Poor old Fintan O'Toole. Had a good run for the last year or so railing against the establishment destruction of our economy. Good old-fashioned lefty journalism; railing against 'the man'. Then along comes Marttin McGuinness (whose anti-establishment credentials are pretty much rock solid) and O'Toole scuttles back into the establishment fortress and throws mud down on the troublesome peasant from the wild North. You might say that an Irish Times staffer whose speciality is theatre criticism (!) was never a very credible critic of the establishment (and I'm with you there). But still ... Fintan's kneejerk anti-nationalism was a tad disappointing. After all Fintan is the first to lecture us on the need, in these times of dire straits, to think afresh. Does that injunction not include the west brits who dominate the media?
You might think it unfair of me to agree with McGuinness in dismissing O'Toole as a west brit. In that case have a look at his latest piece in the IT the writer Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan). Fintan uses his review of the author to peddle his usual line: 20th century Ireland was basically a den of muck savage nationalist/gaeilgeoirs who ruined our country; starting with the Rising and the War of Independence. The problem with this little thesis is that the timeline and the chief culprits don't make sense. It is true that it was a bunch of gaeilgoirs and nationalists that led the cultural and political revolution at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries. To use that famous phrase: the graduates of the Christian Brothers (Sinn Fein) basically threw out the graduates of the elite academies of the west brits. Unfortunately, there was a minor event called the Civil War. In which the CBs were definitely defeated and not only did the posh school boys got back in but so did the rest of the west brit establishment. By the time Finanna Fail won power ten years later almost every major feature of the Irish state was fixed. Every open-minded initiative that the original revolution brought in (such as the acceptance of female political leadership) was pushed back by the very people that the Irish Times and Fintan O'Toole represent: the middle classes primarily of the Pale; the west brits.
If you want to make a new Ireland it is not nationalist ideology that you have to contend with: it is the ideology of the real rulers of Ireland who want to remake it into West Britain.
