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When
Fortnight rang me on Monday morning and asked would
I like to interview George Monbiot, I readily responded.
Belfast is home to so few radicals that the in-house
conversation amongst its own denizens has grown stale.
So the opportunity to speak with one who would expand
our limited intellectual horizons seemed like a gateway
to a certain freedom. The only hoop I had to jump
through in order to access the interviewee was to
read his book, The Age Of Consent, in two days. What
quickly followed was a hasty juggling of an already
packed schedule. It was the only way to find the time
to read. Feeding the ducks with my daughter Firinne
would have to go back to another day, a meeting of
the Left to discuss providing an electoral alternative
to the establishment parties would need to be missed,
and breakfast with a friend, Alex, could just go uneaten
… for now.
Fortunately,
the book was easily read. Monbiot’s knowledge
and experience are so profound, that he has no call
to resort to the language of the obscurantist with
which to shield and disguise a particular intellectual
paucity and, contiguously, terrify the readers out
of being more assertive in their will to question.
On my way across town to meet him in the Fortnight
office, I stopped to buy a book out of the Fontana
Modern Masters series on John Keynes. It was so long
since I had read Keynes, that I had all but forgotten
his role in the Bretton Woods conference. George Monbiot
had brought him back with a bang and seriously restructured
the manner in which Keynes may be read from a radical
perspective.
The
interview went well. He was entertaining, witty, profound
and above all possessed of a passion for the poor
of the world. It was easy to see that I was not in
the company of some bombastic intellectual who knew
lots about everything in the abstract. This man had
tramped the poorest regions in the world and had been
beaten or hounded out of some of them by the police
opposed to his probing. While many of us here in Ireland
take to the streets about Iraq, Afghanistan, Chile,
Palestine, Turkey or wherever, merely speaking with
George Monbiot prompts the notion that our activity
is a bit like learning to swim in the library. Most
of us have never set foot in the countries we protest
about; many of us could not find them on a map. He,
of course, is too polite to even remotely suggest
that.
The
interview completed, we walked across the damp streets
to Vincent’s in Botanic Avenue for a meal. I
had hoped he came via Manchester rather than London.
As it seems to rain as much on Mancunians as it does
on Belfast inhabitants he would hardly notice the
difference. I was tempted to say ‘dull politicians
- dull weather’, only that might have prompted
him to feel that if one causes the other then it must
rain here non-stop. Having listened to him for an
hour I opted to explain something of my own perspective
to him, expressing the view that the republican struggle
had been fatally compromised. Our leaders were going
to World Economic Forums in New York to stand shoulder
to shoulder with the world’s exploiters, breaking
our picket lines and leaving us behind them in their
rush to gallop off into the Bush-Blair war summit
at Hillsborough. ‘George, just set aside everything
else - this struggle in Ireland was never about acquiring
the ability to administer British capitalist rule,
close down hospitals and acute health services and
introduce PFI or PPP’. He smiled, took a breath
and exhaled, ‘definitely not.’
By
now, matters were running late and when we finally
reached the restaurant our host was impatiently counting
down the seconds as the meals seemed interminably
slow in arriving. Eventually they did, and while worth
the waiting, they were rushed down leaving no time
for the type of conversation that if missed out on
leaves you coming away feeling you were overcharged.
What you really pay for you do not get, and through
no fault of the staff.
Once
in the Elmwood Hall, it was clear that George Monbiot,
author of the Captive State, had a captive audience.
But disappointingly, there seemed to be very few republicans
there. I wondered about the radicalism of the jails,
where had it all gone? It seemed as if the most anti-systemic
of prisoners had opted to close their eyes, switch
off their memories and dive headlong into the morass
behind their leaders, not to save them or pull them
back out of it but to drown alongside them in the
muck of centre-right politics. Those H-Block die-hard
revolutionaries who held forth in cell 26 vehemently
opposing the most innocuous of compromises on mundane
jail matters - they are now even the subject of ridicule
and ribaldry within Sinn Fein ranks - prefer the perks
of assisting in the Lord Mayoral office, to actually
doing something for the ‘wretched of the earth’
they so often preached about behind bars. The cosy
bed of conformity for them and a hospital trolley
for the victims of the health strategies they are
eager to support. Somebody somewhere lost their way.
By
the time we left the Elmwood Hall it was clear that
George Monbiot hadn’t lost his.
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