About six weeks ago, for Saint Bridget’s Day, the Irish Government released its now customary video re-defining Saint Bridget of Kildare as an “activist, healer, and peacemaker” who “inspires women who turn compassion into power”. That video includes immortal lines such as “her fire wasn’t just a flame…. It lit the torch for a movement”, superimposed over images of the “yes” campaign for same sex marriage. Apparently, though they didn’t tell us at the time, the “yes for equality” people were in fact the spiritual heirs of Bridget, who famously preached sexual chastity.
If this were just some domestic re-framing of Saint Bridget’s day, that would be one thing. But as usual – because nothing in Ireland can just be about us – the Government’s message contained a “message from Ireland to the world”.
That message? “That the power of women is shaping our future”. That’ll make them sit up and take notice in Kabul and Karachi.
Perhaps this writer is insufficiently patriotic, but I am often reminded by these messages from Ireland to the world of the message currently winging its way through interstellar space, composed in 1977 by United States President Jimmy Carter. Should, many centuries hence, some unassuming alien race encounter the Voyager One space probe, and should they develop the technology to translate the English language, they will encounter a recording of Carter’s soft Georgian drawl telling them that:
“This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”
As yet, no alien civilisation has replied, or at least none that cares enough to send an interstellar force to liberate humanity from the oppression of Jimmy Carter. His message, presumably, floats through the void of interstellar space, unheard and unanswered, and probably incomprehensible to any creature that does encounter it.
Yesterday, President Connolly issued her first annual Saint Patrick’s Day message – a sort of Urbi et Orbi to the nation and the world, in the manner of the Papal Easter blessing:
As a neutral, independent country, a post-colonial society, and a people marked by famine and forced migration, we are uniquely placed to offer a valuable perspective on the challenges facing our world, not least war and displacement.
We are a people who have travelled our own path to peace in dealing with bitter conflict and its legacy.
We understand that peace is not merely the absence of war but also the presence of justice.
To whom, I wonder, is Ireland “uniquely well placed to offer a valuable perspective on the challenges facing our world”? Is it the displaced of Sudan, amidst that country’s vicious sectarian civil war, who will hear the President’s statement that they should look to Ireland for inspiration? Is it the anti-Government rebels in the jungles of Colombia? Is it the former prisoners of Siberian prison camps, now pressed into service on the front lines of east Ukraine?
I wrote during the last Presidential election that Irish people – at least, a clear plurality of the electorate – have come to see the Irish Presidency as a sort of secular papacy. An office which exists to provide moral leadership and direction, not only to the nation but to the world.
Having definitively rejected the Papal role in dispensing such direction, Irish voters have embraced a view of the Presidency in which a wise old leader will make proclamations to the world about the superior morals of this island and its inhabitants, in the hope that the uncivilised savages in the jungles of Borneo (or in this case, Capitol Hill) might hear them and convert to the true religion, which is the soft leftism of the United Nations and the UCD women’s studies faculty.
The irony is that the greatest opportunities for the President to play this role coincide with Catholic religious holidays: Bridget; Patrick; Christmas.
Like Jimmy Carter’s message to the aliens, this is a mostly harmless delusion. But a delusion it is: To read the Irish media about the great Saint Patrick’s Day trip to Washington, one might conjure up images of Frodo and Samwise leaving the pure and untouched shire to venture into the darkness of Mount Doom, where Sauron awaits. All countries, to some extent, are patriotically deluded: The Americans think they have the monopoly on freedom. The British think themselves still a global power. The French regard themselves as linguistically and culturally superior. As quirks, these are harmless.
But when your national delusion becomes so great that you are firing off messages to the world about your own moral superiority over the rest of the world, it starts to look hubristic and off-putting to everyone else. It is no coincidence that Ireland’s relative standing in Europe and the world has declined in recent years. This habit of lecturing the world is one of our least attractive national qualities, and it looks worse and worse at a time when this country is doing deals with our neighbours to provide the self-defence that we ourselves refuse to pay for.
For some reason, a majority of people in the country truly believe – like Carter with the aliens – that the world really wants to hear from us about how great we are. I am not sure they are correct.