Sometimes a political party comes up with an idea, or allows one of their Ministers to neglect the old adage about “inner voice”, and propose something utterly destructive during an election campaign. Let us, for Irish purposes, call it a “Charlie Flanagan Moment.”
I am of course referring to the former Fine Gael Minister’s proposal a month before the 2020 general election that it might be a good idea to commemorate members of the RIC who had been killed during the War of Independence. This being exactly 100 years after the most infamous members of the RIC, the Black and Tans, had been in the midst of a reign of murder, arson and torture.
Bad idea, and one that probably provided the single biggest boost to Sinn Féin who emerged as the largest party in the election held on February 8.
So, is the announcement by British Home Secretary James Cleverly that his party intends to reintroduce “national service” in the increasingly unlikely event that the Tories do win the election on July 4 the Conservative Party’s “Charlie Flanagan Moment”?
Or is it another desperate attempt to shore up their right flank ahead of promised tanking at the polls, exacerbated by the haemorrhage of former traditional Tory voters to Reform who currently hover at around 12% in the opinion polls.
The plan is not exactly to conscript people into the armed forces although that would be one of the options. The young people targeted, if that is not an unfortunate descriptive, would also have the choice of fulfilling their National Service through assisting the police and fire service, working in the NHS or in a recognised charity.
All of those within the age cohort who qualify for the scheme would have to perform 25 days a year or one weekend per month over that year in taking on the tasks set. The military element would only apply to 30,000 “selective placements” where people could choose non direct military roles in cyber security, logistics and civil defence.
Cleverly, in an interview with the BBC on Sunday, pitched the proposal as one that would tackle what he described as social “fragmentation” and that it would take young people out of a “bubble” in which they are cut off from contact with people and ideas and activities outside of that bubble.
Now, call me an old reactionary (I gladly accept both labels on both calendrical and philosophic bases) but I have to say that the idea appeals to me – which I hasten to say the Charlie Flanagan Tan-Hugging Moment certainly did not. Nor do British Tories, with the exception of the late and exceptional Roger Scruton, generally float my boat.
Why does it appeal to me? Well, for several reasons. I know I would have hated it when I was 18 and my idea of National Service back then was rather different and was subject to a raft of legislation pertaining to Offences against the State, etc, etc. That is sort of tangentially related as I do think that young people ought to have an identification with the nation/society as a whole.
That is fostered, or traditionally has been fostered, by involvement in sporting and other community based organisations, through work, the education system and a general sense that all of these were part of a much broader societal nexus that bound people and communities together.
The large numbers of young people leaving the Irish state, among them mostly well-educated and already employed people, suggests that such a nexus has frayed, if not been broken. I am not privileging the GAA in this context, but clubs from Dublin to Gaoth Dobhair could compile lengthy lists of young men and women who have departed for Oz and elsewhere.
The practical reasons for that include the difficulty of getting a place of one’s own to live. Young couples with combined incomes of way more than their parents can no longer in most cases have a reasonable expectation that they will be able to do what their father or even grandfather was able to – buy a family home.
Were such young people already to have spent some time in National Service here might that influence their decision? Might it even help to form the kind of thinking that might bring about an end to the absurd situation in which the future of the country is leaving and their places being taken mostly by young people from other countries?
Which is not a reflection on the young people who come here from abroad to work. It is a critique of the bizarre mentality that believes that replacing a cohort of young Irish people with a cohort of young persons from abroad is somehow a great notion. That there is no expectation that anyone concerned ought really to regard Ireland as any more than a workplace or an apartment or house that you will never own.
Perhaps bursting the bubble of social anomie here might effect a sea change in that mentality among younger Irish people? That fostering a sense that the institutions that have sustained the Irish state; from the family to the public services, local businesses and community and sporting organisations that pre-existed any state funding through a mandatory short engagement with some of those institutions and groups might contribute to reviving a sense of the place as a nation as a community rather than a collection of randomly assembled economic actors.
Which is why – whatever the desperation that lies behind the Tory proposal which at least seems to understand that there might be such a thing as a national community – such an idea will never be proposed here by any of those currently or likely to be tasked with the running of the state.