We could have done with some papal inspiration on non-violence

WHEN there is nothing left to say, some fool will always say it. That was a message that used to hang in the newsroom of RTÉ.

In the past week it often seemed appropriate as we were swamped with what seemed like our first tsunami a tidal wave of emotional twaddle about instant canonisation and national days of mourning.

I am old enough to remember the death of Pope Pius XII, when some also talked about canonising him on the spot, but his papacy has not worn that well in its passage into history. People are advocating that John Paul II should be called John Paul the Great.

Historically he would seem to have very little competition, because there was only one other John Paul and he lasted barely a month.

Indeed, his biggest legacy was the suspicion that he was murdered over the implications of a banking scandal, and there was controversy over who found his body.

Although I was only a teenager when Pope Pius XII died, my memory would suggest that his passing received the same kind of coverage on radio in Ireland in that pre-television era.

What seems really unique this time is the amount of media coverage that the death of Pope John Paul II has attracted around the world, especially in nominally Protestant countries like Britain and the United States.

Even more surprising was the response in Northern Ireland, where even Ian Paisley the man who gained notoriety from assailing various Popes issued a positively statesmanlike pronouncement on the death of Pope John Paul II.

There was some of the usual anti-papal graffiti on the walls of Belfast, but for a change it was promptly obliterated with the word: SORRY. Now that is a sentiment that has so seldom crossed the divide in Northern Ireland that one could hardly be blamed for suggesting that it was John Paul's first miracle.

Many have credited him with bringing down communism in Eastern Europe. His most valuable contribution was not so much in bringing down communism as the way that it was brought down. The millions who greeted him on his return to Poland in June 1979 demonstrated that, despite communist claims to the contrary, religion was strong behind the Iron Curtain. When Solidarity began in Poland in 1980, it could easily have turned into a bloody uprising, as in Hungary in 1956. Revolutionary change might have been achieved almost a decade earlier, but it was more likely that the Russians would have suppressed the uprising as they did in Hungary. This could have set the clock back a quarter of a century.

The Pope's influence on his own country helped to keep the lid on things, as Leck Walesa and his Solidarity colleagues worked patiently, always calling for truth. In the process they exposed the distorted propaganda of the communists.

There were dark days, such as May 13, 1981, when the Pope what shot. Walesa heard the news in Nagasaki, Japan. The initial report was that the Pope was dead.

"I was overcome by a feeling of immense loneliness," Walesa wrote. "The whole world seemed to be turned upside down; with our lodestar gone, some of us were wandering in the wilderness without hope.

"Man, how could you do this?" Walesa wrote next morning in the book at the museum in Nagasaki, where the first atom bomb was dropped in anger. When he wrote that, he later explained, he was thinking of the shooting of the Pope, not the impact of the atom bomb.

Although Pope John Paul II had an impact of nuclear proportions on his own country, he did not bring down the Iron Curtain. But he provided the vital inspirational support for the many who did the people like Walesa and the Solidarity priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, who was taken out and murdered by the Polish security forces in 1987. This marked a real watershed.

After Fr Jerzy went missing, Walesa was prevailed upon to address the congregation in the parish church in the Gdansk shipyard. "Someone is banking on revolution, banking on seeing us follow one another like sheep," he said.

"We'll give him his revolution but not in the way he hopes. We've chosen evolutionary change. We've chosen non-violence. We're not going to play the government's game."

HE WENT on to stress that they were strong in their places of work, and they were strong on their knees at prayer. "We must find a Christian solution that avoids violence, because violence is too high a price to pay," he concluded. "We must not let ourselves be manipulated."

Pope John Paul II provided invaluable emotional support for Solidarity, which eventually undermined communism in Poland. It thereby provided inspiration for the collapse of the communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany and even the Soviet Union itself.

We could have taken a peaceful route to freedom ourselves on this island but instead we turned on to what Pope John Paul II called "the paths of violence". We have ever since, at enormous expense, been extolling those people who led us down those paths. I remember a Christian Brother in primary school who used to become near apoplectic as he spoke about Daniel O'Connell having the audacity to advocate non-violence. It was as if O'Connell had renounced all religious and patriotic values. He was depicted as evil incarnate, in comparison with those Young Irelanders who advocated violent revolution. Did that confused Christian Brother even know the meaning of Christianity?

This country has long been blighted by his ilk glorifying violence. Such people twisted the minds of young people like Michael Collins by nurturing notions that physical force was not only necessary, but actually desirable. Patrick Pearse called others fools, but he was the fool who extolled the senseless carnage of World War I.

"The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields," he wrote in December 1915. "Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives gladly given for love of country."

Whoever wrote that was a "blithering idiot", James Connolly stated. Yet people have virtually canonised Pearse, the great manipulator. He wished to sacrifice himself without realising the real implications of what he was doing. As he saw innocent people being cut down on the streets in the final hours of the Easter Rebellion, he was reduced to tears. This was not what he had expected.

Our confused Taoiseach has made a habit of posing with a photograph of Pearse in the background. What message is Bertie really trying to send?

We took a wrong turn early in the last century, but this week Gerry Adams effectively called for the disbanding of the IRA. His remarks were welcomed, but they amounted to no more than fulfilling the promise that Sinn Féin made in the Good Friday agreement of 1998. The IRA has prevaricated for seven years. Unless it complies now without further delay, the whole thing should be dismissed as a contemptible election gimmick.