Irish Politics for beginners

Last month I did something I swore I’d never do. I joined Facebook. I didn’t do it because I’m interested in fake news or having my personal information harvested and sold to some shady election fixing company. I did it because the drama group to whom I belong only post updates there. Group emails are too complicated it seems.

I felt dirty when I registered, as though I’d just handed over a small piece of my soul. Luckily, I had a spare and rarely used email account available, so I can separate the evil world of Facebook from my normal day to day life. It sits there in the background like an evil troll that I only see if I deliberately go looking for it.

I’m not on Twitter, Instagram or any other social media (apart from the sanitised arena of Linkedin). This is not through contempt for the modern world of communication. It’s more that I’m nervous that I’ll get drunk one night and post something that I’ll later come to regret when I’m famous. I’d hate to be receiving my Nobel Prize for Literature or Oscar for Best Screenplay, only to have the papers splash a headline the next day with my ill-advised comments on the Me-Too movement from five years previously.

Fortunately, this space is anonymous, so good luck tracking down these opinions when I’m accepting the Booker prize.

A friend at work here in New Zealand asked me to explain Irish politics. He’d read something in the Guardian and wanted to know how we ended up with parties with unpronounceable names that have swapped power for one hundred years.

I told him that Fine Gael, the current holders of the keys to power are descendants of the rich farmers who benefited from the distribution of land after the English absentee landlords were forced to give their estates back to the Irish in the late nineteenth century. They didn’t give it back to all the Irish though. Just like when the Soviet Union collapsed, those in the know got their hands on the good stuff first. Not surprisingly, these people are the most pro-British that you’ll find in Ireland which is not surprising considering they benefitted most from the British departure.

A typical big farmer would leave the land to his eldest son. If the second son was smart, he’d be sent to the seminary unless he realised that he was interested in girls before the bishop got his hands on him. Then he’d run off and join the British Civil service and end up in Delhi or some other God forsaken corner of the Empire.

If the second son was too thick to pass his Latin or Civil Service exams, he would join the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). That was the Police force that the British set up to control Ireland and particularly its property. There is a push in Ireland now to commemorate the RIC members who were killed in the Irish War of Independence. And guess what, it’s the Fine Gael party that’s pushing it. Blood it seems is thicker than water.

Those supporting the commemoration are pushing the line that every Irish person is descended from a RIC member. This is rubbish. Most of us are descended from tenant farmers and factory workers. The sort of people the RIC used to harass, not recruit from.

Fianna Fail (the other party with an unpronounceable name to Kiwis) are descendants of these tenant farmers and factory workers. They spent the 19^th century trying their best to cheat the British, so it’s no surprise that Fianna Fail politicians and supporters have problems with paying tax and respecting things like planning permission.

Sinn Fein are the other party I get asked about. They are the party no respectable Irish person would ever support because of their association with the IRA during the ‘Troubles’. If you look at the last one hundred years of Irish history, then you can see where Sinn Fine came from. Sixty per cent of the population accepted the Treaty that the British offered. This was mainly Fine Gael supporters and everyone else tired of years of War. The Civil War erupted shortly afterwards, leaving a stain on Ireland forever. When it finished, the vast majority of rebels buried their arms and became Fianna Fail. Those who still refused to surrender became Sinn Fein. The Irish People’s Front of Judea. They keep splitting of course as more and more of them join the mainstream. Eventually, it will be one man in a tree screaming about 800 years of oppression and holding onto Ireland’s last Armalite rifle.

And that leaves us with the Labour and Green party. These are the parties that most closely represent politics overseas, although the nature of Irish coalition governments is that these parties have traditionally been the junior members of government and sell their soul for a government car and a fancy office. They tend to get none of their policies put into practice but pay the price at the ballot box for all the failings of the right-wing parties they get into bed with.

Sinn Fein has never been in government in Ireland and plays on the virtue of never having made a mistake as a result. They have hoovered up all the left-wing votes in Ireland and decimated Labour and the Green Party. But that will all change when they eventually fall into the same trap and agree to prop up a Fianna Fail or Fine Gael in government. That will be the end of Sinn Fein. They know it but they’ll still decide to consume the golden apple. It is the destiny of all small parties in Ireland. They crave power and are ultimately destroyed by it.

My New Zealand friend looked baffled. New Zealand politics is a lot more straightforward. That is until you try to explain New Zealand First, the junior partner in the current three-party coalition government. But all that will be explained in the last part of my three-part rant on global politics. Next up is Brexit.