Easter Rising Parade

Despite the carping from revisionist commentators in the run up to the Easter Rising parade, romantic nationalism won out in the end and Monday's newspaper reports of the “spectacular success” were made with lumps in the throats and tears in the eyes.

Only Kathy Sheridan in the Irish Times was churlish enough to notice the vaguely ludicrous nature of the whole event. State television breathlessly extolling the virtues of our nation, while presenting images of a platform packed with well-dressed, plump and self-satisfied dignitaries, surveying their military might was a lot more reminiscent of  Pravda's coverage of Mayday rallies in Russia than anything connected to 1916 in Dublin. At least Pravda had the excuse that the spectacle of the Red Army marching with their armoured divisions and nuclear missiles was genuinely awesome. The leaders' marquee on O'Connell street, looking vaguely like a doll's house, and the baby tanks on show made for considerably less impressive viewing. Nonetheless, it was enough to move John Waters to rapture.

The presence of the country's political elite on a platform exalting the exploits of a small group of secretive and violent Republicans in 1916 may have temporarily muted the inquisitive zeal of the Sunday Independent who sensationally failed to unearth a single plot by today's secretive and violent Republicans. Eastern Europeans took their place as villains in the weekly front page sensationalist scare story. A Fianna Fáil junior minister presented the paper with figures claiming that “at least 30” of the 122 road deaths this year have been foreign nationals. Based on this statistic, the paper claimed there was “mounting evidence that large numbers of non-nationals are taking to our roads uninsured, untaxed, unlicensed and, in some cases, intoxicated”. The article went on to inform that there was, in fact, no such evidence: gardaí do not collect such statistics and Gay Byrne was quoted saying these rumours did not add up to a “hill of beans as it is only anecdotal”.

The one piece of evidence they did muster was the headline claim that “one third of drink-drive arrests here are foreign nationals”. However, Jim Cusack's article made it clear that this statistic referred only to one-third of the 94 arrests made the previous weekend. By Monday, when the Irish Independent repeated the story, the numbers had changed and the foreigners were now all Eastern Europeans. “Over a quarter of road deaths were among the East European community” and rather than a third of 94 drink driving arrests on a single weekend being foreign nationals, now 32 out of the 97 people arrested on a single day were Eastern European.

The 30 foreign deaths were not all Eastern Europeans as the Independent claimed. The Sunday Tribune reported that only 19 of the 122 road deaths (15.5 per cent) were from Eastern Europe.  

Using road death figures to promote the theory that road safety problems are caused by Eastern Europeans importing their “hard drink-driving culture” into Ireland is hardly responsible. One would imagine that the media should take such theories with a pinch of salt when presented ready-made by government ministers, and backed up by unreliable and limited data. It is hard to imagine how one would import such a culture into a country where two members of the ruling party have been caught drink-driving in recent years and continue to sit in the Dáil today.