Report From the Front: If it's Scarriff, it must be Wednesday
'We became the spoilsports of the game of Covid, myself and some of my friends. And we were excoriated for that — and shunned, and banished. But we were right.'
Videographer: Gabrian van Houdt
It’s Now or Never
Tonight [Wednesday, June 25th], in a room at the back of McNamara’s Bar in Scarriff, the feeling is electric. This is more than a book launch, more than a fixture, event, talk or public meeting. It is a meeting of minds at a particular moment of implicit understanding: It’s now or never.
Once again, I have this feeling that it is like old times, speaking of less fraught and disturbing matters, a long time ago, but here, now, with a palpable uptick of passion and energy. There is something emblematic about the gathering here tonight, of sixty or seventy souls. It seems, without anyone suggesting as much, to bespeak something much larger. I feel this strongly after I tentatively hint at this feeling when I suggest that many of those among our neighbours and families who have tried our patience in the past sixty-odd months may be much closer to our thinking that we imagine, but are locked in by fears or other inhibitions: we need to find the right codes to open their hearts to courage. This perception is now widely shared. We are not at war with our fellow casualties of evildoing; we are at peace with those who have suffered so much in uncomprehending silence, or unfocussed anger.
Our people are screaming for healing, though minimally, like my granddaughter, Nina Monique, for her feed. The passion is directed at discovering a new tone and emphasis for the processes of consciousness-raising. People are now talking about being kind to those who have suffered from the plague of propaganda and the epidemic of grief imposed on them in the past five-and-a-bit years. The anger is no longer directed at the drafted proxies who fell victim to fear-mongering and gaslighting, but to the perpetrators and their machinations, their willing minions and collaborators. We are understanding the means, or at least the generality of them. Blame is being directed towards the proper targets.
For all my certainty as to its message, I am taken by surprise by the response to my hefty volume of attempted crystallisations of things. This response is unprecedented by anything I have observed in decades of attending book launches. The queues of people seeking their copies signed are not here essaying polite or tokenistic responses to some contribution to the general curiosity or gaiety of the nation. There is a hunger here that I have not witnessed before. People come to me with armfuls of books to be signed for their friends and neighbours. Each encounter bears the hallmark of the confessional, in which we mumble in a bubble of confidence, as though the surrounding hubbub had melted away. These people need to talk, to someone who they know is able to listen, and hear. They hunger for conversation.
A thought occurs to me: this is Middle Ireland,stripped of pejorative innuendoes. The expansion of consciousness that we have been hoping and praying for is upon us. Either the ‘movement’ is broadening out, or this audience is no longer of the ‘movement’, if that is not the same thing. This has at least the feel of a new tribe — its members assembled here not to protest or riot, but quietly, as proprietors of Ireland, to claim their country as their natural right and their descendants’ birthright. These people look like and speak like the people among whom I’ve grown and lived for the past seventy years. They are not recreational refuseniks, but regular people, whose outrage and resolve is all the more reassuring on that account. This feels like the part that was missing that dark sunny spring day in 2020, when the present nightmare appeared to begin.
The video of the question-and-answer session (conversation) which followed this talk will be available shortly.
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