PROBABLY more than any other politician in Britain Nigel Farage was responsible for winning the vote on Brexit in 2016. He exploited racism and anti-migrant sentiment, winning new converts over to an English-centred, jingoistic view of the world. The dangers of Farage’s xenophobic beliefs are evident daily across the British news media. Every day attacks increase on refugees and migrants.
Farage has also exploited the divisions within the British Conservative Party. Theresa May and Boris Johnson said they were for completely cutting Britain from all its legal and legislative connections and treaty obligations with Europe. One of these is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The ECHR was incorporated into the law of the North as an integral part of the Good Friday Agreement. It was written into the Agreement as a way of protecting equality and human rights and preventing any return to the discriminatory and sectarian policies implemented under the Stormont Regime.
Farage has now made the withdrawal of Britain from the ECHR a major plank of his political programme for the next British general election. As the right in Britain become ever more strident, Farage has set his sights, very publicly, on renegotiating the Good Friday Agreement and clearing the way to extricate Britain from the ECHR.
Not surprisingly, Sammy Wilson of the DUP has welcomed the Farage commitments. The Good Friday Agreement remains anathema to many within the DUP who seek to delay and dilute the implementation of its provisions.
This week a right-wing think tank in London – Policy Exchange – has claimed that Britain can quit the ECHR without impacting the Agreement. This same group was credited by former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for helping his government to draft anti-protest legislation. Its opponents accuse it of advocating and assisting the targeting by the state of the right to free speech and the right to free assembly.
Farage and his Reform Party have become a potent force in British politics. In June, IPSOS published a poll showing that Reform UK was on a 34 per cent vote share – nine points ahead of the Labour Party. The Conservatives were on 15 per cent. Last week The iPaper published a poll claiming that Reform UK were now 15 points ahead of Labour.
There are significant dangers in this situation for the people of Ireland. We have already witnessed many examples of Starmer’s ineptitude in government and his willingness to move ever rightward in his efforts to see off the challenge of Farage and the far right. His determination to defend the status quo is also evident in its approach to legacy issues – for example his refusal to agree an inquiry into the murder of Sean Brown – and his determination to re-write the law to prevent 400 former internees, illegally detained in the 1970s, from receiving their just compensation.
The Good Friday Agreement is an international treaty to which the Irish government is a co-signatory and co-guarantor. It was endorsed in referendums by the people of the island of Ireland. No British government has the right to rewrite it. Can we trust Keir Starmer to defend the Good Friday Agreement? Absolutely not. He has already instructed his Ministers to issue new ‘guidance’ to judges on how they should interpret parts of the ECHR. Not a good sign.
There is an onerous responsibility therefore on the Irish government to make clear to the Starmer government its implacable opposition to any attempt to renegotiate the Agreement. An Taoiseach Micheál Martin needs to stand over all aspects of the Good Friday Agreement, including those still outstanding like a Bill of Rights for the North.
This current threat to the Good Friday Agreement brings home the importance of the Irish government pushing for, and winning, the unity referendum provided for by the Agreement. Political stability and the future prosperity of our island nation cannot be left to the whims of the little Englander tendencies that brought us Brexit. Our future rests with the people of this island not with Nigel Farage, Keir Starmer or the rest.
Do the right thing
PÁDRAIC Fiacc (born Patrick Joseph O’Connor) died six years ago at the age of 94. Several weeks ago a Blue Plaque was unveiled on the wall of the Falls Road Library, close to his birthplace, in memory of this redoubtable Belfast poet.
His poems stand out for their stark language and brutal rawness, especially when he writes about the conflict.
Michael and Brid McKernon, brother and sister, have been campaigning for almost twenty-five years to have Pádraic Fiacc, formally recognised and accepted as an outstanding poet of his time. They believe the recent unveiling of the Ulster History Circle Blue Plaque is a significant step in that direction.
Michael first met Pádraic Fiacc in 2003, when the poet was in Haypark Care Home. A friend of Michael’s asked him to paint a portrait of the poet. During the sitting they spoke about Pádraic’s poetry and he asked Michael to read some of his poems to him. Michael was very impressed and believed Pádraic’s poetry should be brought to a wider audience at home and abroad.
He described Pádraic as a writer of depth, great perception and humanity, a man whose life was steeped in literature from a young age, a reader of music and a piano player. He brought these skills to his poems when writing about his many themes, including the conflict here or in Palestine, and the impact of colonisation on oppressed peoples.
He was deeply affected by the loyalist killing of a young poet, Gerard McLaughlin, who was just 20 years old. Pádraic’s powerful poem, ‘Requin - The Ditch of Dawn’, is a tribute to the young poet.
RENOWNED: West Belfast poet Pádraic Fiacc
Pádraic was a contemporary of, and often in the company of, leading poets like Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, John Hewitt, Gerard Dawe, Michael McClafferty, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon and Brendan Hamill.
Two renowned literary figures mentored Pádraic Fiacc in his lifetime – Pádraic Colum in 1940s New York and Michael McClafferty in Belfast in the 1960s. With others he was recognised as an ‘up-and-coming’ poet in a book, ‘New Irish Poets’, published in New York in 1948.
In 1956 he was awarded the AE George Russell Award for his work-in-progress, ‘Woe to the Boy’. This collection is testament to Pádraic’s extraordinary knowledge of birds and the natural world. Speaking at his funeral in 2019 the Belfast poet Gerald Dawe said of this aspect of Padraic’s work: “Padraic Fiacc’s poems are full of birds – storm-birds, surely, but also birds of all kinds – jackdaws, wrens, robins, and blackbirds. Fiacc was a birdman: ‘I recall yourself and the birds,’ he writes in ‘North Man’, recounting a walk one evening along the Lagan with the writer Michael McLaverty ‘and the birds in tune with the sky gone down’.”
In 1981 he was invited to join Aosdana, the academy of Irish artists, and in the same year he received the Poetry Ireland Award.
Shortly after Michael and Pádraic met they collaborated on a book of his poetry, ‘SEA – 60 Years of Poetry’. This was Pádraic’s first illustrated collection. The title, selected by Pádraic, owes its origins to the Greek philosopher, Xenophon, whom Pádraic admired.
To mark the centenary of his birth in 2024, Michael published two books, ‘Tear the Dead Day Back Alive’ and ‘Turas Filíochta’ and organised a series of public events about Pádraic’s work. He was assisted in this by Pádraic’s associates and friends. Michael has acknowledged in particular the support of Jim Gibney and Tom Hartley.
Just days before his death in January 2019, Uachtarán na hÉireann, Michael D Higgins, visited Pádraic in Belfast. Commenting after Padraic’s death President Higgins wrote: “Having experienced tragedy and loss, Pádraic Fiacc was never afraid to reflect dark, deeply emotive and disturbing elements in his verse. He courageously raised crucial questions about the relationship between violence, poetry and language.”
Following the Blue Plaque unveiling at the Falls Library, Michael Mc Kernon believes now is the time for the poet to be on the school curriculum and for universities in Ireland to posthumously recognise the greatness of Pádraic Fiacc, the poet born in Elizabeth Street on the Falls Road.
