Eamon McCann - March 1984

What the Mallon bugging row reveals is the fragility of the Southern State.
This is obscured by the fact that it's attractive to believe that almost anything this government does results from a combination of malice and ineptitude.

And it's difficult to dislodge from the forefront of the mind that it must be sweet as nuts for Charlie Haughey to have a chance to skewer FitzGerald on an issue to do with bugging.

But this one goes way back. It goes back at least as far as the Crinion-Wyman affair in 1970 when a Brit spook and the human bug he had planted in garda communications were posted back to their bosses in Whitehall, no fuss. At the time, hardly anybody prominent in constitutional politics or in the media objected. Odd to think back on that now.

But, privately, some prominent people were outraged and I suspect Charlie Haughey was among them. Not that he was in a position to say or do much about it - the arms business and all that - but he will have kept it in mind through the long years in the wilderness.

It is casually, widely assumed in the media that Haughey spent those years criss-crossing the land glad -handing and back-slapping and making himself generally amenable at hootenannys and hill-billy hoe-downs put on by comical Fianna Fail cuma.inn down the country, fired and fuelled by pure personal ambition to claw and slither his way back to the top.

'For all I know this is the truth of it.

But if it is it's a type of truth which :'oesn't really matter much. What matters are the ideas he carried with him as he went, which he believed were central to what the State is about, which had been subtly derided and were in the process of being ditched by the faction then in control of Fianna Fail, which had never been cherished anyway by the crowd in Fine Gael, but which evoked a deep response where it was eventually to matter - among the raucous red-necks whose whoops and yahoo yelps around Leinster House when Haughey survived successive challenges from the remnants of the Lynch faction sounded so unsettlingly crude to the sophisticate scribblers who report such matters the broadsheet press.

I suspect - and it's only that, a suspicion - that Haughey has believed ever since that the corruption ran deep and that no effort had been made to dig it out. Not, to be fair (although I have a rooted objection to being fair to politicians), because used notes in brown envelopes were being dropped in Merrion Square, but because there was no political will to drive the spade down deep.

Let's spread the suspicion farther. This is what the shennanigans over security have been about since Haughey sailed back into office in 1979: the belief that a leak from a minister of the Lynch faction to a journalist who exuded a certain ... Britishness constituted a threat to "national security", the fact that certain talented senior gardai were shouldered onto the sidelines, the attempt to concentrate control of security and intelligence in those whose personal loyalty had been certified ... all that stuff. Paranoid probably, and dangerous in some of its implications, but growing out of political ideas, not out of the warps of any individual's personality.

And of course it's not paranoid at all to believe that over the last 14 years parts of the machinery of the state have become so enmeshed in the British security operation that its independent existence is now questionable. And to the extent that its independence has been compromised, so must the loyalty of its personnel to itself alone.

All of which pops the question: what is "national security" in Southern Ireland? What is the nation the security of which all this conflict and activity is intended to protect?

It is part of the official ideology of the State that the State itself is a poor, stunted class of a thing, quite undeserving of full-hearted support, the very raison d 'etre of which is to cease being its misfortunate self and to grow into something quite different. A hunchback dwarf striving to walk tall.

Then, so the theory goes, it can set its face to the sun and excite admiration.

This ambivalence about the extent to which loyalty to the existing State can properly be demanded of its citizens is no mere matter of political theorising. Remember Ballinamore. And what, after all, did Des O'Malley mean when he told the Dail after that fiasco that the army and gardai deployed at Ballinamore hadn't, perhaps, been as "tough" as the men they confronted. "Tough" men already walk tall.

The purpose of the New Ireland Forum is to work all this out. It is not a coincidence that it is in the context of a Forum crisis over whether consensus can be reached that the bugging business has arisen, and the ructions about whether the security services were involved, or culpably uninvolved, and if so why, or why not, and what's it all about anyway.

First we have to know what the State is about, and we don't.

Or rather, I do but I'm not sure about the rest of them.

Let me put all this a different way: there are as many Wallys as Jumblats in the Free State ruling class.

*****

The bugging affair did at least divert our attention from the appalling news that Princess Di is in the pudding club again. We are in for another season of goo and slurp.

The British take these things very seriously. The question of the monarchic succession has given them no end of headaches in the past.

Take George I. He was an obscure German prince when the direct line of Orange Billy died out of shame and all the obvious successors, the blooddbrood of James II, were disqualified on account of being Taigs. So they brought over George of Honour, who had neither a word of English nor a titter of wit but did manage to father George II despite having had his wife locked up for n years.

George II died falling off a lavatory seat in Kensington Palace which created problems. His only son, Frederick, had been killed nine years previously by being hit on the bead by a tennis ball. The crown might have fallen down the lavatory bole had it not been fielded by the nimble grandson, George III.

He was a bad lot for most of his long life and eventually went mad.

On one occasion, round about 1804, he got out of his carriage in Royal Windsor Park to shake hands with an oak tree, being under the impression that it was King Frederick of Prussia. When he began the 1811 King's Speech in parliament with: "My Lords and Peacocks" there was no more hiding the fact that he was daft, so they locked him up in a sealed wing in Windsor Palace where he gibbered quite contentedly for many a long year.

The Prince of Wales then became Prince Regent, which caused trouble again. He was married to a Papish called Mrs FitzHerbert. Mrs FitzHerbert was a sound woman and agreed, for three grand a year and access to the Royal loins when she felt like it, which she did, often, to forget about the marriage and allow the Prince Regent to "marry" a Princess Caroline, acquired from Brunswick.

The couple met for the first time three days before the wedding and, understandably enough, hated one another so heartily on sight that both of them were blind drunk during the ceremony. The Prince Regent was held upright by the Duke of Bedford. Caroline collapsed in a stupor. Still, they did the British thing shortly thereafter and managed to produce a daughter, Charlotte, following which Caroline was told to make herself scarce and Mrs FitzHerbert brought back to bed.

Then, tragedy. In 1817 Charlotte died giving birth to a stillborn baby. Caroline, mightily miffed at the way she'd been treated, made it clear she wasn't coming back to bake another bun for Britain. The Prince thought about divorcing her on the ground of her numerous adulteries (including a torrid affair with her brother Bergami) and sending out for a replacement German princess. But this would have been a heavy thing to do since adultery by the wife of an heir to the British throne was a capital offence. (Still is, a fact which Di should keep firmly in mind if she ever fancies a bit of spare, and who'd blame her if she does?).

The situation was serious. There were swarms of Royal kids growing fat off the tax-payers' money but practically all of them were bastards. The first seventeen candidates for the succession didn't have a legitimate heir between them. And of this seventeen only three were under forty.

The prospect emerged of the crown being passed from hand to aging hand quicker than a pass-the-arcel game in a West Belfast pub until they all dropped own dead. However, help was at hand. Royals from all over Europe  railed around and job lots of Germanic princesses were shipped in for quick marriages to Brit Royals, who prevailed upon to leave their various mistresses, concubines, friends, Roman Catholics and country men. One of these was Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg who was married of to the Duke of Kent, who had just left Madame de St Laurent with whom he had lived for twenty-seven years. She got a pension.

Princess Victoria and the Duke of Kent produced a daughter. Which is where Queen Victoria came from.

She lived far too long and was eventually surrounded by offspring, offspring of offspring and the in-laws of offspring, many of them drunkards, card cheats, adulterers, syphilitics and so forth. But not to worry. She lived to pass the jewelled baton to Edward VII who in turn passed it on neatly enough to George V who was something of a bone-head but with no great harm in him. And his heir was Edward VIII. Problems again.

Edward wanted to marry a Mrs Simpson, who was an American, a commoner and a divorcee but (a point in her favour here) not a Catholic. Edward was also a fan of Adolph Hitler.

He was talked into abdicating, and thus George VI, a dull sort, married to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons, who preferred pink gin to black people but nobody minded that.

When he died in 1953 his daughter, Elizabeth, a morose woman of limited intelligence married to a boorish Greek scion of the redundant German Royal Family, took over. And they had Charles. And Charles had Di. And Di had William.

With a family background like that you don't have to wonder at the British establishment going ga-ga when they see the succession "secured" for two generations ahead.

But why isn't proper history taught in our schools so as to cleanse the minds of our children of dangerous, sentimental notions of which no good can come?