Harris is no armchair traveller

THE reaction to the Taoiseach’s unpredictable nomination of the indomitable Eoghan Harris to the Seanad was so, well, predictable.

People divided into two camps, as they tend to do on many things — those who sneer and jeer, and those who dare and care.

Eoghan Harris is no smug armchair traveller and clearly belongs in the dare-and-care category.

He doesn’t just quote classical thinkers, he also lives the inspiring line of Socrates, — “an unexamined life is not worth living”.

Neither is he a prisoner of past political positions — like the great Séan Lemass, the teenage 1916 revolutionary who recognised Stormont with his visit to unionist prime minister Capt Terence O’Neill in 1965 and who a year later generously praised his brave contemporaries who in 1916 were fighting in khaki on the western front, or like Bertie Ahern, that Drumcondra son of a veteran of Tom Barry’s Third West Cork Brigade who went straight from his mother’s grave to finalise the Belfast Agreement.

All refute Churchill’s notorious jibe about the floodwaters receding to reveal yet again the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone, and the integrity of their ancient quarrel.

And all such true leaders also exemplify Cardinal Newman’s notion that “here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”.

Harris is clearly far from perfect — he is still an unreconstructed Corkonian who, like another proud and distinguished Leesider, John A Murphy, cannot, or will not, recognise the infinite superiority of Noreside hurlers, but neither of them is a mere hurler on the ditch.

Harris the sparkling iconoclast — like the fabled Skibbereen Eagle of old — is now the Baltimore Bugle whose sharp scrutiny will lance the lazy, smug assumptions of political and other poltroons from Baghdad to Belfast to Ballydehob, with a youthful vigour that demolishes the ageist prejudice against sexagenarian senators.

And Harris, in the Seanad or outside, will never commit the three unforgiveable sins of being boring, predictable or obscure.

But his bruised targets will long have reason to apply to themselves the words of Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien, after a New York Vietnam demo encounter with the NYPD, that “when you are hit by New York’s finest, you stay hit”.

Long may the redoubtable Harris hit the right targets, and longer may they indeed stay hit, not least the retreating ‘Rafia’ and their selectively amnesic fellow-travellers. And long may Bertie continue as an imaginative and unpredicatable leader.

Tom Carew

Merton Drive

Ranelagh

Dublin 6