THINKING back again on something I touched upon last week, namely the TD Ned O’Keeffe’s objection to the Financial Regulator on the grounds of his being an Englishman, I actually realised that the blundering, objectionable O’Keeffe may well have stumbled upon something.
For after all it does say quite a lot about this state of ours that somebody somewhere realised that the only way to begin clearing it up was to get in an outsider, a foreigner.
Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that O’Keeffe was right to invoke the names of Connolly and Collins for, like him, I too believe that they would have felt very strongly about a foreigner coming in to our system like this.
Unlike O’Keeffe though I believe they would have led the call to get him in here, for the founding fathers of this state would surely be horrified by the financial and political clique who have made a mess of this country for so long.
I suspect Connolly and Collins might have, in the face of our golden circle, in the face of public representatives of the calibre of Ned O’Keeffe, welcomed our ‘English’ financial regulator with open arms.
After all, as many have often pointed out, James Connolly warned that merely changing the flag from a Union Jack to a Tricolour achieved nothing if it left the same clique and class in charge.
If Ned O’Keeffe, so representative of Fianna Fáil, knew his history to any depth he’d have known that the founding fathers of this state, like James Connolly, were not merely squalid little nationalists buttressed up by prejudice and the desire to support a corrupt Irishman over a corrupt Englishman.
They were believers in a certain kind of Irish state and whilst there may well have been a divergence of views between Connolly and Pearse and later on Collins as to what that state might be, there is no reason to believe they would have been anything but united in their abhorrence of the corrupt developers, builders and financiers that Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fáil so openly anointed as our masters these last 15 years.
We have already had our education system questioned internationally recently and it is well known that our financial system was known as something akin to the Wild West.
The high-profile appointment of Mathew Elderfield to the role of Financial Regulator is a further signal that so rotten are the upper echelons of our business and political class that only an outsider, in hock to neither developers or politicians, can be hoped to have the strength to impose agreed rules and ensure they are adhered to.
Ned O’Keeffe’s objection to that is merely the reflection of an elite frightened that they are going to be further exposed.
His resort to objecting to Elderfield on the grounds of his being an Englishman is not because there was a more suitably qualified Irish person but a recognition that such a thing intrudes upon the cosy control of power our golden circle have held.
His dismissal of the foreigner is the shout of those whose only claim to any authority when it comes to Ireland and Irishness and the future of this country is merely the accident of their having been born here.
Someone really should point out to Ned O’Keeffe that his reference to James Connolly in opposition to the foreigner might well have bewildered Connolly as he was born in Edinburgh and probably first came to Ireland in his late teens and when he did come, he did so as a member of the British Army.
As for all the other complications of birth and background amongst those who fought to establish this state, the American-born De Valera, the Isle of Wight-born Tom Clarke, the London Irish who took part, the oh so many others, what do Ned and his supporters believe they would make of his reduction of Irishness?
Of his objection to the foreigner?
When I was growing up in Britain I now realise that some people would have associated being from there as being a supporter of Margaret Thatcher.
Likewise it sometimes seems as if the majority of the Irish populace are tarred with the same brush as their representatives and that to criticise one is to rail against the other. That is not so.
I am still struck everyday by the simple kindness and decency of ordinary people.
But believe me, their representatives, their developers and financiers?
No wonder they fear this new foreigner, this Englishman.