Reclaim the Enlightenment

On the face of it ‘These are the Times that Try Men’s Souls’ may seem an entirely apt title for an address in times when there are so many reasons why we might despair.

It was a phrase famously used by Thomas Paine in his pamphlet The American Crisis published in 1776 when the colonists were indeed facing defeat in their struggle for independence, but the pamphlet helped galvanise them towards ultimate success.

That was a struggle that enjoyed broad support from the oppressed in Ulster. A little over a decade later and in 1789 the fall of the Bastille, the anniversary of which we celebrate today, was universally welcomed here as a moment of hope and an impetus to seek radical change for ourselves.

But we do have to recognise the bleak landscape that we face today even as we insist that human progress is possible and indeed must be fought for.

Ballymena race riots

Most immediately we must respond to the recent race riots. These reveal that in certain very identifiable areas particular movers and shakers have travelled beyond a long history of sectarian violence to attacking an even more vulnerable minority – our immigrant communities. They make up less than 4% of our population, a smaller proportion than in any other area of the British Isles.

The ostensible trigger for events in Ballymena was the alleged rape of a teenager by two Roma teenagers. Cue a large demonstration ostensibly in solidarity with the victims. There was nothing else for them to do because the alleged offenders had already been arrested – the law was taking its course.

One does have to ask why such a large demonstration took place on this occasion. There have been smaller turnouts and usually as vigils in response to the murder of 27 women in Northern Ireland over the last 4 years. Dreadful cases of child abuse have gone unmarked, and in the case of Ballymena, the serial abuser, David Tweed, enjoyed political support to the last. We all too often give a bye ball to offences by our own – that is when they are white.

As matters developed in Ballymena and elsewhere clear-cut racism became the driving force with all immigrant races being targeted. We do have to ask from what does this racism stem. It’s a far cry from those 18^th century days when Belfast citizens were emphatic in their opposition to slavery and proclaimed the equality of mankind. Our subsequent history of colonial and imperial development in which Ulstermen were heavily involved has left a baleful legacy. This was proclaimed as a civilising mission to inferior peoples. Elements in British society and in our own in particular remain wholly unreconstructed in this respect.

Politicians across the board have condemned the riots – that’s the easy bit. But then have come the supposed mitigating factors, the idea that there are problems that need to be dealt with, and hence we are back to imagined mass immigration.

‘Stop the boats’

Evasion of this kind simply encourages more hate crime, a glaring example of which was the Twelfth bonfire in Moygashel complete with a boat full of immigrants on the top which has now burnt just as immigrants were burnt out in Ballymena.

The slogan on the bonfire was ‘Stop the Boats’ but isn’t that familiar. Keir Starmer continually talks of stopping the boats thus mimicking his Tory predecessors. He echoed Enoch Powell when he said, ’We risk becoming an island of strangers’. This kind of narrative coming across the water only encourages the bigots here.

Of course virulent racism is not just the preserve of loyal Ulster. Our desperadoes are in strange alliance with the tricolour waving true Gaels of Ireland. They resist the pollution of their entirely imaginary ethnic purity by foreign blood and see as exemplars of their cause people like Conor McGregor (he was found civilly liable for rape by an Irish court in 2024), who nearly won a Dail seat in the recent election.

We need to resist such forces in every way possible and to offer solidarity to our migrant communities. As a major priority RTÉ will be organising a conference on racism in the spring of next year.

How should we address our many social problems? We have of course our very own Assembly. The trouble is that it is not delivering. That is in part because of the very structures set up under the Good Friday Agreement. Arguably the two tribes framework which it established was necessary to bring the war here to an end, though that has had a long tail. What we got was a vital if uneasy equilibrium rather than a system of effective devolved government.

I needn’t go through all the pitfalls in detail; the misuse of petitions of concern, the marginalisation of non-aligned forces, the prolonged periods of collapse.

Forced marriage

What we are left with today is a particularly deadly forced marriage between Sinn Féin and the DUP. It is difficult to tell which is the black widow spider. For the moment what we are watching is merely a near death experience in which the Assembly staggers on in zombie like form despite the best endeavours of at least some MLAs.

The resultant failure is well characterised by the utter inadequacy of two major and long delayed documents – the programme for government and, more recently, the poverty strategy. In the latter case we are talking in a context where 18% of our households and one quarter of our children are living in poverty. It appears that Sinn Fein and the DUP could only agree on the lowest possible level of delivery – one for the optics and nothing else.

There is a long list of failures. In this season one of the most obvious is that of flags and emblems. We know that animals mark their terrain with spoor or shit. Our shit is flags, flags that not only mark out territory where they are wanted but penetrate neutral spaces and make territorial claims elsewhere causing fear and offence. The PSNI, the Department of the Environment, and local councils all disclaim responsibility for taking them down. Reports have been written but not acted upon. It should surely be a litmus paper test for the executive to deal with this issue.

If they fail, I sometimes engage in a fantasy of forming a peaceful guerrilla movement which would take them down where they are not wanted.

Polluted environment

But I also want to refer to two other areas of abject failure. One is particularly close to my own heart and that is the condition of our environment. The state of Lough Neagh is a national scandal, but nearly all our other rivers and lakes are polluted as is Belfast Lough. Andrew Muir, Minister of the Environment, managed to persuade the executive to adopt draft proposals that could mitigate the situation. Quite rightly these proposals had a substantial focus on agricultural pollution. Even as his proposals went out for consultation both Sinn Fein and the DUP attacked them and the Ulster Farmers Union which appears at times to rule rural Ulster arrived in their brand-new tractors to rally outside Stormont. Meanwhile Muir has received death threats. Don’t expect any resolution of this crisis soon.

Education is a field particularly dear to those of us in RTÉ. After all our forebears were advocates of ‘free and universal education’. What we now face is a disaster area which can be encapsulated in one statistic, that in Northern Ireland 27% of the population have no worthwhile qualifications, by far the highest proportion in any part of the British Isles. These are the left behinds who become the foot soldiers in our many riots, and are all too easily led astray by the paramilitaries.

RTÉ has held two conferences dealing with the many aspects of the problem and published the proceedings of the first of these as, Is Our Education System Failing Our Children.

What has become our Education Reform Group has concluded that by far the most damaging element of our system is selection at 11 and the transfer test. There is a wealth of evidence, including that of a poll we commissioned this spring, that it is this that divides our children into haves and have nots and inflicts much trauma along the way.

How is it that Northern Ireland is the only area in the British Isles where this pernicious test still holds sway. As a side deal at the time of the St Andrews Agreement in 2006 Sinn Féin agreed not to press for abolition of the test which had been their previous position. In effect they handed a veto to the DUP on the question. Thus devolution was restored but at a terrible price with regard to the education of our children. Subsequently successive DUP education ministers have had to recognise that there is a problem with regard to the education of disadvantaged children but in the various enquiries that they have launched have specifically vetoed any examination of the effect of the transfer test. That is the elephant in the room.

How do we move this on? We are making a submission to the Assembly’s Education Committee, but this will go no further than urging them to remove the bar on discussion of the transfer test.

Citizen’s assembly

What else could we do? We are attracted to the idea of citizen’s assemblies. Tom Paine advocated them. How citizens could assemble under a tree, a liberty tree, in then colonial America and discuss reform. It was an idea taken up here in the heady year of 1792 when great town meetings were held in Belfast which endorsed emancipation for all including Roman Catholics. It was however to be another forty years before very limited Catholic Emancipation was introduced.

A much more recent inspiration was the successful use in the Republic of such assemblies to advise on abortion, gender equality, and electoral reform. Under our 2020 New Decade, New Approach deal it was agreed to set up structures to enable citizen’s assemblies to convene. Education would be a prime candidate for discussion. Yet nothing happened until very recently. Now there is talk of activating the proposition, but the nay sayers are already at work – any such gathering should be small, informal, and above all should have no power to trample on the executive. So you see evisceration is threatened before anything actually comes to pass. That we will have to resist.

Much of what I have said echoes the notorious statement by Charles Haughey that ‘Northern Ireland is a failed entity’ but in the immediate future we will have to live with it and seek to improve it in so far as we can. I say this in a context in which even if you are a supporter of a United Ireland this is still at best a fairly distant prospect.

Can the British and Irish governments come together to reform the structures set up by the Good Friday Agreement? Possibly. More likely we will have to depend on our own main players to work more constructively together. As those committed to the Union there is surely a greater imperative for Unionists and in particular for the DUP to make our devolution work. That will require them to move beyond a siege mentality and to respond more positively to the changes taking place in our society. Some of them may be creationists, would that they would think creatively about the future of this place.

Not everything can be blamed on our devolved government and institutions. Week by week our coroners and judges do their best to provide justice for the victims of the many appalling and still unresolved cases arising from the Troubles. Let’s give credit where credit is due.

Time and time again and with the inexcusable support of the Labour government the dead hand of MI5 intervenes and denies access to crucial evidence. The Finucane’s after a protracted struggle will get a public enquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane. Not so Sean Brown despite the judgement of our Court of Appeal. The victims of Freddie Scappatici and the IRA nutting squad are also being denied the truth.

Keir Starmer himself intervenes to prevent justice. Gerry Adams’s success in getting his internment declared illegal potentially opened the way for compensation. Starmer was straight out of the gates stating that he would legislate if necessary to prevent it being paid. The application of legislation retrospectively is itself highly dubious. Whatever you think about Gerry Adams you should appreciate that this issue also affects 400 other ex-internees. In effect Starmer is arguing that internment without trial, one of the greatest injustices of our troubles, was legitimate.

But closer to home securocrats are still at work and most notably in the failed prosecution of Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey who revealed much of the truth about the Loughinisland murders. That case opened up a whole can of worms about police surveillance of journalists and lawyers.

Palestine and censorship

But let us cast our eyes further afield and to Palestine. Last year I warned that Israel by its actions was in danger of becoming a pariah state. I little thought then how much worse the situation could become in a year. Let us call Israel’s actions in Gaza for what they are – genocide. So as long as that war of extermination goes on, we should boycott Israel. The government should formally recognise the Palestinian State. They should continue to support a two-state solution but that can only be realistic if it is based on the 1967 frontiers and not on the emasculated territory left to the Palestinians today.

What of the actual British response. Pusillanimous is I think the word for it. We still supply parts for those jets that Israel uses to bomb the innocents of Gaza. That is why Palestine Action engaged in low level sabotage at a British air force base. They have ben proscribed as a terrorist organisation. By the same token the Suffragettes who actually let off bombs should have been proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Good for those who are risking jail by demonstrating in solidarity with Palestine Action.

It is hardly surprising that controversial band Kneecap have fallen foul of the same overkill approach, and hence their pending trial for allegedly embracing a Hamas flag. But in an act of monumental stupidity for a Prime Minister, Keir Starmer argued that they should be banned from playing at Glastonbury. He got his just desserts when 30,000 fans joined in the chant of ‘Fuck Keir Starmer’.

The attempted censorship went further with outrage that the BBC inadvertently broadcast the Kneecap performance. But the BBC is surely in safe hands. Their coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been heavily slanted in favour of Israel. They did commission two documentaries on conditions in Gaza but banned their showing.

The cry is always ‘balance’ but what can that mean in the context of what has been happening in Gaza. Thanks to the courage of Palestinian journalists, many of whom have been killed for their pains, we have seen almost in real time the ongoing nightmare. But apparently that has to be balanced by mendacious and patently lying statements from the Israeli Defence Force. It is as though when the BBC recalls the original holocaust, and we should never forget that, that it should provide balance by giving a platform to a holocaust denier or to a former SS member.

Let us not forget Ukraine. Last year I argued that we must support their right to self-determination and their right to seek support wherever they can find it. As that war grinds on that remains the case.

Unfortunately that situation has provided part of the pretext for a new level of war mongering by NATO which has secured agreement from its member nations to increase defence expenditure from 2% of GDP to 5%. As supposed NATO aggrandisement was one of Russia’s excuses for its illegal invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s new posturing will only make a peace settlement more difficult. Thank goodness the Irish Republic is not a member of NATO. Long may it maintain its neutrality while supporting the Ukranians in other ways.

I did warn last year that as far as defence was concerned the new Labour government was in the grip of the securocrats. So it has turned out. Keir Starmer has said that we must prepare for war and apparently against Russia, China, and even Iran. Extraordinarily we are now to acquire American jets and American tactical nuclear bombs that they can drop. Thus while we welcome the destruction of Iran’s nuclear pretensions we engage in nuclear proliferation ourselves, a monumental exercise in hypocrisy.

So it is that delusions of grandeur persist, and extremely expensive ones as Labour has accepted NATO’s 5% of GDP target. What will pay for all this. The Foreign Aid budget has been disgracefully hatcheted and welfare cuts one way or another are in the offing. In what are in any case hard times, and will be for Northern Ireland too, this is a so-called Labour government that dare not mention wealth taxes.

Trump, Nato and sycophancy

Overshadowing the whole world situation is the erratic but highly dangerous American Presidency of Donald Trump. Next year will mark the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence but I fear that there will be little to celebrate then. Domestically Trump has secured almost untramelled power and assumed the presumptions of an absolute monarch. He has set about eviscerating the public service, a brutal war on immigrants, and a partial destruction of the limited health system. His recent big bill simply benefits the rich.

Abroad, leaving aside his outrageous ambitions to annexe Canada and Greenland, he has made it possible for Israel to continue its genocidal war against the Palestinians. But his major foreign impact has been to disrupt the global trading status quo with his tariff war.

What is shocking is how the western powers and in particular our Labour government have fawned in the face of his offensive. The NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte calls him ‘daddy’ and Starmer hands him an invitation from King Charles. I am anything but a monarchist but on this occasion Charles deserves our sympathy. I look forward to monster demonstrations when Trump does come.

And where do we stand in respect of The Rights of Man first demanded by Thomas Paine in 1791 and a work which became the Koran of Belfast in its revolutionary era. Subsequently and in the modern era painstaking efforts were made to embrace rights across the globe whether through the establishment of the United Nations, the Geneva Convention, the International Criminal Court and the European Court of Human Rights.

These have increasingly proved ineffective as key players have variously obstructed action, ignored resolutions and rulings, or simply failed to sign up to the body concerned.

This is particularly the case with the International Criminal Court. Israel withdrew in 2022. The United States never joined but when the court indited Israel’s Netanyahu for possible war crimes the United States imposed sanctions on the members of the court.

What we have to say is that even in the darkest hours these bodies offer continued hope for those most disadvantaged and oppressed in the world.

Let’s come back to the title of this talk – ‘These are the times that try men’s souls.’ Maybe so but like our enlightened forebears we believe in the possibility, nay eventual inevitability, of human progress. The means may often not be clear but the human impetus to advance is inescapable.

History is never a sure guide to the future but one thing that we can be certain of is that empires rise and fall. That has been true of the British, French and Russian empires, though in all three cases we are suffering from the long-term hangovers from imperial eras. It will also be true of the newer American empire. It is also true that dictators always fall.

Let us advance then to a better future.