Wedding fever

I DON’T pay my TV licence fee. I’d like to argue that it’s a political principle, a decision motivated by the continued presence of Joe Duffy and Katherine Lynch on RTÉ but it’s actually because Roisín and I live in an apartment and the TV licence guy can’t get to us. And we’re cheap.
Occasionally, An Post leaves a polite little card in the mailbox to let us know they were in the area and I’ll have a flash of guilt about ranting in support of public service broadcasting while trying not to pay for it, but then I think of better things to do with the money (shoes generally) and that’s an end of it.
And now no more guilt.
The decision by RTÉ to broadcast the British royal wedding live (having, by the way, refused to broadcast the Free Staters’ Easter Commemoration) was the final straw.
My licence fee money (if I’d paid it, obviously) would be funding the broadcasting of this extravagant farce, this forelock-tugging indulgence to the Irish gentry and their slavish worship of all things royal. I’d be sickened.
The daughter of a multi-millionaire has married the latest incarnation of the parasitic entity that is the British royal family and we’re supposed to see it as a romantic-against-the-odds fairy tale. The handsome prince marrying a peasant girl, what the Irish Times, without a trace of irony, described as a ‘commoner’. A commoner? The self-proclaimed paper of record, in a state that describes itself as a republic, talking about commoners. Mother Ireland is, as Ma Carney frequently reminds me, rearing them yet.
To be honest, I find it hard to blame the Brits for getting so excited over their royal wedding, although it was interesting to see how incredibly, overpoweringly white the crowds outside Buckingham Palace were. It’s probably okay for a Windsor to marry a good, white, middle-class, Tory-voting, Church of England girl, but God forbid he’d marry a Pakistani Muslim or the daughter of West Indies immigrants. Standards are being loosened, dear boy, not abandoned.
Still, it was a party and a day off. And the British genuinely seem to want a monarchy, not having really evolved much as a race since the late 18th century, so it’s hard to begrudge them that. Each to their own.
Much was made of the fact that Philip and Elizabeth Windsor were paying bulk of the estimated £70million in wedding costs out of their own money saving, so the argument went, the British taxpayers the huge expense. Which makes sense so long as you don’t ask where Phil and Liz got their money in the first place.

It’s the Irish who annoy me. The people in RTÉ and TV3 who decided they should broadcast the wedding live, the Maeve Binchys and Roisín Ingles of this world who cooed over the wedding with Binchy commenting that it was particularly big news in Dalkey. No doubt, though I suspect interest was a little lower in those tiny non-Dalkey pockets of Ireland that the Irish Times covers in its foreign pages.
Because what we also witnessed, and not for the first time, was that fundamental split between republicans and Home Rulers. We saw it before when John Bruton described meeting Charlie Windsor as “the greatest moment of my life” (Mrs Bruton must have been pleased at that), or in the clear joy Enda Kenny is taking from the visit next month of the Windsors’ Tony Soprano figure, or in the occasional floating of the notion that we should rejoin the Commonwealth or adopt an honours system.
To some Irish people the British royal family is something to be respected, even admired. Where republicans, regardless of nationality, see monarchy and inherited privilege as something to be despised, to be opposed, Irish monarchists see a glamour that you just don’t get with our tawdry, democratically-elected politicians. They see, as Maeve Binchy’s friends in Dalkey would put it, ‘our type of people’, or at least what they, like the Middletons, would aspire to.
Republicans, real republicans, don’t like monarchies or royal families. To a genuine republican, all of those families making their pretentious claims to superiority are a distasteful throwback to medieval times, something to be viewed, at best, with a thin veneer of forced politeness to hide our disgust.
And it’s surely not out of order for Irish people to have a specific dislike for the monarchy that still claims authority over part of our country, that anointed the groom as Baron of Carrickfergus and expects its subjects, with all of their insufferable arrogance, to be grateful.
To those who say I should get over it, I make this offer. Once the British Government gets out of Ireland, I will revert to treating the British royal family with the same level of contempt I view their cousins in Spain or Sweden - parasites living off the money and land stolen by the gangsters and thugs that made up their ancestors.