Liberty and Transparency

This story caught my notice recently, it's my own local Council, but it was the concept rather than the geography or even the specific issue that I found interesting. The Council - made up of elected representatives voted for by local people - made a decision which it (correctly) thought would be controversial, and so therefore it also took a policy position to not disclose which councillors had voted for it. Undoubtedly they were navigated through these waters by senior staff.

For a few days there was a minor media kerfuffle about it, but that seems to have fizzled out now.

However, Northern Ireland's obsession with politics makes us all think that politicians run the place, but they don't. Northern Ireland is mostly run by public sector 'officials', not unlike the colonial era British Raj which my father-in-law was born under in Lahore in 1942.

My (limited) experience of years interacting with the public sector here is that - when it deems it necessary - it specialises in anonymity, making decisions and issuing directions - but redacting and camouflaging the names of the individuals who did so. I have seen numerous examples of this.

Over the years, senior civil servants have openly told me how incapable they think most politicians here are. And no surprise – particularly at even a small local council like ours - the idea that 40 elected councillors (all of whom already have proper full time day jobs) can in their spare evenings somehow manage the labyrinthine policies and decisions and activities of say 900 full-time salaried staff is lunacy.

The local councillors that I know, and also those whose social media I follow, seem to spend most of their time as an interface between the public and 'the system' - roads, bins, environmental improvements, etc - a lot of the time expending their energies trying to get the people within 'the system' to do the jobs that they are already salaried to do. 

James Burnham wrote about The Managerial Revolution in 1941. This is our world. The politics is a sideshow.

PS: The German-American writer Hannah Arendt's superb definition of bureaucracy was "rule by nobody".

From Ulster to Yorkshire's Spen Valley - the Exodus of 1689

West Yorkshire isn't on the radar for our stories from 1689-90, but here are two, showing both Protestant civilians and also defeated Jacobite soldiers fleeing there.

"... The handful of Protestants in Ireland took the alarm, and every ship that came over was full of families who had fled for their lives, leaving all their possessions behind them.

When these fugitives landed at Liverpool and other ports they were often destitute, and had to get the customary passes from the authorities there, and with the aid of little sums given to them by the chief constables of every village through which they passed, gradually made their way to the places at which they had determined to settle.

Thus the entries in the towns’ books come thick and fast : “Paid to nine Protestants fleeing from Ireland, 2/6” “Paid to Irish Protestants travelling with a pass, 1/9” &c..."

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"... This was a stirring time in our national history, and the year 1690 especially was one of mingled disaster and victory for King William. The struggle of the bigot James to regain the throne he had so ignobly deserted was not over, but William, by the crowning victory of the Boyne, had destroyed his power in Ireland where sympathisers had mustered in strong force, and we find after this date no more entries of frightened Protestants fleeing through this district for their lives. There are, however, passes for wounded soldiers and destitute seamen in plenty. Here is one that speaks volumes, “Paid for two men and a horse for William Dwyer, an old wounded soldier who had seen thirty years service to hurry him on a sled through Heckmondwike, 1/6.”"

- both extracts are from Spen Valley, Past and Present by Frank Peel (1893) 

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Interestingly, it seems that they were to be dissuaded from going to London:

"... The number of Protestants fleeing from Ireland to England was so great that the April 25–29, 1689, edition of the London Gazette included instructions to them not to try to make their way to the capital as it was already over-burdened with the influx of refugees: 

"These are to give Notice to all Poor distressed Irish Protestants who came lately from Ireland, and are at present in several remote parts of this Kingdom, That they keep their respective places of abode, unless other necessary Occasions draw them to London then [sic] the Charity of the Brief, seeing they may live much cheaper elsewhere, and many of them cannot find Employments fit for them in the City. The notice indicates that if they comply, “speedy care will be taken to send them Relief out of the Monies that shall be given by virtue of Their Majesties [charity] Brief granted for that purpose.”

 - source here.

1798 Rebellion and Community in the Ards Peninsula

I am deeply thankful to a transatlantic and distant relative - or as we say in Ulster-Scots, a far-oot-freen - who recently sent me typescripts of some family letters from ancestors we share, which are correspondences written between an emigrant who had gone to Philadelphia, and his family back home.

The letters date from 1797 (written to Ballygarvan and Nunsquarter near Kircubbin) and there's a further one dated 1821 (to Ballybally, which I suspect is a typo for Ballyboley, between Carrowdore and Greyabbey).

The 1797 letters give fascinating community context to the era before the 1798 Rebellion, and position the 'United Men' rather differently than the nationalistic way in which they have come to be presented.

We are usually shown them in the simplistic national duality of "British v Irish". However, these letters show them as being one of three elements within a complex community dynamic, made up of the Catholic agrarian "Defenders", Protestant agrarian "Peep O Day Boys" and then the "United" as a different strand altogether. For example:

"this country still continues the war against France contrary to the general wish of the people. There was a great talk of peace the while past but no, found to our cost it was too good news to be, the peepaday men and Defenders still continue at war in this country and are making great depradations the folly of these parties makes a union next to impossible" (letter, 23 April 1797)

"our rulers continue to oppress and lode us more and more and they are at present persecuting the peasable and well disposed for being united in the case of liberty" (letter, 24 April 1797)  

There is much to think about in the content of these letters, which are very much in line with the Canadian academic Donald Harman Akenson's enlightening book about the Islandmagee community entitled Between Two Revolutions. In it he takes a 'bottom up' community perspective to explain the seeming contradictions of how the Ulster-Scots acted in 1798 compared with 1916, rather than the usual 'top down' national perspective.

It was when reading Akenson (see post here) that the penny finally dropped with me that our era's binary fixation on nationality in Ireland is a dead end. In reading Between Two Revolutions, community, and community liberty, emerged as a more fluid and vivid way to think.

However, our ongoing political context in Northern Ireland, and 'hybrid non-linear warfare', remains focussed upon concepts of nationality; every issue ends up there, by design. 

Or, as the old adage says, when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail.

• High profile 'conversations' like this about a hypothetical future Ireland are a cosmetic distraction when almost the entire political establishment of the Republic of Ireland is already gaslighting its own population and seeking to diminish its liberty. Thankfully the population defied them at the ballot box (Guardian report here).

• Gravestone below of Alexander Byers of Greyabbey who was killed at Battle of Ballynahinch in June 1798.