Diaries:Kevin Myers is, I suppose, the Irish contrarian par excellence. His journalism is deeply adversarial, opposed to what he sees as the regnant Irish cant: the self-congratulatory nationalistic, and, on social and international affairs, the bien-pensant liberal.
His attacks on the Rising and on Michael Collins, ("a homicidal, dysfunctional buffoon who corrupted an entire generation of young men, yet achieved nothing for his epic exercises in blood-letting"), if bracingly provocative, elide the sheer messiness of the reflux of nationalist politics from the fall of Parnell, and the complexity of the issue of the legitimacy of a recourse to arms to achieve national independence. If the 1916 Rising lacked a democratic mandate at the time, it certainly acquired retrospective affirmation.
This retrospective affirmation is the theme that Myers most forcefully addresses: the tremendous influence of the exalted cult of the Rising, the heart of darkness in the political discourse of modern Irish nationalism. This is something that most historians of the modern state tend to evade by emphasising the countervailing pragmatism of nationalist politics, a line that comes close to the intellectually dishonest in treating ideology, rhetoric and imagery as of no consequence. There is - at some level - an unsettling validity to Myers's argument that " . . . if retrospective arrangements of history were possible, those of us who wear the poppy would certainly reach back in time and undo the Somme, Ypres and Gallipoli. We detest the reason for the poppy. But republicans, both of the kneecapping variety and Martin Mansergh's lot, are proud of the Easter Rising. They don't commemorate it. They celebrate it. Not for them the re-arrangement of history that would mean no Rising. Hell, they love the bloody thing."
THE PASSION OF Myers's sense of what is historically deleted renders forgivable the occasional Gothic exuberances of his prose:
"It is not the narratives that a society tells that define it so much as the tales it does not tell. We have scuffed over the unmarked graves of history's inconvenient dead, and coughed to hide the sound of our shoes. Yet every now and then a torch shines in history's darkness and suddenly, in the dungeon of their exile, the serried eyes of the forgotten start up in exile."
On social affairs, Myers's contrarianism has more mixed results. His attacks on feminist intellectual selectivity are in many instances well taken: his treatment of this subject is, however, marked by a palpable glee and an attendant escalation in the level of provocativeness. On Irish Travellers his jihad against what he sees as fashionable liberal orthodoxy carries him into the realm of unpardonable crassness ("Travellers remain in squalor because they actually choose to. The escape routes exist: they merely have to avail of them").
On international affairs, the exposal of neoconservative positions at times sits uneasily with Myers's essentially traditional patriotism, which expresses itself in a proper respect for the sense of duty to country of serving soldiers and much else. His principal bête noireis the European Commission, an institution he regards as even more reprehensible than the Equality Authority. A trenchant piece on what transpired at Srebrenica is marred by an opening fulmination, worthy of the Spectator, against "the vanity and the ineptitude of this project of a united Europe, which, the last time it was tried, was also the home of the Final Solution".
As mostly happens in such instances, having got this off his chest, Myers proceeds to write an article of lucidity and intelligence. He attacks the abject failure of the European Union to constrain French policy in its former African possessions: "France is only a European country until its glance reaches the Straits of Gibraltar, and then it reverts to its imperial mode."
IN A 2005 piece entitled "Make Poverty History" Myers writes with justified acerbity: "This is the new and godless religion, in which priests are pop stars, the liturgy is rock music, and the object of reverence is an abstract and imagined entity called Africa."
There is perhaps something a little imagined to his own conception of Africa, if much less so than Bono's. In the same article, on the subject of condoms he observes that "young people will have sex several times a day".
It is hard to resist the thought that this proposition derives subliminally from stereotypes of the African. One certainly does not imagine that it was to be the universal experience of, say, the pupils, including Myers, who crowded in the bell tower of Ratcliffe College, Leicester, in 1962, of whom he writes in another (rather good) piece, "The Russian Sub".
It is not difficult to articulate provocative opinions. The trick is to hold a position across time, in this case a decade of column-writing for this newspaper. This entails avoiding the centrifugal tendencies of rehearsing such opinions in Ireland, of being carried in an ever-widening spiral of strident nay-saying into barking self-excommunication. Kevin Myers achieves this not by trimming, but by a combination of argumentative good faith and the sheer plurality of his interests. It is not a mean feat.
Frank Callanan is currently working on a book on James Joyce and Irish politics
More Myers: An Irishman's Diary 1997-2006 By Kevin Myers The Lilliput Press, 271pp. €17.99