Fintan O'Toole

My rapid recount of the week failed to note its highlight. I trekked into Queen’s Wednesday to hear the John Hewitt Society lecture by Fintan O’Toole, a brilliant writer, thinker, political commentator, playwright, columnist, etc. I love his column in the Irish Times and withstood the shingles pain for the long walk to Queen’s to hear him in person.

He has been writing about the intersection of identity and nationalism as only he can--part poetry, part dystopia, part historic lecture. The quality of the four-part series makes clear why he recently won the Orwell Prize.

Fintan being Fintan, his lecture turned on a John Hewitt poem, An Irishman in Coventry. The poem was written in 1958, when Fintan was born. Coventry was being rebuilt from the ground up after being levelled during the war. John Hewitt, who was from Carrickfergus, was living in Coventry and was astonished by the modern and cosmopolitan city taking shape around him. He was glad to be shed of Ireland and its parochial and tragic past. But then he falls in with an Irish celebration of some kind (the labourers in Coventry would have largely come from the Republic). The music, the language, the whisky evokes all that he loves and hates about Ireland. In other words, it’s complicated.

I won’t try to do justice to Fintan’s lecture, which ascribes Brexit to a nascent English nationalism--not British, but English. Brexit will do incalculable damage to Ireland, north and south. He said we have reached a point in history (kicked off by Reagan and Thatcher) where governments want to simultaneously project power (an expensive proposition) and belittle and defund government. Voters have begun to see they are on the losing end of both global ambition and domestic austerity and they are angry that their governments have abandoned them (health care cuts, education cuts, nursing home cuts). Trump and Brexit are the result. He offered no magic bullets other than the need for people to come together in local communities and vivify democracy, giving people a renewed sense of power.

My good friend Ann O’Dwyer joined me for the lecture. She is off to Harare Zimbabwe to do an audit for a charity. Since I’ve had the shingles, I have a new sense of myself as being more frail. I am in awe of Ann, who travels to lots of places where she will not necessarily have pleasant living conditions. I’ve done such adventurous things when I was younger but I can’t imagine at my age taking on such travels.
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