Why did we give Irish nationality to poor Ken Bigley, RIP? Did no-one in Foreign Affairs realise the trap-door we were cutting beneath our feet, even as our necks lay in the noose of existing policy?
For from the moment of his kidnap, Ken was a doomed man: our many Arabists in Iveagh House would have known that. The fate of his two companions confirmed that there was never any real chance of his being released by al-Zarqawi's terrorists.
No one could possibly condemn Michael D. Higgins and others for pleading with the captors to show mercy. It would be wrong, tactically and morally, for us all to abandon all hope, and we cannot presume that all human beings are forever lost to decency. And did not two members of the kidnap gang apparently help Ken Bigley make a doomed escape bid? But governments have to be more sober and realistic than their citizens; they cannot create policies which are based solely on the worthier aspects of human nature.
It is the long-standing, much-disputed policy of this Government to permit US military flights through Shannon. While Ken Bigley remained purely a British subject, then terrorists in Iraq had no leverage over that policy. The moment we declared him to be what he was not, an Irishman, we converted a British hostage into an Irish hostage, and a British problem into an Irish problem.
Al-Qaeda's main medium of war is the internet, its command, control and communications system: for this reason I stayed silent about my disbelief when Dermot Ahern made his well-intentioned but potentially catastrophic move to give Ken Bigley Irish nationality. By its own deed, Iveagh House became responsible for the life of a Briton who had been implementing British policy in the region. So, what if his kidnappers had declared that the release of this newly-minted Irishman was now dependent on our Government closing Shannon to the Americans? Thus, the cliché about the rock and the hard place, to which we had freely, and without duress, navigated our way.
How was this madness possible? Well, perhaps in part because of our belief that we are perceived around the world as the Good Anglophone White People, as opposed to the Bad Anglophone White People - the British who colonised everyone, the Australians who almost exterminated the Aborigines, and the Americans who did the same to their aboriginal populations, and who are now the Great Satan.
But we believe we GAWPs are different. We say we didn't do any of those terrible things - except of course, we did. The Irish eagerly participated in and profited from the British empire, and Irish missionaries followed the union jack wherever it went. It was an Irishman who ordered the massacre of unarmed Indian demonstrators by Gurkhas at Amritsar, and another in the US army who coined the expression: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian". Irish colonists in Australia were as happy displacing native Aborigines as any other immigrants.
No, we GAWPs are different from the rest of the BAWPs only in our extraordinary self-regard and moral preening. It is bad enough that this should be the stuff of bar-room chat, but it's worse when GAWPiness drives government policy, as it apparently did in the Bigley decision. For at the bottom was the belief that once Ken Bigley had been mysteriously transformed by government fiat into an Irishman, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would suddenly smite his forehead with his palm, and declare, "Lord love a duck, we've got a GAWP! Varlet! Let this good Irishman go!"
A nice thought. Here, now, is the truth. In Zaqarwi's eyes, we are indistinguishable Christian infidel filth, who have no right to be in a Muslim country. So what would we have done had Zarqawi been clever enough to use Ken Bigley to make demands of our Government? Well firstly, no doubt we would have reverted to loud GAWPy rhetoric about Ireland's special place in the world.
And actually, it's true. We have one. It is as the US's English-speaking aircraft-carrier off mainland Europe. If we coldly calculate our national self-interest, which is what those sharp minds in Iveagh House are supposed to do, we would know that we antagonise the US at our utmost peril. Subtract the US from the Celtic tiger, and what you have is a Hibernian dormouse.
Can you imagine the impact upon Irish political life of a terrorist demand to close Shannon? The strong anti-American elements in Irish life would of course have been in sanctimonious uproar. Then, had we rejected terrorist demands, and Ken had been murdered - as we would have had to and he would certainly have been - a government which had been wholly impotent from the outset would have been accused (wrongly) by the GAWPs of being complicit in his end. On the other hand, if it had capitulated to the kidnappers' demands, that would have been an utter calamity in our relationship with the US.
How could we have put ourselves in this position? For more than any one else in western Europe, we in Ireland know all about the culture of hostage-taking, from Niall and his Nine Hostages, to poor Major Compton-Smith, "Guests of the Nation", "An Giall", Tiede Herrema, Ben Dunne and Don Tidey.
That we actually volunteered to make ourselves vulnerable to the demands of hostage-takers suggests that the bright sparks in Iveagh House have completely forgotten our history. Maybe that's what too much peace-processing does to the memory.
That was a horribly close call. In future, a little more hard-headedness, please, and a little less GAWPiness.