Fergus Finlay: We are lucky to live in a democracy and must protect it
Russia's President Vladimir Putin — a madman waging a terrible war — speaking with former US President Donald Trump — a man who conspired to overthrow the elected US government.
It’s a miracle. So much so, I think the Government should declare a once-off national holiday to celebrate the extraordinary milestone we’ve just reached. Give us all an extra day before the summer ends and call it the 5 Mill Day.
I come from a family of emigrants, some of whom never came home after they left Ireland. When I was six, the population of Ireland was less than 3m and it kept going down for a while after that. For a good deal of my adult life, Ireland was a country to leave, not a country to come home to. I never thought we’d be as big, as strong and as vibrant as we are.
But last September I wrote here about the prediction by the Central Statistics Office that our population would soon pass the 5m mark. And last week, the CSO confirmed it. There are now 5,123,536 of us. That’s a hell of a jump.
Highest population in a Census since 1841https://t.co/utEHSbk4cu #CSOIreland #Ireland #Census #Census2022 #CensusIreland #Population pic.twitter.com/Qp5iAWASjh
— Central Statistics Office Ireland (@CSOIreland) June 23, 2022
We’re up by 360,000. A little less than half of that is accounted for by what they call natural increase — more births than deaths. And the rest is explained by inward migration — lots of people coming to live in Ireland for the first time, and lots of Irish people coming home.
And would you just look at us? Not just a big and growing population, but no longer dull, Catholic, and white. When we get the detailed census results, we’ll discover we have around half a million non-Irish people living here, all of them contributing hugely to our landscape and future.
We’re a much more open, diverse, and inclusive society than at any stage in my lifetime — even if in some areas we have a long way to go.
Of course, a growing population brings challenges, but also huge opportunities. And the detailed data that we’ll get in time means that we have no excuses about our failure to plan.
When you reflect on how far we’ve come, I think we have a right to feel lucky. And not just in terms of growth, but in other ways too. Despite all our problems, this is a strong and stable democracy. We have leaders that we’re free to criticise — and we do it all the time — but they’re serious, hard-working people.
We disagree, often trenchantly, about stuff, but we’re not so polarised that we can’t see any good at all in the people we disagree with. We know that this is a place where power can and will transition peacefully, and we’re not run by charlatans.
But when I think of being lucky, there’s a thing that often pops into my head. Back in 1984, a man called Patrick Magee planted a bomb in his hotel room in the Grand Hotel in Brighton. When it exploded, about three in the morning, it killed five people. Its intended target Margaret Thatcher escaped — and became a hero when she opened her party conference six hours later, looking perfectly groomed and composed.
In the aftermath of the bombing, the IRA issued a statement acknowledging responsibility for the bomb. It included the lines: “remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” Ain’t that the truth?
Away to the east of us there’s a madman waging a terrible war against his neighbour. His actions have probably killed thousands already, including his own soldiers. And he has wreaked untold and maybe irreparable damage. The economic toll has been huge and has spread like a contagion right across Europe.
In the process, he has sown the seeds of division in Europe. There is at least the possibility, without extraordinary leadership, that economic privation, accompanied by a huge influx of refugees, will start a simmering resentment and the growth of polarisation. There were signs of that in both recent French elections.
Putin can’t win the battle against Ukraine ultimately. He can’t be allowed to. But he can win the war to destabilise Europe, and pit communities against each other.
Much closer to home, another war for hearts and minds is going on in the UK. That unfortunate country is being led by a charlatan who cannot, it seems, be easily removed. He is clinging to the hope that what they are now calling culture wars will enable him to hang on to an alienated and embittered base.
There are dozens of examples of how far Britons have drifted apart from each other already. The starkest may be the support in some parts of the community for a barbaric plan to send thousands of refugees to Rwanda, and heaven knows where else ultimately.
Johnson is a leader who won power and is seeking to cling to power by dividing his country. He’s a leader whose own narcissism blinds him to the damage he is doing.
And then there is the United States. When Donald Trump lost office, I wrote here that the only things he’d accomplished were a big tax cut for the better-off and the packing of the Supreme Court. And I said in that piece, “The good news, I believe, is that we’ll shortly never have to think about him again”.
The essence of the American model is a system of checks and balances where the three branches of government work in creative tension with each other.
Now, the executive branch is hamstrung by a string of major problems (inflation, guns, etc), not of its making; the parliamentary branch is utterly split, with people incapable of working with each other; and the judicial branch has apparently decided to start removing rights that Americans thought were well established.
It seems clear that having struck down the 50-year-old right to choose, there is every possibility now that the Supreme Court will focus its attention on issues like the equal right to marry. That’s half of the legacy that Trump left when he packed the court.
But the other half is being revealed, bit by bit, by the Congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection in Washington. If you’ve been following the hearings and reading what’s coming out of them, only one conclusion is possible.
Donald Trump didn’t just incite a riot on January 6. He was at the heart of a concerted and detailed conspiracy to overthrow the democratically elected government of the US.
January 6 was just the last throw of the dice, but astonishing efforts had been made to subvert systems of government before that and to bend them to his will.
So, if we’re lucky in the current strength of our democratic systems, and we are, there’s a simple lesson from what’s happening in the world around us. What we have, with all its faults, is worth defending and protecting. We have to be lucky always.
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