In Europe

by Geert Mak

  Meanwhile, wealthy Europe continued to attract immigrants, both legal and illegal, from all over the world: workers and asylum seekers, pioneers and reunited families, new talents and rose peddlers, rivals and marriage partners.

  In 1968, British ultra-conservative Enoch Powell made a fiery, now almost classic speech against this immigration. ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad,’ he shouted to a stunned crowd in Birmingham. ‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.'Thirty years later, his train of thought had become commonplace among large groups of Europeans.

  As early as 1956, during a visit to Rome, Chancellor Adenauer had promised free train tickets to all Italians willing to work in distant Germany. In 1964, the millionth gastarbeiter was welcomed to loud applause. The fortunate individual, a Portuguese man, received a Zündapp moped from the employers’ collective. At that time, approximately seven per cent of the country's workforce consisted of foreign workers, a percentage similar to that in England and France. The Netherlands was still actively recruiting abroad: the country signed recruitment contracts with Italy (1960), Spain (1961), Portugal (1963), Turkey (1964), Greece (1966), Morocco (1969) and Yugoslavia and Tunisia (1970). In addition, some four million Algerians had emigrated to France after their country received independence, and Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands took in huge numbers of immigrants from their former colonies as well. The percentage of foreigners was rising all over Europe: from 3.7 million (1.3 per cent of the total European population) in 1950, to 10.7 million (3.8 per cent) in 1970, to 16 million (4.5 per cent) in 1990.

  Added to this were many hundreds of thousands of immigrants – estimates from 1998 put their number at around 3 million – who lived and worked in Europe illegally: in restaurants and cleaning firms, in nursing and health care, in agriculture and construction. Their contribution to the European economy should not be underestimated. In 1990, the Financial Times claimed that it was to a large extent the work of illegal immigrants that ‘kept the wheels turning’.‘The construction sector depends on it, including the construction of the Channel Tunnel; the clothing industry would collapse without its illegal worker; and all household help would evaporate.’

  Europe, which had been faced in the early 1950s with the phenomenon of emigration – hundreds of thousands of Irish, Portuguese, Spaniards and southern Italians in particular had left each year for the United States and South America – was now suddenly the destination of millions of immigrants. The number of Muslims in France rose to seven per cent of the population, in the Netherlands to more than four per cent, in England and Germany to over three per cent. Problems arose primarily in those neighbourhoods where the newcomers huddled together – immigrant concentrations of seventy per cent were noted here and there – and where a competitive struggle arose for such scarce resources as jobs, housing and educational facilities.

  In 1981, violence and rioting broke out in working-class neighbour-hoods in London, Liverpool and Manchester. They had to do with the dearth of opportunities – at least for Britain's poorest inhabitants – during the Thatcher era, but racial conflicts also played a role. Starting in the early 1990s, that dissatisfaction began to play a role in European politics as well: in France, the vehement nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen won some fifteen per cent of the votes; in Germany, the Republikaner party of former SS man Franz Schönhuber – whose memoirs about his great role model Adolf Hitler sold around 180,000 copies – took between five and ten per cent of the vote; in Austria, the FPÖ of the young right-radical Jörgen Haider became – with a quarter of the votes cast – the country's second largest party in October 1999; in the Netherlands, the Centre Democrats – including a number of splinter parties – came on the scene, and in Belgium the Flemish Bloc of Filip Dewinter created a furor with slogans like ‘A Flemish Flanders in a White Europe’.

  Without exception, opinion polls reflected the same pattern: the majority of Europeans remained reasonably tolerant, but the group opposing a multicultural Europe had grown since the 1980s. In a survey held in 1997 among a thousand citizens from each of the EU member states, forty-one per cent stated that there were too many foreigners living in their country. One in ten felt sympathy for racist and ultra-right-wing organisations. In 2000, more than half the Western Europeans surveyed felt that their lives had worsened with the arrival of immigrants, and that their social system had been undermined.

  Halfway through the 1990s, the journalist Will Hutton sensed a clear shift in mentality in Britain, a waning tendency to bear collective responsibility, a ‘dissipation’ of values such as ‘an honest day's work for honest pay’ and ‘the idea that success and hard work go together’. ‘Businessmen are mesmerised by their personal salaries. Politicians are no longer able to step outside their tribal circuits. Jobs are easily lost and never found again. A lifetime's savings can easily be stolen … The prevailing mood is one of general fear and apprehension.’

  For ten years Thatcher damned equality and extolled the virtues of inequality. Inequality was the key to her ideology, the driving force behind her success. In this way, following the post-war consensus ideology, she set a new tone. And, despite her dubious achievements, this tone was adopted by an increasing number of European countries in the 1990s. Four decades after the war, the sense of togetherness, the solidarity after all the shared hardships, had run its course.

  It is the morning after in Llangynog. The empty pub still smells of beer and sweat. On the car radio a church service in Welsh, indecipherable yet highly familiar. The trees have already lost most of their leaves, the countryside is a greenish-brown, the sky an unbroken grey, the light watery. Then comes the quiet little port of Fishguard and the wait for a ferry. A few dozen wooden ships are listing on the muddy flats, a little further along emergency repairs are being carried out on the Queen Beatrix, three sandpipers are grubbing after a worm, a little girl runs in circles on the pier, a hardy family is having a picnic in the wind. The entire scene is immersed in the sound of waves, gulls, the clang of metal.

  Late that afternoon, after the crossing, the road leads through little Irish villages, past low houses, a factory with bars at the windows. There are betting shops – the bank branches of the poor – everywhere. A hunched farmer is holding a red flag: his wife drives a herd of cattle across the road. The countryside is full of crows. At dusk I arrive at the home of my Irish acquaintances, Declan and Jackie Mortimer. Declan has just come back from the hunt, beside the mower and the compressor in the barn hangs a good-sized deer, a tub of blood on the ground beneath it. Declan works for a contractor. ‘Everything is expensive, and you don't earn much around here,’ he says. ‘But you can always go hunting, and the river is full of trout. And now it's time to dig peat and bring it in, we all have our own little section of peat bog, it's been in the family for centuries.’

  They take me along to the pub. Jackie goes into one of the side rooms for her weekly folk-dance lesson: step up, step back, turn, and turn. Meanwhile I sit by the fire and hear the local gossip: about Crazy Mary who sells lottery tickets and always lets her family win; about the local judge who drives all the single ladies mad; about the Dutchman, Willem, who never stops building and whose head, if you sawed it open, would reveal one huge do-it-yourself catalogue with all the Dutch and Irish prices listed side by side, down to the final decimal point. A song is sung, then another, outside the rain rattles, the judge tosses another chunk of turf on the fire.

  Dublin is the capital of all these soggy heaths. Keeping up appearances is a concept completely foreign to Dubliners. They gave up the fight long ago, everyone trundles down the street here in equal disarray. According to Brussels’ statistics, Ireland is one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union, but I do not notice a bit of it. Quilted vests are
the pinnacle of fashion here, the women push rusty prams. Even in the Czech Republic, the roads and houses look better cared for than they do here.

  Concentrations of wealth do exist, of course, and they are doubtlessly on the increase. Successive Irish governments have made massive investments in education and training, a third of all Europe's computers are built in Ireland, and for the first time in modern memory there are Irish emigrants coming home in huge numbers. A sheen of luxury has settled over Dublin's shabby city centre, ‘simple’ restaurants charging ridiculous prices are popping up all over, and so a new product is gradually being created: a nostalgic, dirty, drunken and poetic Dublin for the new rich and the weekend tourist. But is this really Dublin? The television shows reports of a fire in a working-class neighbourhood on the edge of town, a complete shambles, two children killed. The camera zooms in on a burned roof, a few cheap pieces of furniture and curtains, toys, a wet street, skinny ladies. No matter what the statistics and the folders say, my eyes see a nation of farmers still marked by the poverty of generations.

  Life here has always required poetic, dreamy, romantic and nostalgic spectacles, in order to put up with this life and give it meaning. Without such spectacles Dublin is little more than a great nineteenth-century working neighbourhood, a sea of squat brick blocks of flats with here and there the grey columns of a large historical building. At almost all these buildings, a hero once died.

  Listen to the Irish Proclamation of the Republic, read aloud by poet Patrick Pearse outside the General Post Office on Easter Monday, 1916: ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen: in the name of God and of the dead generations …’ The wings of the angels in the statuary along the street are still riddled with bullet holes, but that particular revolution did not succeed. Pearse and fifteen others died in front of British firing squads. The popular fury this provoked resulted at last in modern-day Ireland.

  The Troubles, as the British call any problem in Ireland, are the aftermath of a centuries-old colonial conflict that is not yet over. From the sixteenth century, Protestant England was lord and master over poor, Catholic Ireland, and in 1800, after the ratification of the Act of Union, the country was even formally annexed by the United Kingdom. Ireland itself was sorely neglected. Only the north of the country kept up with the times. Protestant colonists from Scotland built estates – where the native Irish worked in virtual serfdom – and heavy industry grew rapidly. By 1900, Belfast resembled a second Manchester.

  After the 1916 Easter Uprising, a bloody war broke out between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British Army, and a compromise was reached only in 1921: the largely Catholic south was to become independent, while little Northern Ireland would remain a part of Great Britain. In the north, the Protestants were in complete control.

  ‘The dead generations …’ I take a tour of 200-year-old Kilmainham Prison, the Bastille of Ireland and now a favourite location for gloomy costume dramas. The courtyards have high grey walls; between them, hundreds of little children, often nothing but petty shoplifters, took their exercise in the nineteenth century. Their forgotten bodies are still buried here beneath the paving stones. A few doors down is the prison chapel where poet Joseph Plunkett married his beloved Grace Gifford at 1.30 a.m. on 4 May, 1916. They were given exactly ten minutes together. Two hours later he faced the firing squad.

  And then: the same grey walls against which the Irish executed each other later, during the brief civil war between the IRA and the Free State Army, until the IRA literally buried its weapons in 1923. What was that bloody fratricide all about? Strictly speaking, about whether to accept a peace with Britain, with a divided Ireland as part of the bargain. But, above all, the war had to do with the two eternal questions posed again and again by the dead in every war: hasn't it been enough? Haven't too many of us fallen already? Or: was that all, is this what we died for, why don't the rest of you push on?

  That is how the dead generations have always ruled over this land.

  Empty beer barrels rattle through the narrow streets of early morning Dublin. In Henry Street the Christmas decorations are already being strung up. At St Mary's Pro-Cathedral, near O'Connell Street, at least a hundred people are attending morning Mass on this normal working day: office workers, housewives, a striking number of young people. The church itself is sober and square, white and grey, no statues, no gold. The people pray intensely for peace, everyone is holding hands. The cry of gulls can be heard above the dome.

  Later I drive through the pleasant hills of Armagh. The border between the republic and Ulster slips by unnoticed, but soon you see them popping up: villages encircled by British and Ulster flags, flapping islands of Protestantism. Tractors come by pulling beets and manure, I see trailers full of family-owned turf, along the road are dead foxes, badgers and weasels, enough meat to feed an orphanage, just lying on the road here every night.

  ‘The Killing Fields’ is what they call this part of the country. More victims have fallen among these prosperous hills than in all the poor neighbourhoods of Belfast put together. For years the IRA did its best to terrorise the Protestant farmers into moving away, so they could have the land for themselves. Farmers’ sons were the primary targets. For more than thirty years, Western Europe's last religious war raged between the villages here, but today it has little to do with faith. Religion here seems to be in a state of suspended animation: ever since the seventeenth century it has been raining heaven and hell here, without pause.

  Omagh looks like a provincial Dutch steel town: a post office, a Boots chemist. At the top of the shopping street, a redevelopment project is in progress; huge holes have been excavated left and right. One of the houses beside the construction site is blackened. On a lawn lie three bouquets, still in the florist's wrapping.

  The bomb that exploded here on the busy Saturday afternoon of 15 August, 1998 was made from Semtex, artificial fertiliser and motor oil. It took the lives of Brenda Devine, twenty months old, Oran Doherty, a boy of eight, Samantha McFarland and Lorraine Wilson, two seventeen-year-old girlfriends, and twenty-four others. It was a last-ditch attempt by the Real IRA, a radical splinter group, to block the peace process. It had the very opposite effect, and united all Ireland in abhorrence.

  Omagh was the worst outrage of the war: two whole housing blocks were blown up. It was also one of the most cruel: a warning had been telephoned in beforehand for another location, so that many people had crowded together at precisely the spot where the bomb actually exploded. Everywhere that afternoon parents were out shopping with their children, to buy new uniforms for the start of the school year. ‘I saw people with protruding abdominal wounds,’ one policeman said. ‘We used Pampers Nappies from Boots to staunch the bleeding.’

  The infirmary looked like a field hospital at the front lines. Thirty children lost their mothers. The toddler Brenda Devine was buried in a little white coffin, carried by her father. Her mother had burns over two thirds of her body, and knew nothing about her daughter's funeral. Brenda had been asked to be a bridesmaid; her mother had taken her into town to buy new shoes for the wedding.

  Belfast is the city of fences: barbed wire around schools and neigh-bourhoods, armoured barriers around police stations, metre-high constructions around every clubhouse. Even the traffic lights are protected by iron screens. On Dublin Road, all niceties have been burned away by thirty years of war. Crumlin Road consists largely of burned-out shops and Protestant flags: the smaller the bay window, the bigger the flag. Only Wilton Funeral Directors is still in tip-top condition. The Good Friday Agreement, a historic ceasefire according to all concerned, has been in place since April 1998. It was then, for the first time, that David Trimble's Unionists agreed to share power with Gerry Adams’ Sinn Féin. For the first time too, the IRA announced that the force of arms was to play no role in this new situation, in which ‘Irish republicans and Unionists will pursue our different political objectives as equals’.

  On Shankill Road, a group of about twenty men are marching through t
he quiet Sunday afternoon with their sashes, cockades and bowler hats. They parade along behind a British and an Irish flag, with two drummers and an accordionist out in front, behind them about a hundred grey, worn-out men. There is not a single young person to be seen.

  The evening news according to ITV Ulster on 30 October, 1999:

  Gerry Adams says that the peace process is in trouble again.

  Gerard Moyna of Belfast has been sentenced to seven years in prison after a Semtex bomb he was transporting through the city went off prematurely.

  Victor Barker, the father of a twelve-year-old boy killed in the Omagh bombing, wants the damages committee to pay back his son's tuition, all £30,000 of it. ‘After all, it's done us no good,’ Barker says.

  Preparations for Halloween have begun in Londonderry, ghosts look out of the windows, children run screaming down the darkened streets.

  The Reverend Clifford Peebles has been arrested; he believes that the Protestants of Northern Ireland are one of the last, lost tribes of Israel. He has been charged with possession of a home-made pipe bomb.

  The very first victim of the new Irish civil war was John Patrick Scullion, aged twenty-eight, a warehouse worker. On the evening of 27 May, 1966, as he was stumbling drunkenly down Falls Road in Belfast, he shouted at a passing car: ‘Up the republic, up the rebels!’ A little later he was shot and killed outside his door. His Protestant killers said later: ‘We had nothing against him. It was because he shouted “Up the rebels!”’