Sinéad O'Connor

TRIGGER WARNING: I will be discussing the issue of child abuse in this blog.

It's been seven hours and fifteen days since I found that Sinéad O'Connor had been taken away. 

We've lost many talented musicians in recent years, but none have moved me as much as that of this amazing, talented, beautiful Irish artist.

Like most people, I became aware of Sinéad when the single Nothing Compares 2 U was released in 1990. Even as someone who prefers their music to arrive on albums, I could tell this was an amazing recording. The video was both artistic and touching, with Sinead shedding a real, unscripted tear, whilst looking fabulous and like no other artist.

I was saw her play the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury that year. As this was before the days of big screens, and I was a long way back in the crowd, 'saw' is perhaps not the best word. But I did hear her. (A recording of her set can be heard here.) The single was also being played by almost every stall that had a sound system, I remember. It was effectively the theme tune for the festival. People find it hard to believe now, but she really was talked about as being an Irish Madonna.  

Then came the infamous Saturday Night Live performance in 1992. This was the days before the internet, and I didn't even own a TV at the time, so I knew of this only as a news item. We're used to rock 'n' roll people shooting from the hip, but there was nothing impulsive about this act of rebellion. From the Ethiopian flags on the microphone to the Bob Marley song War she sang, everything was thought through. The picture of the Pope itself had belonged to her late mother and she been carrying it round waiting for the moment to destroy it. 

It nuked her career, but then she was never going to be the pop princess the record company wanted. I didn't see it at the time, but her appearance at the Bob Dylan tribute later that year is justifiably famous. When I watch the video now, and see her, so young and fragile, as she is booed by the crowd, it is still gut wrenchingly awful, right up until the moment Kris Kristofferson whispers in her ear "don't let the bastards get you down" and she launches into an acapella version of War. What's less appreciated is how significant the occasion was for Sinéad. Bob Dylan was her hero, whose music comforted and inspired her after she'd been floored by the death of Elvis. This was not a minor gig for Sinéad. 

I respected her for this, but I knew almost nothing about the issues she was trying to raise. I was hardly a fan of the Catholic Church, but the criticisms of the Church at that time were of the Father Ted variety, where priests were idiots, but not monsters. That changed a little over twelve months later when I found myself working for the Simon Community in Cork City. 

There I started to encounter the Ireland that Sinead was trying to tell people about. The other volunteers of the Simon Community either came from abroad, like me, or from the fringes of Irish society. The later were often themselves survivors, or at least witnesses, to abuse in Convent Schools or other Church establishments. Child abuse was, literally, never talked about in Ireland in the press, and the very few cases that came to light were usually referred to as 'incest', not abuse. From the Social Workers I encountered I also learnt how some abusers they had identified were effectively untouchable due to patronage from the Church. These people weren't priests, but just influential members of the congregation. What we didn't ask was why the Church didn't want any investigations. Nobody else asked either and Sinéad remained a loan, marginalised voice. But during the two years I lived in Ireland this all changed. 

First came the case of Brendan Smyth, a priest from Northern Ireland who'd been arrested for child abuse in Belfast, but who had then fled to the Republic, where the Catholic Church and the government protected him for three years. This was was not a minor scandal - it brought down the government - but at the time the issue was mainly one of cross-border extradition, always a difficult issue during the Troubles, rather than the abuse itself. 

Then in 1995 the bubble burst. There was a new case in the papers every month, it seemed, and this time they weren't being brushed under the carpet. Some people still refused to accept the truth. I remember one woman ringing in to a radio show to say that we should forgive priests as they were being deliberately tempted by Satan, and others simply chose to ignore the facts, but for most ordinary Irish it was now obvious that Sinéad had been right. 

How closely she was personally linked to abuse we would only later learn. She was named Sinéad after the mother of the doctor who delivered her. He was Eamon de Valera Junior, the son of a former Irish President. In a strange piece of synchronicity, it would later emerge that de Valera Junior had been involved in the covert kidnapping of children from the Magdalene Asylums to be adopted by childless couples. The Asylums, where single mothers, sometimes rape victims, were incarcerated for life were yet another Irish scandal.  Sinéad herself went to a reform school next to one Magdalene Asylum, and as a punishment she had to spend a night with the elderly ladies who's spent maybe sixty years in these prisons. This incredibly sad, and frightening experience was turned by Sinéad into one of her earliest songs, Take My Hand. 

But Sinéad didn't just witness abuse, she experienced it at home, from her mother, whilst that picture of Pope John Paul II looked on. This didn't just change her life, it changed her and she was eventually diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Thanks to my work experience in Ireland I have gone on to become a qualified Social Worker. I have done child protection work, but I have also worked with abuse survivors and have been privileged to have them tell me their stories, sometimes before they told anyone else. 

This takes courage, and Sinéad was over the course of her life to show great bravery in describing herown abuse. Unfortunately, there is rarely a happily ever after in these stories. She had to live with the scars of her early life. Her mental health problems, her family and relationship issues, even her changes of faith, are totally familiar to those of us who work with survivors. You can help people like Sinéad, but you can never take away the damage that has been done. I'd have loved there to be a fairy tale ending to her story, but there never was going to be one.

Just before I left Ireland I had the opportunity to appear as an extra in the film Michael Collins, a dramatic, and realistic, depiction of how Ireland became free, and stars Liam Neeson as the title character, and the late Alan Rickman as Eamon de Valera. Sinéad sang on three songs on the soundtrack, and her collaboration with The Chieftains on the project would also give us a version of The Foggy Dew, which is one of my favourite tracks by her. 

The final song of the film is She Moved Through The Fair. Mystical and haunting, there is no other Irish trad. song like it and nobody, not even Van Morrison, has ever sung it better than Sinéad. She would recorder an even better version a couple of years later, which I've always loved, although now it is almost too poignant to listen to. 

I'll admit I've shed a tear for the death of Sinéad; for the death of a remarkable talent, a fearless activist and a beautiful but damaged soul. But I also mourn for the many other lives lost or diminished by abuse in families and institutions, both in Ireland and elsewhere. May we all, just like Sinéad did, work to ensure there are fewer victims in future.  

 

My Guide to the Top Five Irish Rebellion Sites

Michael Collins (1996) Can you see me?

Easter 1916 marks one hundred years since the uprising in Ireland that led, via a very torturous route, to the creation of an independent Irish state. It also marked the start of the disintegration of the British Empire. Nationalism and modern weapons would make the great European empires untenable, although it would be a while before most people realised this.

My own connection to these events is to have been an uncredited (and unpaid) extra in Neil Jordan's 1996 film Michael Collins. Twenty years ago I stood with four thousand other people to cheer Liam Neeson as Michael Collins, the late Alan Rickman as Eamon De Valera and Julia Roberts as Kitty Kiernan as they arrived at a replica of Dublin Castle and gave a victory speech in front of the ruins of a fake GPO. It was almost like being there.

Michael Collins is a film that managed to annoy just about everyone, crediting British forces with atrocities they didn't commit and omitting ones they really did, whilst sanitising the very messy business of the Civil War that followed semi-independence. Still, if it had been a Mel Gibson movie it would have been a lot worse. 

During my time living in the Emerald Isle I also got to march behind The Plough and the Stars, which was the flag that James Connolly's Citizen's Militia flew over the GPO in 1916, and which the Irish TUC brings out every year for its May Day march. I also lived in the former house of Joe Murphy, the Republican Mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike, which must look good on my police file.

I also got a chance to visit some of the other places around and about associated with the bloody struggle for Irish freedom.

Here are my top five.

1. The General Post Office, O'Connell Street, Dublin

It all started at Easter 1916. Or was that when it all ended?

W.B. Yeats wrote that "a terrible beauty is born", but a few years earlier though he'd written "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone. It's with O'Leary in the grave". Yeats jumped the gun by three years, but in essence he was right. The last stand at the GPO, in it's magnificent futility, represented the old tradition of previous failed uprisings. It was the moonlight charge of half-pike's that was a traditional subject of republican myth and song recreated with modern weaponry.

The real Michael Collins was there. But as he was led away into captivity he was not thinking about romantic poetry but of the futility of defending a vulnerable fixed position. On the prison ship that took him away he was already making plans for a very different kind of war next time.

There was fighting elsewhere in the city in 1916 including trench warfare in St Stephens Green, a spot well worth a vist, where the park warden still fed the ducks during lulls in the fighting.

The GPO building has been rebuilt and is still a post office. The only hint of its role in the fighting
one hundred years ago is the magnificent statue of the dying mythological hero Cuchulainn in the window, a wonderful symbol of courage and sacrifice.

O'Connell Street itself has changed in the last century. In 1916 it would have been dominated by a pillar with a statue of Nelson on top, the twin of the one in Trafalgar Square. That was removed in 1966, as IRA's contribution to the fiftieth anniversary celebrations, with a rather nifty bit of dynamiting that left the rest of the street untouched. Just to prove who the real professionals were in this regard, when the Irish Army came to blow up the remaining stump they took out every window on the street in the process.

The pillar was replaced first with a piece of modern art known to the Irish as "the floozy in the jacuzzi" and then by the Spire of Dublin, which was considered to be rather more in line with the new look of the street.

2. Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin

The battle at the GPO ended with the Republican prisoners being led from the building through jeering crowds. That was not the start of the uprising, but what happened next was. They were taken across the city to Kilmainham Gaol, and for fifteen of them it would be a one way trip.

The gaol was closed in the 1920s and is now a museum. It doesn't appear in many tourist guides to Dublin, but it's worth a visit. As well as being able to see where the Easter rebels were imprisoned, and where those fifteen were shot. You can also see the Asgard, the yacht that Eskine Childers used to bring the guns over for the uprising. Childers had made himself a British hero by writing a story about a different boat, the Dulcibella, which his square jawed hero uses to thwart a German invasion in his 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands. Eleven years later it was from Germany that the Asgard brought the weapons.

Another former British hero who died in 1916, and who is often forgotten, is Roger Casement. He was hung for treason at the Pentonville Prison, three months after the executions in Dublin, for his part in trying to secure more German rifles. Casement had been instrumental in exposing the abuses in the Belgian Congo, and was the inspiration for the hero of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Roxton in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

Another gaol associated with the War of Independence is Cork. Here Countess Markievicz, the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons, and others were interred. However the museum there focuses on the less famous inmates who passed through. It is worth seeing if only to remind us that for ever person locked up for being Irish and a rebel, a hundred were imprisoned for being Irish and poor.

3. Kilmichael Ambush site, County Cork

The events of 1916 were the spark that lit the fires of which broke out in rebellion in 1919. The war started with attacks on isolated Royal Irish Constabulary barracks. Once these had been abandoned the authorities were blind as to what was happening in most of the country.

The film has Michael Collins leading these attacks. In reality he certainly helped organise them, but volunteers in County Tipperary carried out the first attack on their own initiative. Soon though roving guerrilla bands controlled most of the Irish countryside.

The most effective leader of these units was Tom Barry from County Kerry. An unlikely rebel, he was the son of an RIC constable, and Easter 1916 saw him fighting the Turks with the British Army in Iraq. When he did eventually join the IRA he ended up in command of the West Cork Brigade, and on 28 November 1920 they fought one of the most significant, and controversial, battles of the war.

The British authorities had tried to regain control of the countryside using units of Auxiliaries made up of veterans of the Great War. These 'Black and Tans' ended up being responsible for most of the war crimes committed by British troops.

Barry decided to do something about this. His unit of 36 men ambushed a Black and Tan patrol of 18 soldiers near their base in Macroom. The IRA lost three dead, whilst all but one of the Auxiliaries died, several after trying to surrender, or pretending to surrender, with others allegedly being dispatched after being wounded. Whatever the exact circumstances, most Irish thought they deserved what they got. The loss of a decent sized force of veteran soldiers was deeply shocking to the authorities and Cork and the surrounding areas were placed under martial law, and a fair part of the City burnt in retaliation.

The Irish being the Irish there is a song about the battle. A (very) slightly fictionalised version also appears in Ken Loach's film The Wind That Shakes The Barley. There is a memorial by the side of the road at the scene of the ambush, whilst Cork Museum has a detailed map and plan of the battle, as well as some memorabilia. 

The spot itself is pleasant enough, but more the sort of place you pass through after fishing in Macroom, or on the way to Gougane Barra. West Cork though is wonderful, and as well as the Irish it is now home to a population of formerly English Travellers, who relocated to Ireland after their own ambush at the Battle of the Beanfield.

4. Michael Collin's Cork, County Cork

Meanwhile in Dublin, and other cities, a different kind of war was being fought, one were the victims were usually killed in their beds. As director of Intelligence for the IRA, Collins was responsible for the creation of a special execution squad that killed British spies and informers, shooting no less than twenty MI5 officers in one night exactly a week before the Kilmichael Ambush.

Despite Neil Jordan's film, Michael Collins' legacy in Ireland is still mixed. On the one hand is the revolutionary urban guerrilla leader who won the War of Independence, and on the other he's the man who signed the Treaty and settled for a divided Free State, rather than a whole independent one. He's the founder of the unarmed police force that replaced the hated Royal Irish Constabulary, but a person who, unlike the heroes of 1916, killed his enemies in their beds rather than in pitched battle.

Michael Collins armoured car, Curragh

The controversy stems from one simple fact, unlike almost every other Irish revolutionary, he was successful.

A Michael Collins tour of Ireland would start in Dublin. It would include the Stag's Head pub in Dublin where he used to drink, which was round the corner from his intelligence office at no. 3 Crow Street. It would take in the Imperial Hotel in Cork where he spent his last night, but it would end at the obscure village of  Béal na Bláth in his native County Cork.

Here he died after a confused ambush by anti-Treaty forces. His convoy included an armoured car, but its machine gun had jammed. Collins was the only fatality in the battle. The film plays fast and lose with the facts of this, but you can't get over the poignancy of the version of She Moved Through The Fair by Sinead O'Connor and The Chieftains that Jordan commissioned for the movie.

Béal na Bláth is not the sort of place that usually gets mentioned in tourist guides. There is a small monument there to the Big Fella, but little else.

In his home town of Clonakilty though there is now the Michael Collins Centre, where you can learn some more about his life.There is also more about Collins in the barracks that bears his name in the City of Cork, whilst the armoured car that failed to save him is at the main Irish Army Museum at Curragh.

Collins himself lies in the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, where there is a visitors centre and memorial to other Republicans. The cemetery is also home to another legacy of Ireland's past, one that isn't remembered as well as Easter 1916, but which has also had its own film made about it. This is the site of the mass grave of the 'fallen women' of the Magdalene laundries.

5. The Falls and Shankill Roads, Belfast

So when did Ireland's struggle for independence finally end? That is a difficult question.

One answer is 1921, when the British Empire threw in the towel and the Free State was formed. Another answer is 1923 when the Free Staters won the civil war, or 1932 when the bulk of the anti-Treaty people gave up the gun and adopted democratic politics.

Another answer is that it never did.

Twenty years ago a walk down the two main streets of West Belfast would have endorsed that view. Soldiers in armoured Land Rovers, helicopters, fortified pubs, paramilitary murals and the occasional gun or bomb attack, or bus being petrol bombed, were the sights in offer to the rare tourist. It was like walking round a slow motion civil war.

You can still experience some of that side of Belfast, especially if you can find a black taxi driver

Women for Peace, Belfast 1976 victorpatterson.photoshelter.com

prepared to give you an unofficial tour. Brits are certainly tolerated, unless (like me) they ask to view the Official IRA graveyard. However for the most part that Ireland has gone thanks to events of another Easter weekend, but this one only eighteen years ago.

The Good Friday Agreement is a good place to end the chain of events that started at Easter 1916. Tony Blair, David Trimble and Gerry Adams certainly deserve the praise they received for the agreement, but this was a peace created from the bottom as much as one imposed from the top. Countless community groups and peace campaigners of both communities had worked for twenty years to end the fighting. 

Unlike the rebels of Easter 1916, the heroes of the War of Independence and the fighters of The Troubles, these people have no memorials to their name, no museums about them and are not remembered in film or song or mural. But that Ireland today, north and south of the border, is at peace with both itself and it's former imperial master across the Irish Sea is thanks more to them than to the people with guns.

Lets remember that this weekend.

A Very Irish Victory

There is an old saying that if you want to find an Irishman, look for the nearest fight.

A bit unfair really as I remember Ireland as the most peaceful and safe place I've ever lived.

However the Irish do fight. Mostly though they fight abroad.

The Wild Geese were a unit of Irish mercenaries that fought for various European monarchs after the Battle of the Boyne. Rather less romantic were the Blueshirts sent to Spain to fight for Franco and who seem to have spent their time drinking and occasionally shooting their own side.

Rather more Irish though served in the British Army, mainly the Royal Irish Rangers, a unit of which burnt the White House in the War of 1812, and which more recently served in Oman and Bosnia.

Those who choose not to go abroad could join the Irish Army. Not usually considered one of the world's elite units, it can however say that whilst it has only ever fought one war, this was against the IRA and they won a clear victory, something the British Army never achieved.

Funnily enough they don't actually like to boast much about fighting other Irishmen, and instead like to talk about their record of UN Peacekeeping missions. This is a pretty impressive and has included service in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, East Timur, Liberia and Chad.

Most of these have been fairly routine blue hat duty, but things did a bit hairy on occasion in Lebanon and Somalia, and in Liberia the Irish Army Rangers got to do a spot of SAS-style hostage rescue.

However their first major UN mission, to the Congo in 1960, was even more dramatic.

The Irish soldiers found themselves plunged into the middle of the chaos of Congo's independence. Having elected the nice guy Patrice Lumumba to be Prime Minister the country was then ripped apart by civil war. A cabal of Belgian mining companies clubbed together to create the breakaway province of Katanga, which was guarded by Belgian soldiers and white mercenaries. Within seven months of independence Lumumba was dead, having been kidnapped, tortured and killed by Katangan soldiers under Belgian officers.

Military Heritage of Ireland Trust

The United Nations Security Council met amidst a seething anti-colonial feelings and passed Resolution 143, demanding the removal of Belgian troops and authorising a UN force to bring stability to Katanga. Britain, France and Taiwan abstained. The next day 1200 soldiers from 24 countries arrived in the Congo.

Amongst them were the Irish. They were blessed by the Archbishop as they boarded giant US transport planes at Casement Aerodrome. Most had no idea where the Congo was. In all about 700 flew out in the first wave, heading for the tropics wearing woollen tunics. Hastily armed with new rifles, they were off to patrol an area several times the size of Ireland.

The United Nations organisation was totally unsuited to what was to become a small war.

Military Heritage of Ireland Trust

Nine Irish soldiers were killed in a village called Niemba after they were sent out on patrol with inadequate intelligence and no back up. Meanwhile 156 of their colleagues, under the command of Commandant Pat Quinlan from Kerry, found themselves in a place then called Jadotville, now Likasi, where they waited for the chaotic logistics system to bring up supplies and heavy weapons.

However the Katangan puppet state was not going to allow the UN time to sort itself out. They counter attacked with their army of native gendarmes, tribesmen and European mercenaries led by another Irishman, Colonel "Mad Mike" Hoare.

I once tried to read this man's terrible book about his service in the Congo. The only bit of any interest was his evident revulsion when, after advertising for a bunch of butch soldiers to join him in an all-male barracks in the middle of nowhere, he found a large number of those applying were gay.

So anyway Quinlan and his men - whose sexually is not recorded - where out there in the middle of Africa at the end of a long, precarious and somewhat shambolic supply line. Local Belgian settlers - the people the UN were supposed to be there to protect - tipped off Hoare's men that the Irish attended Mass every Sunday morning. The Katangans then planned a surprise attack on the UN soldiers with a force of at least 3000 men.

But it didn't go to plan.

Instead of rounding up the Irish whilst they were tucking into their communion wafers, the attackers ran into Sergeant John Monaghan from Offally with a Vickers machine gun. He'd just finished shaving and was returning to his trench when saw vehicles approaching rapidly. John Gorman from Westmeath, then a seventeen year old private remembers “We were always drilled about not commencing hostilities first. We were there as UN, to keep the peace and to avoid causing conflict. ‘Don’t be the first to fire,’ we were always told." Ignoring the etiquette of peacekeeping, Monahan quickly grabbed the old weapon and opened fire.

His quick thinking probably saved the unit.

Military Heritage of Ireland Trust

Unfortunately for the Irish this was their only heavy weapon. Soon they found themselves under fire from 81mm mortars and 75mm artillery with only 60mm mortars to defend return fire with. They were also deficient in experience. The Irish were mostly young and untested, whilst Hoare's mercenaries were veterans of World War Two and France's colonial wars.

However the Irish were up to the job. Quinlan, a man you didn't argue with, had ordered his men to dig when they arrived in the village, and from their positions they mowed down the attackers whilst their mortar teams amazingly managed to silence the enemy guns.

The battle went on for four days. When the UN asked how they were doing they received the classic reply "We will hold out until our last bullet is spent. Could do with some whiskey".

But Quinlan knew his men were trapped. An attempt to relieve the position by Swedish troops was stopped by the Katanagan air force, which had also destroyed the Irish transport.

The Irish has beaten off every attack. At least 300 Katangans and 30 mercenaries were dead and more Katangans were killed by their white allies when they refused to attack again. But Quinlan knew his men were trapped. Seven had been wounded but none killed, however their luck couldn't last.

Quinlan opted to surrender.

Military Heritage of Ireland Trust

I'm sure nobody reading this has any doubt that he did the right thing. His men had fought bravely but they had no more ammunition, no more food, no more water and no more hope of rescue. They did not deserve to die for nothing.

Quinlan waved the white flag and became one of the very few officers to have gone to war and brought all his men home again.

But that was not how it was seen back in Ireland.

The whole business was regarded as a humiliation and hushed up. Whilst the soldiers who had died in the Niemba ambush were honoured for their (very real) courage annually, the veterans of Jadotville were forgotten.

No medals were awarded and the battle was removed from the official history. Quinlan never served abroad again and the men who served under him soon learnt that if the wanted to get on with their careers it was best to pretend they'd been elsewhere at the time.

Not for the first time, it seems Ireland preferred dead heroes to living ones. No Irish actually died in Jadotville, but a dozen are believed to have committed suicide after returning home to be ignored by their superiors and taunted by their colleagues.

Military Heritage of Ireland Trust

The situation was only changed thanks to the tireless campaigning of veteran John Gorman, but he was the other side of 60 before he managed to get the army to look again at the siege. In the end they concluded Quinlan had done the right thing and in 2006 the battle received the recognition it deserved, but by then though the Kerry man had been in his grave for nine years.

Jadotville was far and away the fiercest and most skilful battle the army of the Irish Republic has ever fought, and it was fought not for the country's own benefit but for an African nation thousands of miles away.

Yet the nation chose to forget it for more than forty years.

Will Greece take the neoliberal medicine?

The long and boring crisis of the Euro continuing, with claims that this weekend it's make or break for the currency. However as we've heard this more than once I guess nobody outside of Greece is holding their breath.

The Euro has always been a bit of a political curiosity here in the UK. The whole European Union project has always been somewhat Janus like, with one head facing towards a brotherhood of nations healing the wounds of two hot wars and one cold one, whilst the other points in the direction of the nefarious neoliberal dream.

As a result the Euro has at various times been loved by liberals who ought to know better whilst being simultaneously hated by the right wing Tories who want to privatise everything in sight.

In the end both sides of the project failed as tensions in Europe are at their highest since 1989, if not 1945, whilst the big corporations are looking decidedly wobbly.

The Euro was supposed to propel the EU into the economic fast lane by setting up a market that would be the Monetarist's dream. Capital would flow effortlessly from country to country and the most unproductive and protective southern European enclave would become models of Teutonic efficiency, surfing towards a prosperous, if unequal, future on a wave of cheap credit.

To sum up what went wrong the easiest thing to say is that almost none of the planned benefits appeared whilst almost all of the feared problems emerged. Greek workers were no more efficient than before but now cost as much as Bavarian ones and the taxis in Florence still cost more than those in Frankfurt.

If it hadn't been for the Credit Crunch it would still have gone tits up, but thanks to the events of the last five years the whole thing is now going to hell in a Ferrari rather than a handcart.

If you want to think about where we are now its easiest to imagine a game of domino toppling in which the dominoes get progressively bigger.

First to fall was the US sub-prime mortgage market, in which crafty bankers sold houses to people who could never afford to pay for them using the age old trick of passing off the debt to someone else and running. Until it nearly crashed the entire banking system it was a wicked wease.

Incidentally US Republican candidate Rick Santorum now believes that the banks were forced to do this by a cabal of socialists, despite the fact that there's no evidence that they needed any incentive other than greed and that the famously non-socialist George W Bush was in the White House. That's just too bizarre to be even scary!

Anyway that crashed the US Housing market, which in turn crashed small banks like Northern Rock, which then crashed bigger banks and investment houses like Lehman Brothers and RBS which in turn crashed the economies of small countries like Iceland and Ireland.

The next dominoes are medium sized countries like Greece and Portugal, but before we come to them it's worth looking at what happened to the last dominoes, Iceland and Ireland.

Both were small countries that had seen their economies, previously grounded on farming and fishing, leap into the stratosphere on the back of huge bank lending and a turbo boosted property bubble.

The Irish have a proud history of being Europe's victims. Usually it's of English thuggery, but this time they mugged themselves. In order to stay in the Euro they turned 70 billion Euros of private debt into public debt, shrank their economy by 20% and gave themselves the toughest budget in the state's existence. But, heh, they're still in the Euro and it still costs a fiver for a pint of Guiness in Dublin.

Iceland by contrast is a nation of settled Vikings, that was still pagan when Edward the Confessor was born, which invented Parliamentary democracy and the soap opera. Not the sort of people to riot in the street, they never-the-less protested in their own way when such austerity was threatened.

What followed was interesting. They told the banks they weren't paying and halved the value of their currency. The economy crashed, saving and jobs were wiped out, but the state was still able to protect the vulnerable and state pensions and other benefits actually went up as a proportion of state spending and relative to average incomes. They don't buy so many foreign cars these days, but Whale Watching is doing really well.

The result of these two policies is interesting. the rather crude economic "Index of Misery", which is just the unemployment rate added to the inflation rate, hit 25 for Iceland, but is now less than 10, whilst for Ireland it started at 6 and has now passed 17.

Early days, but the future looks better for the Vikings.

Which brings us back to Greece. A previously rural economy, famous for fish and olive oil, relatively recently freed from an Imperial neighbour, with a glittering pagan past. A democratic pioneer, but with a Misery Index on the wrong side of 20 and rising.

Which path will she take, Ireland or Iceland?

The EU wants them to take the Irish medicine, and it has very good reason to do so. If Greece leaves the EU its debts will convert to Drachma, which means that even if they were paid back all its creditors would be able to buy would be retsina.

Mostly this would affect the French, and whilst the Little Englanders might initially sneer as those garlic munching Europhiles watch their banks disappearing into la merde, it will be our banks next as they're joined at the hip to those across the channel. First to go would be our own Royal Bank of Scotland, which really is our own as I'm a shareholder now, along with every other tax payer in the country. That's why they gave their boss a massive bonus. It's the same reason bomb disposal teams in Afghanistan get combat pay.

Faced with the prospect of a second Credit Crunch, its no surprise then that we're still applying a Neoliberal remedy to Greece and trying to bail them out.

Perhaps the real question though is, why are the Greeks still taking the medicine?

Don't Mention The War

According to Lisa Simpson all wars are wrong apart from the American War of Independence and the Second World War. As they didn't officially participate in either that causes a few problems when it comes to war memorials in Ireland.

The Queen today laid a wreath at Dublin's Garden of Remembrance, a memorial to "all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish Freedom". It was a tricky thing for a British Head of State to do, honouring those who fought against us, but as a significant proportion of the world has fought wars of liberation against us, she's had quite a lot of practise.

Remembering their war dead though is also a sensitive problem for the Irish.

The Garden of Remembrance is a moving place with a wonderful statue of The Children of Lir, dying at the moment of liberation.

The memorial is dedicated to those who died fighting the British occupation from 1798 to 1921. The second date shows the problem. 1921 was the date of the formation of the Irish Free State, and also the start of the Irish Civil War. If you were in the old IRA in 1921 and were killed by a Brit soldier you’re in the Garden of Remembrance. If you were killed by an Irish soldier with a British rifle, you're not.

Instead Irish have tended to remember not the end of their final struggle for freedom, but the beginning; the Easter Uprising.

Easter 1916 pushed almost all the right buttons; a glorious, romantic, decisive, failure. It was also a complete cock up, with 90% of the troops not turning up, and the survivors were pelted with rotten fruit afterwards by an ungrateful population. But the subsequent retribution by the authorities stirred up the latent republicanism in the Irish and, as W B Yeats put it, a terrible beauty was born.

The war of urban assassination and rural guerilla warfare then instigated by Michael Collins and Tom Barry was inglorious, unromantic, and indecisive. The most important battle of the war, the ambush at Crossbarry, although a significant victory for the IRA, is still highly contentious and the one fact everyone can agree on is that the last British soldiers killed were shot whilst waving a flag of truce.

Remembering all would therefore be rather tricky, even if it wasn't for the problem of deciding when it actually ended. Was it 1921 when the Treaty was signed? 1923 when the Civil War ended? 1926 when De Valera founded Fianna Foil and opted for the democratic route to a Republic? 1972 when the Official IRA declared a ceasefire in Northern Ireland? 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed? Etc etc. It's not surprising really they opt to remember 1916 instead.

Commemorations began seriously in 1966, with an event which, if you'd made it up, would have got you accused of stereotyping. The Garden of Remembrance was opened, which was great, but the march past by the Irish Army was somewhat spoilt by the empty VIP grandstand - someone had forgotten to sent out the invites.

The IRA also decided to play their part, neatly blowing up the column in the middle of O'Connell street on which a statue of Admiral Nelson stood. The Irish Army then turned up to blow poor Nelson up again so the bits could be carried away by lorry, but being somewhat less proficient with explosives than the RAs ended up taking out every window in the street in the process.

The spot on which old Nelson stood is now the impressively spikey Spire of Dublin, but before that it was occupied by a piece of modern art known locally as the "floozie in the Jacuzzi", and O'Connell street now only has statues of two famous adulterers (Thomas Parnell and O'Connell himself).

However there was another group of veterans who were feeling a bit left out. Irishmen who'd served in the British Army had been meeting on Remembrance Sunday at the Irish National War Memorial Gardens since it opened in 1948. By the 1980s though the place was virtually derelict, and with two groups meeting at different times to remember men who were effectively fighting on opposite sides in the same war the Irish government decided to try to do something promote some sort of national remembrance day.

The result was National Day of Commemoration, held on the nearest Sunday to July 11th. The idea was to remember the dead of the wars of liberation, both World Wars and modern Irish soldiers who've died serving as UN Peacekeepers.

A reasonable compromise, but as some have pointed out the rather woolly wording of what the day actually commemorates does mean that the Blue Shirts who fought for Franco also get remembered. Fair enough I suppose, they were soldiers too, and by all accounts they killed more fascists than republicans.

All told the Queen probably had the easier job, she just dumped the flowers and ran. Ireland meanwhile is getting ready for the centenary of the Easter Uprising in five years time. They hope that by then the chaps at the top of the page will be ancient history, but if not they might just be creating even more problems for themselves.

Parnell: The Empire Strikes Back

Inspired by Geoffrey Wheatcroft's article on Gladstone in The Guardian today, here is a little story of sex and unintentional revenge.

The story begins on the morning of the 28th February 1881 on a hilltop in South Africa. A British Army led by one of the best and brightest of its Generals has been defeated by a bunch of farmers. General Colley and 91 of his men lie dead and 59 bewildered survivors are marched off into captivity. The Boers have only lost one man dead on the field.

Back in the British camp, General Sir Evelyn Wood, an experienced and successful commander in many of the Empire's small wars, is plotting how to extract revenge using the large army that is even now marching to his aid. Wood is a veteran of the Empire's small wars, who had turned the course of the Zulu War with his victory at Khambula. However, before he can put his plan into action, word comes from the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, that he is to seek peace instead.

When Wood met the Boer leaders though, most of the talking was done by one Alfred Aylyard. An Irishman qualified as a solicitor and a surgeon, the talented Mr Aylyard was officially there as a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, but he was really engaging in his primary occupation, that of professional revolutionary, and taking great delight in humiliating the British.

Aylyard wasn't the only Irish Nationalist jubilant at the Boer triumph. The Irish World declared, "Give thanks to God, ye starving Irish...the Boers and Basutos (referring to the recent revolt of Sekukini) of South Africa are fighting the battle of Ireland, although they don't know it."

Wood signed the peace treaty and his mentor, Sir Garnet Wolseley - the very model of a major general - was so incensed it was effectively the end of Wood's career.

As the 1880s wore on it seemed that Ireland would indeed finally get Home Rule. but without any fighting at all. O'Connell having won them the vote, Irish Catholics then used their votes to elect Charles Stuart Parnell to Parliament and to give his Irish Party enough seats to make them kingmakers in Westminister.


Unfortunately for Aylyard, Parnell and the Nationalists, the Wood family were to have their revenge, for the unfortunate General Wood had a sister, Katharine.

Known as Kitty, she had married one of Parnell's supporters, a Major O'Shea and it is as Kitty O'Shea that she enters history.

Like O'Connell before him Parnell fancied a bit on the side, and Kitty was his mistress. The Major was not impressed and when he sued for divorce Parnell was exposed and fell from power.

The Empire had stuck back.