A week ago today, more than two dozen Spanish schoolchildren were killed in a coach crash 70 miles outside Madrid. Another 30 were injured, some of whom might since have died. The Irish Times reported this calamity in a single paragraph; cross-channel newspapers covered it with maybe three or four paragraphs and a photograph. And then it was over, gone, vanished, no more part of our consciousness of the events of the world in which we live, and the human grief we make ourselves accessible to, than a comparable tragedy in Bangladesh.
But this dreadful event happened in a country with which we share membership of the same greater political and economic union; we have similar laws, answer to the same higher courts, and have, we are told, a common future. But what is the basis of that common future when suffering so terrible, so unique, so all-consuming as the slaughter of two dozen schoolchildren out on a summer holiday in Spain, is of so little significance to us in Ireland? Is the entirely unselfconscious relegation of such a tragedy to the sort of singe-paragraph filler that we might also give a beached whale not a reflection on the lack of emotional substance underwriting the entire European adventure?
Disaster in US
Would English-language media in Europe have similarly neglected such a disaster had it occurred in the US? I doubt it. Moreover, if those unfortunate Spanish children had been killed in similar circumstances, but in a plane crash, they would almost certainly not have been disposed of in a single paragraph. For we have twin hierarchies of value. One is emotional; the other is technological, but they are related. Plane crashes are sexier than bus crashes. Why? Because part of us feels that people who are in buses, simply because they are in buses, must be less important than people who die in aeroplanes.
These are unselfconscious judgements. That is what makes them useful. They speak a truth that the conscious mind finds more difficult to do. Ask readers of The Irish Times if the life of a Spanish child is more important than the life of a Californian, and they would say no. The reality is different. We know as a matter of media consumer choice that 24 dead American children are more important to us than 24 dead Spanish children. We know that whatever vicarious grief one feels for complete strangers is more easily bidden if the children speak English and belong in a general sense to our international Anglophone culture. We know that in our workplace or our supermarket, we are more likely to make the standard expressions of sympathy if the dead are not Spanish or Portuguese or Austrians but Americans.
EU institutions
At one level I find this perfectly deplorable. Europe invented high art and the sciences which transformed the world. We should be friends. But we are not; quite clearly, no matter what we purport. Is there not an extraordinary dissonance between our professions of friendship and the way we actually feel? On the one hand, daily, councils of ministers gather, and EU institutions toil, and the pieties of union are religiously preached; yet on the other, there is not the emotional bond or even the feigned interest which could in the long term, and through adversity, keep that union together.
Are democratic political unities not in their essence based on emotion? Bismarck brought Germany together with the sword, but it was held together by the heart. What binds Nice with Calais 1200 kilometres away is heart and tongue and the strange and elusive alchemy of identity. Will Nice feel more strongly about 24 children killed in Genoa, just down the road, or 24 children killed in Calais? How would Calais respond if similar calamities were to be visited on Dover, 30 kilometres away, or Marseilles, 1,000 kilometres distant?
A quarter-of-a-century of vigorous Europeanness has not convinced us that the Spanish are closer to our hearts than are Californians; and my desire that they should be is irrelevant. What is, is. We noisily resent Spanish lawfully fishing in waters we ourselves do not wish to fish in. We even ignore their innocent children, slaughtered as they gaily make for their annual holiday, as we would not do if the dead had been Americans or Australians.
National interests
So what is this word "union"? Has it any power at all in these times of prosperity and plenty, other than in terms of aspiration and the standard platitudes of Euroblather? And how real will it be in times of adversity, when our central national interests are in direct conflict with Spain's? Where stands the "union" then? How binding will our bonds to Spain - or France, or Germany or Denmark - be when the equivalent of the coach crash occurs within the conduct of our foreign policy?
You cannot forge enduring political unity out of temporary self-interest, and temporary self-interest is the basis of the Europe experiment so far. Burnt by the fires of Verdun, Auschwitz, Hamburg, the Germans and the French have called us into the cooling union of European states. But neither membership of that union nor the huge bribe to pretend that we are indeed thoroughly European, can take away from two dozen innocent children, dead on a road in Spain, and the fact that almost nobody in this country knows or cares about them. And that, alas, is the most realistic measure of how truly European we really are.