stenio solinas

DUBLIN: There are five, poor scanty funeral wreaths on the Bobby Sands' tomb, in the graveyard of Milltown, Belfast. Sixty-six days of hunger strike to die, 27 years old, in an England prison, on October, seventeen years ago... He's buried in the place there's the Ira's Country Antrim Memorial, an impressive list of names and “died in war “, “hanged”, “murdered”, “accidentally killed “, to beat the 20th century age... For the Irelands, the Ulster is not any more the divided 'Six counties” of a motherland and simpler, more pragmatically, it is already the North Ireland, another country... whose inhabitants, their time, do not look at the remaining isle

with the contempt, more or less condescending, reserved to poor, ragged and sinner relations, but with the invidious wonder of whom must recognize the develop and the progresses of that is called the “Celtic tiger”, one of the Europe economic miracles. Next months the peace process, started-off last year, will show each party renouncing something: the south, the idea of an unique nation, the north, the idea of a unique guide and government party, ethnically divided and without links, and that of a catholic minority without politic power. Less frequent roadblocks, disappeared the military presence. Falls Road and its analogue and opposite Shankill Road, reign of the Protestants, are going to be a tourist route. For 20 pounds the taxi brings you to see the policy stations, the seat of the Sinn Fein, stops behind the murals, more and more unusual, where the opposite factions have exercised their talent and their hate for lots of years. I don't mean that all its over, or that nothing can happen anymore but the feeling is that of a general trend to cushion, to tone down, to soothe.

Bombs burst again, but the Irish Times issues them in the fourth page, in two columns: in the third page are issued the tourism boom data: yearly record of visitors: five millions and a hundred, increase percentage record: +9%, foreign currency record: more than two billions pounds. Protestants, Catholics, it does not mean anything anymore in the south, and the north slowly end by resembling to them.It is a laicized society and another Ireland with respect to the stereotypes of few years ago: it shows one of the lower consumption of alcohol pro- capita in the continent and, having not known industrialisation, has passed without striking a blow to the post-industrial age, not knowing trust tensions, factories closing, restructuring. So at the beginning of the 2000,

Ireland presents well minded to start a different future from the one its past seemed have prepared for it. It 's not the matter that it ignore it or does not question about: in the downtown Belfast libraries as well as those of Dublin, Waterstones's and Hodges Figgs', shelves are plenty of books reviewing the political and insurrection history, the declared conflicts and the clandestine ones.Civil wars leave marks that cross through entire families, break friendship, covering generations...

The Ireland one, all the absurdity featuring it and making it alike the high heel people and low heel people conflict, told by Swift in Gulliver's travels, risen over the question about which end of the hard-boiled egg must be broken before eating it, is not an exception. Tim Pat Coogan e George Morrison have just narrated it in “The Irish Civil War” (Weindenfeld & Nicolson), a beautiful photographic album leading essays sales along with “The Irish Century”, written by Michael MacCarty Morrogh for the same publisher. Today Grafton Street is the shopping street, crossed by crowds, vulgarized and uglified by the commercial centres built all along it. In the first post-war in the covered in blood Dublin Ira's brigades filed there, supplied with German guns, trench coats, jackets and ties. The four Court facing the Liffey river, now the seat of the high court of justice, in the photo of the time reminds they were the headquarters of the rebels of de Valera who were against the self-government in name of the total independence. At the College Green where the Bank of Ireland rises, Michael Collins made the historical speech on April 1922, bare-head and under a torrential rain, explaining Irelands why it must be said yes to the agreement came to with England. It is at O'Connel Street, the main capital's street, with its monuments, its big department stores, the banks, the public offices and cinemas, that the men of de Valera barricaded themselves in July 1922 for the last defence in the “Block”, a hotels and houses complex, interconnected by a tunnels and cellars. The Gresham Hotel, a Georgian little jewel that still today, restored, makes a fine show, was the last to fall under the gunfire of the troupes of the new-born Ireland state. The Phoney War, as it was renamed, the internal clash tearing the country through a year and that made a thousand dead, caused big damages and rousing atrociousness: in the county of Kerry, destroyed by dynamite attacks, general James Daly tied up nine insurgents to a tree with an explosive strip, then exploding it. Collins ended by being murdered what he on the rest had already taken into account. De Valera was arrested and a poignant photo shows his son, his father's living image, while in shorts and thick socks makes a speech taking his side. Liberated and back to political life, he followed the line his civil war rival has traced in 1922. More than the phoney war it was a useless war. Maybe it is also the acknowledge of the senselessness of so many passions and choices and hates and contraposition of the past to explain the new course of the present in a country where the 40 per cent of the population is under 25. And maybe the fading of an age-long inferiority complex regard to England, whose senseless choices, guilty delays, inability to foresee changes place it second to none within its relationship with Ireland, allows a more realistic view of things, a cost-benefits calculation not vitiated by irrationalism. In the Remembrance Garden of Parnell Square, the epitaph for the Ireland fallen says: “Generations of freedom, remember us who were the generation of the view “. But sometimes it is useful to know how to forget, not to be compelled to deny.