Back Issues / 2002

One morning in midsummer 2001, an interviewer on RTE Radio One’s “Morning Ireland” was conducting a typical interview, but, for a moment, the whole business rose to a higher plane, when, in somewhat accusatory tones, the interviewer asked: “Are you making a value judgement?” The interviewee rushed to give an assurance that no value judgement was being made. Less than two months later, after the events of 11^th September, value judgements were being made on all sides and by every commentator, without any hesitation whatsoever.

“Congratulations!” was the somewhat surprising affirmation from central Europeans to this travelling Irish citizen in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 Nice Referendum. Having been assured by politicians and pundits at home that we should hang our heads in shame at having voted “No”, a warm response from ordinary Europeans was unexpected. The initially positive reaction to meeting an Irish person was usually followed by a statement such as “your government allows you to vote on European issues, but our governments don’t.”

Racism is an attitude or a prejudice which is always taken or held by somebody else, never by me! The word and its cognates are now thrown around as frequently, and as unhelpfully, as “fascism” was until the 1990s. The pejorative use of “communism” was never so frequent on this side of the Atlantic, probably because the leftist bias in many intellectual circles could never permit an admission that here was another god who failed. It faded altogether from Irish political discourse in the 1970s.

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