Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 177
in Paris for a Human Rights conference, jetted to Wales for a conference on
the effects of satellite TV on local cultures, and spoke in Dublin at a rally of
Irish pacifists planning demonstrations against Ronald Reagan, then visiting
Ireland. Looking over his Vita, I found that he still serves as President of the
Irish sections of Amnesty International (he was Chairman of the international
Executive Committee of Amnesty, 1961-74) and is also President of the
Nuclear Safety Association, Vice-Chairman of the Irish Civil Liberties
Associations, President of the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,
President of the UNESCO Commission for the Study of Communication,
President of the International Peace Bureau and serves more than a dozen
similar posts, including President of the Literary and Historical Association
of University College Dublin, member of the Foundation for the Prevention
of Childhood Handicaps and even Vice-President of the "Trees for Ireland"
Association, a reforestation group. The taxi-driver who took me to
MacBride's home in Clonskea, a Dublin suburb, told me he once asked
MacBride, "How can you keep so busy at your age?" MacBride answered
with typical Irish self-mockery, "If I quit now, who'd pay the bills?"
Actually, Sean MacBride has been extremely active—an engage, as the
French say—since he joined the I.R.A. in 1919, at the age of fifteen. He had
already been imprisoned by then, at fourteen, as a suspected revolutionary
(he quickly escaped) because his father, Major John MacBride, one of the
leaders of the Easter Uprising in Dublin, 1916, had been executed by the
British. (Sean's mother, Maud Gonne MacBride, although best known to
students of literature as the inspiration of some of the poetry of William
Butler Yeats, is best known in Ireland as an often-imprisoned leader in the
struggle of the Irish peasants against English absentee landlords.) At
sixteen, in 1921, Sean was one of the I.R.A. delegates to the Frankfurt
Congress Against Imperialism, where he met Nehru and Ho Chih Minh; it
was there that he began to see Ireland as part of the Third World, an idea
that he retains to this day. ("We are an undeveloped country, a part of the
Third World," he said in a recent speech, "no matter how much the smart
young executives pretend that we are a sophisticated, developed economy.")
At seventeen, in 1921, Sean MacBride was the youngest member of the
Irish delegation to the London Treaty Conference which ended the Irish
War of Liberation on terms he still finds unacceptable. He therefore
remained in the Irish Republican Army during the Civil War that followed
and was imprisoned by the Irish Free State in 1922 and again in 1930;
ironically, the Free State eventually became the Republic of Ireland which
gave him a medal in 1938 for his 1919-1921 military activities against the
British, elected him to Dail hEirann (roughly, the House of Representatives)
in 1947-58, and made him Minister of External Affairs in 1948-51. "He