Thanks for coming to Ireland – but we still need a bailout
When Colm Toíbín was a boy, his father took him to see John F Kennedy during his visit to Ireland. This week, he met the Queen in Dublin, and next he will watch President Obama fly in. Visiting celebrities are great, but the Irish economy is still a basket case
The Queen at St Patrick's Rock in Cashel, County Tipperary, during her state visit to Ireland. Photograph: Reuters
Last Thursday afternoon as I made my way through Dublin I kept the instructions carefully in my inside pocket. The sheet of paper told me that the appropriate form of the address to the Queen, whom I was going to meet, was "Your Majesty" and after that "Ma'am" and not "Marm". It was hard not to think for a second of my grandfather, who took part in the 1916 rebellion, and was later interned by the British, and of his brother who was a diehard republican, and of my uncle who fought in the Irish war of independence. And it might be easy to also say that I felt these ancestral voices whispering in my ear. And easy maybe also to say that I felt that something new happened last week as a reigning British monarch came to the Republic of Ireland for the first time.
But I am not sure I did feel these things. The morning news in Ireland on Thursday was dominated not by the Queen's visit, but rather by the death of Garret FitzGerald, who was minister for foreign affairs in the 1970s and taoiseach in the 1980s. I remember the day at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland in 1985 when FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish agreement. I remember the steely glint in Thatcher's eye that day and how reasonable and intelligent FitzGerald sounded. It was clear something new was happening then in the relationship between the two islands, that the British side had understood that the Irish government wanted stability in Northern Ireland rather than territory or further chaos. And that both sovereign governments had come to recognise that the majority of Catholics in Northern Ireland wanted their Irish identity somehow recognised, and that this, since they were in a minority in Northern Ireland, would require imagination, ingenuity and serious negotiation; it would require hard work on the part of diplomats, and bravery on the part of politicians.
The hand of history actually was on our shoulder that day. The accord, and the agreements that came later between the two governments, were the result of many years of slow work by Irish and British civil servants and diplomats; it came from the gradual understanding and trust that grew between these officials, and the even more gradual work done by politicians. It helped that British and Irish leaders could meet in Brussels as equals. But it was also the result of work done by historians, who had begun to write about the sheer complexity of the relationship between the two islands over many centuries, insisting that the campaign of violence in the name of history misrepresented history in all its layers, nuances and ironies.
The many meetings to arrange the Anglo-Irish agreement, the slow trust built between Dublin and London, was, it could be said, merely Anglo-Irish relations for slow learners. Such accord had been enacted within families for many generations as ordinary people went back and forth between Ireland and Britain. On 29 June 1963, when President Kennedy addressed a crowd in Galway in the west of Ireland, he asked people who had a relative in America to raise their hands. We can watch the video footage as almost every member of the crowd put their hand up. Had the Queen asked people in Ireland how many of us have cousins, or aunts and uncles, or brothers and sisters, or sons and daughters, or nieces and nephews living in Britain now, the answer would be that the vast majority of us do.
For a long time now the relationship between the two islands has been a close relationship within families. It has been marked by visits for Christmas, homecomings for weddings and funerals, for summer holidays. It is part of the rhythm of the year, the rhythm of our lives. In this context, the idea that the Queen has never come to the south of Ireland before seems strange, almost sad. And for many people her state visit has been a final thread in what has been the fundamental texture of so many ordinary lives. In a wonderfully crafted and sensitive speech in Dublin Castle on Wednesday evening, the Queen recognised this when she said: "Many British families have members who live in this country, as many Irish families have close relatives in the United Kingdom. These families share the two islands; they have visited each other and come home to each other over the years."
But there have been other contexts for Anglo-Irish relations, and some of them, as anyone who reads any of the history books will know, have been fraught with difficulty and, have left a stain on the past and, indeed, on living memory. In her speech on Wednesday, the Queen recognised this in a statement that seemed surprisingly stark and frank: "With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently, or not at all."
The places the Queen visited in her first days in Ireland also made something else clear, and this is that Irish history is not simple, and that the relationship between the two islands is filled with ambiguity as much as it is with difficulty. On 11 November 1998, the Queen, the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, and King Albert II of Belgium opened a memorial site near Ypres dedicated to the soldiers of Ireland, of all political and religious beliefs, who died, were wounded or went missing in the great war.A tower was constructed using stones from a demolished workhouse in Mullingar, County Westmeath in Ireland. The design is that of a traditional Irish round tower dating back to the eight century. The presence of the Irish head of state at the inauguration, alongside the Queen, was an important recognition that this too is part of Irish history, Irish heritage, Irish memory, as much as the Irish struggle for independence. Hundreds of thousands of Irishmen from north and south served in the war and 50,000 were killed.
Thus on Wednesday the Queen and the Irish president visited the Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge by the River Liffey, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, which commemorates the Irish who died in the first world war.
But the previous day, as soon as she arrived in Dublin, the Queen visited the Garden of Remembrance in Parnell Square, which is dedicated to the Irish patriot dead; it was opened in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 rebellion. The Queen laid a wreath in memory of the very people, the comrades of my grandfather and my uncle, who had died trying to remove the British from Ireland. She stood there for a minute in respectful silence with her head bowed.
As I watched this on television, and it was replayed many times last week, I found it moving and interesting. Since the 1970s, it has been difficult here to commemorate or honour Ireland's own patriot dead without feeling that you were, in some way, glorifying violence, or helping, however unintentionally, to foster further division and atavistic bitterness in Ireland. The image of the Queen with her head bowed in the Garden of Remembrance seemed to me a significant moment. It suggested that now that there is such ease and open harmony between our two islands and our two governments, we can include without worry the Irish patriot dead among those we wish to honour and remember, we can think of their years in prison, or their early deaths, and we can honour their idealism, their bravery. I am not sure how long this feeling will last, but that is what went through my head as I watched the Queen in the Garden of Remembrance on Tuesday.
In a time when people in Ireland feel let down by leaders of both the state and the Catholic church, let down by the public sphere itself, when there is so much fear about the future, so much gloom and worry, there was a genuine feeling of warmth and welcome here towards the British visitors this week. There was a feeling that not only the Queen herself and her advisers but David Cameron and William Hague, who also came to the city, put great care in every word they said, and seemed determined that this visit would have enormous symbolic power, and would be a milestone of some sort in the relationship between the two islands. Something that once seemed intractable, fraught with difficulty, has now been eased.
For the past two and a half years there has been nothing but debate in Ireland about how we got into this economic mess, and there is little sense of how we are going to get out of it. There is a new term in Ireland called "celebrity economist" to describe the pundits who are on radio and TV day and night telling us how bad things are, and how they much worse they will become.
Thus it lifted things in Ireland to have a real and serious celebrity here, even if most people could not actually see the Queen, or meet her, because of genuine worry about security. On Thursday night, as 2,000 people stood up and applauded the Queen in the new conference centre by the Liffey, the warmth seemed real, as it had earlier in the afternoon when she was introduced to people in politics and sport and the arts. Where is Irish republicanism now, I asked myself, as all around me people waited to shake her hand, worried about what they should say to her.
On Thursday, on a radio show, as people rang in to remember Garret FitzGerald, another caller came on the line, and he had a problem. Barack Obama is following hot on the heels of the Queen, coming to visit Ireland early next week, and the man wanted a ticket to see the president in his ancestral home in Moneygall in County Offaly. The president, on his mother's side, has roots in Ireland. Once more we are back thinking about history, the boatloads who left here from the 1840s onwards, the strange idea that most of them who came from small farms and rural places moved straight into cities. We became policemen, priests, firemen, servants, builders, barmen, politicians. And presidents. In June 1963 my father took me out of school to see John F Kennedy in Wexford, our county, and the one his ancestors came from.
The difference between emigrating to America and emigrating to England was that in America your descendants could become president, but in England there were pretty strict systems in place that made it unlikely your descendants would become the Queen. President Obama will arrive in Ireland next week with all that glamour of openness and opportunity. On Monday he will address a crowd in Dublin's College Green. There will be tight security but no tickets are required. Anyone can go down there and see him.
As we know from attempting to solve the problems in Northern Ireland, symbols are important. It seems that the two communities there wanted a language that was so ambiguous and open to describe their identity that diplomats began to work like poets, staying up late making language work for politics. Thus, the Queen's speech in Ireland lifted things here, made things easier, and Obama's eloquence in College Green will do the same. In the meantime, in the centres of power in Europe, there are politicians and bureaucrats who don't care much about language, they care about figures, rates of interest, bondholders and bottom lines.
After all the brightness of the Queen's visit this week, and all the audacity of hope invested in what Obama might say, we know that the chances of getting Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy to come to Dublin and make winning speeches about relationships, use soothing, careful words that will help to put an end to dark political problems, are very slim indeed. The visit by the Queen made a real difference in Ireland last week, and symbolises a new relationship between our islands, and the visit by Obama will further lift our spirits. But after that, it is back to business, and while large historical issues have been solved, the business of our basket case economy, which is damaging so many lives here, is on the agenda. The question we might ask ourselves in the wake of the Queen's visit is this: since the British now seem to love us so much, how can we get the Germans over to our side? Can they not love us too? Enough to bail us out maybe?
But I am not sure I did feel these things. The morning news in Ireland on Thursday was dominated not by the Queen's visit, but rather by the death of Garret FitzGerald, who was minister for foreign affairs in the 1970s and taoiseach in the 1980s. I remember the day at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland in 1985 when FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish agreement. I remember the steely glint in Thatcher's eye that day and how reasonable and intelligent FitzGerald sounded. It was clear something new was happening then in the relationship between the two islands, that the British side had understood that the Irish government wanted stability in Northern Ireland rather than territory or further chaos. And that both sovereign governments had come to recognise that the majority of Catholics in Northern Ireland wanted their Irish identity somehow recognised, and that this, since they were in a minority in Northern Ireland, would require imagination, ingenuity and serious negotiation; it would require hard work on the part of diplomats, and bravery on the part of politicians.
The hand of history actually was on our shoulder that day. The accord, and the agreements that came later between the two governments, were the result of many years of slow work by Irish and British civil servants and diplomats; it came from the gradual understanding and trust that grew between these officials, and the even more gradual work done by politicians. It helped that British and Irish leaders could meet in Brussels as equals. But it was also the result of work done by historians, who had begun to write about the sheer complexity of the relationship between the two islands over many centuries, insisting that the campaign of violence in the name of history misrepresented history in all its layers, nuances and ironies.
The many meetings to arrange the Anglo-Irish agreement, the slow trust built between Dublin and London, was, it could be said, merely Anglo-Irish relations for slow learners. Such accord had been enacted within families for many generations as ordinary people went back and forth between Ireland and Britain. On 29 June 1963, when President Kennedy addressed a crowd in Galway in the west of Ireland, he asked people who had a relative in America to raise their hands. We can watch the video footage as almost every member of the crowd put their hand up. Had the Queen asked people in Ireland how many of us have cousins, or aunts and uncles, or brothers and sisters, or sons and daughters, or nieces and nephews living in Britain now, the answer would be that the vast majority of us do.
For a long time now the relationship between the two islands has been a close relationship within families. It has been marked by visits for Christmas, homecomings for weddings and funerals, for summer holidays. It is part of the rhythm of the year, the rhythm of our lives. In this context, the idea that the Queen has never come to the south of Ireland before seems strange, almost sad. And for many people her state visit has been a final thread in what has been the fundamental texture of so many ordinary lives. In a wonderfully crafted and sensitive speech in Dublin Castle on Wednesday evening, the Queen recognised this when she said: "Many British families have members who live in this country, as many Irish families have close relatives in the United Kingdom. These families share the two islands; they have visited each other and come home to each other over the years."
But there have been other contexts for Anglo-Irish relations, and some of them, as anyone who reads any of the history books will know, have been fraught with difficulty and, have left a stain on the past and, indeed, on living memory. In her speech on Wednesday, the Queen recognised this in a statement that seemed surprisingly stark and frank: "With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently, or not at all."
The places the Queen visited in her first days in Ireland also made something else clear, and this is that Irish history is not simple, and that the relationship between the two islands is filled with ambiguity as much as it is with difficulty. On 11 November 1998, the Queen, the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, and King Albert II of Belgium opened a memorial site near Ypres dedicated to the soldiers of Ireland, of all political and religious beliefs, who died, were wounded or went missing in the great war.A tower was constructed using stones from a demolished workhouse in Mullingar, County Westmeath in Ireland. The design is that of a traditional Irish round tower dating back to the eight century. The presence of the Irish head of state at the inauguration, alongside the Queen, was an important recognition that this too is part of Irish history, Irish heritage, Irish memory, as much as the Irish struggle for independence. Hundreds of thousands of Irishmen from north and south served in the war and 50,000 were killed.
Thus on Wednesday the Queen and the Irish president visited the Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge by the River Liffey, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, which commemorates the Irish who died in the first world war.
But the previous day, as soon as she arrived in Dublin, the Queen visited the Garden of Remembrance in Parnell Square, which is dedicated to the Irish patriot dead; it was opened in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 rebellion. The Queen laid a wreath in memory of the very people, the comrades of my grandfather and my uncle, who had died trying to remove the British from Ireland. She stood there for a minute in respectful silence with her head bowed.
As I watched this on television, and it was replayed many times last week, I found it moving and interesting. Since the 1970s, it has been difficult here to commemorate or honour Ireland's own patriot dead without feeling that you were, in some way, glorifying violence, or helping, however unintentionally, to foster further division and atavistic bitterness in Ireland. The image of the Queen with her head bowed in the Garden of Remembrance seemed to me a significant moment. It suggested that now that there is such ease and open harmony between our two islands and our two governments, we can include without worry the Irish patriot dead among those we wish to honour and remember, we can think of their years in prison, or their early deaths, and we can honour their idealism, their bravery. I am not sure how long this feeling will last, but that is what went through my head as I watched the Queen in the Garden of Remembrance on Tuesday.
In a time when people in Ireland feel let down by leaders of both the state and the Catholic church, let down by the public sphere itself, when there is so much fear about the future, so much gloom and worry, there was a genuine feeling of warmth and welcome here towards the British visitors this week. There was a feeling that not only the Queen herself and her advisers but David Cameron and William Hague, who also came to the city, put great care in every word they said, and seemed determined that this visit would have enormous symbolic power, and would be a milestone of some sort in the relationship between the two islands. Something that once seemed intractable, fraught with difficulty, has now been eased.
For the past two and a half years there has been nothing but debate in Ireland about how we got into this economic mess, and there is little sense of how we are going to get out of it. There is a new term in Ireland called "celebrity economist" to describe the pundits who are on radio and TV day and night telling us how bad things are, and how they much worse they will become.
Thus it lifted things in Ireland to have a real and serious celebrity here, even if most people could not actually see the Queen, or meet her, because of genuine worry about security. On Thursday night, as 2,000 people stood up and applauded the Queen in the new conference centre by the Liffey, the warmth seemed real, as it had earlier in the afternoon when she was introduced to people in politics and sport and the arts. Where is Irish republicanism now, I asked myself, as all around me people waited to shake her hand, worried about what they should say to her.
On Thursday, on a radio show, as people rang in to remember Garret FitzGerald, another caller came on the line, and he had a problem. Barack Obama is following hot on the heels of the Queen, coming to visit Ireland early next week, and the man wanted a ticket to see the president in his ancestral home in Moneygall in County Offaly. The president, on his mother's side, has roots in Ireland. Once more we are back thinking about history, the boatloads who left here from the 1840s onwards, the strange idea that most of them who came from small farms and rural places moved straight into cities. We became policemen, priests, firemen, servants, builders, barmen, politicians. And presidents. In June 1963 my father took me out of school to see John F Kennedy in Wexford, our county, and the one his ancestors came from.
The difference between emigrating to America and emigrating to England was that in America your descendants could become president, but in England there were pretty strict systems in place that made it unlikely your descendants would become the Queen. President Obama will arrive in Ireland next week with all that glamour of openness and opportunity. On Monday he will address a crowd in Dublin's College Green. There will be tight security but no tickets are required. Anyone can go down there and see him.
As we know from attempting to solve the problems in Northern Ireland, symbols are important. It seems that the two communities there wanted a language that was so ambiguous and open to describe their identity that diplomats began to work like poets, staying up late making language work for politics. Thus, the Queen's speech in Ireland lifted things here, made things easier, and Obama's eloquence in College Green will do the same. In the meantime, in the centres of power in Europe, there are politicians and bureaucrats who don't care much about language, they care about figures, rates of interest, bondholders and bottom lines.
After all the brightness of the Queen's visit this week, and all the audacity of hope invested in what Obama might say, we know that the chances of getting Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy to come to Dublin and make winning speeches about relationships, use soothing, careful words that will help to put an end to dark political problems, are very slim indeed. The visit by the Queen made a real difference in Ireland last week, and symbolises a new relationship between our islands, and the visit by Obama will further lift our spirits. But after that, it is back to business, and while large historical issues have been solved, the business of our basket case economy, which is damaging so many lives here, is on the agenda. The question we might ask ourselves in the wake of the Queen's visit is this: since the British now seem to love us so much, how can we get the Germans over to our side? Can they not love us too? Enough to bail us out maybe?
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