There has always been massive propaganda against republicans.
Still more massive against republican socialists or socialist republicans. One of the propaganda lines expressed by a writer in an Irish newspaper was that unless and until the republican movement is supported by writers, novelists, poets and playwrights, it is not going to mean anything in Irish life.
An interesting thing happened. More and more Irish writers appeared who were unreservedly republican in their lives and writing. And their writing was good.
So that propaganda line ended and we heard no more of it. The usual thing happened – that is, people say if only such and such thing happened, we would think better of the republicans, then it does happen and far from thinking better of the republicans, they say something else must happen – the more improbable the better – to make the republican movement good, wholesome and proper.
That is how crude propaganda works. Unsuccessfully. The republicans have their writers, their poets, their political thinkers, their playwrights and will have more in the times ahead. While this facet of republican life is developing, their opponents can show no such development on their side. The British or unionist or loyalist or partitionist or high conservative cause has no such development.
Strangely enough, that is not just their loss, it is also a loss for those of us who want change and the development of republican and socialist ideas. One of the obstacles to any decent cause is the lack of intellectual competence in its opponents. How can republicans or socialists or socialist republicans hone and perfect the presentation of their case unless they can test it against opponents who are intellectually competent? There is nothing as good a competition to make a good case perfect.
Brian Campbell is one of the gifted writers who emerged in recent years. We lost him last week. Playwright, encourager and teacher of others, editor, observer, kind keeper of ideals and family, a man whom so many hailed as friend.
He and others like him brightened the often dull political scene by their competence and inspiration, they created what their opponents said they should create but hoped they would not, men and women of skill and brightness who would carefully and lovingly beckon even their opponents into an intellectual world which so far the North of Ireland has been deprived of.
Ireland's northeast never had the free cut and thrust of intellectually bright political discourse because every time it threatened to appear there would be a distraction, another weird procession which would require that we discuss Orangemen's bowler hats or preachers' absurdities rather than our people's economic and political needs. Or an assassination which would divert all our sympathetic energies towards consoling and protecting those who were made to suffer. In all this deliberately created turmoil rational conversation between political parties and between parties and governments and between neighbours became difficult and often impossible.
It was in this atmosphere that the writers and the thinkers had to work. And they did. They had a great pent-up energy waiting to be released. A big question was whether having being suppressed for so long it would corrupt, whether all those ideas and thoughts and ideas and ideals prevented from flourishing would fester in a rage which would devour them from the inside or would escape and inflame those on the outside.
We pay tribute to our writers and thinkers who in the midst of it all literally kept their heads and created a body of writing and a stream of thinking that will serve us well in the time ahead.
Republicans and socialists nowadays have access to more means of expression, more means to foster self-esteem, more means of convincing others, than ever in their history. They have the means, they have the minds, they have the people, they have the future to grasp with courage and wisdom.
We are losing some whom we greatly needed, but on the other hand we are also seeing people emerge, young and older, who have a greater self-confidence than ever in our history, a greater ability to use not one but two languages, or three, or whatever is needed. The level of political and literary competence was never higher.
As people lay to rest these writers and thinkers of ours who are taken from us too soon we realise that while they are at rest, the intellectual world they helped to shape is flourishing all around us.
We are grateful for that.
