Persecuting the Irish: icon of our times

Noble, that’s the word for the Colegio de los Irlandeses, now part of the prestigious university of Alcalà de Henares near Madrid. 

Quiet, understated but self-assured, it is a fitting tribute to the offer of Spain to the persecuted Catholics of Ireland, to a refuge where they could safely study within the tenets of their faith.

Colegio de los Irlandeses, Alcalà de Henares

Makes you wonder what the ancestors of today’s Brits were up to, oppressing Irish Catholics. What good did it do them? Today Ireland is still Catholic and, what’s more, it’s independent of Britain. All that pain and suffering Britain imposed, and it gave neither nation anything benefit at all. You’d think we might learn.

The truth, of course, is that some people did very well out of the arrangement. A tiny number of people, but they were powerful. The holders of great fortunes in Ireland, particularly in the form of land, were doing just fine and saw no reason to loosen the reins. On the contrary, they felt they were absolutely entitled to see the army doing whatever it took to put down anyone uppity enough to question their right to enjoy what they, and their ancestors, had always enjoyed.

Meanwhile, in Spain the founding of the College had nothing to with preserving liberty from persecution. Far from it. Spain itself was more than happy to do its full share of persecution. Protestants: burn them. Moors, Jews: drive them out. And if they don’t go: burn them. Just like the Mayflower pilgrims, Spanish Catholics weren’t out to obtain religious freedom, just the freedom of their own religion to persecute anyone who belonged to a different one.

And in just the same way, a handful of people did very well out of the arrangement: the owners of the great fortunes, in Spain, Latin America or anywhere else controlled by force of Spanish arms, were convinced that this was right and proper and the preservation of their way of life was a divinely ordained duty.

That’s what makes the College in Alcalà so eloquent a monument. So eloquent today, I mean.

When a couple of crazed, misfit Muslims, who can’t distinguish between an act of political courage and a simple piece of barbarism, hack to pieces a British soldier in Woolwich they are perpetuating the attitudes that drove Britain to impose its will by force on the Irish. Or Spanish Catholics to force the conversion of Spanish Jews. Or Pakistani Sunnis to murder Pakistani Shiites. Or orthodox Jews to deny the right of Jewish women to pray like their male counterparts at the Wailing Wall.

What they are perpetuating is the mindset of anyone who is so sure of being right that it justifies inflicting suffering or even death on those who disagree.

That goes just as much for those, in the English Defence League and outside, who’ve reacted to the Woolwich murders with violence against Muslims and their institutions. Less obviously, it also applies to organisations that don’t themselves promote violence, like the United Kingdom Independence Party. They may not actively condone persecution, but by their attacks on immigration, they sustain the belief that a nation is better for being homogeneous.

Homogeneity was what all those persecuting powers, driving out Muslims, Jews, Catholics or Protestants were trying to do, too. Looking back on their attempts in the past, as I did when I saw the Colegio de los Irlandeses, I had to ask myself ‘why did they bother?’

Though, seeing how many people seem to be rallying to the banner of intolerance again today, perhaps the question ought to be, ‘why do they still bother now?’

Terror and the words we speak

Often the responses to a terror attack is even more notable than the attack itself. As are the words in which they are expressed.

‘I spoke to him for more than five minutes,’ said a woman who approached one of the killers in yesterday’s fatal, meat-cleaver attack on a soldier in Woolwich, South London. ‘I asked him why he had done what he had done.’

Quietly confronting an armed killer

The man she was talking to was still carrying the cleaver and he was bespattered with his victim’s blood. Despite that she showed exemplary courage, as well as calm good sense in asking the one question which really matters and to which we shall never get an adequate answer.

The Prime Minister has also spoken out, repeatedly, and each time has reiterated how ‘shocking’ he finds the event. Well, I think most of us agree. But does it need to be said so often? The aim of terrorists is to terrorise us. Perhaps fewer references to being shocked might give them less of a sense of success.

Much more appealing were the words of a Sikh from the neighbourhood interviewed on the radio this morning. He had been upset by the reaction of the extreme right English Defence League, who within hours were calling demonstrations to demand the return of their streets to them: the attackers were Muslims and therefore from a culture the EDL perceives as alien and to be driven out. The Sikh underlined the fact that though he was Indian, he wasn’t Muslim, and he’d been brought up on those streets – they were his just as much as they were the EDL’s.

What other words did the EDL come up with? Its leader proclaimed ‘They’re chopping our soldiers’ heads off. This is Islam. That’s what we’ve seen today.’

As it happens, no-one had his head chopped off, though apparently the attackers did try to decapitate their victim. But that was one victim. Notice how one soldier has become ‘soldiers’? So a one-off gruesome event is converted, by simple pluralisation, into part of a series of attacks. And then instead of being attributed to two profoundly misled Muslims, it’s attributed to the whole of Islam, even though community leaders up and down the country have denounced the atrocity. That, sadly, did not stop a couple of Mosques being attacked.

The men suspected of killing the soldier have been caught. They seem certain to be convicted of a vile murder and will doubtless spend most or even all of the rest of their lives in gaol. Let’s take that as the right way of dealing with the attack. Let’s not use that crime to fuel an Islamophobic campaign, whose target is one of our most law-abiding communities. Let’s not use it to stoke up the fires of anti-immigrant hatred that are already generating far more than enough heat.

After all, let’s go back to the lady who spoke so calmly to the attackers. Many in Woolwich reacted well to the murder, confronting the men calmly and with courage, and they have been saluted for it. But her case is particularly intriguing.

Her name was Ingrid Loyau-Kennet. The papers took delight in describing her as a ‘British Mum’, but I think the Britishness comes with the ‘Kennet’ part of her name. She explained in a radio interview this morning that she'd been travelling home from France when she made her stop in Woolwich, and both the accent in which she told us the story and the ‘Loyau’ in her name suggest that her roots are French.

That cool courage, in other words, was displayed by one of those immigrants so frequently denounced by the likes of the United Kingdom Independence Party and the English Defence League. And the French have automatic right of residence here thanks to that maligned organisation, the European Union. That’s the union UKIP and the EDL, and many in the Conservative Party, would like us to leave.

She, unlike the Prime Minister or the far right, found the behaviour and the words that were right when confronted with yesterday's horror. For my part, I’d be delighted if we could get a few more Loyau-Kennets here, from France, from Germany, from Poland, from Bulgaria. And I’d be more than happy to send a few EDL and UKIP leaders back the other way in exchange.

But that would be terribly unfair to the countries that had to accept them.