There is a popular song about the seditious Irish, as seen through the lens of the man from the Daily Mail which includes the cautionary line, "oh, Ireland is a very funny place, sir/It's a strange and troubled land".
Those words were pinging around my head last week when I went to Capitol Hill in Washington to meet with Congressman Jonathan Jackson, a great friend of Ireland and son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson who passed away in February. The Rev J. had his own warm relationship with Belfast, visiting the then forgotten parts of Belfast — in the east and west of the city — back in 2004 with the mantra, "I am somebody".
I was in Chicago briefly for some of the obsequies for the civil rights champion and was reminded of the Rev's pride in his own Irish blood, now passed down to son Jonathan who, being a man who believes in preaching the Gospel without using words, has given practical support to Irish justice causes since arriving in Congress. Of course, all politics is local: Congressman Jackson's district includes the 19th Ward which is the epicentre of Irish Chicago.
Usually, in the Capitol, it's me asking for the favours.
The tables were turned on me, however, when Congressman Jackson had a request for the Irish: "Speak out on Cuba".
As a member of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Congressman Jackson and colleagues visited Cuba for five days earlier this month to investigate the impact of the now 60-year-and-counting illegal blockade of the tiny Caribbean nation by his government.
On his return from Cuba, Congressman Jackson echoed the position his father had long-taken on this Cold War-era blockade — in 1984, Rev Jackson visited Cuba and famously brought Fidel Castro to church, breaking his 27-year embargo on religious observance — , only differing in how harrowing his description is of the blockade's impact today.
“The illegal U.S. blockade of fuel to Cuba—90 miles south of the United States—adds to the longest embargo in world history and is causing untold suffering to the Cuban people," he said. "The United States prevented a single drop of oil from entering Cuba for over three months. This is cruel collective punishment—effectively an economic bombing of the infrastructure of the country—that has produced permanent damage. It must stop immediately.
“We witnessed firsthand premature babies in incubators, weighing just two pounds, who are at tremendous risk because their ventilators and incubators cannot function without electricity. Children cannot attend school because there is no fuel for them or their teachers to travel. Cancer patients cannot receive lifesaving treatments because of lack of medications. There is a water shortage because there is little electricity to pump water. Businesses have closed. Families cannot keep food refrigerated, and food production on the island has dropped to just 10 percent of the people’s needs.
CAPITAL IDEA: Congressman Jonathan Jackson and the author on Capitol Hill last week
“The Cuban government has sent many signals that this is a new moment for the country. While we were there, President Diaz-Canel released over 2,000 prisoners. The Cuban government has begun to liberalise its economy with significant reforms, including allowing Cuban American entrepreneurs to invest in private businesses in Cuba."
You would think that Congressman Jackson would hardly turn to smaller nations to amplify his appeal for Cuba but then America today is "a strange and troubled land". Witnesss the bizarre fact that the American Congressional delegation to Cuba was denied diplomatic support from the US Embassy in Havana — the Chargé d'Affaires actually refused to meet his own country's legislators.
Surely even the British, who invented political vetting, would have to take their hats off to that one. (And I know that of which I speak: back in the eighties and nineties, local civil servants were forbidden to meet this lowly Sinn Fein councillor on grave issues of state like Riverdale speed bumps and Kennedy Way sewage depot odours.)
And so the Congressman is sending out an SOS to Ireland. I did bring him up to date with Kneecap, who were assailed by Leo Varadkar et al for highlighting the inhumanity of the blockade on their recent visit to Cuba. But his focus is more on the Irish Government — after all the Republic of Ireland will hold the Presidency of the European Union in the second half of this year.
If truth be told, a neutral country like the Republic of Ireland holds great sway among the nominally unaligned nations of the world, especially in the global south. Or at least it did before both Russia and the US went guns-a-blazing into Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. In such troubled times, keeping mum is the default position for most European governments when it comes to criticising our friends across the pond. Even when the harshest criticism of all comes from the scion of a civil rights icon in the form of Congressman Jackson.
But of course in the time ahead, in our own "strange and troubled land" that might change, if, as the man from the British tabloid so eloquently put it:
"And every old cock in the farmyard
Stock singing triumph to Sinn Fein
And it wouldn't be surprising
If there'd be another rising
Said the man from the Daily Mail"
