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As Malcolm has previously opined, if it’s got to be a Tory, Matthew Parris is as house-trained and gentlemanly a specimen as can be found.

His column for today’s Times starts with a good’un:

“God,” said an excited Tory after a fellow MP was pulled from the sawdust of Thursday’s Private Member’s Bills tombola clutching a euro-referendum Bill, “must be a eurosceptic.”

No. God must favour the sane for He directed my steps that same night to a book launch at the National Gallery where the totally sane Conservative MP for Hereford, Jesse Norman, was unveiling his new study of Edmund Burke. And as I walked across Trafalgar Square contemplating the great 18th-century liberal conservative philosopher, God reminded me of the last time the Tory Right were deafening us, and I quoted Burke on this page: “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate clink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

What madness has seized my party? Is it only the noisy ones? Have the rest been brainwashed? Or just scared into silence? If so, that silence is flattering the hysterical minority. The silence must be broken. The Tory MPs keeping their heads are more numerous than we may suppose; we need to hear them.

Let’s be honest here, when Parris quoted that from Burke, it was mid-December 2012, and Parris was even more extreme in his denunciation. The header was:

Stamp on the grasshoppers of the Rabid Right

These spittle-flecked, obsessive reactionaries belong in UKIP. Don’t let them shelter under the Conservative fern

Furthermore, in that earlier piece, Parris continued the quotation (which should end above with a wholly-grammatical and super-Goveian semi-colon):

… that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

The original is in the 143rd paragraph of Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution.

The spirit of a gentleman

Malcolm recalls, a bit earlier in that Burkean out-pouring (he checks: it’s the 133rd paragraph), the great man (as are all Trinity men) was pronouncing on the natural relationship of learning to the established social order:

Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

Which, in small part, is simply arguing that learning is its own reward: not a thesis accepted by the utilitarian Gradgrind-Gove types who dominate the curriculum.

Trinity colours

Our undergraduate scarves are still like those once sported by the Lady in his Life and by Malcolm himself: they should be in a closet somewhere. If the moths haven’t reached them.

The colours were dark blue and light blue, which suggests the desired comparison, with a stripe of red. There has always been a radical streak about TCD. Once upon a not-too-distant time (thanks to the provision of the College’s foundress, and the bigotry of John Charles McQuaid) Trinity had a particular spirit of religion. But the spirit of a gentleman was ever on the syllabus (and it wasn’t restricted to Jameson Redbreast).

Every day a new distraction

Today’s was William Bloat.

That has divided those who venture these ways into an immediate switch off (the usual “dwell time” on a blog page is reckoned in micro-seconds) or a more positive, Oh, yes! I know that one!

Well, here’s the best-known rendition (from the Clancy’s reunion concert):

Once the final verse gets into one’s neurones, it’s ever-lurking, ready to pop out:

But the strangest turn of the whole concern
Is only just beginnin’:
He went to Hell, but his wife got well,
And she’s still alive and sinnin’
For the razor blade was British-made
But the rope was Belfast linen!

There is considerable debate about that “British-made”. That’s the version Tommy Makem gave us, and he was the first (as far as Malcolm knows) to marry the verse to The Dawning of the Day. Well, even that’s arguable. There’s a delicious, earlier, Makem concert (also on YouTube) when the blade is “Japanese-made”. That’s worth a visit if only to see Tommy trying to break through the rigidity and hyper-politeness of the RTÉ audience (don’t miss the lady with the hat).

We have, then, another opportunity to deploy the pencilled variae lectiones. But this is folk-music, for heaven’s sake! The whole point is modification, adaptation, re-working, interpretation. It’s what kept Cecil Sharp (and others) in tea and biscuits.

What we may grasp at is that the verse was by Raymond Calvert of East Belfast. And that’s Orange country. It seems the original blade was “German-made”.

Confuse a Mudcat

In any case of doubt or difficulty over folkery matters, a ready resort is the Mudcat Café. Sure enough, there’s a couple of threads on William Bloat. What is evident there is the lack of understanding of what goes on in Ulster (even in Irish) humour. Above all, it is wry. It is self-referential. And it crosses all the divides of religion and culture. The same jokes crop up each side of the Great Divide: all that happens is the protagonist is ‘ours’ and the stooge or ‘antagonist’ is one of them uns.

So, depending on where one is — north or south — the razor-blade may be be Free State-made or English-made. Belfast linen, though, is a matter of pride both ways. It’s the same as the Titanic gybe: it took 10,000 Ulstermen/Belfast men/ Irishmen (that bit depends on locality and allegiance) to build it, but only one Englishman to sink it (that bit is common to all parties).

While we in these parts …

The other — perhaps far greater — song that is set to The Dawning of the Day is Paddy Kavanagh’s love-lorn appeal to Hilda Moriarty:

There’s a useful RTÉ archive on the song, including Benedict Kiely asserting that Kavanagh had the tune in mind, and intended it to be a song rather than just a verse. There also is Hilda Moriarty briefly commenting on the inspiration.

For a couple of years in the early ’60s, undergraduate Malcolm used to stagger home, alone, bereft and unloved,  to his cold-water basement flat in Elgin Road, Ballsbridge, after a night at O’Neill’s in Suffolk Street. If it wasn’t Wellington Road, it would be Raglan Road he passed down. He never met or was inspired by a Hilda.

Dublin is a small place, and Hilda — having discreetly repulsed the inept gropes of Kavanagh — went on to marry Donogh O’Malley, the later Minister of Education. Which, finally, brings us to another personage worthy of respect and admiration.

Gallus gallus domesticus … raptus

That, as Julian and Sandy would insist, is your actual Latin.

It translates to a Trinity News review (from around 1963) of a Cilla Black concert. She was, to the reviewer, like a chicken in mid-rape.

Self-evidently, Dusty Springfield, currently being featured by BBC4, hadn’t come into the comparisons.

Now, let’s be honest (ear-plugs optional) …

Constitutional reform only happens if …

… it suits the interests of those implementing it.

Not just an historical truth, indeed an axiom, but the punch-line of a beta++ effort by Steve Richards for Independent Voices.

Let’s take on face value Richards’ headline:

Why fixed terms parliaments are a nightmare for leaders and a gift for rebel MPs

Our Chief Political Commentator says that Conservative MPs can plot and stir because the next election is still years away

Hold on! Surely that’s what a true Independent would wish? And … err … yes, it somehow reminds Malcolm of …. Ah, yes! —

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion…

If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?

Indeed, the authentic Burkean voice from the College Historical Society of Trinity College, Dublin (founded 21st March 1770), of which — much later, and far less oratorically polished — Malcolm’s alter ego was once a minor officer.

Richards’ Big Thing amounts to this:

The current parliament is already nearing the end of its natural life. Symptoms of mortality take many forms. In terms of policy Cameron has made waves recently with two big announcements. Both apply to the next parliament and not this one. His proposals for a referendum on Europe and high speed rail take effect after the next election. The more immediate agenda in the Commons is of little significance compared with those post-election policies and the near revolutionary measures placed before MPs in the Coalition’s early unprecedented flurry of reforming zeal.

In other words, the health of the body politic depends on a renewal of the parliamentary mandate in the short term, not in May 2015.

Yet, as he makes clear, with little to do, and at a time when MPs should be honing their knives for re-election, it’s all gone deadly, flatly dull. The death of the Bill to change boundaries was the last straw, which is why (even after Clegg slit its throat) the Bill was kept in suspended animation while all kinds of pressures were brought to bear:

• Over the weekend, were the DUP really told they could exempt Northern Ireland, if only …
• Why does James Kirkup (who should know better) and other susceptible post-adolescents keep afloat the notion that the Bill can be revived?

And, for the Satan’s Blood (“800,000 Scoville units”) in your political chilli, muse on what MPs get up to, when otherwise not exerted. Why, they plot, of course! Or, as Richards renders it:

There will be no election in 2014. After the next 12 months there will be another whole year before the election moves fully into view. There is still plenty of time to be disloyal, to speak up for principled conviction, to plot and plan against a leader. This has some danger for Clegg. But Cameron is the main victim as news surfaces of a plot to install a successor … if he loses the election. Such plots happen for many reasons. One is that Conservative MPs have time on their hands, lots of it. They will rally round next year, but not this. The fixed-term has made prime ministerial life less secure rather than more.

Even so, Malcolm has another gripe with Richards’ piece, particularly so in the rest of that final paragraph:

Constitutional reform only happens if it suits the interests of those implementing it. Presumably Cameron thought that in the unusual circumstances of a Coalition a fixed-term would bring stability. But most fixed-terms in other countries last a maximum of four years. Five years is far too long. And of those five this is much the most dangerous for leaders hoping to flourish when the still distant election finally arrives.

As Malcolm recalls, the LibDems, suspicious that Cameron and Osborne would dump them were an electoral opportunity to open, inserted the time element in the coalition agreement. Now, what could possibly have provoked that partisan fear into the pre-nup?

Second, Richards is absolutely correct. Five years was, is and always will be too long. Malcolm’s Pert Young Piece had considerable difficulty in  explicating the five-year term, at the Anzac Cove gathering, 2012, to a band of highly-dubious antipodean democrats. It’s also been commonly accepted, nearer home, ever since the Fixed Term Parliaments Bill was first out there in the wild. Anyway, consider:

• The “ones-we’re-bound to lose” (Macmillan-Home in 1959-64; Wilson-Callaghan in 1974-79, Major in 1992-97; Blair-Brown in 2005-10) went into a fifth year;
• To which might be added the “one we miraculously didn’t lose” (Major, 1992) which also went to the wire.

Versus:

• the ones “we can win” (Thatcher in 1983, 1987; Blair in 2001, 2005) which took advantage of the opportunistic electoral windows.

On that basis alone, the 2010-15 government had given away its main electoral advantage: the chance for any prime minister to exploit a particular moment, one when the economic and electoral cycles could be matched. So, a Malcolmian prediction, when the next parliament assembles, if there’s a majority government, the 2011 Act will be repealed in short order and shall hear no more of fixed -terms.

In short, there’s that gross misunderstanding: in the unusual circumstances of a Coalition a fixed-term would bring stability. Richards, wisely predicates that with the weaselly “presumably”. Consider the normality of UK politics: in the forty years from Wilson to Cameron we will have had just three governments defenestrated — in 1979, 1997 and 2010. The success of Gordon Brown was that the expected Tory take-over didn’t happen (and, in Malcolm’s book, history will be very much kinder to Brown than current poison has it).

Burke, whom we had above, had the Fixed Term Parliaments Act bang to rights, and as far back as 1780:

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. In such a country as this they are of all bad things the worst, worse by far than anywhere else; and they derive a particular malignity even from the wisdom and soundness of the rest of our institutions

Let’s add a word to the wise:

The people can recognise them. And resent them

1% of austerity. 99% of low calculation

The British Sundays know what — pending a major disaster — next week’s stories should be.

It’s all about The Make Labour Look Like the Party for Skiving Fat Slobs bill, as Andrew Rawnsley explains:

This is the legislation that will put a 1% cap on increases in most state benefits over the next three years. Nominally, this is being done in the name of collective national belt-tightening and fairness. The country is brassic. Working people, in both the private and public sectors, will have been very fortunate if their incomes have kept pace with price rises over recent years. Many have seen their living standards badly corroded. It is therefore only just that those drawing benefits should also suffer a period of retrenchment. That was the argument rolled out by Iain Duncan Smith last week as he prepared the pitch for the vote. But there has always been a partisan purpose to this measure, which has never really been disguised since George Osborne announced it in his financial statement last month. The state pension is excluded from the squeeze, even though the elderly have generally done relatively better than any other group over recent years. But, then, there are more pensioners than there are unemployed and pensioners are much more likely to vote.

It is doubtful that legislation was actually necessary. Putting it to a parliamentary vote was a cunning device to create a dividing line – or so the chancellor hoped – that would put the Tories on the side of hard-working “strivers” and force Labour to choose between endorsing a benefits squeeze that many in its ranks would see as a betrayal of its core values or looking like the defenders of idle “scroungers”.

On the other hand, as the Observer‘s front page headline story (by Daniel Boffey) notes:

Half a million soldiers, nurses and teachers will have their income slashed under the coalition’s benefits crackdown, according to a new report. The chancellor’s sub-inflation rise in benefits and tax credits over the next three years will hit a whole range of the country’s most trusted professionals.

Up to 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will lose cash, in some cases many hundreds of pounds, according to the Children’s Society. The revelation appears to contradict the government’s stated intention to target shirkers and scroungers, and will raise the temperature of the Commons debate and vote on the plan on Tuesday.

Which suggests that Cameron and Osborne are betting the farm on casual opinions from focus groups being more viable than righteous anger among millions of ripped-off middle-class voters. Hmmm … could make 2015 tricky.

In the shrubbery, something very nasty stirs …

The Sunday Times [£] goes even further. The editorial shrieks:

2013: THE YEAR WE CRACK THE WELFARE STATE

If that seems grotesquely and Murdochian neoCon, the content equally suggests such a superficial impression is not unfair:

The coalition’s record, as it will new presented tomorrow, is not bad. Financial storm clouds have not gone away and the risk is of a loss of Britain’s triple-A credit rating, but the country has moved away from the fiscal edge. Michael Gove’s school reforms are welcome and have further to run. A different health secretary has taken the heat out of changes to the National Health Service. Crime has fallen by 10% over the past two years despite spending cuts and tension between ministers and police. Yet this is also a government prone to drift and bouts of incompetence, as we saw last year.

Fortunately the Sunday Times, even at the expense of  half-a-dozen tired  clichés and the odd very partial statistic, is ever-present to insert anally a poker alongside any missing backbone. Let’s not pause to think:

• Have Gove’s “reforms” worked? Is education really on the up?
• Is the “heat” out of the NHS?
• Has real crime (and opposed to “reported crime” — reported and recorded, that is, to fewer desk-sergeants and closed police stations) actually declined by such a conveniently measurable amount?

No, let’s be swept along by the Sunday Times editorialist’s flow:

British people are not averse to change and know that the size of the state in general, and the welfare state in particular, has to be reined back. Welfare changes should be simple and fair. When the chancellor decided to take away child benefit from most higher-rate tax-payers, he thought this ticked both boxes. But while HM Revenue & Customs has made the best of a bad job, the change is anything but simple. Some of those who are losing out would also question its fairness.

Of course, had those “losing out” read Saturday’s Times, avoiding any unfairness would have been made pellucid clear (cut your hours, up your pension contributions, do a fiddle with your partner …). Note, too, no blame can — in this definition — fall on the putative 18th baronet Osborne of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon — he of the “omnishambles” budget. He was merely “ticking boxes”. The devil is in the detail, and HMRC’s implementation.

Onward and … err … upward?

The mid-term review will signal the government’s intent of implementing the Dilnot commission’s recommendation of a cap on individual liability for care costs, although Treasury worries about the long-term bill mean the cap is likely to be set at more than double the £35,000 that the commission had recommended. A white paper on pensions will pledge a new single-tier pension but is already setting hares running about big increases in the retirement age in decades to come.

Gosh: isn’t all that positive inducement to vote Tory in 2015? Particularly when the ST‘s front page (and page 2) has it that:

Elderly people will have to pay £75,000 towards their care home bills before the government steps in to provide financial help.

Lest we forget: the essential issue at stake in care of the elderly is that homes have to be sold to pay care bills. £75,000? Just lift it out of the bank? Well, perhaps not:

On average, a Brit has the grand total of just £2,205 sitting in the bank. This is peanuts – it equates to just 1.7 times the average monthly take-home pay…

There are, of course, some people who save lots. They’re called the rich. ING has a model of the distribution of savings across the UK population, and after about the 95th percentile, it starts to really take off. It was ever thus, of course, but I’d bet my cash Isa that just as income inequality has grown markedly in the past decade, so has savings inequality.

When unemployment is so high (although the jobless figures are becoming meaningless these days), when wage growth is zero or falling, when inflation is at 2%-3% (and with VAT rising), then the idea that the ordinary ­person could or will be saving more was ­always a stretch of the imagination.

We can, but naturally, skim lightly over such pinko propaganda (it was Patrick Collinson in the Guardian, and as far back as those cliff-edge days of January 2010).

For the sake of brevity, the ST‘s paragraph on Duncan Smith’s universal credit can be passed: it’s going to be a total cock-up, we all appreciate, but provided we keep the perpetrator’s name in the frame, we also know whom to blame — and it’s not going to be Dave or Ozzie if the ST can help it! And so, to a happy conclusion:

The public mood has shifted on welfare but will still become impatient with a government that displays incompetence, let alone presides over a disaster. It is important to get this right. Indeed, it must be one of the biggest priorities this year.

As opposed to a priority of government being not getting it right? And, of course, we well recognise that, this last Leveson year, the whole Murdoch Empire has been shown to be admirably competent, on the side of the angels, disaster-proof, and “right” — as here, far right. After all, across the water, the WSJ, on Rupert’s order, picked Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate, and then spent the campaign ignoring all the polling evidence. Not to mention Fox News.

Austerity: economy, parsimony, and judgment

Malcolm doubts it one of the best-known or quoted (or, as more often, misquoted) bit of Edmund Burke, though it deserves to be. It’s Burke at his vituperative and vitriolic best.

Malcolm hat-tips Hugh Dalton’s Principles of Public Finance, all the way from 1922. And that, hardly coincidentally, from very early in the text, page 7 of volume 1: — Dalton, like most economists and moralists, like Marx and Joyce in their different spheres, being one of those many authors of whom it is easy to tire, even in the first chapter.

Therefore, a well-composed word to the wise (and a dearth of cliché) from Edmund Burke, Collected Works, volume V, page 229. Burke has it in for his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator. Bedford had criticised the payment of a state pension to Burke — and Burke had no compunction is contrasting his public service to those of the Russell family, who had become great and good by pandering to Henry VIII.

Burke saw an overgrown Duke of Bedford machinating to oppress the industry of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity of the crown.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense and great expense may be an essential part in true economy. Economy is a distributive virtue and consists not in saving but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct may produce this false economy in perfection. The other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment and a firm sagacious mind.

What’s in a name?

… That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet’s soliloquy, (II, ii, 44-45), of course and now so clichéed as to need an occasional reference for respectability.

And then there’s the vexed question of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland. In English, this is “Northern Ireland”  — though the most northernly part of Ireland is Malin Head, which is in Donegal — and so, in the parlance, paradoxically in the “South”. Nor, of course, is a Northern Irishman exclusively an “Ulsterman” — because Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan are in the ancient province of Ulaidh, but are not in Northern Ireland.

My passport’s green

Even among the northern (missing capital deliberately so — see more on this below) Irish there is no agreement on what one is: British? Irish? Northern Irish? Ulster Scots? When Penguin Books included Seamus Heaney with Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon, in the The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, he was the one who famously objected:

Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised
My passport’s green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.

He made up for it, though, at Dublin Castle in May 2011.

The People with No Name

That is the title of a fine book by Patrick Griffin, in Malcolm’s view the best account of the Ulster protestant diaspora who occupied and extended the Western frontier of the American colonies. It is subtitled: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764.

The opening paragraph of that book illustrates the nominal confusions with a variety of names:

BETWEEN 1718 and 1775, more than 100,000 men and women journeyed from the Irish province of Ulster to the American colonies. Their migration represented the single largest movement of any group from the British Isles to British North America during the eighteenth century. In a first wave beginning in 1718 and cresting in 1729, these people outnumbered all others sailing across the Atlantic, with the notable exception of those bound to the New World in slave ships. By sheer force of numbers, this earliest generation of migrants had a profound influence on the great transformations of the age. Even before they left Ulster, they contributed to the triumph of the Protestant cause in Ireland, paving the way for an unprecedented extension of English power into the kingdom. They also figured prominently in the British transatlantic trading system by producing linen, one of the most important commodities exchanged throughout the empire. Sailing when they did, Ulster’s Presbyterian migrants played a formative role in the transition from an English to a British Atlantic. Before their migration, Puritans and adventurers leaving England during the seventeenth century for the North American mainland and the Caribbean dominated the transatlantic world. After men and women from Ulster boarded ships for America, the cultural parameters of the Atlantic broadened, as they and thousands of land-hungry voyagers from the labor-rich peripheries of the British Isles sought their fortunes in a vast, underpopulated New World. In America, Ulster’s men and women again had a hand in a number of defining developments of the period, including the displacement of the continent’s indigenous peoples, the extension of the frontier, the growth of ethnic diversity, and the outbreak of religious revivals. In the abstract, therefore, the group contributed to the forces and processes that dwarfed the individual but yoked together disparate regions into a broad Atlantic system.

The editor of Gaelscéal, Ciarán Dunbar, has picked up Griffin’s essential thesis, inverted it, and now puts up a ruminative thread on Slugger O’Toole:

Whilst working on Gaelscéal on Tuesday last I realized that I did not know the correct Irish term for ‘Northern Irish,’ so I quickly checked focal.ie, the ‘National Terminology Database’ for Irish.

That was a fruitless journey for they had no such term, I requested they provide one.

The term was one I have strangely never needed in Irish and I have never thought about it to date.

On the day, we simply used the English term in single speech marks.

That night I heard two terms used on TG4, ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’, agus ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’, both translating into English as  ‘Northern Irish’ but with a subtle difference in meaning in Irish which the English doesn’t capture.

One implies a mere geographical distinction, the other, perhaps, a clear political distinction.

A meaningless distinction for most but one could argue that constitutional  future of the Northern Ireland state rests on this distinction, whether the Northern Irish are ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’ or ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’ at the end of the day.

Malcolm queries whether English cannot capture precisely the distinction between Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh, and Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha by doing what he did above: capitalising or not the “n” of “northern”.

Proconsul

Beyond that, the thread provided Malcolm with a bit of further diversion, the Latin version of wikipedia. Yes, indeed: there is one — even if somewhat abbreviated for the present. And here is its definitive statement on the topic:

Hibernia Septentrionalis, quondam (H)ultonia (Anglice: Northern Ireland, Hibernice: Tuaisceart Éireann) est provincia in Hibernia et Regno Britanniarum. Caput est Belfastium et dux gubernationis est Petrus Robinson; ille est dux factionis civilis qui appellatur Factio Unionistarum Democratica. Successit Reverendum Ioannem Paisley, qui abdicavit in Iunio 2008. Proconsul est Martinus McGuinness. Ille est membrum factionis civilis Sinn Fein (Latine: Nos Ipsi), olim dux Exercitus Republicani Hibernici.

Apart from stroking Malcolm’s self-esteem (that even after half-a-century, his TCD Latin, ever so rusty, can still cope), there were several amusements in that.

One was Máirtín Mag Aonghusa transmogrified from the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland into the far more concise, even poetic, ‘proconsul’. Which instantly directed Malcolm’s butterfly mind to Kipling:

The overfaithful sword returns the user
His heart’s desire at price of his heart’s blood.
The clamour of the arrogant accuser
Wastes that one hour we needed to make good
This was foretold of old at our outgoing;
This we accepted who have squandered, knowing,
The strength and glory of our reputations
At the day’s need, as it were dross, to guard
The tender and new-dedicate foundations
Against the sea we fear — not man’s award.

The subject there was originally Sir Alfred Milner, who was the British High Commissioner in South Africa during the Boer War. The “Oh, gosh!” thing is, stripping from one context to the other, the elevation of  Máirtín to ‘proconsul’ almost works.

“Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”

Moving swiftly on, there is the conceit of Petrus Robinson, dux Factionis Unionistarum Democraticae (3rd declension, feminine: genitive case!). Thus rendering the DUP into Latin gives us the acronym FUD:

generally a strategic attempt to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information. An individual firm, for example, might use FUD to invite unfavorable opinions and speculation about a competitor’s product; to increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers; or to maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival.

In the case of the DUP, precisely.

Green, Shapps and Redfellows

There is something askew about Grant Shapps, a.k.a. Michael Green. Even the Daily Mail thinks so:

Shapps is now ultra-defensive about the whole business, not excluding the Brazilian he gave his wikipedia entry. According to his version he was ridding the site of false information — his exaggerated exam results (in Woodwork?) and his religious affiliation. What also went is the Southall by-election fracas.

Mark Pack had that one on libdemvoice:

Now here’s an interesting tale. … can anyone provide a decent explanation?

Over on one of the (official) YouTube films from the Liberal Democrats there is this comment from someone:

Okay, realistically we’re not going to win though. Especially since the Tories have just received 5 defecting Councillors from Labour. Don’t quite know how they’ve done it, but the Tories have stolen a march on us this time.

With phrases such as “us” this is clearly written as if from a Liberal Democrat member or supporter.

But according to YouTube the comment was posted by a “GrantShapps” (look just above the comment for the name), which is the name of the Conservative MP for Welwyn Hatfield, Shadow Housing Minister and their Ealing Southall by-election campaign supremo.

A forged name perhaps? Except that click on the name and it takes you through to Grant Shapps’s genuine YouTube profile: http://uk.youtube.com/user/GrantShapps

And yes, I know it is his genuine YouTube account because it is the one linked to from his own website,http://www.shapps.com/

I know that on Blogger you can post a comment and make it look like it really was posted by someone else, but that doesn’t seem possible on YouTube. To post under a particular name, you have to really be logged in with that name and password.

What’s the story here then?

Well, bear in mind that YouTube tells you at the top of the page who you are logged in as, but if you are at the comment box on a video and ready to type in a comment, there’s no reminder next to the box as to who you are logged in as, nor is there a username/password box there.

So it would be possible to make a comment, thinking it was anonymous or that you were logged in as someone else, and overlook that you are really, er…, you. That would be a bit silly wouldn’t it, but how else do you end up with a comment appearing under Grant Shapps’s name?

I’m a generous soul, so I’m willing to listen to an innocent explanation for all this. Can anyone reasonably explain away why Grant Shapps appears to be trying to pass himself off as a Liberal Democrat? (And Grant, if you’re reading this, happy for you to post an explanation in the Comments).

 Malcolm reckons that’s “bang to rights”

So, a parallel story, from nearer home.

It’s Malcolm’s birthday. Except it’s not.

With rare exceptions most readers here and elsewhere get the obvious: “Malcolm Redfellow” is a pen-name. A precious few, by comparing certain accounts and interests, have even bothered, shrewdly to put a real name to this creature. Well done, chaps.

The story so far

When all this blogging lark started, the bod that pulls Malcolm’s strings was still a working teacher, with a very distinctive name. It seemed a good idea to fudge the focus.

Malcolm reached back a long way.

Once upon a time a couple of undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin, invented a series of “masks”. The slimy, upwardly-mobile, flexibly-unideological leftie was “Malcolm Redfellow”, a pale imitation of the great Michael Frayn’s “Christopher Smoothe, the Minister for Chance and Speculation”" and PR-man supreme “Rollo Swavely”.

“Malcolm Redfellow” was about the only one credible enough to pass scrutiny by the sub-editors of a number of periodicals.

Time passed, until it was right for “Redfellow” to be revived. And a hero was re-born.

Except, to get a blogging account, it was necessary to invent enough persona to get by. That required, in one case, a birth-date. So “Malcolm” was gifted with the first day of one Trinity student’s junior freshman existence — 1st October 1961. It’s only some eighteen years short of the string-puller’s real age.

So, to those e-mails which greeted Malcolm this very morning, thanks.

He even had one card:

He’s still trying to work out if there’s any hidden meaning in the front cartoon:

Saturday I

Malcolm had a curiously productive day.

Trinity & St John’s

The main event was supposed to be the London-resident TCD geriatrics gathering at the Museum of the Order of St John.

Once upon a historical-novelist’s time, this was the Priory of the Knights of Saint John in Clerkenwell. Now, it is all gimmied up to  look very ancient, and St John’s Gate (which sits on the site of the entry to the priory which Henry VIII dissolved) is a perfect, if pretentious traffic restriction. In fact, almost everything we see is a Victorian mockery — thanks to Norman Shaw and Gilbert Scott’s less talented son.

The place has any importance because, in 1888, Queen Victoria created a brand-new “order of chivalry”, the Grand Priory of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in England (they’ve modified that description over the years). This means that a variety of odd-bods can parade around, from time to time, in fancy dress, and add inexplicable initials after their names. Inevitably anyone linked to the royal household ends up with a consolation prize of one or other of the hierarchies of this nonsense.

At a level well below all  the flummery, something useful is happening. At any public British outing one sees the “St John Ambulance“. These are do-gooding volunteer first-aiders. And good luck to them. They just don’t get within a league of the pretentious affectations that go with the ceremonial stuff.

There are two grand moments in the organised tour.

On is the “crypt” of the original St John’s temple. It clearly was more of an undercroft, else the windows would haves been redundant. It sports too much of that Victorian “every picture tells a story” stained glass. and a whole gallimaufry of memorial plaques to the self-appointed and committee-annointed “Great and Good”.

The claims is that this is one of the half-dozen oldest structures in London. Fair enough. Take that as “a starter for ten“:

• OK, there are various places where the original Roman wall of Londinium is still visible. That’s from around AD200.
• Around the same time the road pattern radiating from London (probably based on long-established tacks) was formalised. So the A2 was the Roman “Iter III” or (to the natives who’d been tripping down to Kent since Adam wor a bu’ a lad) Watling Street, and Ermine Street took you from Bishopsgate to Eboracum (on a modern road map, long stretches of it are numbered A10 or A14).
• Even before that, when the spooks were erecting their palace at Vauxhall, half a dozen piles from the Mesolithic period were discovered.
• London Stone has been about the place since Æðelstān, which is the end of the ninth century. A romantic would wish this was where Arthur drew the sword from the stone.
• Bits (admittedly small bits) of the Tower of London go back to five minutes after Guillaume le Bâtard took over in 1066, and he decided walls and fences make good neighbours, particularly when he had the heavy metal to frighten the ordure out of the locals.
• We’d better allow in Westminster Abbey.
• And the Temple Church.

Oh, look ! we’ve overrun our number limit. And we still didn’t list the Iron Age burial mounts, like the one on Hampstead Heath. Or Alfred’s dock at Queenhithe. And let’s not speculate about those piles that appear at low water near London Bridge and at Westminster.

So, in Michelin terms, worth a visit, even — if you’re at a loose end — worth a short detour. Just don’t make a special journey.

“Unfair!” you cry

Well, to each his own. The (excellent) lady guide made a big thing that the room over the gateway was the office of the Master of the Revels. or, as the potted history on line has it:

However, on the accession of her Protestant sister, Queen Elizabeth I, the Order in England was dissolved for good.

The buildings in Clerkenwell were put to different uses in the years that followed. During the sixteenth century they were used as the offices of the Master of the Revels. Thirty of Shakespeare’s plays were licensed here.

In the eighteenth century the Gate was briefly used as a coffee house, run by Richard Hogarth, father of the artist William Hogarth. Dr. Samuel Johnson was given his first job in London at St John’s Gate, writing reports for The Gentlemen’s Magazine. At the end of the eighteenth century the Gate was used as a pub, The Old Jerusalem Tavern, where artists and writers, including Charles Dickens, used to meet.

All of which deserves some credence. Only an irredeemable cynic would wonder which pub of any age Dickens is not alleged to have frequented: it’s quite incredible how he still managed the odd thousand or two words a day. As for the office of Master of the Revels, it would be hard at this distance to assert without any smidgeon of doubt which “room” was Edmund Tilney‘s “office”.

Ah! yes! Tilney.

He really deserves some extended study, sooner or later.

The greatest mind shift?

This crossed Malcolm’s mind as he jousted on politics.ie over the fall of Rome.

He began to wonder whether the most profound historical re-appraisal of his life-time was not the vexed question of the “Dark Ages”.

See! We don’t really use the term anymore. It’s not PC in academic circles.

A broken mirror to the past

As Malcolm recalls, in his time at school, the lights went out in the early fifth century and (a few generalisations about “barbarian” invasions later, and a brief interval for Charlemagne) the lights switched on again, about the start of the first millennium.

Groping through the fastness of the night, students were allowed the merest candle glimmers. Typically this might be no more than:

¶ the fiction of Gregory the Great’s Non Angli, see angeli!

¶ the further fiction of Alfred’s Great Saxon Bake-off

¶ the more authentic forensic drama of the Synod of Whitby (that one, less because it settled Easter, but because it was a poke in the eye for the dreaded Irish, and a walk-on part for the occasional woman, as left) …

All of which is thoroughly Anglocentric, as indeed is the name given the “Dark Ages” themselves. Apparently the German scholars have always preferred die Völkerwanderungen — the time of the wandering peoples. Since many of those peripatetics were germanic in origin, that arguably is equally Germanocentric.

Catch ‘em young. treat ‘em rough

A first day at secondary school inevitably starts with getting a timetable.

Somewhere in those disorienting hours, and new subjects’ names  (which, for Malcolm, also involved Fakenham Grammar’s holly-bush) one heard: Geography is about maps; history is about chaps. The “chaps” who defined early modern history were late classical or Christian authors. The “barbarians” (another loaded term) didn’t leave their written record; and so were always seen through the writings of the good guys.

Some of the gaps between geographical maps and historical chaps amount to archaeology. That is where much of the reconsideration of the “Dark Ages” has stemmed from.

But were there other factors?

As part of that politics.ie exchange, Malcolm found himself musing on whether one element in the fall of Rome was technological — and social changes that implied. On the whole, history teachers aren’t too good on things technological.

One example came to mind.

Thanks to quadruple-dealing, the Venetians conveyed the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, committed widespread mayhem, rape and pillage, and brought this bit of porphyry home as a souvenir. They were so proud, they cemented it to the Treasury of St Mark’s. A missing bit is still in Istanbul. It’s not exactly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. It represents the four Tetrarchs.

Diocletian in AD286 appointed three others to share, under his sway, the management and defence of the Empire:

• Diocletian himself was based at Nicomedia, modern Izmir, on the Asian frontier;
• Maximian operated from Mediolanum [Milan] with authority forItalia et Africa;
• Up on the Danube, at Sirmium, near modern Belgrade, Galerius had oversight of the Danube frontier;
• While Constantius Chlorus was officer commanding the Rhine frontier at Augustus Treverorum [Trier].

Plum, sputum and glades (not)

Here the tetrarchs are depicted in a spirit of brotherhood (which didn’t last long — so we can accurately date this bit of statuary)  and in full military fig. These guys are wearing state-of-the-art heavy metal, and the swords are spathae.

One of the things Malcolm dimly recalls recall from classical archaeology lectures (Professor Pyle at TCD, alas not doing this with actions) was why Caesar did so well against the Gauls. Vercingetorix and co. came at the Romans with their long slashing swords. Their metallurgy wasn’t up to their ambition. Hence a Gaulish warrior might periodically retreat, leap up and down on his sword to straighten it, and then return to the fray. Meanwhile the Roman legionnaires, with plum, scutum and gladii (which the spelling-corrector would wish as “plum, sputum and glades”) just kept doggedly poking their way forward.

If the spatha became the weapon of choice and fashion in the late fourth century, and was the the nearest substitute for a Glock 19 the quartermasters could offer, metal-bashing must have significantly improved. Lest we forget: if the iron sword was improved, so too were other applications for iron — the plough, for an obvious example. Sure enough, the heavy mouldboard plough makes its appearance just around the same time as Tetrarchs are happily presenting their side-arms. That’s technology in social action.

With the spathae there would be improved infantry handbooks, new soldiering — the day of the heavy infantryman has arrived. In due course, equine-management would deliver beasts capable of putting this heavy mob on horseback, and — lo! — we have arrived at the age of the armed knight.

That’s not the complete story of the fall of the Empire by a long shot: as Rory Carr, another sparring partner of Malcolm’s, reminded us:

In 1984, German professor Alexander Demandt collected 210 different theories on why Rome fell, and new theories have emerged since then.

TV lightens the darkness

None of that in any way explains why we have gone through a major academic reconsideration of five centuries. Nor that this has, to some extent, penetrated the public consciousness.

Obviously knowledge has improved. We now enjoy data and analysis from technical equipment that previous generations of archaeologists lacked. And there are many, many more archaeologists in productive employment.

Similarly, on the monkeys/typewriter/Shakespeare analogy, an excess of PhD students will eventually have to consider previously-neglected topics, and may even produce results.

Added to which there are infinite hours of numerous TV channels needing material. A fluffy, scruffy, muddy and bloody archaeologist, preferably with a strong regional accent and eccentricities, in a trench is cheap filming and audience-friendly. Throw in a bit of eye-candy (there’s another relationship which failed the test of time) and you’re making a mark in the ratings.

All the better for it

If the early modern period can be “sexed-up”, so much the better.

It might even have an impact on schools. David Starkey may not be everyone’s (and certainly not Malcolm’s) cup-of-tea but he hits the button:

History, fundamentally, is a branch of storytelling. It is, of course, a very sophisticated branch of storytelling: issues of evidence, issues of critical analysis, issues of debate are very important, but they seem to me to be the scaffolding and the foundations.

There is nothing dry, desiccated, dreary about history. In schools it has to become something more than castles, eight wives, the slave trade, Hitler, Stalin — which, in many cases it has been in recent years. The other problem is that each of those topics, important as each is, comes with value-added. There’s a clear ideological overtone. And all together they do not give any “sweep” to history. Starkey again:

We need big courses, we need ancient history, we need medieval history, we need the history of the dark ages, we need that sense of change and development across time.

Malcolm will take a little milk, no sugar, with that.

And finally, Starkey gets to how, why and what Malcolm reads (that ever-tottering guilt-pile). It is the first of his two powerful justifications for the teaching of history and its place in the National Curriculum (the second is the “celebratory” element — who and what we are and have achieved):

… how can we justify the idea of history at the centre of a national curriculum? There are two ways of doing it. The first is psychological. Memory is central to being human. The most terrible sign of Alzheimer’s is the loss of memory, something uniquely destructive to the personality. We are memory, we are our awareness of ourselves. I would suggest that societies are really very similar. They are collective memory, and a society that loses its collective memory has nothing. Without an awareness of the need for collective memory any notion of community, value or stability vanishes and we become merely individualised flotsam and jetsam. So there is a really powerful argument of this sort to be made for the centrality of history.

1500

Yes: this is the one thousand, five hundredth Malcolmian spouting. He thanks his reader for such long-lasting supporter. Perhaps by three thousand, we will have at least two more —

if I be alive and your mind hold and your dinner worth the eating.

That quotation, brief as it is, cut-and -pasted from the MIT site, where you will also find this headline: “Big Julie”, of course, was the Chicago gangster (played by B.S. Pully, the “blue” comedian) in Guys and Dolls. Big Julie always played with his own dice.

While we’re “off-colour” …

… there are these insights from Damian Thompson, courtesy of Saturday’s Telegraph:

Here’s a trenchant headline for you: “Transgender community celebrates ‘great diversity of gender identity’ in new book.” And another: “President tells youth groups to be vigilant against racist attitudes and to value diversity in society.” Care to guess which venerable organ published them? Here’s a clue: “Multicultural awards take place in Dublin following three-year break.”

Actually, that last one is a bit of a scoop. To anyone who knows modern Ireland, the notion that Dublin went a whole three years without multicultural awards is frankly incredible. Somebody really screwed up. They’re supposed to happen every month at least. The newspaper is the Irish Times, which these days makes the Guardian look like the bulletin of the Prayer Book Society. Rumour has it that it employs a special nurse to soothe joints sprained by marathon sessions of finger-wagging.

This week was a good one for the finger-waggers. The Irish parliament passed a law stripping political parties of state funding unless 30 per cent of their candidates are women; in later elections the quota will rise to 40 per cent. This means that bright men will be dissuaded from entering politics because the system will fill the Dáil with dim hectoring feminists with DIY Sinéad O’Connor haircuts. (Incidentally, did you know that eight out of the past 10 World Hectoring Champions have been lady members of the Irish Green party? It’s called Comhaontas Glas. Don’t ask me how it’s pronounced: the bizarre vagaries of Gaelic pronunciation were designed to trip up the English.)

Anyway, my point is not that rigged elections will destroy the democratic mandate of the Dáil, though they will. It’s that an especially toxic strain of political correctness has infected almost the entire Irish intelligentsia. Small-government conservatives are treated like lepers – something that, the Guardian/BBC axis notwithstanding, isn’t true of British public life. Meanwhile, the sucking up to minorities is beyond parody: a recent Irish Times profile of the travellers made them sound like latter-day Athenians. How long before there’s a transvestite traveller quota in the Dáil?

Admittedly, the programme of thought reform is not complete: the Irish working class is still instinctively socially conservative. But it is, unsurprisingly, increasingly anti-clerical, and that takes us to the heart of the matter. Churchgoing in Ireland has fallen off a cliff, thanks to the clergy’s dreadful record of committing and covering up paedophile crimes. The moral vacuum at the top of a hierarchical society has been filled by political correctness, much of it imported from the European Union at the height of Ireland’s Brussels-worship.

Identify innate prejudices lurking in those five paragraphs. But — hey!— we can’t abide “political correctness”, can we?

Your starter for ten:

• Irish is a an alien tongue, so that’s fair game (just don’t try mocking the Frogs or the Huns, the Nips or the Chinks, when you’re looking to do business with them).
• Gender equalities?  can’t have that! who’ll cook dinner and wash my socks?
• It’s all the fault of the EU, isn’t it?
• And Guardianistas are always fair game.

Add your own pig-ignorances at (s)will.

Gutter xenophobia (would Tony Gallagher, editor of the Telegraph, be capable of arguing that Thompson wasn’t in the gutter?) is endemic to English journalism. Perhaps we should omit the “journalism” substantive. And Scottish independence could, happily, restore to its rightful place the lost verse of the National Anthem?—

Lord, grant that Marshal Wade
May by thy mighty aid
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush,
And like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush.
God save the King!

Oh, dear! another irony! Field Marshall George Wade (1673-1748), whose roads crushed the Scots after the 1715 Jacobite Rising, was Irish-born at Kilavally, co. Westmeath, the son of a Cromwellian Major. So obviously a candidate for one of Malcolm’s occasionals on the Not-so-great and the not-so-good.

A Malcolmian aside

Sadly — for it would prompt an digression of some length, the story that Wade’s illegitimate daughter married Ralph Allen, whose quarries produced that gorgeous limestone to build Georgian Bath, seems just a tale.

Ralph Allen, entrepreneur, postmaster, Cornishman, patron and friend of Alexander Pope and Whig politicians, is better recognised in his literary version: Squire Allworthy in Fielding’s Tom Jones.

Hibernophobia

Thompson is mining a seam has been endemic in English thinking for centuries. Gerald of Wales, when he accompanied Prince John on his Irish trip, could claim the original copyright:

This people, then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress, but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner, just like the modern fashion recently introduced; indeed all their habits are barbarisms. But habits are formed by mutual intercourse; and as this people inhabit a country so remote from the rest of the world, and lying at its furthest extremity, forming, as it were, another world, and are thus secluded from civilised nations, they learn nothing, and practise nothing but the barbarism in which they were born and bred, and which sticks to them like a second nature. Whatever natural gifts they possess are excellent, in whatever requires industry they are worthless.

Bede, by comparison, had been much more positive. Perhaps that is because in AD730 conquest and domination were not the agenda, in the way they had become in Gerald’s day:

Ireland is broader than Britain, is healthier and has a much milder climate, so that snow rarely lasts for more than three days. Hay is never cut in summer for winter use nor are stables built for their beasts. No reptile is found there nor could a serpent survive; for although serpents have often been brought from Britain, as soon as the ship approaches land they are affected by the scent of the air and quickly perish. In fact almost everything that the island produces is efficacious against poison. For instance we have seen how, in the case of people suffering from snake-bite, the leaves of manuscripts from Ireland were scraped, and the scrapings put in water and given to the sufferer to drink. These scrapings at once absorbed the whole violence of the spreading poison and assuaged the swelling. The island abounds in milk and honey, nor does it lack vines, fish, and birds. It is also noted for the hunting of stags and roe-deer. It is properly the native land of the Irish; they emigrated from it as we have described and so formed the third nation in Britain in addition to the Britons and the Picts.

Advance the fiendish Fenian

By the time Punch could produce that gem, the main staples of the prejudice were established. “Britannia”, stern and wise, was defending  her dependent junior “sister” from the demons. the Irish peasant is characteristically deformed and depraved.

That is a mild version. There are far worse.

John Leech

He was the chief cartoonist for Punch between 1841 and 1861, and his illustrations for Dickens, especially A Christmas Carol became iconic. He was also seminal  in ramping up hibernophobia among English readers.

Repeatedly he reaches for repulsive anthropomorphic grotesques to depict things Irish.

This shows as early as 1848:That, of course, is the Young Ireland movement. Malcolm has been this way, recently, and feels no great need to traipse back through Widow McCormack’s potato patch.

Making John Mitchel (the usual spelling, despite Leech) the point of that cartoon, to the exclusion of O’Brien, Meager and Dillon, might seem perverse. It does however, precisely date the moment. Mitchel was — arguably — the hottest head, and, as editor of The United Irishman, a tall poppy to be cut down. Mitchel’s arrest in March 1848, his prompt conviction for treason felony, and sentence of transportation, pushed the Young Irelanders to their abortive rising.

Malcolmian aside: nine Irishmen

In the last couple of decades, they’ve become a regular on wall-plaques, posters and tea-towels. They inevitably have a faux-Irish bar named in their honour. Just off the Strip in Las Vegas, so you have been warned.

Have you missed the hype it goes like this:

In 1874, word reached an astounded Queen Victoria that the Sir Charles Duffy who had been elected Prime Minister of Australia, was the same Charles Duffy who had been transported into exile there 25 years before. On the Queen’s demand, the records of the rest of the transported Irishmen were revealed and this is what was discovered:

The Queen’s Record of the Rest of the Transported Irishmen:

• Thomas Francis Meagher: Governor of Montana
• Terrance MacManus: Brigadier General, U.S. Army.
• Patrick Donahue: Brigadier General, U.S. Army.
• Morris Leyne: Attorney General of Australia, in which office…
• Michael Ireland succeeded him as Attorney General of Australia.
• Richard O’Gorman: Governor General of Newfoundland.
• Thomas D’Arcy McGee: Member of Parliament, Montreal, Minister of Agriculture and President of Council Dominion of Canada
• John Mitchel: Prominent New York Politician, father of John Purroy Mitchel, Mayor of New York at the outbreak of world war I.

To which it is obligatory to add:

The moral of the story: you can’t keep a good Irishman down.

Malcolm suspects a lot of that is “improved” from Tim Pat Coogan’s own inventiveness, especially from Wherever Green is Worn. A cynic might add not all went well:

• Meagher drowned in the Missouri, having mysteriously — though probably drunk —fallen from a steamboat;
• MacManus died in abject poverty in San Francisco,as early as 1861, so no Civil War command;
• Donahue is frequently confused with his near-name-sake — the Patrick Donahoe who died in his bed, aged 90, a prominent Boston businessman, newspaper owner and philanthropist;
• Neither “Leyne” (even his name is disputed, though he seems to have come fromKerry) nor Ireland seem to receive an entry in the Dictionary of Australian Biography;
• McGee was never more than a Member of the Canadian Parliament, but was assassinated;
• Richard O’Gorman became a New York lawyer and judge, and here may be confused with Sir Terence O’Brien, Manchester-born Governor of Newfoundland 1889-95;
• Before 1901 there was no Australia, and the six territories were separate entities, so Duffy was no Prime Minister thereof — though briefly he was Premier and Chief Secretary of the province of Victoria, and ditto for Attorneys General of Australia: ;
• John Purroy Mitchel fell out of aircraft, having failed to strap himself in.

There are several fuller analyses of this superb urban myth.

More of Leech

When John Leech produced this one for Punch (14 December 1861), he was exploiting several contemporary ideas.

One was the notion of the “missing link” in evolution (Leech had used a similar representation  for a visiting French zoologist earlier in the year). Hence, the Irish nationalist belongs to an irrational and inferior species.

Specifically, though, the burning topic was the Trent incident. A Unionist captain had removed two Confederates delegates from a British merchant ship. Daniel O’Donoghue, a Nationalist MP, used a public meeting at Dublin’s Rotunda to declare that Ireland would offer England neither money nor men   at this moment of tension. Notice how Punch and Leech are leaning towards support for the Confederates (refer on this to Amanda Foreman, whom Malcolm has noted previously, and more than once).

Leech in Ireland

Through a shared enthusiasm for hunting, Leech became friends with the Reverend Samuel Reynolds Hole, squire and vicar of Caunton, Notts. In 1859 the two travelled through Ireland, and out of that trip came A Little Tour in Ireland, with illustrations by Leech.

After a long run up, getting to Dublin, and a rumination around TCD, we join Hole in Phoenix Park, amid the RIC:

Picked men, and admirably trained, they are as smart and clean, lithe and soldier-like, as the severest sergeant could desire. They do credit to him whose name they bear, for they are still called Peelers, after their godfather Sir Robert, who originated the force, when Secretary for Ireland. Fifty of them had left Dublin for Kilkenny that moring, to expostulate with the bold pisantry on the impropriety of smashing some reaping-machines recently introduced among them. The Irishman is not quick to appreciate agricultural improvements. It required an Act of Parliament to prevent him Attaching the plough to the tails of his horses …

We have Hole’s number: all that concern for the horses, rather than implied rural unemployment. And isn’t the pun on peasant/piss ant so neat and witty? Or not.

As these couple of examples show, Leech went along with the fun. even when he got away from the anthropomorphics:

Hole, who — for a beneficed and married cleric of the Church of England — spends a remarkable part of his narrative admiring young ladies (and Leech sketching them) manages the odd occasion of human sympathy, shows a capacity to write, and almost manages to maintain the effect:

We witnessed at the railway station, on our arrival at Galway, a most painful and touching scene, — the departure of some emigrants, and their last separation, here on earth, from dear relations and friends. The train was about to start, and the platform was crowded with men, women and children, pressing round for a last fond look. Ever and anon, a mother or a sister would force a way into the carriages, flinging her arms around her beloved, only to be separated by a superior strength, and parted from them with such looks of misery as disturbed the soul with pity. And then, for the first time, we heard the wild Irish “cry”, beginning with a low, plaintive wail, and gradually rising in its tone of intense sorrow …

Nor was this great grief simulated, … but came gushing from the full fountain of those loving hearts. There were faces there no actor could assume — faces which would have immortalised the painter who could have traced them truly, but were beyond the compass of art. Two, especially, I shall never forget. A youth of eighteen or nineteen, who had a cheerful word and pleasant smile for all, though you could see the while, in his white cheek and quivering lip, how grief was gnawing his brave Spartan heart … and the other, an elderly man, who had stood somewhat aloof from the rest, with his arms folded, and his head bent, motionless, speechless, with a face on which despair had written, I shall smile no more until I welcome death…

Many of the emigrants had bunches of wild flowers and heather, and one of them a shamrock in a broken flowerpot, as memorials of dear ould Ireland. Nor does this fond love of home and kindred decline in a distant land; no less a sum than £7,520,000 having been sent from America to Ireland, in the years 1848 to 1854 inclusive, according to the statement of the Emigration Commissioners.

No end of prejudice

Leech was not unique, not the first, and by no means the last in this mode. Nor is it entirely an English failing. This from as recent as 2005, and Vancouver:

So Damian Thompson can rest easy. He and his like have taught well. As Malcolm can personally testify:

• one can be born and raised in Norfolk,
• one’s speech still has those Anglian broad vowels and missed consonants,
• spend half-a-century of adult life in England’s fair and pleasant land,

but …

• because of a while at school and university in Dublin, one is inevitably “that mad Irishman”.