I wouldn’t exactly call Kevin Myers one of my favourite writers, but it takes a belly full of bile to compose an epistle of anger this good.
I must admit to harbouring similar feelings for some of the people I’ve encountered along the way.
From the Irish Independent, March 2008, here’s Myers on Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley and Northern Ireland:
What is it that can bring these two monsters together? …
Ian Paisley was a visitation from the 17th century, terrible in his wraths, and awesome in his power over the credulous, the weak and the violent. Europe had its fill of this madness during the Thirty Years’ War, as the valleys of Bohemia were turned into vaults of bloodshed by the rhetoric of the archetypal travelling Hussite preacher.
Paisley was to be the living reincarnation of this creature, the dark tassels of his gown flapping in the breeze as he led his little posse of followers into a hitherto peaceful Moravian mountain village, there to spread war with his demonic visions of hell, of Sodom and of the saved.
Gerry Adams represented a slightly more modern form of malignance: some 18th century Defender, mixed in with some 19th century Fenian, plus of course a bit of 20th century pidgin Marxism, as a catalyst to make all his tribal gibberish modern, and cool and respectable. Thus two toxic men; and at their command, this island was to shed rivers of blood and weep oceans of tears.
The dead number over three thousand seven hundred. We cannot count the maimed, the gibbering, the blind, the maddened, the speechless, and the unmanned men whose loins are as featureless as mannequins.
And where now the repentance from Paisley and Adams? Where the contrition? Where the true remorse at the suffering inflicted on others, merely so that their demented visions could come to pass?
There is none. Alpha males do not repent or recant or repine. In their ego-oriented world, self is everything, and a gratification of their urges comes before all else. Paisley and Adams wanted war, and they got war; then they wanted peace, and in due course, they got peace. But the price for that peace was, as always, paid for by others.
So, bullied and lied to by Blair, Trimble went into government with a still-armed Sinn Féin, and thence to his political grave. Outflanked, out-talked, out-glamoured and out-gunned by the Shinners, the SDLP obligingly slouched towards the same historical cemetery, leaving just the forces of Adams and Paisley standing.
Around them a political wasteland; but they had survived and, in the long, slow stare of the final draw — peace process tumbleweed blowing in the wind and the dust — Paisley outranked and out-alpha’ed Adams. So the Shinners cut most of their guns in half; but not all. They still have their army, just as Paisley can boast that he secured decommissioning: and all is well.
Look, I understand nothing about Northern Ireland. I merely know that Sinn Féin tourist buses show the location of this Brit atrocity and that Brit atrocity, but somehow miss the truth that republican terrorists killed more people than all the other sides combined.
Possibly the ghastly thugs of loyalism, with knives and their hatchets and their Happy Hours in the romper room, have their buses, too. I don’t know.
The rains tumble down from the Black Mountain, the wind comes up Belfast Lough, and soon the Orange marches will start again. Somewhere or other, in this ghetto or that, a young alpha male will one day stir. There is something he doesn’t quite like about this settlement, and he’s thinking that he should do something about it. In the distance, the faint rattle of a drum. Or is it something else?