Ireland’s mixed messages when it comes to Old Britannia

There could be no clearer illustration of our ambivalence towards our nearest neighbours than the General Election of 1997 and the contrasting attitudes of the good people of Donegal.

Back in a time when Sky was something we all could see for free – because it was behind the clouds immediately over our heads – Thomas Gildea was a campaigner for the legalisation of ‘deflectors’, large masts which retransmitted English TV channels into rural areas.
Back at the end of the nineties, these deflectors were being dismantled because the now-legalised cable and MMDS operators wanted to stamp out cheap or free alternatives.
So Thomas took a stand and went up for election on a single issue – free English TV for the masses – and the 58 year old farmer swept into the Dail as a new Deputy for Donegal South West.

Up the road in Donegal North-East however – where the quite conceivably enjoyed an half-hour of Coronation Street the same as the next man – the latest member of the Blaney dynasty, Harry Blaney, was following in the footsteps of his late father Neil and bidding for Dail success all of his own.

Blaney senior had come up with the Independent Fianna Fail title, because the more familiar model wasn’t going far enough when it came to the issue of getting the British troops out of the six counties.

Harry Blaney – who himself passed away this week – shared his father’s nationalist believes and he too made it into the 28th Dail.
Which brings us to the point of the story – the voters of Donegal saw nothing ironic about one half of the county voting for a ‘Brits out’ candidate while the other voted for one who wanted – admittedly through the medium of television only – Brits in.

It’s an ambivalence that many others on this island also share – when it comes to football teams, three-quarters of the country pledge their allegiance to an English team; we follow their soaps, their music, their celebrities and most of all their television.

We proclaim, for the most part, to have no time for their Royal family and yet, for example, the sale of newspapers shot up when Princess Diana died; indeed she sold many papers before her death as well.

Now you wouldn’t have found many perched on high stools discussing the merits of Diana’s fashion sense over a pint, but there was a touch of the guilty pleasure about keeping an eye on her from a distance.

And all of this came back to mind when they cremated Maggie Thatcher recently – thankfully we didn’t have live RTE coverage even if there was a touch of the tugged forelock about the coverage on the news – because while there was little divide on our attitude to her, we still all knew more about her than we did about our own.

Nobody does pageantry better than the British, mainly because – in the upper echelons of their society – they are still deluded enough to see themselves as a world power.

And they rolled out the red carpet for Maggie, as though she was their first directly elected queen, instead of someone who was reviled by half of her own country and all of ours.

They cleared the streets of objectors and other traffic, and turned central London into a no-go zone, a safe place for doddering Prime Ministers from across the globe to get together for one last hurrah.

Enda Kenny played this one cleverly by not ignoring the event, but by doing the next best thing – sending Ruairi Quinn who might as easily have been mistaken for one of the Chinese mourners instead of our token gesture to the woman who still has Charlie Haughey’s tea-pot.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.