Gallant allies and immortal writers

Yesterday, while some poor dears in the green half of Glasgow were fretting about the availability of Camilo Andres Durán Márquez for selection, the Bretton Woods dispensation was being potentially reimagined.

The Mayo man from Canada was in Strasbourg.

It was, to use the lexicon of the Belfast Agreement talks, a highly sequenced bit of performance art.

Nothing President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said would have blindsided Prime Minister Mark Joseph Carney.

Whatever the European Union actually becomes, Hanseatic League or Holy Roman Empire, in 2026 it is a major economic power with a nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of approximately $23.03 trillion.

That is one of the reasons that Brexit a decade ago was such a glorious own goal for the Brits.

It meant that Partition, effectively parked by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, was back on the agenda.

Yes, it presented us here in Ireland with the prospect of a hard border, but we have dealt with that.

There’s now a sea border for trade goods between Britain and the Six Counties.

The frontier is at Larne, not Lifford.

We have gallant allies in Europe.

As the political moves were happening in Strasbourg, another Connolly was on manoeuvres in Fair Caledonia.

Uachtarán na hÉireann is on a four-day trip; she has already met with the leader of the regional assembly and had dinner in Dumfries with John Swinney’s head of state, Charles Saxe-Coburg Gotha.

It is worth remembering that before he took his well-paid seat in Holyrood, like the rest of the Bravehearts, he swore the following oath:

“I (Name), do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, His Heirs and Successors, according to Law. So help me God.”

Sociologists call this kind of thing a “degradation ceremony”.

This is the sort of thing that writers point out, much to the chagrin of the bought and paid for.

Whether on the page, the stage, or the screen, writing is the primary cultural weapon of the disposed and the outsider.

Even more so in this attention-deficit doomscroll era, writers are important.

So I was particularly saddened to learn yesterday of Bonnie Greer’s passing.

Here she is giving it straight to the Brits about the island they colonised and the real “special relationship”.

I met the woman once.

In the early 1990s, it was before the first IRA cessation.

However, the sequencing, there’s that word again, of the Peace Process, was already underway.

The event was in Camden for the Irish community.

Your humble correspondent was the warm-up act for the late, great Father Des Wilson of Ballymurphy.

Speaking without notes, his grasp of the subject of the conference was magisterial.

A force of nature.

As I recall, herself was in the front row in the little hall.

Afterwards they had a sit-down; I took it as a sign they knew each other.

That’s when I was introduced.

So, when I saw her on Question Time, I wasn’t in any way surprised by her very sound take on Ireland’s British problem.

Sociologists assert that outsiders carry out a “common-sense inventory” when they settle in a place.

Just by being themselves, they generate questions about why things are the way they are.

That, I believe, is why many writers are, in some ways, outsiders.

Culturally, socially, politically, or an amalgam of all of them and others.

Bonnie Greer, the writer, did that and then some.

The Brits were lucky to have her.

Writers are immortal.

They speak to us after they’ve gone.

In the future, audiences will hear Bonnie’s unique writer’s voice through the characters they see on stage performing her plays, or more intimately if they sit down with one of her novels.

Meanwhile, the pressing issue is whether Duran plays through the middle or is stuck out on the wing.