Ireland's Fortinbras; Gerry Adams, two-term Taoiseach and Nobel Laureate?

The truth of Hamlet is that the Prince loves to act decisively; he dispatches Rosencrantz and Guildesnstern, and kills Polonious. It is only when it comes to continuing a cycle of regicide as power politics that he baulks. Something was indeed rotten in the state of Denmark and the tragedy of Hamlet is that he has to allow these forces play themselves out in his psyche rather than realize them externally to himself, as he should have been allowed to do. Eventually, Fortinbras junior of Norway (whose Dad had lost to Hamlet senior) steps into the grand guignol and sweeps away the ancien regime without a battle. At no point did the court engage with the pressure he represented, preferring to indulge in regicide, incest and petty viciousness.

The recent Irish water debacle, a debacle that has turned out to be the final straw for our two-party system, exemplifies how Ireland resembles Shakespeare's Denmark. Irish community and civil society structures have been historically strong and its people are very resourceful and resilient. Put a jack hammer and plastic pipes in a pile and Irishmen will self-organize to raise funds (raffles! Dinner dances!)' and take extreme physical risks to get the system going. Put the same men of a committee a la Irish water and they will embezzle everything before jackhammer meets tarmac. The bureaucratization rampant in the neoliberal world order brings out the worst in the Irish; boards overseeing boards, paying themselves extravagantly with nothing ever getting done.

Rather brilliantly put here;

video on the scam

Gerry Adams realized the vacuity of 26-county politics during the 2002 general election campaign. As he put it, it seemed to be about which leader was the better craic (fun) rather than any serious issues. This is one way of curtailing debate, as he later realized Conversely, he was expected to roll over and die when he was tried by media for the deaths of Jean McConville and the rape of Mairia Cahill. The problem for the Free state establishment is that these charges have not managed to stick in a court of law; indeed, Mairia refused to give evidence against Seamas Finucane et al having herself made the complaint against them and the prosecutions failed. The Free state establishment has now played its last card aginst Adams as leader.

The result is that Adams is now a racing certainty to be the next Irish Taoiseach. (For the record, I predicted in a broadcast I did on Dublin's Anna Livia radio in 2001 this would happen.) But who is he? What does he believe? What will he do? Apart from the fact that the NI statelet will not exist a day longer than he wants it to, once he is installed as Taoiseach we do not know. We can be sure of his republican credentials because he has manged to keep a lot of the hardliners around him

Or can we? In march 2012, Mitch Riess – a huge admirer of Adams, whom he regards as a great peacemaker – said that the Brits had kept Adams alive to deliver the current settlement. Conversely, they handed files to loyalist terrorists to kill Adams' rivals. Faced with threats to his intellectual authority – most famously by women like Bernadette Devlin – Adams has behaved viciously.

Adams has almost certainly been involved in attempted coup (the IRA recognized neither government/state/statelet in Ireland), torture (the informer and torturer Scappaticci was a close associate), summary executions (Jean McConville), and extortion. Quite a list; yet after Blair, GW Bush, Putin, and indeed Obama, this list is beginning to look like a sine qua non of qualification for being a 21ste century leadfer.

The most likely scenario is indeed the Fortinbras one – Adams is about to exploit a power vacuum. He has been at times Marxist revolutionary, the father of the modern car-bomb through the Ballymurphy IRA, and man of peace. He is an Irish nationalist who cannot speak Irish, an intellectual whose prolix books betray a serious inability to handle abstract thought, and the author of the compromise that will bring about a United Ireland. Moreover, he is aware that Scotland is ready for more ferment as the UK disintegrates

We can take it that Sinn Fein have learned the dark arts of bureaucracy; they are as likely to see their mission as uniting the “republic” with the northern statelet they have learned to administer with the careful coaching of the Brits. The sad thing is that we southern Hamlets will again have to let it happen

 Seán Ó Nualláin  9u samhain  2014


Again, my books on Ireland are at;

scams unveiled

and

http://www.amazon.com/Ireland-A-Colony-Once-Again/dp/1443840858