St Patrick's Day 1982 - 19 March 1982

St Patrick's Day is always a touchy day in New York City. I mean touchy for Britons, either resident or visiting.

Didn’t used to be so, the troubles were long gone, even when the night came on and the Fifth Avenue parade was all over, an Englishman could go into a Third Avenue bar, places with names like The Shamrock and The Blarney Stone and Riley’s and bend an elbow with the grandson of any immigrant, and they could toast each other as if celebrating a permanent armistice.

I haven’t heard of any hassles, or what the police used to call altercations, between the English and the local Irish last Wednesday, and the good reason could be that, on that evening anyway, no Englishman would think of provoking trouble by being there, any more than a white of any origin would dream, in these tense times, of doing what all English visitors did at least once, as a tourist ritual, of going up to Harlem.

People, visitors from England, are always asking me how the situation in Northern Ireland is reported, always with a gloomy look, on the assumption that the Ulstermen in New York are not getting a fair hearing. Now, I don’t know the figures but the main point here is that the Irish, the Irish-Americans of New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago, are overwhelmingly the grandchildren, the great-great-grandchildren or whatever, of immigrants from southern Ireland.

The Ulstermen – what the Americans call Scotch Irish – the Protestants, emigrated long before the potato famine of the 1840s, and went into the south, often as far into the south-west as west Texas. The Hatfields and the McCoys originated a feud that was a family or clan affair.

I should say that the main problem about getting a thorough airing to the whole tragic business, and a fair hearing for both sides, is the hard fact that these big eastern and mid-western cities, with their overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Irish populations, have mayors and other politicians who, whatever their own ethnic origin or religious persuasion, must keep those people, their convictions and their prejudices, always in mind.

Any mayor of New York, of Philadelphia, of Boston, simply can not afford to buck the prejudices, or the honest convictions, of his constituents. A mayor of New York City who said flattering things about the Arabs would be, in that moment, committing political suicide, since there are five times as many Jews in New York, in the city alone, as there are in Tel Aviv.

I recall a former mayor, Robert Wagner, himself of German Catholic origin, saying during a strenuous time of his office that he was at last going off for a holiday in Europe, like the rest of us longing for a lazy retreat. He had in mind a couple of weeks on a Mediterranean beach. In those days, the Mediterranean beaches were uncluttered and the sea was unpolluted, but for him this could be only a dream. When I asked him where he was going, he said, he hadn’t worked out where he would wind up, but he said, of course he’d have to make the compulsory stops in Dublin, Rome, and Tel Aviv.

The present mayor of New York, Ed Koch, is at once the most outspoken, uninhibited of men and possibly the most adroit politician alive. But even he, who never gives a hint in public or on the telly of having a second thought about anything that comes to mind, even he keeps his mind on a tight rein; he is not going, under any circumstances anywhere, to make a nasty remark about blacks, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Jews, or Irish.

On the Irish question, he is pretty shamelessly on the simple side, the simple side being expressed on Wednesday by placards and signs bobbing up Fifth Avenue crying, "Get the British out of Ireland". I’d say that the New York ... probably most of the city newspapers of the north-east, do give a fair shake to all sides, though it's surprising how many otherwise well-informed Americans don’t know that British soldiers are in Northern Ireland not only by the invitation, but at the insistence, of the Protestant majority.

Newspapers, however, and newspaper editorials, no longer have a tittle of the effect that their editors like to think. Television is the thing, and every violent incident in Ulster is there, on the tube, the day or the morning after it happened. Quite frankly, this is not because television news producers and camera crews are bloodthirsty or because of any fore-ordained policy on the part of the networks. A fire, a riot, a shooting anywhere makes the more gripping picture than a picture of Mrs Thatcher or President Reagan thinking. And since most of the names of the places where the bloody incidents take place are tricky or unknown, there is always on the screen a map of Ireland with the north-east corner painted in another colour. With the best will in the world, the mere sight of that map and a following shot of British tanks and British soldiers in battle gear, these two pictures juxtaposed illustrate the magic – the curse if you like – of the movies.

The first I remember, the most famous anyway, of the early Russian film directors, Eisenstein, said that the method of cinema is based on inevitable deceit. You show a close up of a keyhole, you then cut at once to a medium shot of a girl in a bathtub. The audience at once thinks that it, or somebody, is peering through a keyhole at a girl in a bathtub. Never mind, he said, that the keyhole is in Moscow and the girl is in Leningrad.

So, the emotional effect of the fairest, the most scrupulous, television item on Northern Ireland shows you Ulster, which looks on a map as marooned, as artificial, a bit of geography as was West Berlin on a map of Germany. You see British soldiers grouped round street corners or clattering along in a tank. And, as a friend of mine put it, you are reminded of tanks clattering through the streets of Budapest, long ago, or soldiers with guns copped in Warsaw today.

So there was considerable nervousness in some quarters as St Patrick's Day approached to see how President Reagan – as Irish a name as Kennedy – would handle it, especially since he had the Prime Minister of Ireland as his guest of honour at a special White House lunch, and especially also, since such White House lunches are now televised.

Wearing his Kelly green tie, the president recalled the grisly scene last March; his walk to the car, the shots fired, and the four men who pushed him or threw themselves on him, all of them had Irish names. Now Mr Reagan is an expert at sentimental recall, but, he didn’t mention his forebears in Ballyporeen, he bypassed the prime minister's appeal for unification of north and south and for encouraging Britain to seek more positively, and pursue more actively, a change in attitudes and outlooks to pave the way for that unity.

The president, who had evidently been surprisingly well-briefed (as he very often isn’t) on matters of foreign policy, he said the only way out, was, and I quote him, "Through a process of reconciliation between the two traditions in Northern Ireland and between Britain and Ireland, and in a continuous reduction in the level of violence".

And he made another appeal – his first was made a year ago – to all Americans to be wary of solicitations for money and any other form of help for Northern Ireland which might wind up in the hands of those who perpetuate violence.

For once there was no need, next day, to issue, through groaning aides, a clarification of what he’d said the day before. This process has become almost routine, clarification usually means saying, that the president didn’t really mean what he said, or acknowledging in a weaselly way, that he had, in fact, not only got his facts wrong but was arguing from the exact opposite of the facts.

Still, and all, I have to say that whenever the topic comes up even among Americans you would take to be well-informed or neutral or both, it’s a kind of head-shaking bewilderment about the grinding monotony of the violence on both sides, the apparently endless prospect of its persistence. Are British soldiers to be there next year, 5, 10, 20 years from now? Is there not anywhere in sight a Disraeli, a Gladstone, a Lloyd George, or somebody who can look at all the facts, at the genuine grievances of the non-violent masses, of both the majority and the minority, and find soon the solution that must surely come in the long run? We shake our heads, and do not stay for an answer.

A lot of people wish that Mr Reagan and his aides could be as careful and statesmanlike in their utterances – which are innumerable – about the foreign affair that boggles the mind of more Americans that anything since Vietnam, namely the mess of El Salvador, and the channel of supply, whether it’s an alley or a floodgate through Nicaragua.

The other day the White House did what recent presidents have come to do more and more which is to invite, for a secret briefing, former secretaries of state and national security advisors who served under former presidents of both parties. Well, these men came out of the White House and said the evidence was absolutely convincing that the Soviet Union was behind it all.

Trouble here is that without disclosing the supply routes and the intelligence sources who live in peril in secret places, the proof can not be published. Well at any rate, 85% of Americans bristle with apprehension at the thought of getting into central America, and they turn a deaf ear to the heavy warnings of Secretary of State Haig that American security is being threatened or tested, as it was in Cuba, through the soft underbelly of the Caribbean.

The reluctance to believe him is due to the wound of Vietnam, which still winces smartingly. There is, it seems to me, however, the danger that the scar tissue of Vietnam will have the effect of immobilising American public opinion against ever considering any military involvement anywhere, except when the missiles are in place somewhere in the Caribbean. It is, though, a likelihood that Moscow shouldn’t bank on.

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