IRISH MY ERSE!

The Guardian's Obituary for Harold McCusker MP prompted the following, published in  THE IRISH DEMOCRAT in APRIL 1990

OBITUARY

There's a story of an old curmudgeon, who, when he died, posed his good neighbours a conundrum. It was not right to speak ill of the dead but they couldn't think of anything good to say either. Finally the local barber spoke his epitaph- "He was an easy man to shave."

The Guardian' s correspondent in Ireland, David Hearst, reminds me of that barber. His obituary for the late Unionist MP Harold McCusker eschewed judgement, good or bad, on the man, but in deadpan style described his beliefs nd political actions.

Mr McCusker died tragically of cancer at 50. Before emerging into the political limelight he was a teacher and a personnel manager. His pupils may have warm memories of him, as I have of a teacher who became a Fine Gael Cabinet Minister, and those who worked under his management may remember him as a fair and a good man. But my perception of him, from the media, is of a humourless and confused zealot. If Mr Hearst is to be believed, his confusion, as a phenomenon, was rib-ticklingly funny, but as a basis for political action lethally dangerous.

A few years back a newspaper printed a picture of Mr McCusker, with a drum bigger than himself strapped on, marching down a street. It might be a part of a Two Ronnies sketch, or a walk-on part of a Christmas show with Denis Healey, who knows how to act the fool without persuading the spectators to suspend disbelief. But not Mr McCusker; he was beating the drum as if his very life depended on it. His parliamentary seat probably did, because, before and above being a politician, Mr McCusker considered himself an Orangeman.

McCusker said of the Orange Order: "For two hundred years it has been a unifying force and it is the only ecumenical organisation I am interested in." I hope he never taught History, for during its first forty years the Orange Order excluded all but (Church of Ireland) Anglicans and it still has five years to go to reach its bicentenary.

Curious too is the fact that MrMcCusker considered himself a Socialist, who in a real United Kingdom would have sat on the Labour benches in the Commons.(Incidentally, isn't "The United Kingdom" the real 'failed entity' and 'Northern Ireland'the most obvious sign of its failure?). Mr Hearst, though, like the barber above quoted,is too charitable to note the irony. Let's examine the Socialist tendencies of the Orange Order.

Explaining Orangemen to his fellow Russians, Lenin called them "Black Hundreds" equating them to the bands of Czarist thugs who mounted anti-Jewish pogroms. As against the Bolshevik view, let's examine that of W.D.Allen, who in 1912 was a Unionist MP and follower of Carson, and in 1934 a member of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. In an article in the BUF magazine Allen described Carson as "Leader of the first Fascist Movement in Europe." But Bolshevik and Fascist could both be wrong and it is instructive to look at the record of Orangeism to see if there was anywhre the germ of a socialist, labourite, democratic or liberal approach to politics.

Its origins in the 1790s give little ground for hope. Promoted when Catholic and Protestant tenants were beginning to seek common solutions to agrarian problems and Presbyterians and Dissenters were applauding Paine's "Rights of Man" the Orange Order was in Ireland what the "Church and King" mobs were in England, anti-democratic, manipulated by the aristocracy, and out for Tom Paine's blood.

In the Land League days nearly ninety years later, when the poor peasantry of Mayo refused to reap Captain Boycott's crops, Orangemen flocked in from Ulster to scab,under the protection of regiments of British troops. The refusal of the Catholics of Mayo to cooperate with the English, Protestant, Landlord's agent gave us the verb to "boycott." But the Mayo people were involved in a social, economic, not a sectarian, struggle, and had first used their power of solidarity against an Irish, Catholic landlord, Canon Bourke, a Parish Priest.

When, in the first decade of the 20th Century, during a strike in Belfast, the RIC were prevailed upon to join the strike, the Orange Order furnished the employers with pistoleros to escort scab drivers to the docks, and these armed strike breakers were the nucleus of Carson's London-bankrolled Freikorps, the Ulster Volunteers. All of which make Mr McCusker' s socialistic protestations a mite hardto swallow for Irish Democrat readers, I'll bet, but I wouldn't put my money on Guardian fodder.

I saw Mr McCusker on  TV once, professing to find Gaelic language and games alien. Yet I detect genetic connections to both the Cumann na nGael/Fine Gael movement and to Fianna Fail .McCusker is a fairly common name in the North of Ireland but in other provices it is often Angicised as Cosgrave, as in the Fine Geal dynasty. Given its correct Gaelic spelling it is Mac Oscair, son of  Oscar. Now Oscar was a buddy of Oisin and Fionn MacCumhail, who roamed Ireland sixteen hundred years before the New York-born, Hispanic- named De  Valera set foot in Ireland.Oscar and his buddies were all in Fianna Fail, prototype Fenians!

I can't be alone in thinking that an aboriginal, Gaelic, Fenian Irishman, who finds Gaelic ways alien, and an Orangeman that thinks himself a Socialist, is a suitable case for ridicule and beyond cure? And that an Obituarist who fails to point out the funny side of the matter is being charitable beyond the call of duty?

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