This begins with an account of a trip I am about to take to some of the counties of the province of Ulster in the north of the island of Ireland – Cavan and Donegal in the Republic, and Fermanagh, Derry and Antrim in Northern Ireland.
It is a few months before the latest date – 31 October – for Britain’s exit from the EU. Recently appointed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in typically intemperate language, has made a ‘do or die’ pledge to uphold Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc on that date, even if it means ‘crashing out’ of the Union without a deal. ‘Do or die. Come what may’. This attitude represents a threat to the current, comparatively open British border in Ireland – the so-called soft or frictionless border that was negotiated through the Good Friday Agreement (10 April 1998), the political culmination of the Northern Ireland peace process in the 1990s. Millions of column inches have been written on the ramifications of a no-deal Brexit that fails to honour the ‘backstop’ that the EU insists on – that is, the guarantee of maintaining a ‘seamless’ border on the island of Ireland. Suffice to say, the potential threat of renewed violence in Ireland bubbles beneath the possibility of renewed physical checks or infrastructure demarcating the line between the Republic and Northern Ireland.
Frontier, boundary, partition, borderline, seamless, porous, frictionless, hard, soft, borderlands, boglands, drumlins, crossroads, marches, limit, bounds, perimeter, divide, red line, blood red line, regulatory alignment, technological solution, backstop, single customs territory, cross-border trade, provision, withdrawal agreement, customs checks, permanent solution, no-deal Brexit, civil peace, civil war. ‘Do or die. Come what may’: This is a time for worrying about borders. Seamus Heaney’s line from his poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’, on the violent birth pangs of the Troubles near the poet’s birthplace in rural County Derry, is apropos here: ‘The “voice of sanity” is getting hoarse.’ (From the 1975 Faber collection North.)
As it happens, my maternal great-grandfather (James Cooney) and paternal great-grandmother (Mary Duncan) were born in neighbouring Ulster counties – Cavan and Fermanagh respectively – both leaving Ireland in the second half of the 19th-century, eventually for New Zealand, before the dividing line between the two counties was imposed. Emigration, immigration, subjects in transition, migratory forces and balances of power that regulate them still temper, insistently, the relations between how bodies of land and people are composed and articulated.
But my methods are not so easily defined – I’m going to wait and see: ‘What for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine my course’ writes Walter Benjamin, of his approach to the Paris Arcades project. Adorno defined the form of the essay, as practiced by Benjamin, as an ‘unmethodological method’. Deviation, hesitation, delay and detour colour this initial foray into Ulster at this moment in time. I leave on Monday.
Today The Times leaked the government’s classified ‘Yellowhammer’ report on preparations for a no-deal Brexit. This includes the prediction that avoiding the return of a ‘hard border’ in Ireland is unlikely to be sustainable and that ‘protests and direct action with road blockades’ are likely. See responses from Irish politicians in this Irish Times article.
From the ‘Yellowhammer’ report:
Northern Ireland On Day 1 of No Deal, Her Majesty’s government will activate the “no new checks with limited exceptions” model announced on March 13, establishing a legislative framework and essential operations and system on the ground, to avoid an immediate risk of a return to a hard border on the UK side.
The model is likely to prove unsustainable because of economic, legal and biosecurity risks. With the UK becoming a “third [non-EU] country”, the automatic application of EU tariffs and regulatory requirements for goods entering Ireland will severely disrupt trade. The expectation is that some businesses will stop trading or relocate to avoid either paying tariffs that will make them uncompetitive or trading illegally; others will continue to trade but will experience higher costs that may be passed on to consumers. The agri-food sector will be hardest hit, given its reliance on complicated cross-border supply chains and the high tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade.
Disruption to key sectors and job losses are likely to result in protests and direct action with road blockades. Price and other differentials are likely to lead to the growth of the illegitimate economy. This will be particularly severe in border communities where criminal and dissident groups already operate with greater freedom. Given the tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade, there will be pressure to agree new arrangements to supersede the Day 1 model within days or weeks.
See the Irish Times special investigation on Brexit & the border here.
I left EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin with burning eyes and ringing ears. The museum is located in Dublin’s docklands, in the vaults of an industrial building dating back to 1820, initially used as a bonded customs warehouse for tobacco and wine. It now houses a shopping mall. The museum underneath strikes me as a souped-up version of the corridor displays sometimes seen in airports that serve as a taster of the country you are about to enter – generally, exercises in banality. EPIC is dedicated to histories of the Irish diaspora and emigration from Ireland – clearly a fascinating subject. Unfortunately, it primarily consists of soundbytes and rapidly moving, ruthlessly edited film clips: sound and image bleeding and morphing in an infuriating fashion. Throughout the galleries, mawkish and pointless ‘interactivity’ (Guess the Outlaw!) is liberally scattered. It seems to have been designed for people with a concentration span of about three seconds and the ability to read no more than two sentences at a time. A whole room of fake ‘olde worlde’ book spines with titles by authors from Ireland and the Irish diaspora is par for the course.
Bookshelves of fake books with titles of books by authors from Ireland and the Irish diaspora. EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin.
One ‘byte’ that caught me was a snippet of a sentence from the writer Edna O’Brien: ‘There must be something secretly catastrophic about a country from which so many people go, escape…’ Manifestations of this sense of catastrophe is very evident on the streets of Dublin where, around every corner, there is a plaque or monument to fallen heroes, victims, martyrs, to those massacred or starved, impoverished, imprisoned, locked out, removed, shamed or otherwise driven from homes, workplaces or homelands. It is reminiscent of Freud’s image of the unconscious, in Civilization and its Discontents, as a Rome ‘in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones’.
Outside EPIC there is a memorial to the Great Irish Famine (1845- 1849), which commemorates the forced emigration of 1,490 tenants from Strokestown Park estate in Co. Roscommon (now the site of the National Famine Museum) during the summer of 1847. The tenants were forced to walk the 167km route along the Royal Canal to Dublin, where they boarded the open deck of a packet steamer to Liverpool. From there, they travelled on some of the worst of what became known as ‘coffin ships’. One of them was the Naomi, on which 196 out of 421 passengers died on the voyage from Liverpool to Quebec.
A pair of children’s shoes: detail from the Famine Memorial in Custom House Quay, Dublin. Commemorates the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849). Artist: Rowan Gillespie.Children’s shoes found in a famine graveyard near the Erne Hospital in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. On display at the Cavan County Museum, Ballyjamesduff.
Reversing the course of this 1847 eviction, since 2017 a hotel in the remote town of Ballaghaderreen in Co. Roscommon gave asylum to around 334 Syrians fleeing war-stricken homelands (though the contract with the former Abbyfield Hotel expires in December 2019). This accommodation was one of a number of Emergency Reception and Orientation Centres (EROC) across Ireland providing sanctuary during the height of the recent mass migration of people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe.
Latter day ‘coffin ships’, particularly those crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa, are well documented. Since 1993, a group called United for Intercultural Action has been compiling a list of ‘documented deaths of refugees and migrants due to the restrictive policies of “Fortress Europe” ‘ (here), which numbered 36,570 as of 1 April 2019 (though there would be many more undocumented). Earlier this week there were reports of migrants jumping off an overcrowded Spanish rescue ship and trying to swim to Lampedusa. By that stage, the Proactiva Open Arms ship had been refused entry by Italy for over three weeks since far right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has taken a hard line on migration and is attempting to close Lampedusa to migrant rescue ships.
Meanwhile back in the province of Ulster, following the revelations of the leaked ‘Yellowhammer’ report, a suspected bomb was reported near the border of Co. Fermanagh and Co. Cavan close to the Cavan to Clones road. When PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) officers attended the scene, a bomb exploded nearby, leading police to believe that they had been lured to the spot by dissidents attempting to murder PSNI officers. I overheard someone in Cavan say: ‘Any excuse, they’ll come out of the woodwork’. It is a common sentiment amongst borderland locals fearful of renewed sectarian violence if the border is fortified following Brexit. (Undoubtedly, the incident would have brought unpleasant memories to many older locals of the bombing in the border town Belturbet in Co. Cavan on 28 December 1972. Two teenagers, Geraldine O’Reilly (aged 15) and Paddy Stanley (aged 16) lost their lives. Eight others were seriously injured. Both of the youngsters were on Christmas holidays from school. Geraldine was waiting for her order in a local chip shop when the bomb hit. Paddy was calling his parents from a public phone box when he lost his life. Across the border in Co. Monaghan, another bomb had been detonated earlier in the day, seriously injuring two men. A third bomb exploded outside a pub at Mullnagoad, near Pettigo, in Co. Donegal. Nobody claimed responsibility for the Belturbet attack, but it was thought to be the work of loyalist paramilitaries.)
These are just two recent examples that suggest how ‘border thinking’ (Walter Mignolo) tempers the way the contemporary world is perceived, performed and produced. The complex interplay between borders, as well as frontiers like the Mediterranean, represent multiple ranges of register: bridge – dividing line, porous – watertight, soft – hard, unauthorised – authorised, invisible – visible, no-man’s land – demarcation zone, etc. Rather than being marginal, borders are increasingly key nodes for understanding the contemporary political landscape. According to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their book Border as Method, ‘borders play a key role in the production of the heterogeneous time and space for contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism’.
For some years, I have been thinking about how concepts linked to hospitality may be a useful way of thinking through such negotiable and contested spaces. The point of departure was Jacques Derrida’s political analyses, in a sequence of seminars from the late 1990s,[1] in which he reads ‘hospitality’ as an aporetic space between the principles of unconditional or absolute hospitality – the principle of allowing whomever or whatever enters one’s domain without reservations or calculations – and conditional hospitality – the laws required to control and protect ‘home.’ Rather than setting these principles of hospitality as mutually exclusive forces, Derrida argues for an irreducible relation between the two.
Derrida understood ‘hospitality’ as an interrogative term to consider both public space as a bounded zone, in which the stranger/foreigner (étranger) is subject to the codes, rules and regulations of its host (home, city or state), and the common right of any stranger to any space; that is, the ethical imperative that the host receives whatever and whomever enters its domain. The radical basis of Derrida’s interpretation calls for the hyperbolic, unlimited ethics of (unconditional) hospitality to orient the (conditional) realm of legislation operating between hosts and guests, challenging the more conventional situation in which the unconditional is contained or guarded by the precepts of conditional hospitality. Radically re-orienting the conditional identity of hospitality, which Derrida summarises as the requirements for ‘a police inquisition, a registration of information, or a straightforward frontier control,’ invokes threshold politics as an ‘unstable place of strategy and decision.’ This, Derrida writes, is ‘[a] difference both subtle and fundamental, a question that arises on the threshold of “home,” and on the threshold between two inflections.’ For Derrida, this is an absolute principle: ‘An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire ethics is decided by it.’[2]
[1] Key publications related to this topic include: Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Adieu to Emmanual Levinas, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999); On Cosmopolitanism and Foregiveness, trans. by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000).
[2] Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Hospitality,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 66-7.
Richard Wentworth, Glad That Things Don’t Talk (1982). Zinc, rubber, cable, lead. 34 x 68 x 33 cm. IMMA Collection: Loan, Weltkunst Foundation, 1994.
I was drawn to this small work called Glad That Things Don’t Talk (1982) by English artist Richard Wentworth, on loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). It is typical of his whimsical found or fabricated constructions but was also quite specific to my situation at the time since, after trudging in the rain from the Hugh Lane Gallery to see Francis Bacon’s reconstructed studio, to EPIC and then on to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells followed by the long stretch to IMMA, I rather fancied the thought of galoshes, bearing in mind that my trousers were wet to the knees. I also identified with the lead ball attached to the back of the overshoes since, at the time, I felt like one of those old dogs who sit down on the pavement in the middle of a walk and refuse to move.
While I was in Dublin, it had either just stopped raining, was raining, or was about to rain. After I got to Cavan, the next two days hovered between teeming and torrential. On the Friday, the weather report on the radio promised a ‘heatwave’ for the next few days. The radio announcer interjected wryly: ‘Sure, it’ll be an Irish sort of a heatwave: a damp one, in other words’. We are in the boglands, so expect a bog. By midday, though the temperature was only around 21 degrees, locals were sweating buckets and mopping their brows ostentatiously. I suspect they were hoping for the return of the rain.
In his account of a trip to Ireland in the mid-1950s (Irish Journal: A Traveller’s Portrait of Ireland), Heinrich Böll writes that ‘The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather’. Rain also features heavily in Colm Tóibín’s account of his walk along the border in the 1980s, at the height of the Troubles. An old fellow he meets along the way rather gleefully welcomes the onset of rain since it signals the promise of a warm pub: ‘Nothing for it but the high chair!’ On another occasion, Tóibín is feeling creeped out on a lonely lane near Kiltyclogher when he sees a man coming towards him ‘in a way which was deliberate and ominous. I considered turning back. I stared straight at him as he came close. “It rains oftentimes,” he said, as he passed me by.’
I was sheltering from the rain in a pub in Virginia, Co. Cavan, waiting for the 11:36 bus to Ballyjamesduff. To be precise, the pub was part of a double-barrelled business under the ownership of a James Matthews – Lounge Bar and Funeral Directors. I would guess they have a monopoly on wakes in the area. This hostelry-cum-final resting place was a fitting symbol for the transition between life and death – an emotional and physical borderland that strongly resonated since I had recently returned from a long journey to Christchurch, New Zealand, to experience the last few days of my mother’s life and departing, aged 90. As a staunch Catholic, she had already received Supreme Unction – a ritual designed to connect the body to a spiritual realm – by the time I got to her bedside. As Rosemary Hill eloquently puts it, ‘Supreme Unction at the approach of death involves anointing the portals between the body and the material world – the eyes, nose, lips, ears and hands – to mark the end of the senses’ dealings with the things of the earth.’ (‘Was Plato too Fat? LRB, 10 October 2019, p.35). My mother’s death was precipitated by an inability to swallow, the beginnings (or endings) of a slow starvation, due to cancer of the oesophagus. The threshold condition of the ‘James Matthews’ also stood for the final shift in state signalled by the inability to drink, to swallow – the transitional drift from the pub lounge to the funeral parlour, to last rites and ashes, from the corporeal to a realm beyond (at least according to the Catholic ritual).
Of course, my mother did not willingly succumb to the sacrifice of starvation as did the republican hunger strikers of the Long Kesh and other Northern Irish prisons in the early 1980s. The most famous of the ten men who starved themselves to death in Long Kesh in 1981, protesting against the removal of Special Category Status for political prisoners, was Bobby Sands, who died on 5 May 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike, aged 27. The diary entry he wrote to launch his fasting reads: ‘I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.’ As South African journalist David Beresford recounts in his book on these events, Ten Dead Men, the 1981 hunger strikes hark back in Irish history to the practice as used by early twentieth-century republicans during the flashpoint of the Anglo-Irish conflict at the time. Prominent amongst these was the poet, playwright and philosopher Terence MacSwiney – the Lord Mayor of Cork and commanding officer of the local brigade of the IRA – who was captured by British Troops and sentenced to two years’ jail for sedition. Protesting that the British had no jurisdiction in Ireland, MacSwiney immediately went on hunger strike and died in Brixton prison on his seventy-fourth day without food. MacSwiney wrote a famous line often quoted on murals in the Bogside and the Falls: ‘…the contest on our side is not one of rivalry or vengeance, but of endurance. It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.’
Beresford refers to W. B. Yeats’ 1903 play The King’s Threshold, in which the poet Seanchan goes on hunger-strike against the king Guaire. The play weaves a narrative around the ancient history of the hunger strike in Ireland as a weapon to protest grievances:
KING: …He has chosen death:
Refusing to eat or drink, that he may bring
Disgrace upon me; for there is a custom, that if a man
Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve
Upon another’s threshold till he die,
The Common People, for all time to come,
Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold,
Even though it be the King’s.
The King’s Threshold, by W. B. Yeats
Both Troscadh (fasting on or against a person) or Cealachan (achieving justice by starvation) are recorded in the Senchus Mór – the ancient civil code of pre-Christian Ireland. The legal tract specified circumstances of the action of a complainant fasting on the doorstep of the defendant with the aim of recovering a debt or objecting to a perceived injustice. The defendant, who was also obliged to fast, was disgraced if he did not submit to the procedure and pay (or pledge to pay) the debt. If the fast ended in death, Beresford writes, the defendant ‘was held responsible for [the complainant’s] death and had to pay compensation to his family. It is probable that such fasting had particular moral force at the time because of the honour attached to hospitality and the dishonour of having a person starving outside one’s house.’ (Ten Dead Men, London: Harper Collins, 1994, p. 15)
This speculative link between honour and hospitality – or the dishonour of allowing someone to die on the threshold of your home – offers a pointed take on the treatment of stateless human beings fleeing war and persecution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 2012, among some 300 other fasting detainees, the Iranian asylum seeker Omid Sorousheh carried out a hunger strike for 50 days on the island of Nauru, the remote site used by the Australian government for the ‘offshore processing’ (double-speak for indefinite detention) of people seeking asylum, protection, resettlement and, ultimately, liberty – in wider ethical terms, hospitality. The Australian government preside over a policy of inhospitality, designing the camps as dumping grounds or deterrents, according to a Guardian report, ‘to discourage anybody from seeking sanctuary in Australia by boat.’ Close to death, Sorousheh was air-lifted to Brisbane for treatment. As soon as he was deemed fit for travel, the Australian Department of Immigration returned him to the Nauru detention centre. Back to the scarcely human, inhospitable, dishonourable, ‘threshold of another trembling world’, having been barred from crossing another threshold into a home that might offer a place in the world. Closer to these shores, on 23rd October 39 Vietnamese people, including 10 teenagers, were found dead in the back of a truck parked in an industrial park in Essex, having been shunted across borders from Vietnam, Bulgaria, Belgium and onwards. And, in an action that Una Mullally calls ‘abhorrent and pathetic’, four Fine Gael MEPs voted to block a European Parliament resolution to try to stop migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. An appalled Fintan O’Toole, who reminds readers of Ireland’s extensive history of post-Famine economic migrants, comments that:
We know them. They are our grandparents and aunts and uncles. They are not commodities to be trafficked or spectres to frighten voters with. They do work that needs to be done. They have names and lives and families and the same desire for decency and dignity as we have. They are us and, if we let them die so casually, we kill something in ourselves.
Before her father (a Matthews, or ‘the’ Matthews perhaps?) bundled her away, a wee girl showed me her ‘list’. ‘I’m doing my list’ she told me. The impulse to produce lists is understandable given the business of administration that the girl (of no more than four or five years old) no doubt espies on a daily basis – inventories, purchases, totting up takings etc. The list comprised a freeform cloud of doodles and squiggles. I asked about the most coherent of these – an upside-down spiral with a line running through it. She told me it was a bottle. ‘Is it a particular bottle?’ I asked, thinking she may have copied the symbol from a label on one of the bottles behind the bar. ‘No’, she forbearingly explained: ‘It is all bottles. Every bottle.’ It was a shadow image on Plato’s cave. Or an archetype. This clumsy adult had failed to access the primitive unconscious at play in the formation of this list. A very human impulse, a seed in the soul of an Irish girl to make sense of her world. A seed in the spirit of a line from the 1992 story ‘Time and Tide’ by Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, in which the protagonist, Nell, a book editor, gives some advice to a would-be writer, Millie: ‘The seed is within yourself. “How?” I hear you ask. Simple. The sperms are the moonbeams and sunbeams and shadows of every thought, half thought, and follicle of feeling that have attended you since your first breath of hardship. Think only of big things, Millie, big sad, lonely, glorious, archetypal things.’
Recorded in my notebook: ‘All the bottles.’
The girl in the pub is, of course, right to begin her study of symbology early. Ireland is steeped in symbols and signs, and there was a time not so long ago, during the Troubles, when a misreading of symbols, from the complicated iconology of Orange Order banners to the myriad symbols adopted by republican factions, may have been a matter of life or death. While I was in Ulster, I had direct experience of this sensitivity to symbols. In Donegal, the blue colour of my seemingly innocuous M & S rain jacket, bought especially for the trip, meant I was accused of being a member of the police. Twice. And again (I think, though not in so many words) in the Falls Road in Belfast. Spotting my blue-clad figure coming towards him, a local tapped a metal ruler he was holding (a tool of his trade?) on the edge of a rubbish bin. I took this to be a throwback to the practice, used by republican communities during the Troubles, of hitting bin lids to signal the approach of the Royal Ulster Constabulary or the British Army (it was also used to mark the death of hunger strikers in 1981 and to rally ensuing protests). Thankfully, my kiwi accent distinguished me as a harmless tourist (and, crucially in some circles, not English). An Irish artist friend speculated that the identification of me and my blue raincoat with the police may have had something to do with the state of attentiveness such a recce requires – I don’t know, but it was a curious thing indeed. Maybe it was paranoia. Across the way on the Shankill Road, no such doubt: the appearence of a Donegal tweed cap I was wearing, which I’d picked up in Glencolumbkille (Co. Donegal), prompted a spotty youth to shout: ‘F**k off back to Donegal.’ Happy, by the way, to be associated with that fine county, and at least I was no longer being branded a cop, ‘that seeming incarnation of a hostile world’, as Hannah Arendt put it. (The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, p. 88).
The offending Donegal tweed cap.
So, I was in this slightly dark and gloomy pub in Virginia, sheltering from the rain while I waited for the bus, literally because of sperm: the birth of my maternal great-grandfather – James ‘Jimmy’ Cooney – was registered in Ballyjamesduff, hence my pilgrimage. My research on distant relations in the vicinity was pretty lack-lustre due to a feeling of entropy produced by bereavement, so I was heading there pretty much on spec. Just ‘blowing in’, as my mother would’ve said. An email from an extremely dedicated family archivist with the lowdown on the Cavan Cooneys – ‘my people’, as they say in Ireland – arrived a day too late — I’ d already moved on. Fortunately, a friend in Dublin had spoken of a Ballyjamesduff family connection. Apparently, she herself had spent many a childhood summer in the area and her first cousin was currently the director of the Cavan County Museum. The cousin was ‘great craic’ and bound to be of help, so my friend reassured me. The bus trundled through green, gentle, rolling hills and fields. The sun tried to nudge through the clouds.
In the Irish country song ‘Come Back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff’, written by Percy French in 1912, Ballyjamesduff is remembered, lovingly, as a garden of Eden: ‘The grass it is green, as from Ballyjamesduff,/And the blue sky is over it all.’ I wonder if Jimmy Cooney heard the place calling for him all the way to Oamaru , in the South Island of New Zealand (over 19,000km), as did Paddy Riley, the ‘toil-torn and rough’ emigrant to Scotland. In the song, a voice: ‘Still whispers over the sea’:
‘Come back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff,/Come home Paddy Reilly to me.’
While the real Paddy O’Reilly, a local jarvey (driver of a hackney coach or jaunting car) who drove round the town, often with French as a passenger, eventually returned to Ballyjamesduff (according to this Belfast Telegraph article), the majority of ‘Paddies’ left, never to return. Jimmy Cooney was amongst these, though he did not forget his far-off homeland. Having become a successful businessman in Oamaru, he was to play a minor role in the early twentieth century fight for home rule in Ireland. According to his death notice in the local paper, published on July 27, 1938:
As an Irishman he was staunch and in the bad old days when Ireland was fighting for freedom and Irish delegates paid visits to New Zealand to enlist financial assistance, ‘Cooney’s Store’ was the focus of activity by local Home Rulers for the cause of Ireland’s valiant fight, and Mr Cooney acted as treasurer for all the committees formed to assist the delegates.
It’s amazing to think how this small-town shopkeeper, perched on the far reaches of the Empire, was to remain interwoven in this international network. A photo of himself in front of what became known as ‘Cooney’s Corner’, showing the shopfront festooned with flags (including what I guess is the Irish tricolour), suggests he was very much aware of this internationalist outlook.
Jimmy Cooney in front of ‘Cooney’s Corner’, a grain and seed store on the intersection of Severn, Coquet and Thames Streets in Oamaru, Te Wai Pounamu/South Island, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
It is clear that Jimmy developed into canny businessman in his adopted hometown after he arrived in 1878. He’d found his way there via a spell in Queensland for a few years, having left Ballyjamesduff aged 16 or 17. In an article in The Tablet (21 February 1999), written to celebrate the affixing of a plaque on the site of ‘Cooney’s Corner’, the writer Fred Howard recounts that the population of Oamaru was around 5000 at the time and the country was in a depression. Since wool was being sold off at a song, farmers turned to growing grain to supplement their income. Jimmy set himself up as a grain and seed merchant, with a sideline importing tea from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). (Remember too that this was less than 40 years after the signing in 1840 of the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi between representatives of the British Crown and Māori chiefs (rangatira) acting on behalf of their hapū (sub-tribes), so this was a very new colonial set-up. As a comparison, the Irish plantations – the foundations of the colonisation of Ireland by England – date back to the 16th and 17th centuries. In fact, Cavan town was the first Ulster town under the Ulster Plantation scheme to be incorporated and receive its charter, in November 1610.)
I wonder if Jimmy’s departure from Co. Cavan around the end of the 1860s was accompanied by an ‘American Wake’, which is described in a caption at the Cavan County Museum as an Irish ritual that mirrors the vigil kept over the dead until their burial. The ‘American Wake’ acknowleded the sense of bereavement felt by the family of the emigrant, since it was in many cases a farewell to a loved one who might never be seen again:
The American Wake was a combination of celebrating the person who was leaving and mourning over their going. It would be marked by singing, music, drink and tobacco and continue through the night until the early hours with serious conversation and advice for the young emigrant. As the time to depart drew near women noted for their ability to keen (wail or lament) would be called upon to acquaint listeners with the virtues of the emigrant and the suffering brought upon the parents by the departure. This eulogy was given in a high pitched wail, resulting in a room full of keening women and weeping men.
These sad farewells would have been a common feature in the social life of Ireland both before and after the Great Famine of 1845-9. The population of Ireland sank from 8,200,000 in the early 1840s to 4,400,000 in 1911, with a dramatic loss of 2,225,000 of the population between 1845 and 1851 through disease, starvation and emigration. (R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, London: Penguin, 1989, p. 323). At least 3,000,000 emigrated from Ireland between 1845 and 1870. (Foster, p. 345). Jimmy’s emigration (along with many of his siblings) from a smallholding in the Cavan townland of Carricknamaddoo (Irish: Carraig na Madadh: the rock of the dogs) is probably in part explained by what R.F. Foster identifies as an ‘intrinsic part of the Irish rural mentality: the need to preserve the family farm.’
Emigration after the Famine did not release land for consolidation into larger units, as the theoreticians had hoped; farm owners were not emigrating. Their ‘assisting relatives’ were … to clear the way for an undivided inheritance by leaving. Subdivision and partible inheritance had long given way to the ‘stem family’ method of descent, where one inheritor took over, often late in life. (Foster, p. 351).
Jimmy’s future wife, Margaret Page, was also the offspring of an Irish farmer, in her case from Galway.
James Brenan, The Finishing Touch, 1876, oil on canvas. In the middle of the composition, set in a Cork farmhouse, the stooped figure of a father of a young woman, on the eve of her departure to America, lays his hand on her green travelling box as the engraver finishes decorating the carving of her name ‘O’Connor’ and destination ‘New York’. Behind these two, on the left, the young woman is adjusting her hat and talking to her mother. To the right, her younger brother carries turf into the kitchen, in a creel on his back. A shadowy figure behind him contemplates the scene.Notice promoting female emigration to New South Wales from Cork, Ireland c. 1835The son and daughter of Irish farmers – James Cooney and Margaret Page were married on 24 June 1884 at St. Patrick’s Church, Oamaru, New Zealand/Aotearoa.
When I got to the Cavan County Museum in Ballyjamesduff, I met my friend’s first cousin – Savina Donohoe, who was the director of the museum. Like a whirlwind, she was soon on the trail of the Cooneys of Co. Cavan until we stumbled across a name I recognised from my mother’s archival papers – one Eithne Brady. Eithne and I arranged to meet the following day. She picked me up from my hotel in the morning and our first stop was St. Mary’s Church cemetery, Clanaphilip (Eaglais Chlainne Philib), in the townland of Termon (An Tearmann), in the parish of Killinkere (Cillín Chéir – the little church of Cair). This is where some of my ancestors are buried, but the gravestone erected by my great-great-grandfather, Peter Cooney, Jimmy’s father, solely commemorates his first wife, Jimmy’s mother and my great-great-grandmother Susan Cooney (nee Cusack), who died on 17th June, 1857, aged 32.
The inscription on the gravestone reads:
Peter Cooney in memory of his beloved wife Susan Cooney who died June 17th 1857, aged 32 years
Adieu dear friends wipe off your tears
Here I must lie until Christ appears
and when he comes I hope to rise
unto a life that never dies
Eithne’s great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather Peter Cooney’s remains are also here. One of his sons from his second wife Elizabeth (Eliza) Brady (b. 1838, d. 1901), Thomas, managed to buy out the Carricknamaddoo farm, where my great-grandfather Jimmy was also brought up. Thomas’s son Peter is Eithne’s father. She still lives on the farm today.
Carricknamaddoo homestead, as it is today.This window may be all that remains of the 19th building that my great-grandfather Jimmy grew up in.Cooney farm at Carricknamaddoo (Carraig na Madadh: the rock of the dogs).Cooney farm at Carricknamaddoo (Carraig na Madadh: the rock of the dogs).
Last week, the Queen agreed to Boris Johnson’s motion to suspend (prorogue) parliament days after it is due to return this week. The closure is expected to be for around five weeks, which means that the time for politicians to push through legislation to stop a no-deal Brexit before parliament is suspended is severely limited. The return of parliamentary business after the prorogation is proposed for 14 October – dangerously close to the date of Britain’s proposed departure from the EU on the 31st.
Protests have taken place across Britain against what is seen as an anti-democratic move (#DefendOurDemocracy; #StopTheCoup). Crowds in London and other cities including Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Swansea, Liverpool and Belfast chanted lines such as ‘Stop the Coup’, ‘Boris, Boris, Boris – out, out, out’ and ‘Bollocks to Brexit’. Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell called Boris Johnson a ‘dictator’, adding that the suspension of Parliament had ‘rightfully’ been called ‘a very British coup’.
In Belfast, protesters underlined their further lack of political representation in Northern Ireland in the context of the collapse of the devolved power-sharing executive and assembly in Stormont in 2017. The Northern Irish Assembly was established as a condition of the Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement) of 10 April 1998. The Assembly was set up as a structure for the DUP and Sinn Féin to work together in a mandatory coalition in which nationalist and unionist parties share power. The coalition dissolved when Martin McGuinness resigned as deputy first minister over the DUP’s handling of certain policies, which meant that DUP leader Arlene Foster lost her job as first minister, triggering the collapse of the Assembly. Brenda Gough, an activist who helped promote the Belfast protest on Saturday, is reported in the Belfast Telegraph as saying: ‘A lot of people don’t seem to understand that politicians work for us, they are there to represent our voices, and we understand what it is like not to have that in Northern Ireland because obviously Stormont has been shut down for two-and-a-half years’. She added: ‘The fact that democracy has now been removed from our society is exceptionally sinister’.
Raymond McCord, a victims’ campaigner in Northern Ireland whose son was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1997, is launching a legal bid in Belfast to reverse Boris Johnson’s advice to the Queen to suspend Parliament. This injunction is being pursued in advance of judicial review proceedings against the Government to stop a no-deal Brexit, which McCord claims would damage the Irish peace process. On Boris Johnson, he is quoted by the Belfast Telegraph as saying: ‘This is a Prime Minister who will do anything to get his own way without concerns for the people of Northern Ireland and the peace process.’ Judges will decide today whether the injunction case will be heard later this week. The full hearing is currently set for 16 September.
In yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, the European Commission’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier is unequivocal about the EU’s commitment to the Irish backstop, deal or no deal: ‘In case of no deal, all the UK’s financial and other obligations from its past EU membership will continue to exist, as well as obviously the international obligations it has to protect the Good Friday Agreement, in all its dimensions.’
Tuesday 3 September, 2019: I’m sitting in my hotel room in Belfast watching BBC news. It’s just gone nine in the evening, and there is still a raucous crowd of protestors blocking streets outside Westminister as MPs debate the possibility of pushing forward legislation to prevent a no-deal Brexit. More than 20 Tory rebels are being threatened with de-selection if they don’t vote with Boris Johnson’s government on the bill – these include Winston Churchill’s grandson Sir Nicholas Soames, former chancellor Phillip Hammond and long-standing Tory MP and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke. Depressed, frazzled and fractious MPs are firing potshots at each other across the House. It’s all very complicated.
Earlier in the day, former conservative member Philip Lee defected to the Liberal Democrat party. Midway through Boris Johnson’s speech, Lee crossed the floor of the chamber to the Lib Dem benches, leaving Johnson without a Commons majority. The Guardianquotes a statement from Lee that says ‘he had departed due to the way Johnson was pursuing a “damaging Brexit” that could “put lives at risk.” ‘
A snap general election on Monday 14 October may be called if the bill goes ahead to take a no-deal Brexit off the negotiating table – that is, if the Tory ‘Brexit Rebel Alliance’, Labour MPs, Lib Dems and others in support of the anti-no-deal motion take control of the Commons. Johnson needs a two-thirds Commons majority to call a general election.
It’s almost 10pm and the first vote is to allow MPs to take control of House of Commons’ business tomorrow in order to push through legislation to stop a no-deal Brexit and to delay the leaving date for another three months… those in favour seem confident…
There is a delay in the ‘Aye’ voting lobby due to overcrowding.
The vote is in at 22:13 – (Aye) 328-301 (No). The Ayes have it! The vote was in response to the question: Can MPs take control of Commons business? Boris is blustering… and tabling a motion to call an election. But Corbyn wants the no-deal-Brexit legislation to go through first… lots of baying and bellowing from the Tories. Boris is acting like a petulant school boy who’s not allowed a lollipop. But the defeat is decisive and no-one is very reassured by Boris’s witterings (or ‘Pifflepafflewifflewaffle’, as John Crace describes it) in which he tries to assure the house that he’s working towards a deal but he insists that he needs ‘no deal’ as part of his negotiating hand. He dubs the motion, put forward by backbencher Hilary Benn, ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s surrender bill’.
And all 21 Tory rebels are being expelled from the party.
Wednesday 4 September, 2019: The Benn bill passes in the House of Commons, and the prime minister’s attempt to force a general election on 15 October is thwarted – opposition parties defy Boris Johnson because they want to wait till the no-deal legislation passes into law before they agree to the snap election.
Following the series of defeats in the Commons – the first time a prime minister has lost his/her first parliament vote since 1894 – Johnson and his cronies resort to outrageous bullying tactics and schoolboy name-calling. Following the prime-minister’s lead, Brexiteer Andrea Jenkyns accuses Jeremy Corbyn of ‘chickening out’ of going to the polls on 15 October on BBC’s Newsnight. During PMQs on Wednesday 4 September, Johnson calls Corbyn a ‘chlorinated chicken‘ and (apparently) a ‘great big girl’s blouse‘ for not agreeing to the snap election and repeatedly accuses Labour MPs of being ‘frightened’ of an election. At least two British tabloids take up the ‘chicken’ line in their front page headlines:
To return to the subject of Northern Ireland, what I’m most interested in here is the rhetoric that surrounds Johnson’s coinage of the term ‘surrender bill’. Fintan O’Toole has brilliantly analysed this use of hysterical language in his book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (UK: Head of Zeus, 2018), in which he interprets the ‘structure of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) that underlies Brexit as a ‘strange sense of imaginary oppression’ (p. xxii): a fantasy of English nationalism in which the EU is cast as a German-led neo-fascist dictatorship from which England needs to ‘Take Back Control’, in the words of the Brexit campaign slogan for the 2016 Referendum. The perjorative ‘surrender’ bill likens the parliamentary opposition to no-Brexit to ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’, the phrase that was made up by a writer for the Simpsons TV series in 1995 to mock the French capitulation to the Germans in WWII. O’Toole extrapolates further from this deranged myth of English capitulation to Europe by describing how Brexit rhetoric conjures up:
…the fever-dream of an English Resistance, and its weird corollary: a desire to have actually been invaded so that one could – gloriously – resist. And not just resist but, in the ultimate apotheosis of masochism, die. Part of the allure of romantic anti-imperial nationalism is martyrdom. The executed leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, for example, stand as resonant examples of the potency of the myth of blood sacrifice. But in the ironic reversal of zombie imperialism, the appropriation of the imagery of resistance to a former colonizing power, this romance of martydom is mobilized as defiance of the EU.
Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (UK: Head of Zeus, 2018), 51.
These ideas resonate in Boris Johnson’s recent response to the prospect of further delays to Britain’s exit from the EU on 31 October. Remember back in June, before he was appointed PM, Johnson vowed on Talk Radio to secure Britain’s departure from the EU ‘do or die, come what may‘, with the ‘can do’ spirit of the plucky English character witnessed at Dunkirk (the latter, in O’Toole’s interpretation, ‘more toxic waste from the faded myths of English character as pain-as-redemption’, another ‘grand heroic failure’ (pp. 230-1)). This week, Johnson would rather ‘die in a ditch’ than delay Brexit.
O’Toole’s book focuses on Brexit as an essentially English phenomenon, but in Northern Ireland ‘No Surrender’ has a distinctly (white, marginalised and self-pityingly beleaguered) British identity all its own.
When I was in Belfast earlier this week, I found the line ‘No Surrender to the E.U.’ scrawled beneath an International Day of Peace mural. The wall is positioned in a buffer zone between two gates – still able to be closed at short notice to prevent access – in a ‘peace wall’ along Cupar Way between the (predominantly unionist/Protestant) Shankill Road neighourbood towards the left and the (predominantly republican/Catholic) Falls Road towards the right of the image below.
‘No Surrender to the E.U.’ – graffiti beneath an ‘International Day of Peace’ mural in the buffer zone between the Shankill and Falls Road neighbourhoods in Belfast. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.
The ‘peace walls’ or ‘peace lines’ are a series of security barriers in Northern Ireland that started going up in 1969 at the start of civil unrest in the region (‘the Troubles’) to separate predominantly Catholic rebublican neigbourhoods that identify with the Irish nationalist cause and Protestant loyalist groups that identify themselves as British Unionists. The original walls were roughly erected by residents during rioting in Derry, Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland urban areas where Catholic and Protestant communities lived in close proximity to one another. The walls were then incorporated into the British government’s strategy to contain sectarian violence, establishing internal borders that reinforced patterns of division and disconnection. In time, the consolidated control zones were fortified by watchtowers and security cameras. A 2017 report by the Belfast Interface Project identified 116 existing security barriers in four urban areas in Northern Ireland. By far the highest density of these are located in Belfast.
The scrawl is at once a nod to the incoherent call to ‘sovereignty’ (‘Take Back Our Borders’) that colours Brexit rhetoric, a re-drawing of unionist battle-lines in opposition to republican desires for Irish unification, and a put down of the ongoing peace process and power-sharing initiatives that the mural above is designed to represent. The slogan also speaks from a minority position, since the Northern Irish electorate voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Yet Teresa May’s deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to prop up the Tories in key Commons’ votes following the 2017 Election ‘ended up giving a far louder and more insistent voice to a marginal expression of vestigial Britishness’, according to O’Toole (Heroic Failure, p. 223). In the no-man’s land of this defensive architecture and its clearly inscribed internal borders in West Belfast, anatagonism – of a distinctively loyalist flavour – still putters away. In the hands of the Brexiteer, ‘No Surrender to the EU’ offers a glimpse into what O’Toole describes a ‘form of self-pity that goes into the making of Brexit: the colonizer imagining itself to be the colonized’. (p. 76).
A view of part of a multi-level security barrier in West Belfast separating the Shankill and Falls Road ‘interface communities’. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.‘Peace Line’ security gates between the Shankill and Falls Roads neighbourhoods (Protestant and Catholic populated areas, respectively) in Belfast . The gates are able to be closed at specified times to restrict access between ‘interface communities’. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.
I saw another sign (there are numerous) redolent of the permanent paranoia of the unionist ‘No Surrender’ message painted on a section of wall, which can be seen from the 17th-century city walls in Derry. These ‘Londonderry’ walls were built between 1613 and 1618 by the Irish Society as defences for early seventeenth century colonial settlers from England and Scotland. On the sign, the ‘Londonderry West Bank Loyalists’ proclaim they are ‘Still Under Siege: No Surrender’. In this historical relic, the ‘West Bank Loyalists’ take a nostalgic long view back to the former glories of the 1689 Siege of Derry and the 1690 defeat of the Catholic King James II by Protestant William of Orange (William III) at the battle of the Boyne. These are the touchstones for the Orange Order and its ‘glorious revolution’ – celebrated by loyalists to this day with marches, flute bands, sashes and murals. Murals in the Shankill neighbourhood of Belfast depict a victorious William of Orange on horseback alongside celebrations of the prowess of 36th Ulster Division at the (grim and disastrous) battle of the Somme. Red poppies and Union Jacks abound, intermingled with the red hand symbol of Ulster and multiple other factional symbols. Other murals commemorate deaths of loyalist volunteers during the Troubles. The motto of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster loyalist paramilitary group established in 1966, is ‘For God and Ulster’. The group’s declared mission was to combat reblicanism and, in the Ulster unionist narrative, the Somme acted as a counterweight to the events of Easter 1916. Phillip Orr reports, in an article in the Irish Times, that ‘Orange Lodges were established in memory of the battle, banners featured the deeds of first World War soldiers, new commemorative sashes and collarettes were worn and a lore was created that included stirring stories of Orangemen going into battle wearing their regalia and calling out “No Surrender.”’ After WWI and the partition of Ireland (críochdheighilt na hÉireann, 1920-1), Northern Ireland loyalists started to commemorate the Somme annually on 1 July, the date of the battle of the Boyne on the old, pre-Gregorian calendar – a day on which Orange services and parades were already taking place. At the other pole, a reblican group called 1916 Societies have erected a placard in the Bogside area of Derry – the site of the Bloody Sunday atrocity – that demand ‘Irish Unity Now’ and ‘No Border’. Meanwhile, back in Westminster, we have clown prince Boris riding roughshod over these deeply imprinted divisions, wantonly brandishing the ‘No Surrender’ regalia (but with no clue about the implications of this rhetoric in relation to the history and current state of affairs of Northern Ireland).
Loyalist placard as seen from the 17th-century city walls in Derry. The walls were built between 1613 and 1618 by the Irish Society as defences for early seventeenth century settlers from England and Scotland. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.Placard erected by 1916 Societies calling for ‘No Border’ and ‘Irish Unity Now’. Bogside, Derry. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.
Friday 6 September, 2019: The ‘contents’ have it. The Benn bill, intended to prevent a no-deal Bexit, passes through the House of Lords. The final steps towards this legislation becoming law is royal assent, due to be received on Monday. According to the Guardian, Johnson responds by writing to Tory members on Friday evening ‘pledging to break the law that will require him to seek an extension of article 50. “They just passed a law that would force me to beg Brussels for an extension to the Brexit deadline. This is something I will never do.”’ The PM is further into the throes of fascism, it seems. In the outlandish rhetoric of a ‘No Surrender’ Brexit, the Guardian reports that ‘former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith encouraged Johnson to break the law, saying he would be seen as a Brexit “martyr” if judges opted to put him jail for breaching parliament’s terms.’
Metro and Evening Standard headlines on Thursday 12 September 2019.
On Saturday 7 September, prior to the suspension of parliament set for Monday 9 September, vocal groups of pro-Brexit marchers in Parliament Square clashed with protesters against prorogation and no-deal Brexit. The most visible of the pro-Brexiteers were the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA), counter-protestors to the March for Change group (in coalition with Another Europe is Possible, Momentum and the Green Party). According to reports, the anti-Brexit MP Anna Soubry was ‘too frightened‘ to speak to the rally because she was intimidated by the aggressive ‘Leave Now’ pro-Brexiteers, who marched through the crowd with St George cross and Union Jack flags, and banners demanding that the UK leave the EU on WTO rules – ie. with no deal. To boot, the self-styled ‘patriots’ were heard singing ‘We love you Boris Johnson, we do’ and calling their pro-European opponents ‘traitors’. In response, their adversaries led chants of ‘Nazi scum, off our streets’.
Some of the DFLA protestors were carrying a flag I was unfamiliar with – a white dragon on a red background. Via dubious online sources, I found that this white dragon flag had been revived by English nationalist groups wanting to re-establish the ‘white dragon’ standard in preference to the St George (‘dragon slayer’) cross, which is currently the official flag of England. In the narrative of these groups, the white dragon represents the victory of the Anglo-Saxons over their Celtic adversaries signified by the red dragon (now seen on the Welsh flag). The Saxons, Angles and Jutes are viewed (by nationalist groups) as the founders of England and touchstones for the fabled ‘pure’ English ‘identity’ that the DFLA and their kin seek to ‘liberate’ from EU ‘invaders’ in a nostalgic fantasy of reasserting a ‘sovereignty’ that never in fact existed. Clearly, the idea of a ‘pure race’ is rendered a nonsense by the intertwining of the different immigrant-settler groups (Saxons, Angles, Jutes) that nationalists adopt to signify their ‘pure blood’ against the ‘impurity’ of immigrants and EU ‘invaders’. Unlike the (post-Norman) St. George cross, English nationalists argue, the white dragon standard has no religious connotations (but I sense that the sectarian impulse remains, along with the ‘No Papists’ rallying cry of the Ulster Loyalists). One commentator (‘Britain is Radical’) questions the dubious historical origins of the white dragon (‘true ethnic English’) flag and surmises that (in recent times at least) it was adopted by a neo-Nazi group in the ’80s.
A source for the white dragon as symbolic of the Saxons is Arthurian legend, the body of medieval stories and romances centring on King Arthur. There is an account of a particular legend, sometimes called the ‘Prophecy of the Two Dragons’ or ‘The Prophecy of Merlin’, featuring a battle between a red and a white dragon, in which the white dragon is defeated. This is an extended quote from this account that outlines Merlin’s prophecy:
‘Vortigern’s Fortress
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, after the Treachery of the Long Knives, when the greater part of the nobility and leadership of the Britons had been brutally and treacherously murdered by Hengist and his Saxons, the wise men of King Vortigern, advised him to seek out a place where he might build a fortress as a place of safety to retreat to.
After searching what remained of his realm for a safe and suitable site he finally chose a rocky, wooded, hill about one mile from what is now called Beddgelert in Gwynedd, Wales, that rises to a height of about 250 feet above the valley of the River Glaslyn. This hill was once called Dinas Ffaraon Dandde or fortress of Fiery Pharaoh, and later became known as Dinas Emrys which means fortress of Ambrosius.
Thinking he has found a good site Vortigern gave the command for the work on building the walls of the fortress to commence. His builders worked hard building walls and towers in the daytime but no matter how far they progressed in a day, when they came back the next morning, they would find the previous day’s work in a heap on the ground. Although the builders used all their skills and knowledge and worked as hard as they possibly could during the day, each morning they would return to find the previous day’s work once again in a pile on the ground. This went on for many days until Vortigern was obliged to seek help from his wise men. According to Nennius, a 9th century monk and writer, his wise men informed him that that he would have to seek out a young boy “not conceived by a mortal man’. who would be sacrificed and his blood sprinkled in the mortar of the stonework in the hope of appeasing what ever dark power was hindering the construction of the fortress.
Myrddin Emrys
Vortigern sent his messengers out across the land seeking out such a boy. After many days and much searching, one of the messengers returned with a boy named Myrddin Emrys or Merlin Ambrosius, who was the only boy they could find “not conceived by a mortal man’.
Geoffrey of Monmouth in his book Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain, 1137) says that Merlin was believed to have been the the son of an incubus or demon and his mother was mortal and was a nun. With the incubus representing Satan and the nun representing Jesus Christ, or God, he had been born from two opposing powers. As such he was said to have inherited the wisdom, knowledge and powers of both of these forces. He was brought before Vortigern who told him the fate he intended to inflict upon him. Geoffrey says,
“A meeting took place the next day for the purpose of putting him to death. Then the boy said to the king, “Why have your servants brought me hither?’ “That you may be put to death,’ replied the king, “and that the ground on which my citadel is to stand, may be sprinkled with your blood, without which I shall be unable to build it.‘
However, according to Geoffrey, Merlin was not intimidated by Vortigern. Instead, he spoke with power and authority, demanding to know where he had got this idea from. He then declared to Vortigern he would reveal the real reason why the construction of the fortress was unsuccessful.
‘The Prophecy of the Two Dragons
‘Geoffrey of Monmouth then gives the following account of Merlin’s interview with Vortigern and his wise men,
“Who,’ said the boy, “instructed you to do this?’ “My wise men,” answered the king. “Order them hither,’ returned the boy; this being complied with, he thus questioned them: “By what means was it revealed to you that this citadel could not be built, unless the spot were previously sprinkled with my blood? Speak without disguise, and declare who discovered me to you;’ then turning to the king, “I will soon,’ said he, “unfold to you every thing; but I desire to question your wise men, and wish them to disclose to you what is hidden under this pavement:’ they acknowledging their ignorance, “there is,’ said he, “a pool; come and dig:’ they did so, and found the pool. “Now,’ continued he, “tell me what is in it;’ but they were ashamed, and made no reply. “I,’ said the boy, “can discover it to you: there are two vases in the pool;’ they examined, and found it so: continuing his questions,’ What is in the vases?’ they were silent: “there is a tent in them,’ said the boy; “separate them, and you shall find it so;’ this being done by the king’s command, there was found in them a folded tent. The boy, going on with his questions, asked the wise men what was in it? But they not knowing what to reply, “There are,’ said he, “two serpents, one white and the other red; unfold the tent;’ they obeyed, and two sleeping serpents were discovered; “consider attentively,’ said the boy, “what they are doing.’ The serpents began to struggle with each other; and the white one, raising himself up, threw down the other into the middle of the tent, and sometimes drove him to the edge of it; and this was repeated thrice. At length the red one, apparently the weaker of the two, recovering his strength, expelled the white one from the tent; and the latter being pursued through the pool by the red one, disappeared. Then the boy, asking the wise men what was signified by this wonderful omen, and they expressing their ignorance, he said to the king,“I will now unfold to you the meaning of this mystery. The pool is the emblem of this world, and the tent that of your kingdom: the two serpents are two dragons; the red serpent is your dragon, but the white serpent is the dragon of the people who occupy several provinces and districts of Britain, even almost from sea to sea: at length, however, our people shall rise and drive away the Saxon race from beyond the sea, whence they originally came; but do you depart from this place, where you are not permitted to erect a citadel; I, to whom fate has allotted this mansion, shall remain here; whilst to you it is incumbent to seek other provinces, where you may build a fortress.‘
Merlin then explained that the problems with the construction were actually caused by the two sleeping dragons waking up and fighting each other. He explained the Red Dragon represented the defenders of Britain which although exhausted and appearing defeated would eventually rise up and repulse the White Dragon of the invading Anglo-Saxons. He told of the coming of Arthur who he referred to as the Boar of Cornwall which would be the emblem on his banner and prophesied that six kings descended from Arthur would rule before the Anglo-Saxons returned to rule over Britain.
For the defenders of [Celtic] Britain the prophecy of the two dragons was a momentous event, giving hope and inspiration for those who lived in those times to carry on the fight and was an important moment in the destiny of Britain and he went on to make further prophecies concerning the future of Britain beyond Arthur’s time.’
‘Woe to the red dragon, for his banishment hasteneth on. His lurking holes shall be seized by the white dragon, which signifies the Saxons whom you invited over; but the red denotes the British nation, which shall be oppressed by the white. Therefore shall its mountains be levelled as the valleys, and the rivers of the valleys shall run with blood. The exercise of religion shall be destroyed, and churches be laid open to ruin. At last the oppressed shall prevail, and oppose the cruelty of foreigners.’
White dragon on red field flag. Wikimedia Commons.‘Englisc Strong and True’ car window sticker with white dragon on red field.English Illumination of a 15th century manuscript of Historia Regum Britanniae showing king of the Britons Vortigern and Ambros watching the fight between two dragons. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Medievalists keen to dispel the myth of a ‘pure white’ Middle Ages have noted the use of Celtic symbolism by American white supremacists seen, for example, at the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. According to Karen Overby, ‘[f]or white supremacists, medieval Europe is a fantasy of white culture and the source of an imagined, pure heritage. This is a dangerous view of a whites-only Middle Ages, a Middle Ages located primarily in England, Ireland, and Western Europe, with fair-skinned royals and valiant knights defending the borders against threats to that homogeneity’. Sierra Lomuto argues that ‘[w]e are allowing the Middle Ages to be seen as a preracial space where whiteness can locate its ethnic heritage.’ Writing after Charlottesville, Dorothy Kim is unequivocal on this point when she challenges fellow medievalists to interrogate ‘our old-style position’ of ‘objectivist neutrality’ that ignores deployment of medieval symbolism by ‘white supremacists/white nationalists/KKK/Nazis’:
‘Let us be crystal clear here—medieval studies is intimately entwined with white supremacy and has been so for a long time. Feel free to ask historians of 19th-century Confederate history, the KKK, and the Nazis. They will produce reams of bibliography, material culture, documents, images, etc. for your perusal. Let us be even clearer on this second point: white supremacy is not fringe. This is not a peripheral, tiny subculture problem.’
She also notes that: ‘[a]s Catherine Cox recently presented at MLA, ISIS/ISIL also weaponizes the idea of the pure medieval Islamic past in their recruiting rhetoric for young male Muslims’.
The story of Merlin’s prophecy could bear further interpretation, but here I merely want to highlight the fantasy of a homogeneous identity promulgated by the image of the battle between the red and the white dragon. Clearly (albeit a characteristic conveniently forgotten by white supremacist groups adopting such symbolism) both the represented groups were already intertwined conglomerations of various cultural and ethnic identities. Yet such definitive drawing of the borderlines between identities seeps into the rhetoric of the so-called Brexit divide – the psychology of ‘us’ and ‘them’ inscribed in the pro- and anti-Brexit protests of 7 September and the movement towards the more extreme positions of either leaving the UK with no deal (‘no surrender’!) or revoking Article 50 altogether.
Additionally, the Merlin prophecy emphasises the settler-colonial context of Britain, with the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes representing just the latest wave of colonial domination, a situation that Merlin is able to fantasise about a future reversal when ‘the oppressed shall prevail, and oppose the cruelty of foreigners’ – the colonized (under Rome) who have become the colonizer may yet revert to the status of the colonized… and so the power play between the dominant and the dominated goes on.
Moving to the modern context, Etienne Balibar discusses how we might conceive of Europe as a ‘borderland’. He calls one of the (four) patterns that he uses to describe this condition ‘crossover’, ‘overlapping folds’ or ‘Nappes superposées‘. He writes that:
There is no ‘centre’; there are only ‘peripheries’. Or, better said, each region of Europe is or could be considered a ‘centre’ in its own right, because it is made of overlapping peripheries, each of them open (through ‘invasions’, ‘conquests’, ‘refuges’, ‘colonizations’ and ‘postcolonial migrations’, etc) to influences from all other parts of Europe, and from the whole world. This creates a potential for ethnic and religious conficts, but also for hybridity and cultural invention. […] It is impossible to represent Europe’s history as a story of pure identities, running the danger of becoming progressively alienated.
Etienne Balibar, ‘Europe as Borderland’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pp. 190-215, p. 200.
This ‘progressive alienation’ (as opposed to what Balibar calls ‘constructed identities, dependent on a series of successive encounters between “civilisations” ‘) is relevant to the ‘alienation’ groups like the DFLA want to claim for themselves in combination with what Balibar calls the ‘production of the foreigner [or stranger]’. (p. 204) How the foreigner/stranger was constituted or ‘produced’ by the Brexit campaigners is of course highly significant to the production of the subsequent ‘Brexit divide’.
During the 2016 Brexit campaign Nigel Farage, on behalf of Ukip, unveiled a poster with an image of a large queue of migrants and asylum seekers crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015. The slogan on this piece of propaganda was ‘Breaking Point’, with the subheadings ‘The EU has failed us all’ and ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control’. The image was deliberately chosen not only underline an anti-immigration message pandering to racist sentiment but also to illustrate the supposed effects of Angela Merkel’s 2015 ‘open door’ policy, which was the German government’s response to the extraordinary numbers of people fleeing war in Syria at the time. Temporarily suspending some of the terms of the Dublin Regulation, Merkel decided to welcome unregistered asylum seekers no matter which European country they had first entered. Farage’s conflation of the ‘foreign threat’ and Merkel’s policy signalled not only the racist tenor of Ukip’s campaign, but also gave contour to the rhetoric that poses the EU as a German-led foreign ‘invader’ threatening the ‘sovereignty’ of a beleagured Britain (or maybe ‘England’), in defense of which Farage and his ilk fashion themselves as ‘patriots’ determined to pull up the barricades. Fintan O’Toole has written about such paranoid fantasies in his book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain and here , where he draws the connection between the Brexiteers warped perspective on the EU and ‘alternative history’ narratives such as Len Deighton’s bestselling thriller SS-GB, which imagines Britain’s surrender to and occupation by Germany at the end of WWII. Brexit rhetoric includes the projection that Britain is (or will become) a ‘vassal state’ (thanks Jacob Rees-Mogg for that wee gem, a lexical oddity that mirrors the medieval context of Merlin’s prophecy). O’Toole quotes Boris Johnson, from an article in the Telegraph on 12 November 2018, stating that ‘we are on the verge of signing up for something even worse than the current constitutional position. These are the terms that might be enforced on a colony’. ‘We seem to be on the verge of total surrender’, Johnson blusters in the same article. These hysterical anti-EU language infusions have been rampant, with pro-EU types being dubbed ‘quislings’ and ‘betrayers’ of Britain. During the lead up to the 2016 referendum, the official Vote Leave campaign attempted to distance themselves from Ukip’s overtly racist rhetoric, yet Johnson (one of the Vote Leave campaign’s figureheads) repeatedly referred to the ‘threat’ of Turkey’s planned membership of the European Union (which he later went on to deny), implying that this would result in mass migration from Turkey to the UK (even though Turkey’s entrance to the EU is highly unlikely). Vote Leave produced a poster with the slogan ‘Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU. Vote Leave – Take Back Control’. The campaign group added further fuel to the fire of racial prejudice by implying that this would pose a ‘security threat‘ – the mythical Turkish immigrants were demonised as gun-wielding criminals. A Vote Leave spokesperson claimed that: ‘Since the birthrate in Turkey is so high, we can expect to see an additional million people added to the UK population from Turkey alone within eight years’. Michael Gove stacked up the odds even further by claiming that the accession of five new countries into the EU – Turkey, Albania, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia – would place pressure on the NHS: ‘The idea of asking the NHS to look after a new group of patients equivalent in size to four Birminghams is clearly unsustainable‘, he argued. In this way, the Vote Leave Campaign constructed the two keystones of their argument for quitting the EU: putting the frighteners on by producing fear of an invasion of dodgy ‘johnny foreigner’ and selling the lie that leaving the EU would provide the NHS with an additional £350 million. Chaos-monger and all round bully boy (Vote Leave campign director and now goverment advisor) Dominic Cummings is quoted as saying (on 9 January 2017): ‘If Boris, Gove and Gisela [Stuart, Vote Leave’s chair] had not supported us and picked up the baseball bat marked ‘Turkey/NHS/£350m’ with five weeks to go, then 650,000 votes might have been lost.’
The world of Brexit provides a wide-open window into such schoolground antics, the likes of which cultivates the ground of a dumb-headed ‘us’ v ‘them’ politics and uncomfortable nationalist rhetoric unwilling to admit a more complex set of categories for citizenship and neighbourliness across Europe.
The Monday (9 September) following the Parliament Square protests was the day set for the contested prorogation. The Benn bill (in Johnson’s rhetoric, the ‘surrender bill’) blocking a no-deal Brexit received Royal Assent. Speaker of the House John Bercow announced his intention to stand down from his post on 31 October. The Commons also passed a bill demanding the release of government documents on their plans for a no-deal Brexit and prorogation. Number 10 indicated that it intended to resist both demands. In the evening, a poorly attended and rather desultory Northern Ireland debate took place, reflecting the government’s cavalier attitude towards upholding the tenets of the Good Friday agreement. Nothing much seems to have changed here since the 1980s: Commenting on a 1984 session on the New Ireland Forum in the House of Commons, William Shannon remarked in 1986 that ‘as usual most members of Parliament chose a debate on Northern Island as the time to go answer their mail or have a drink with a constituent’ (cited in Diarmaid Ferriter, The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics. London: Profile Books, 2019, p. 115). MPs piled back into the House to listen to Boris Johnson’s demands for a snap election, again another ‘people vs parliament’ diatribe in which Johnson claimed that his government ‘will not allow the emphatic verdict of the referendum to be slowly suffocated by further draft and paralysis’. Jeremy Corbyn responds by telling Johnson that ‘This government is a disgrace’. On Johnson’s sixth parlimentary defeat in as many days, MPs voted to block the election. Opposition MPs made clear that the terms of the election should not be dictated by Johnson until a no-deal Brexit was taken off the table.
And so to the prorogation of Parliament. The Usher of the Black Rod, an office of medieval origins, enters the Commons around 1:30am on Tuesday 10 September. John Bercow expresses his discontent with the extraordinary suspension of parliament, calling it an ‘act of executive fiat‘. Before Bercow is able to exit his chair to go to the House of Lords to formalize prorogation proceedings, a group of opposition MPs, carrying signs saying ‘silenced’ tried to prevent the Speaker from leaving. (On at least one occasion, in March 1629, Members managed to delay a prorogation by holding the Speaker down in his chair and locking the doors of the House). Reluctantly, Bercow carries out his duty, with only the government and DUP MPs in tow. Opposition benches remain packed throughout the proceedings, and afterwards Tory MPs fail to return to the Commons, as is customary. It marks the end of a long and rancorous evening.
Knolly’s Black Rod. Vanity Fair cartoon, 1877.
Bercow’s disdain for the extraordinary prorogation was supported by The Supreme Court on 24 September in response to appeals from the High Court of England and Wales and the Inner House of the Court of Session in Scotland. The High Court of England and Scotland had decided that the challenge to the lawfulness of prorogation was not justiciable in a court of law. The Scottish courts, on the other hand, had judged that the issue was justiciable, and that the suspension had been motivated by, as Lady Hale, President of the Justices of the Supreme Court, stated in her summary judgement, ‘the improper purpose of stymying Parliamentary scrutiny of the Government’. The 11 Justices of the Supreme Court, in essence, agreed with this judgement. In her summary of the Supreme Court judgement, Lady Hale concluded that: ‘the Prime Minister’s advice to Her Majesty was unlawful, void and of no effect. This means that the Order in Council to which it led was also unlawful, void and of no effect and should be quashed. This means that when the Royal Commissioners walked into the House of Lords it was as if they walked in with a blank sheet of paper. The prorogation was also void and of no effect. Parliament has not been prorogued. This is the unanimous judgement of all 11 Justices’.
Parliament had been unlawfully suspended for eleven days.
Lady Hale, President of the Supreme Court, reading the Judgement Summary on 24 September 2019 in the case of R (on the application of Miller) (Appellant) v The Prime Minister (Respondent). The decision to declare that the prorogation was unlawful was unanimous.
19 October 2019: Parliament sits on a Saturday for the first time since Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1992, and for only the fourth time since the start of WWII. The main order of the day is to consider and vote on whether to approve the Brexit deal struck between UK and EU negotiators on 17 October.
The agreement avoids a ‘hard’ border in Ireland by placing a regulatory and customs border down the Irish Sea. The DUP has already rejected the deal because in the new arrangement Northern Island will continue to be aligned with EU single market regulations and customs rules (while remaining legally in the UK customs territory). Stanch unionists will be unhappy about the proposed border between NI and EU, leaving Northern Ireland left on the ‘window ledge‘ of the union (this was the image used by Robin Swann, leader of the Ulster Unionist party (UUP)). More dread-filled language from Jim Allister, leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice party, who is fearful that NI will be left out in the cold and left susceptible to (horrors!) Irish unity: ‘The inescapable reality is that a permanent regulatory and customs border cutting us off from GB puts us in a waiting room for Irish unity with the door locked from the outside.’ A statement from the DUP claimed that the government was driving ‘a coach and horses through the professed sanctity of the Belfast agreement’. The lukewarm response of Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald was that the deal was the ‘least worst option’ that would ‘only mitigate the worst effects of Brexit.’
No longer the heart of the empire? Loyalist mural on Shankill Road, Belfast.
Labour is expected to vote against the deal. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell is quoted as saying that: ‘It will introduce checks and barriers on our border and. It is worse than Theresa May’s deal because it removes those commitments that she was willing to offer about a level playing field to protect workers’ rights, environmental standards and consumer rights. It’s a very bad deal we can’t support it.’ Though Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister and SNP Leader, has a sneaking suspicion that there will be some Labour rebels voting to push the deal through:
‘Super Saturday’ turned out to be a bit of a damp squib, from the government’s perspective. Extravagant deployment of the government’s cavaliar talking point that spoke of ‘getting Brexit done’ failed to persuade. Rather than voting Boris Johnson’s deal through, the House was asked to consider an amendment put forward by Sir Oliver Letwin, a conservative MP, proposing that Parliament decline to approve the ‘new’ Brexit deal until all the supporting technical legislation had been passed. Outside Westminister, a crowd of a million-odd people who had gathered in support of a People’s Vote cheered in jubilation after the House voted for Letwin’s amendment – 322 to 306. This triggered the Benn Act (European Union (Withdrawal) (No.2) Act 2019), which meant that Johnson was forced to send a letter to the EU asking for an extension to Brexit beyond 31 October 2019. Despite having said that he would rather ‘die in a ditch’ than ask for an extension, Johnson sent a legally mandated letter – unsigned – requesting the extension to Donald Tusk, president of the European council, along with a personal letter putting forward arguments as to why he didn’t want the extension. Typical Johnson machinations, performed with the grace of a petulant schoolboy. But the upshot is it doesn’t look like Britain will be leaving the EU on the 31st.
Autumn chill is in the air on the day that six odd weeks of campaigning begins in the lead up to the General Election ‘snap poll’ on 12 December – Johnson wins the vote on his fourth attempt. More than 100 Labour MPs abstained and 11 voted against the motion, which doesn’t bode well for Corbyn. What spectacle will ensue? The party line is that this election will break the Brexit deadlock. The Tories will campaign along the lines of ‘getting Brexit done’, Labour is promising a second referendum to resolve the question of the EU, Farage’s Brexit are arguing for a no-deal Brexit, while the Lib Dems pledge to revoke article 50. Nicola Sturgeon has made known that a second Scottish independence referendum in 2020 – six years after the first one – will be at the heart of SNP’s manifesto. European council President Donald Tusk has announced that EU27 has formally adopted the extension to the withdrawal agreement to 31 January, but he warns that: ‘It may be the last one. Please make best use of this time.’ So it looks to be a fractious stretch. No change there then.
