In a previous post, I spoke about the political and how it relates at its purest to the distinction between friends and enemies. That is because nothing unites like a common enemy (it is much harder to unite around a common value) and from that unity comes political community.
The politics of any given time refers to the way in which friends and enemies are designated in that time. In the Ireland of the present, the political enemy is what can be termed "Catholic Nationalism". Catholic Nationalism has never really existed. It is an imagined object. To be sure there has been nationalism and there has been catholicism and the two have often overlapped, associated with each other and even complemented each other. But they are nevertheless distinct and separate.
Why are they perceived as forming a singular thing? Well nationalism and Catholicism are both the foes of a third political creed in Ireland, liberalism. And for liberalism, presenting these foes as one unified villain creates a more simplistic and therefore compelling narrative.
In presenting the unified villain, Catholicism and nationalism are reduced down to common essential elements. Mainly, these are patriarchy, authoritarianism, atavism, irrationality and a general sense of being of the past. These are all very much the opposite of what liberalism today prides itself on. Desmond Fennell famously characterised this binary division in the 1980s as being between nice people and rednecks. This was quite brilliant by Fennell because his use of the term 'rednecks' emphasised the imported artificiality of this division. Ireland has actually not changed that much since the 1980s, i.e. all of the key structural changes that have produced the social upheaval since that decade had already occurred by that point.
This weird politics, still at its infancy when the shrewd Fennell commented on it, has now grown into an all-encompassing monster. The picture above shows Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Fein leader, speaking after the disgraceful and reprehensible killing of journalist Lyra McKee in Derry and waving the pride flag in solidarity. LGBT rights have of course long been pulled into the orbit of the contemporary politics, and so the flag in a southern Irish context has come to signify liberation from Catholic repression. How interesting then that in the north, it is used by McDonald to express a rejection of a retrograde nationalism. Afterall, there is nothing to suggest that McKee's LGBT identity was anything but incidental to the killing. And yet the political currency of that identity is used by McDonald to shame her killers.
The LGBT movement and feminism, radical movements in their purest forms, have been effectively commandeered by liberalism and used by it to clobber its enemies. The street credibility, authenticity and general coolness of these movements, which accrues from an earlier and genuinely disruptive radicalism, has conferred on them a moral power which liberalism has exploited shamelessly. This reserve of moral power is fast depleting but not before liberalism has mined every last bit. And not before Sinn Fein has subscribed fully to liberalism.
Why do I call this politics weird? For the simple reason that it is clearly dysfunctional and seems to distract from monstrous incompetence and shoddy governance. It is not a politics that delivers for the plain people of Ireland. What Ireland needs is a new politics. The enemy designate for this? Let's go back to what works; the British, colonial imperialism of all forms, rentiers, landlords, planters.
