Perhaps you read the imperturbable common sense from Lt-Gen Gerry McMahon on our proposed membership of Partnership for Peace and the comparable wisdom from Prof Tom Raftery on genetically modified foods, both of which appeared in this newspaper this week. You may be sure: they're wasting their time. A huge new constituency of know-nothing voodoo greenery has emerged in recent years, which revels in cabals of wicked scientists out to poison us all, and in secret NATO conspiracies to lure us out of our internationally admired neutrality, and which most of all triumphs in simple ignorance.
This voodoo greenery is as immune to logic, to science and to fact as any of the unintellectual witch-burning hysterias which regularly visit human societies. We can only hope it passes before it does too much harm.
Inorganic methods
Food first. The world we live is fed not by natural green methods but by the unnatural modifications of science. There is, however, an enduring example of what happens when we depend on solely "natural" methods of food production which we should all remember; it is called The Famine. Potato blight is not kept at bay by organic methods but by inorganic ones devised by chemists. It is by the endeavours of such chemists that the great centres of world famine, China and India, where until 30 years ago starvation would roam in regular cycles, predictably killing tens of millions of people, are now able to export food around the world.
In his recent letter, Tom Raftery quoted from Norman Borlaug, one of the greatest human beings of this century. He was the architect of what is called the Green Revolution; but of course, it was not green at all. It was proto-GM crop engineering. He devised wholly unnatural genetic combinations to produce higher and more disease resistant grains and rices, and it was he who more than anyone else in the world has the moral and scientific authority to pronounce on the green voodooists who dominate debate on this topic.
"Current agricultural technology and advances in the pipeline give the world the ability to feed 10 billion people. The problems is whether producers are going to be permitted to use this technology. Extreme environmental elitists seem to be doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks. While affluent nations can afford to pay more for food produced by the so-called `organic' methods, one billion chronically undernourished people of the low-income, food-deficit nations cannot."
Bourgeois elite
Of course, the billion chronically under-nourished people in what used to be the Third World do not matter a great deal to the middle-class green voodooists in the West. This bourgeois elite probably rather likes the thought that ten miles below the wings of the jetliner taking them to a green conference in Rio or wherever there is an ecologically friendly Eastern peasant toiling in his ecologically friendly paddy field helped by his ecologically friendly buffalo while his ecologically friendly wife weaves ecologically friendly garments in their ecologically friendly hut surrounded by their ecologically friendly children with their ecologically friendly rickets.
The truth is that the greens are not so fond of people as they are of their own doctrines of pious anti-scientism. Like their ideological predecessors, the commissars who imposed collective farming, and collective famine, on the peoples of the Soviet Union and Communist China, the application of their politically-pure know-nothing green theories is far more important than the actual consequences of that application. These greens can be really quite dangerous, nasty characters.
A virulent verdurousness has also been at work in discussions about our membership of PfP, and poor Gerry McMahon will try to explain the truths about this in vain; his words are unlikely even to be heard in the deafening and sanctimonious roar about our neutrality. They are nonetheless worth repeating: our absence from PfP is further restricting what was already a rather limited role in world peacekeeping. And limited that role certainly has been. The smallness of our Army, its limited equipment and the 21-year UNIFIL commitment has meant our capacities as peacekeepers comes nowhere near matching the reputation our neutralists think we possess.
No colossus
We are not the Colossus of Neutrality Bestriding the Globe that the green neutralists like to think we are. For most people around the world, Ireland is as indistinguishable from Scotland as Latvia is from Estonia or Ecuador is from Venezuela. They do not, on hearing of this country, fall on their knees crying, "Ireland! Internationally revered neutral country! Ireland, home of internationally respected peacekeepers! Ireland, ex-colony, uniquely placed to understand the concerns of other non-imperial countries! Ireland, home of an independent and non-aligned space where opposing sides in a conflict can feel their case can be presented and heard!"
No. In reality, if they even admit to hearing of this tiny little country - merely half the size of the ancient Finnish province of Karelia - most foreigners are likely to say: "Ireland, ah yes, home of the IRA, bang bang, Bobby Sands and knee-capping." Or maybe: "Ireland, capital Edinborrow, and just a few hours' train-ride from London, and I sure do love those kilts and your Highland Flings." Or: "Ireland? Ireland? You mean Holland, yes?" But: "Ireland, legendary home of morally superior neutrality and of an army which is internationally admired for its peacekeeping"? Hardly.
And as for membership of alliances: Ruairi Quinn is right. NATO's days are over. We must look to a United European Treaty Organisation; and in the meantime, we might learn a little modesty. But most of all, we must learn not to pay any attention to those who make a political virtue of their ignorance.