IRISH MY ERSE!

The following appeared in The Irish Democrat December 1986

OF DUKES AND JACOBINS

When the House of Commons first met after the Reform Act of 1832 it drew from the Duke of Wellington the comment that he'd never seen so many bad hats in his life.

The Duke's military career restored Feudalism to Europe after the shake-up it got from the French Revolution. His political career was devoted to stifling in Britain the ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity loosed by the Revolution and to frustrating their realisation in Ireland. Despite such setbacks as the Reform Acts and the admission of Catholics to Parliament many of the Duke's successes have long outlived him. Today streets, town squares, British Army Barracks and Regiments bear his name, and your Bank of England fiver bears his portrait.

I don't think a single street in England is named for her greatest democrat, Tom Paine. In the 1960s (on the initiative, paradoxically of American servicemen stationed there) a statue of Paine was unveiled  in his native town* in Norfolk. Tory Councillors and the Tory MP boycotted the ceremony, thus showing an understanding of their tradition and an honesty rare in their ranks, for Tom Paine remains, in their philosophy,  "a bad hat."

To all "Right-thinking people" the IRA and Sinn Fein are "bad hats" and  The Broad Black Brimmer has no place in their wardrobes. (What they have in their cupboards is another matter!) One such Right-thinking person is Ireland's Justice Minister, Alan Dukes. So too is the anonymous author of the profile of Gerry Adams which appeared on November 1st in the new London paper "The Independent." It's apparently policy for all news items and features other than Editorials in the paper to go out under the authors' names, but you may recall the observation of the Reverend Sidney Smith of the tendency for common decency, common humanity and common ssense to desert the Englishman on the mere mention of Ireland. He might have added moral courage.

The profile takes its headline from the remark of Alan Dukes that "no feudal lord ever said 'He shall live, and he shall die' more arrogantly than the present lords of the IRA." The profile's headline was "Feudal Lord of Gun and Ballot Box."

The trouble with even the most superior hat is that it can't guarantee that its wearer won't talk through it. It's baloney to label the IRA, Sinn Fein or Gerry Adams with feudal tags. For good or ill they're all Jacobins, imbued with the ideas loosed in Paris in 1789 with the fall of the Bastille; the ideas, incidentally, defended by Tom Paine in his pamphlet "The Rights of Man."

Visiting Belfast in 1791 Theobald Wolfe Tone described Paine's pamphlet as "the Koran" of that city. It's of course the city where Gerry Adams is at home.

*THETFORD

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