hence Mays allies in the popular press prickly the express of the mail at least pick the mail under Paul taker who subsequent step down use the language of the French revolutionary terror recalcitrant parliamentarians were heretics judges who ruled on the procedure by which brexit could be affected we're enemies of the people and sure you remember those headlines the accompanying article to that infamous headline quoted Faraj as dark warning that I now fear that every attempt will be made to block or delay the triggering of article 50 if this is so they have no idea of the public anger they will provoke given his earlier warning of violence the meaning was clear as Faraj boasted to a cheering audience at South Hamptons Concord Club he would personally and I called Don tacky pick up a rifle and head for the front lines when wonders which hands he might have carried the rifle and given buddy we've had a pint of beer and what happened so it's Azam to try an with a pint of IPA and what happened a normal item dealer perhaps but the next logical step then and this was voiced by Frederic for sighs the very successful thriller writer was also a kind of influential far-right columnist was to call for loyalty tests for public servants those pro-eu fanatics now seeking to frustrate the clear public will are almost entirely on the public payroll they should be subject to a huge clear-out to know that every penny entering your bank account comes from the brags a taxpayer is a privilege it is to be repaid with loyalty foresight later went the whole hog and another column and labeled any public servant with any skepticism about practices as a traitorous fifth column when Thomas Maher the far-right fanatic who murdered Joe Cox during the referendum campaign told his trial that his name was death to traitors to britain he was at the extreme end of a spectrum that stretched into the respectable mainstream opinion much of the rhetoric of Briggs's springs from a long reactionary history of imagining and invaded Britain which you know in the book but you know it's like we're under wartime conditions and anybody who is not with us is a traitor and and a fifth columnist and an enemy of the people now this is really important to understand May's fatal decision to call an election in 2017 it's up to say well why the hell did she call elections when he said changed she had a very good working majority and there was a lot of Britain's plates you know she had started the brexit processing but it's it was often that written off of time as pure vanity that she wanted her own majority but actually there's a deeper logic to it it's the inevitable result of the rhetoric that she had adopted when in her first flushes leader she told her party conference that if you believe you are citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere evoking the far-right trope of rootless Cosmopolitan's who did not deserve citizenship a working majority is just not enough when such ideas are in the air in a revolutionary war a united people must have a unified parliament and a single uncontested leader one people one parliament one ring to rule them all so the election of 2017 was to ensure that the opposition would be reduced to a token smattering of old socialist cranks and self-evidently traitorous Scots crushed the saboteurs screamed the Daily Mail's from page when the surprise poll was announced Britain would become in effect of one-party state an overall Europe would bow before this display of British staunch honest and concede a breakfast in which of course cake supplies would be infinitely renewed now may was actually rather woefully miscast as the Madame Defarge of the Briggs of revolution the embodiment of the popular will sending saboteurs to the guillotine but her wavering embodied deeper contradictions the idea of a single British people united by the Briggs's vote was self-evidently ludicrous not only to Scotland Northern Ireland and London have large ante brexit majorities but many of those who did vote for brexit were deeply unhappy with the social effects of the conservative austerity policies so this year's zero French revolutionary way of trying to escape history just didn't work the Committee of Public Safety phase of the brexit revolution finished less than a year after the referendum ending when the Tories squandered that majority in June 2017 the attempt to evoke the people as a single entity and to mobilize it against traitors had simply failed so then we had to move on to the second strategy once the French revolutionary fantasies were done with the next escape hatch from history was heroic failure the grand cock-up is not new and in English historical memory it's not shameful it's striking if you ever go up the mall you know that great processional way up to Buckingham Palace and just on the right hand side there's a kind of large area offered for statues and memorials and Stephanie Bartowski the this already pointed out that every single one of the memorials is is from a disaster it's coughed up the Antarctic it's the charge of the Light Brigade it's there is Florence Nightingale but who was associated the Crimean War which was a disaster I think there's Gordon of Khartoum so you have in the English and it is particularly English imagination you could say it was powerful enough to affect us I mean we have our own triumphal failure you know we've done that stuff too but it's particularly powerful I think in in in Britain for very particular reasons so the cult of heroic failure and remember this is not might seem abstract but just go back to the Tory Party conference in the autumn the number of references to John Kirk for example you know again and again and again Winston Churchill of times don't character said you know you don't win wars by retreats you know he was actually quite shocked by the fact that people were kind of embracing it that's a great victory you know but he was perhaps misunder I was gonna say misunderestimated that's george w bush perhaps under estimating the sheer power of the emitter protractor the cult of heroic failure was in many ways the ultimate colonial appropriation britain took to itself not just the resources of its conquered peoples but their suffering and endurance the whole power of heroic failure of people segovia it was it was about the we're celebrating failure but it was about celebrating your own suffering and endurance as a way of saying we're not really imposing ourselves on the rest of the world as ruthless exploiters we are heroically going out to try to bring civilization to the wildernesses and we suffer too we suffer much more than you do you know you think this hurts you it's also much more just look at poor garden of Khartoum just look at poor Scott of the Antarctic you know so it's a kind of self-serving myths of Empire which you can afford when you are running 25 percent of the world so only by virtue of actually being in charge can you celebrate the failure so the road failure becomes a kind of displaced mythology the point of the myth of a royal failure is that it's supposed to be a myth the problem is that it become increasingly a reality with braixen so in reality Britain went from being an imperial power to being a reasonably ordinary but still privileged Western European country but in the apparition that's conjured by brags 'as England in particular dreams itself into the colony status it was so triumphantly imposed on others so in order to start thinking of yourself as needing to deliberate says you have to first think of yourself as a conquered people as having been colonized and of course this comes from in a way something really quite simple in the Imperial mentality there are only two possible states you are either the top dog or you're being kicked in the head you're you're either to use that great work of literature which I draw on a lot of the book fifty Shades of Grey you're you're either the dominant are you're the submissive you know and this is really at the heart of a lot of the problem which is that Britain cannot think of itself as normal can't think of itself is just being an equal partner in a multilateral set of institutions where you have the same power as everybody else the same respect the same dignity as everybody else the same mutuality going on mentally you're always looking out for if we're not dominating them then they must be dominating us if we're not in charged and they secretly must be in charge it's kind of paranoid subtly sets in so in the apparition conjured by Braga's the history of the last 45 now 46 years of EU membership is not so much to be awoken from as to be transformed into a masochistic fantasy of an oppression that must be thrown off the moment of greatest triumph the defeat of the Nazis as I said is reimagined as the moment of greatest silly Asian defeat by a resurgent Germany that has achieved its right by stealth rather than by force now if you drill yourself with these dark imaginings and they are quite erotic really you might end up spying salvation in the insights they offer the EU is a front for a German cabal that's the paranoid fantasy and in this second phase of kind of escaping from history this is a good thing this suddenly becomes a good thing why because if the EU as we all really know is really a German front then brags it's going to be very easy because you just have to deal with the Germans Brussels doesn't exist the European Union institutions don't exist the whole sense of this very complex rule-bound organization doesn't exist this will be a deal done between London and Brussels not even Berlin rather David Davis said during the referendum that and I quote the first calling point of the UK's negotiator in the time immediately after Brigade will not be Brussels it will be Berlin to strike the deal absolute access for German cars and industrial goods in exchange for a sensible deal on everything else now this you might say is just an idiot however this guy becomes brexit secretary right this is the guy in charge of the negotiations and a year later after referendum while he is brags of secretary Davis appears on the and Romero program and and America reminds him of this he says you basically argued that the German car industry and German industry generally would put pressure on the German Chancellor who would put pressure on the EU to ensure that we got a good deal is that still your view Oh Davis that's where it will end up yet now as it became playing that it wasn't going to end up there that the European Union actually isn't just the German front and that actually does take seriously the idea of being a rule bound organization which you couldn't just start to do the deal you know quietly over some sausages and beer in Angela Merkel's office I was obviously David Davison Boris Johnson these other people simply walked away from the field huffing at Mays checkered plan that proposed accepting a measure of EU influence as the price of certain trade trading privileges in November of course then came the further outrage of the failure of the EU to accept even that plan wholesale the checkers plan and then there were more resignations but between the two waves of walkouts the bright interior MP Daniel Hannan had written on Twitter no British governments could go further to accommodate the EU if Brussels holds out for more dictating terms as if to a defeated enemy a breakdown is inevitable and I think that phrase is really very telling you know dictating terms as if to a defeated enemy we lost the war and this morning in the European Parliament Nigel Faraj used exactly the same phrase that Brussels has been dictating terms as if to a defeated enemy so this German fantasy again it's it was sort of started off as a fantasy that this is what would save brexit could just do the deal with the Germans and then it'll all be fine and then when it goes sour it's those maths Nazi bastards or dictating terms to us as if we'd lost the war again you know so it hovers between this kind of fantasy of this is the way of escaping the problems of brexit - this is exactly why we're stuck with this they're punishing us for beating them now this idea that that Hannah and air there of a defeated Britain having to rise again in an ash rebirth dovetails with the third and strangest mental maneuver to escape history which is the idea of Britain as Ireland this one is you gotta think about my LSD so Hanan who's a very kind of influential figure you know in all of this he's got one of the people who's gonna driven this for a long time he's a genuine zealot right so so we must give him some credit he's not like Boris Johnson they just you know Jose says whatever is good for Boris Johnson I mean Hammond is a true believer but Hannon when the checkers proposals came out Hannon actually directly compared them to the approach of the pro-treaty side in the early years of Irish independence and I quote when the Irish Free State left the UK in 1921 there were all sorts of conditions about treaty ports and ODEs of supremacy and residual fiscal payments and what very quickly became apparent was not just that those things were unenforceable once the split had been realized it was that everyone in Britain kind of lost interest in enforcing them and that there were some difficulties along the way in the 1920 aldol durs although there were some difficulties along the way in the twenties it turned out to have been better to have grabs what looked like an imperfect independence and then build on us rather than risking the entire process and here's we have to hold on to your brains in this vertiginous analogy interwar Britain you know Britain of the nineteen twenties and thirties is today's EU and Ireland then is Britain now so you know we what what Britain was in the 1920s and 30s - the Free State that's that's the European Union now and Britain has replaced Ireland so it's so the idea of course is that we can do the same thing in Ireland it you can sign up to a treaty you can take out all sorts of obligations then you kind of slip out of people people will forget to be fine but this is very powerful and it may seem mad as it is my heart but it's it's a very powerful idea and it's I mean Michael goal for example is playing a very interesting game in all of this has been hinting at this again recently you know not just sign up to the deal it doesn't matter get get the withdrawal think Donna sure a couple of years time we can just tear it all up kit just look at data Lera you know so but it's isn't it did we ever think we would get to the point where the bridge would be taking Ireland's independence from Britain as the model for the way in which they wish to shape their future and taking aim of devil era really as their as their gold standard political operation so the British are now the people against whom they themselves once Unleashed Oliver Cromwell and the Black and Tans they're the Gallants natives of a conquered territory rising up against their Imperial overlords now for those of us who are Irish it is tempting to take this as a compliment but it has one flaw Britain was not colonized by the European Union by no stretch of the imagination and the elasticity of the brexit imagination is quite astonishing can the relationship between Brussels and London be credibly compared to that between London and Dublin before the Free State let alone that between London and Colonial Delhi or Nairobi 46 years of modern history in which the UK has been deeply unprofitably intertwined with the EU are here being evaded but so too at the same time is the actual living history of that part of the United Kingdom known as Northern Ireland as we know the latest future of England survey reveals that a breathtaking 83 percent of leave voters agree with the proposition that the unravelling of the peace process in Northern Ireland is a price worth paying for a brexit that allows them to take back control this is surely not mere cruelty it's a determination to escape the history of the Irish border as a creation of the British Parliament of the tolerance by that Parliament of structural discrimination against Northern Irish Catholics of the awfulness of the troubles themselves and most strangely of the greatest modern British diplomatic success about fast agreement so forget the endless bickering over the technicalities of the Irish backstop these are the real Breyers on which Briggs's coat is snagged for here we come with Ireland and the backstop to a very different way of escaping the nightmare of history the one has been unfolding in Ireland over the last 25 years history on our island really didn't seem like marriage we weren't dreaming it we seem to be stuck with incompatible notions of national identity and indeed the sour dregs of the Reformation and counter-reformation and yet as we remember in this very city in 2011 for the first time in a century it was possible for the British head of state to visit our Britain's closest neighbor and there were no more than two hundred people out of the streets of Dublin probably last summer streets of core protesting about this it was over the nightmare really did seem to be over Anglo Irish relations we're the best they had ever been which is to say they were utterly normal they had ceased to be epic and had become ordinary we in Ireland by and large have radically revised our nationalism big things changed the power of the Catholic Church tainted by the child sex abuse allegations collapsed in the 1990s the Irish economy for good and it became a poster child for globalization and the search for peace in Northern Ireland forced a rethinking of ideas about identity sovereignty and nationality the questions that had tormented Ireland for centuries and fuelled the stubborn troubles had burned in the north since 1968 resolving that seemingly interminable conflict could not be done without being radical things that nation-states do not like ambiguity contingency multiplicity would have to be lived with even embraced Irish people for the most part have come to terms with this necessity the English has the breaks that referendum suggested have nots this is why the Irish border has such profound implications for Briggs's it's a physical token of a mental frontier that provides not just territories but ideas about nationally it is striking of course that it was the Conservative Party even under Margaret Thatcher that that allowed the seeds of the peace process to be sown in the 1990 announcement by Peter Brooke that careful phrase the British government has no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland and this phrase since embedded in international law - Belfast agreement is remarkable sovereign governments do not ordinarily declare themselves neutral on the question of whether a part of their own state should ultimately cease to be so but even more remarkable I think was the parallel shift in the Irish position since Ireland became independent in 1922 Dublin had always looked on Northern Ireland as a part of its national territory unjustly and temporarily amputated by partition now of course the Republic - was drew its territorial claim I often wonder whether the referendum in 1998 was so overwhelmingly passed because we didn't really read what we were voting for just how radical it was just how radical the change in the definition of national aspiration was in the Constitution so we deleted of course all reference to the idea of the reintegration of the national territory and we put in something that talks about people the new articles in our constitution talk about the stated desire in harmony and friendship to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland in all the diversity of their identities and traditions these plurals resonate Irish nationalism rests itself now on notions of shared space and of simple identities within this shared space Irish nationalism and Irish identity are understood in radically new ways the Belfast agreement recognizes of course the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British or both as they may so choose and accepts in other words that national identity and the citizenship that flows too much is a matter of choice even more profoundly it accepts that this choice is not binary those lovely little words or both which I think would be nice to put on our flag in the in the middle and quite bit stand as a rebuke to all absolute and absolutist nationalisms identities in the way we've had to reformulate our sense of identity are fluid contingent and multiple this is how you awake from the nightmare of history into an embrace of the complex and fluid identities that real people have when these ideas were framed and entrenched by the referendums of both sides of the border there was an assumption of course that there would always be a third and shared European identity in the preamble to the Belfast agreement British Irish governments of vote the close cooperation as partners in the European Union that they had shared the two countries joined the Dan EC in 1973 and particularly after the creation of single market in 1993 with the free movements of goods services capital and labour the Irish border as we know became less of an irritant and more something that we kind of noticed by its absence while all this is valid this was being done that nobody was thinking about the emergence of another force English nationalism there were as brand and Belfast agreement just two nationalisms on these islands Irish and British and they have been reconciled in a Korean a civilized way but the UK contained in every sense other national identities Scottish Welsh and English in Scotland especially a sense of difference was evidence in the devolved Parliament and growing demands for independence but few of us foresaw and I very much include myself in this that the decisive nationalist revolution on these islands would not occur on our part of the Irish Sea it would not even occur in Scotland it would be the English nationalist revolution brexit is unmistakably a nationalist revolt albeit one that is contradictory incoherent are not fully articulated it is England's insurrection against the very ideas that animated the Belfast agreement the belief that contemporary nationality must be fluid open and many-layered it is so unsure of itself that it escapes from a nightmare into a strange and woozy dream time so finally to go back to Ulysses mr. DC that boring headmaster insists as all utopians do that all history moves towards one great goal which for him is the manifestation of God as he says in response and I quote Stephen jerked his tongue towards the window saying that is God then we hear the noises gray away what mr. dizzy asked shout in the streets Stephen answered shrugging his shoulders history doesn't move towards a single goal but it's not a shout of the street either it's not a moment of national destiny and that is not sacred expression of the people's will it's an endless search for ways in which people in all the diversity of their traditions can share space perhaps ultimately in that light the Irish border and the problems it has created for breakfast might be thought of not so much as a problem to be overcome for English but as a frontier over which we all might have to pass from a mythological history into an acceptance of the complex here and now that is the only place of moments for which we can move forward perhaps to adapt that great Anglo Irish thinker Johnny Rotten Ireland's might be the place in which there is after all the future in England's dreaming thank you [Applause]

Channel: UCCIreland

Views: 54,575

Keywords: University College Cork, UCC, Ireland, Cork

Id: vdBRm3UGP9w

Length: 54min 11sec (3251 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 18 2019