Civil War Politics

When I was naught but a nipper, Old Man Tickell once caused a fight in a pub in Kerry with what he thought was an innocuous question. Always interested in the politics and history of the Republic, he guilelessly asked one of the friendly locals, "what's the difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael these days anyway? Ideologically, what separates them?" Cue one mighty stramash, as the punters around him fell out, and fell out dramatically, about what distinguished Ireland's two biggest parties ideologically.

The cynical answer might be: not a lot. But the orthodox answer is a historical one, rooted in the bloody, divisive and unnecessary experience of the Irish Civil War. The great houses of Fianna Fáil fell in behind Eamon De Valera, and the principle of an Irish republic. Fine Gael represented those who struggled for the Irish Free State, gradualism, and the awkward compromise Michael Collins struck with Lloyd George in London in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The Free State may have won the war, but under the premierships of the scheming and reactionary Eamon de Valera, Sean Lemass, Jack Lynch, and the odious and greed-rotted Charles J Haughey, the Fianna Fáil machine crushed all before it for decades -- until 2011. 

Just as Scottish Labour was swept out to sea, the Soldiers of Destiny found themselves kicked into the soup by the Irish people, outraged and disgusted by the recklessness, incompetence and corruption of the Cowan government, and the poisoned legacy of profligacy, incompetence and mismanagement which  the cute hoors of Bertie Ahern's cabinet had abandoned the country to.

To the British political anorak, peeking across the Irish sea, the idea of structuring contemporary politics along civil war lines, rather than political ideology, seems bizarre. All of our large political parties are coalitions of opinion - a spectrum within which compromises must be struck - but organising your contemporary political struggles according to whether your great-grandfather favoured De Valera or Collins seems bonkers. It obscures, rather than illuminating, the key schisms dividing political points of view. 

But in Scotland, increasingly, I wonder if we aren't drifting quietly towards our own - peaceful - sort of civil war politics, with the splits and divisions of the 2014 referendum running deep, papering over the more significant political splits which untie and divide the country. Alex Massie has the droll but slightly horrifying gag that the electoral battle between Labour and the SNP is to decide "who gets to be Scotland's Fianna Fáil." I begin to suspect that this is truer now than it was before the September poll.

And if any figure is likely to reinforce this tendency, and to root it deep, it is Jim Murphy. The smoothest and most media-savvy of Scottish Labour's leadership candidates he may be, but Murphy is also the one most identified with the referendum, and most likely to alienate those who took a different view on the 18th of September. He has made much of his intention, if elected, to unite the country. In many ways, Murphy is uniquely incapable, of the three, of doing so. The memory of those Irn Bru crates won't fade soon.

And art is already anticipating politics. In Stanley Odd's Son I Voted Yes, we look forward to the kind of inter-generational political conversations and expectations which have been the stuff of Ireland's civil war legacy. "My da' was a Yes voter," you can imagine a proud wean explaining to his wee pal, who remembers in turn that his parents voted No. And dimly, in the future, anticipate a fight in some rural pub on this side of the Irish channel, the compliment of history repaid, as an inquiring Irish visitor to our shores enquires: "Can you tell me what the difference between the SNP and Labour is anyway?"

"Well," I'd say, "back in the referendum of 2014..."