Why not? A native English-speaker who has been in Washington for a while, but from a country which is in the Eurozone and wasn't in the Iraq War. The two main Irish parties are notoriously difficult to place on any normal ideological spectrum, but "Christian Democrat" is not a bad description of either, and perhaps especially of Fine Gael. Within that, Bruton has a proven record of being able to work with the Left. These would not necessarily be my criteria. But they are the criteria.
People always said that he was dull. Good. Essentially the chairing of a glorified committee, this is not a job for a politician like Bertie Ahern, or Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, or Margaret Thatcher in her pomp, so scornful of her Cabinet. Not a job, in other words, for a politician like Tony Blair, also no friend of Cabinet government. No, this is a job for a politician like John Major or Gordon Brown. Or John Bruton.
He'd do.
A Europhile!
ReplyDeleteHim, you, or me?
ReplyDeleteNot us!
ReplyDeleteHilariously xenophobic that you should regard being an Anglophone as a condition to be President of Europe.
ReplyDeletePresumably David when you go on a stag weekend to Prague or a week to Ibiza, you shout and wave your arms a lot.
I don't. I don't want the post to exist at all. But people will and do. All about relations with the US. And you couldn't do better than an Irishman on that score, I suppose. Why Bruton is in his current job. And why he may very well be given this one.
ReplyDeleteWell of course you could not do better than an Irishman or Irishwoman on the International Stage. Sean MacBride and John Hume and Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams as Nobel Peace Prize Winners. I dont think the undeserving "Lord Trimble" would like that definition.
ReplyDeleteMight add former Uachtarán Mary Robinson as influential and acceptable international.
And of course the thousands of Irish soldiers who have served in United Nations Peace keeping missions such as from Congo to Lebanon to Bosnia to Timor......what made them so acceptable in the de-colonisation process is avowed neutrality and peace loving ethos of the Nation as a whole.
And of course a European nation that has actually BEEN a colony rather than have our national Flag fly on concentration camps, slave ships or execution yards in other continents.
There has been talk of Mary Robinson. But she doesn't seem to want it. Rather a small stage for her now, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteI think you'll find that there were rather a lot of Irishmen under the Union Flag in the circumstances that you describe. They were neither the inmates, nor the slaves, nor those being executed. And it was as much Ireland's flag as anywhere else's at the time. That red saltire was no word of a lie.
The Irishmen you describe were of course in an era when our National Ethos was being denied by the wavers of the Union Flag.
ReplyDeleteOur National Ethos is much different to yours.
I am not quite sure what you mean by the red saltire. Perhaps you mean the house flag of the Fitzgerald Anglo-Irish dynasty.
Always a family that made a notable contribution to Irish affairs. Notably Lord Edward Fitzgeralds role in the 1798 Rebellion.Or owning the ground of Maynooth College which has turned out so many people influential in our nations religious and secular life. Or the family home now being the seat of the Assembly of the Irish nation.
I think I can overlook the Red saltire "contribution".
"The Irishmen you describe were of course in an era when our National Ethos was being denied by the wavers of the Union Flag"
ReplyDeleteThey themselves clearly didn't think so.
No of course they didnt think that.
ReplyDeleteWhich is why Maynooth College, Catholic Emancipation, voting reform, literacy, free education, the rise of the Catholic middle class in Ireland led to the copper fastening of your "ethos"......well no it actually led to the establishment of our own national ethos.
And likewise the rise of the Catholic middle class (my grandfather a mill worker, my father a trade unionist with a trade, myself a career civil servant with an accountancy qualification and my own son a solicitor) will provide te same in 21st century.
"Which is why Maynooth College, Catholic Emancipation, voting reform, literacy, free education, the rise of the Catholic middle class in Ireland led to the copper fastening of your "ethos"......well no it actually led to the establishment of our own national ethos"
ReplyDeleteWell, that's very debateable indeed, of course. Except perhaps in the immediate post-1916 dawn period, diehard Republicans have never got anywhere at the polls in either part of Ireland. FF left SF in ever sense. FG was its main rival. Labour was and is funded by all-islands trade unions headquarterd over here. SF itself has risen to its present prominence precisely by, frankly, selling out. Sometimes, it is the right thing to sell out. That, not any sort of rigorous Nationalism, is the characteristically Irish "ethos".
Ireland was never a colony. Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, and provided a particularly high number of military personnel. Domestic repression in Ireland was domestic repression throughout the United Kingdom at the time. Likewise, poverty. Overseas, of the undoubted offences of British imperialism, Ireland was not a victim, but a perpetrator. If anything, a disproportionate perpetrator, so many were the Irishmen in the British Army and the Royal Navy.
Oh David David....the Anglo Norman colonisation began over 700 years ago and the "United Kingdom" dates (with amendment) from 1800.
ReplyDeleteAnd the Kingship of Ireland only established under Henry VIII based on the absurd Laudabiliiter (charmingly descibed by the late Cardinal O'Fiach as more "bull than papal".
I am surprised you dont even know the date of the formation of the "United Kingdom" you say you love.
I dont think my comments on Maynooth etc are debatable. Historical record shows that in 1800 most catholic opinion was in favour of Union....to bestter protect Catholic interests than the Anglican rule. Most Presbyterian opinion was against Union.
Several books have been written and doctorates awarded and even the odd BA awarded on the basis of study of that period.
Irish Republicanism was actually facilitated by Reform. I should have added that the British Government actually published and provided text books "as Gaelige" and the rising mercantile and "clerk" class provided the impetus and membership of nationalist organisations including the Gaelic league and Gaelic athletic Assn.
And rather like railways in England provided the means by which Football was established and public school university etc brought about Rugby and Cricket........so too in Ireland did University provide Rugby...the army provided Cricket and these all (facilitated by Railways) gave the crucial impetus to the GAA.
And as you will know these organisations provided the cover for both Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army.
If you want to go all the way back to the Normans, then you have to classify England as a victim of colonisation, the same colonisation as Ireland. (There are those who would. Don't go there...)
ReplyDeleteWhy people joined the Army is entirely beside the point, which is that they did join it, with all that that entailed.
Ireland was a full, equal, sometimes more than equal participant in everything, good and bad, that the British Empire ever did. Where applicable, this means that she was not a victim, but a perpetrator.
Not our Nation. Not our ethos. Yours based on pre-Enlightenment Monarchy and a dose of the sectarian Glorious Revolution. Ours based on the Rights of man, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution etc.
ReplyDeleteOurs based on the tree stripes in our Flag of Equality, Fraternity and Liberty.
Oh, you mean a product of the French Revolution against which Irish Catholics joined up in such enormous numbers to fight during the Napoleonic Wars, seeing the fate of the Catholic Church there and being determined to stop any such development in Ireland?
ReplyDeleteA very odd basis indeed for any Irish identity. Undoubtedly one with a following, but one that only works by deracinating almost all the Irish of the period.
Odder again, the necessary identification with the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the Ulster Scots, from among whose crankier members came such contemperaneous Irish support as there was, never seems to occur.
Well actually Napoleon also had an Irish Legion.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course prior to the French Revolution, there were whole Irish Regiments in the Catholic armies of France and Spain.
As you know Jacobite History and the military aspect of it is one of my passions. Inspired I think by an ancestor who managed to get himself hanged for recruiting Irish into the army of France.
I think its a kind of honour to have a family tree with a noose dangling from it. To be honest I have tried hard to avoid emulating him.
Perhaps you meant the Army of the French Republic who landed in Killala in County Mayo in 1978 and marched behind the banners of the Virgin Mary.
Admittedly these French must have thought this was a very odd thing to do......as they had earned their reputation by nailing Catholic babies to church doors in the Vendée.
Like I say.....the enemy of my friend is my enemy. Or whatever.
The de-activated weapon I loaned to a local museum is hanging next to a German Mauser which was actually landed at Howth prior to WW1. Like I say a nation that has done me no ill.
"Well actually Napoleon also had an Irish Legion"
ReplyDeleteHitler had a British one. Not much known. But true.
"And of course prior to the French Revolution, there were whole Irish Regiments in the Catholic armies of France and Spain"
Before the Revolution, there's the rub.
And the Revolution killed off Jacobitism as a serious force. Not only removed the potential sponsor, but replaced it with something far more repulsive to the potential base in these islands than that with which they were already, however discontentedly, familiar.
Ah I merely wanted to show that opposition to English rule went beyond Republicanism. And Jacobitism was not killed off by the French Revolution.
ReplyDeleteIt was dead long before the Bonnie Prince died and was succeeded by his brother the homosexual Cardinal Henry Stuart.
Killed off with the cowardly failure of the English to rise in 1745. Although bizarrely some of the great recusant buffoons in the Royal Stuart Society refuse to believe it.
Yes and the Germans had Lord Haw Haw, the old Black and Tan informer who got his just desserts.
I suppose that British passport holder Joyce might be described as a pro union Catholic.
Could well have headed an all-Ireland puppet regime, although there is a widespread suspicion that would have gone to a UVF type.
ReplyDeleteRecusants were never as a rule big Jacobites. Sympathisers, mostly. History of political quietism, suspicion of princely absolutism. But the Jacobite coalition was an extraordinary thing, and its implications can still be felt.