Top Issue 1-2024

6 May 2004 Edition

Resize: A A A Print

Inside John Waters

Book Review

The Politburo has decided that you are unwell

A decade of dissent from Ireland's most fearless dissident!

By John Waters

The Liffey Press

€16.95 (Paperback)

As I sat down to write this review I felt like the best man at a West of Ireland wedding. For the uninitiated within the Pale, basically all that is said by the aforementioned best man at these rural occasions is: "This is a decent man, his father was a decent man and his people are all decent people."

I know John Waters and he is, above all else, a decent decent man — straight as a poker and honest to a fault.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us then that he is as isolated and vilified a public figure within the 26 Counties that the Tiger years produced. In many ways, he is the antithesis of Tiger "ME ME ME!" values.

This is a timely publication of the thoughts and battles of John Waters. Throughout the 1990s in Ireland, Waters was the bête noire of the polite classes.

As his custody battle for his child Roisín with Sinéad O'Connor became messily public, he was styled a bitter man who hates women. Actually, like many public truths, it was a distortion of Orwellian proportions.

It didn't surprise me that he had dedicated this latest book to his mother, sisters and his daughter. The great woman hater from Castlerea merely wrote about a father's right to be part of his child's life.

But within the Irish Times, Waters was seriously offside in a more damning issue for Conor Brady's neo-unionist daily. Waters is a republican, albeit with a small 'R', but never did an Easter go by that his Irish Times column did not focus on the Rising, Pearse, Connolly and their legacy on our island. He believes in 32 Counties. He believes in 1916.

In the Section 31 days, he wasn't fearful of stating his beliefs. His column dealing with the IRA's decision to open the arms dumps to inspection was hugely positive of the decision's rationale within a republican perceptive.

As the Peace Process unfolded and the Irish Times editorials seemed written by Trimble himself, the bearded one became an Alamo of Roscommon sense about the North in D'Olier Street.

In this compilation, he has been able to publish some of the articles in their original form. During the years, much of his work was either spiked or butchered by on-message subeditors. Often in his Irish Times columns, John has been watered down. Here he is in full flow and he deserves that space for his ideas.

Not all of the work originally saw the light of day in the Irish Times.

In 2002, during the last World Cup, Waters, for my money, wrote the best analysis of the relationship between Association Football and Gaelic Games in post-colonial Ireland that I have ever read. 'The Quarterfinals Mentality' is peerless in how we have made sense of our sort of independence from Westminster through sport. It originally appeared in Magill magazine.

Because of the controversy of gender issues, much of his other stuff gets bypassed. Actually, he has much to say that is useful, original and always unique on a range of subjects.

However it is for the gender issue that he will remain instantly recognisable in the public eye. The title alleges that 26-County society operates a soviet system in social policy when it comes to fathers and issues that disproportionately impact upon men — like suicide.

His construction as the dissident of the Tiger Years in the South comes from three events that affected him — two global, one intensely private — which became the stuff of the tabloids.

The cover of the book has a picture of his daughter Roisín. His battle to remain within her life has been nothing less than heroic. I didn't read that anywhere — I saw it.

The first global event was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which started his journey from a belief that state socialism would solve many of the problems that beset the human species. He came to see himself as something of a Soviet era dissident within Ireland 4.

The other happening on the world stage that assailed the worldview of his youth was 911. He watched that cataclysm in Manhattan and decided that there was a new war in town. Irish neutrality was dead in the water. We were part of the West and the West was being attacked.

He took the simplistic view, in my opinion, that you had to choose between the American state on one hand and Al Qaeda on the other. Faced with that choice, he has been steadfast in his support for the Bush administration ever since.

Unlike Kevin Myers in the Irish Times, who at the last count is on his sixth position change on the Iraq/Middle East situation, Waters tends to make up his mind and then hold onto it.

This is a strength in that what you see is what you get. He doesn't court popularity or controversy. However, even his closest supporters would have to admit that he has dug himself into a massive hole on the subject of Iraq and WMD. Only a few months ago, he restated on the Vincent Browne Show that he believed stockpiles of WMD were buried somewhere in the deserts of Iraq.

Waters' main positive contribution to Irish discourse was that because of his own personal trauma he wandered to the further edges of the social policy desert. Ridiculed as John The Misogynist, he was in fact voicing a very personal concern about the essential roles of fathers in the lives of their children and the structural inequalities that men face in such situations.

Now this campaign is associated in the public mind with Saint Bob Geldof — what Waters outrageously suggested in 1996 is now hardly controversial.

This compilation holds together well. If you just arrived in Ireland and had no idea who John Waters was and what he represented in the public discourse over the last decade, then this book would put you straight very quickly. It would also bring anyone up to speed with many of the pressing issues in this society in the last decade.

I would recommend this book to any republican. What Waters writes about is what we are concerned with.

We might not agree with some or even much of what he writes, but he challenges all of us to restate why we believe what we hold to be true and in that John Waters is hugely valuable in modern Ireland.

As we say down the country, I'd have him for a neighbour.

BY MICK DERRIG


An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland