Forces driving EU project beyond our experience

RECENTLY I watched a TV documentary on the Battle for Rome (1943/’44).

It dwelt in some detail on the Fosse Ardeatine — which I have visited twice — where 335 Romans, picked almost at random in most cases, were “terminated with extreme prejudice” by drunken, frightened conscripts “acting on orders”.

One would not want to become obsessive about certain matters, but the inability of Anglo-Saxon (and, regrettably, Hibernian) ‘no-noes’ to understand the European project is due — in part — to the fact that they did not share that kind of experience — even in a grandfather’s memories.

Or the Katyn Woods, or Lidice, or what was apparently the ‘wrong’ Oradour — the French town destroyed by the Nazis and now preserved as a ruin.

Or jails in Franco’s Spain or the Colonels’ Greece.

I once had the eerie experience, one truly beautiful summer’s evening in 1998, of passing through sunlit forests in a slow train past a station platform marked Oswiecim (aka Auschwitz).

I do not know how people, even under 50, felt in places like Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest, Talinn, Riga and Vilnius, even Helsinki, in recent weeks when they saw Russian tanks on their TV screens. Or the great-grandchildren of the Resistance in Italy and Germany itself.

Or indeed, as somebody who claims to have read (in translation) 19 times the novel erroneously entitled War and Peace, do I know how Russians feel when they walk past memorials which remind them of the 20 million Soviet citizens who were ‘removed’ by invaders from the west between 1941 and 1945.

Nor do I know the attitudes of those who were ‘removed’ at Srebenica in more recent times, while all of us turned our collective backs.

The recent decision of the government of Belarus apparently to restrict travel to the west of what are called the Chernobyl children will impact very personally on some Irish families but most of us neither know nor care that some of the radioactive caesium from that event actually reached the mountains of Wicklow.

Geologically or not, none of us lives on an island. That bell tolling is not for someone else.

I have forgotten the name of the town in Iraq where a family of six children had their parents killed (technically quite understandably), on top of them in the family car.

Were mum and dad having a heated argument because mum was ‘giving out’ to dad because he should not have been out after the curfew?

All I know is that there has to be a better way in which this benighted species of ours can run what is left of this planet.

The European project is far from perfect and is open to all manner of exploitation by sectional interests and is fraught also with mere technical inadequacies.

But it is for me at least a reasonable and sincere effort to manage — together — our humanity in a humane and civilised way.

I have been intensely proud, as somebody who is more than peripherally interested in the story of the Irish nation, of how we Irish have gone to the very heart of this project and tried to make it work. For us. For all Europeans.

Maybe, one day, for all men, women and children. Even for this potentially wonderful garden of a cosmos bequeathed to us by destiny.

Or by ‘whatever’.

Maurice O’Connell

Fenit

Tralee

Co Kerry