Jeff Peel's Diary

Meghan O’Sullivan – Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and Head of the Belfer Center’s Geopolitics of Energy Project

They abound.  Peace leeches. People who straddle the globe like colossi proffering their powers of envoy, moderation, decent thinking. Oh and they demand the best hotels and talks venues and limousines.

But here’s the deal. These peace emperors have no clothes.  They are snake oil salesmen. They know nothing.  Haass and his entourage of Harvard academics are worse than useless. They bring no science, no formulas, no powers to solve. Why? Because the problem they are trying to solve is insoluble. But they’ll take the fine dining and limousines anyway. But their expert knowledge is quackery. And we’re paying for it – or, rather, the tax-payers of the South East of England who foot the bill for all of our contrived, expensive folly.

So how have I come to this conclusion? Simple – social scientists and diplomats and academics know nothing. They appear to be experts, but they aren’t. They have read books, but the books provide no answers.

Social science experts like grand titles to prove they are experts.  Consider this for a title: Meghan O’Sullivan, Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and head of the Belfer Center’s Geopolitics of Energy Project.  

Meghan is the lady who has been nominated to chair the latest hyper-expensive round of “all-party talks” with Northern Ireland’s rag-bag collection of super-parochial weeny parties. The leader of the “largest” of these weeny parties, our illustrious First Minister, couldn’t even muster enough enthusiasm from the electorate to get re-elected to Westminster at the last general election.

But I digress, let’s return to Ms O’Sullivan. Ask yourself why she is  Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and head of the Belfer Center’s Geopolitics of Energy Project.  The answer, almost certainly, is because she found physics, mathematics and computer science a tad too tricky at High School. She couldn’t get her head around all those immutable laws of science. So she took the easy option – an academic career in the social sciences. All of the prestige but none of the hard stuff.

No doubt Ms O’Sullivan has contributed to the social science section of Harvard’s libraries. There are, apparently, some 2 million books in the section, and research papers. In order to read the entire collection would require some 9,000 years. And after all that reading – if it were humanly possible – I’m not sure one would be any wiser.

But now she’s lending her wonderful brain, her insightful social scientific international affairs knowledge to Norn Iron’s thorny flags issue. According to her media release, “I look forward to working with Richard Haass and the leaders and people of Northern Ireland to tackle the thorny issues of parades, flags and other symbols, and the past. We plan to build on the tremendous progress that has been made in recent years.”

No doubt she’ll wallow in the glory that Blair, Clinton, Hume and the rest have been wallowing-in for the last few decades.

But here’s the rub. According to the Centre for Independent Research and Analysis of Crime, “Contrary to the media image, the province suffers from very low levels of crime. According to both recorded crime figures and victim surveys Northern Ireland has one of the lowest levels of crime in Western Europe. For example, recorded crimes for 1990 showed that it had the lowest rate of recorded crime per 1,000 of the population compared with all 43 police constabulary areas in England and Wales.”

By comparison the United States has some four times the murder rate than the United Kingdom.  Some 14,748 people were murdered in the United States in 2010. Just yesterday a crazed gunman murdered a dozen people in a naval base in Washington DC. I need hardly mention other mass shootings, but I will.  Sandy Hook Elementary – 22 murdered, mostly children. Luby’s Cafeteria, Texas – 23 dead plus the gunman.  McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif. – 21 dead. Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. – 15 dead.  Etc. Etc. Etc. On and on, with nothing done to change America’s mad gun laws.

Northern Ireland, like most places, has problems. But, ironically, our problems don’t, any longer, result in mass death. Even during the worst years of our troubles our murder rate wasn’t as high as Philadelphia’s.  But right at the heart of our civil society we have a festering problem of sectarianism that cannot and will not be solved by these talks led by a well-intentioned, if silly, Professor.

And the problem will be in the Professor’s talk-rooms. The politicians themselves feed and stoke and are representative of a sectarianism that bores most of the population witless. We have political parties that suckle at the teat of Irish or British nationalism.  But these people do not speak for the majority of our population. Our voter turnout is now the lowest in the UK. Those who vote tend to vote for the most extreme parties to force them to do business with each other – but they rarely do even that. Our supposed obsession with flags and symbols is a media and politico-contrived nonsense. Those that do care are an ill-educated rabble that is cajoled by a self-aggrandizing political class that makes no obvious sense in a normalizing society.

Meghan O’Sullivan could do us all a favour. She could go home and try to sort out her own back yard. In the meantime we should ignore the ‘problem’ of our flags and our past because, over time, they are problems that will diminish. Sometimes, ignoring a problem is its best solution. But we could help by creating some replacements for political parties that are creating the problem – not solving it.