Jude Collins

Long to reign over us?

2012-01-27T07:01:00.000Z

Martin McGuinness may have annoyed a few people this week. And made a few others nervous. And mildly pleased a few more. Odd, how the same action can provoke such a range of reactions, isn’t it?

Although McGuinness hasn’t so much acted as hinted that he might one day act. At some future date he may walk through a door marked “Meet the queen”; for now he’s just nudged the door open a little bit. The Deputy First Minister has said that the visit of QE2 to the south and her demeanour at the Garden of Remembrance and her use of Irish have given him food for thought about meeting her. Or not.

The people likely to be annoyed are those republicans who believe McGuinness and Sinn Féin have sold out and are administering British rule in the north: they'll see this is just one more step on the road of servitude. The people nervous are those republicans who have stuck with McGuinness and Sinn Féin through all the astonishing changes of the last decade or two, and who are maybe wobbling just a bit at this latest potential move. The people mildly pleased are the unionists. They’ll see this as confirmation that the man central to the IRA campaign has re-committed himself to conventional within-the-union politics.

It might be instructive for all three groups to turn their eyes to another man in the public eye at present - Alex Salmond. You’ll notice that while the leader of the Scottish National Party is happy to put two questions on the Scottish referendum, one of them will not be should Queen Elizabeth remain head of state for Scotland: "The Queen will be Elizabeth of Scotland in the same way as she is Queen today in Canada, Australia and a host of other Commonwealth nations".

Now it may be that Salmond has a genuine respect for the queen and believes his fellow-countrymen would be the poorer without her as their head of state. But my guess is that he knows talking up the un-threatened relationship with QE2 will calm more than a few nervous Scots. When Alex Salmond reassures his fellow-countrymen that while there may not always be an England, there’ll always be a monarch, you may be sure he’s counting on several thousand votes being added to the independence box.

Angry Irish republicans, of course, will argue that while Salmond may be using the queen to build a bridge out of the union, McGuinness is using the same queen as a bridge that takes us deeper into the union. Nervous republicans will grit their teeth and hope that the Meet-the-queen bridge isn’t one that leads to the Commonwealth. Unionists will be pleased by the extent to which these latest words appear to ‘normalise relations’ between Northern Ireland and Britain – within the union.

Actually, Martin McGuinness’s door-opener should surprise none of us. It's totally in line with what has been at the top of Sinn Féin policy for the last fifteen years approximately: to encourage unionists to decommission their suspicion, let go of their siege mentality and consider how much they have in common with the rest of us. Not an easy task and God knows with the likes of Edwin Poots it may take a long time, but then republicans are nothing if not patient. And if some day the man who may by then be the First Minister of Northern Ireland decides to walk through the “Meet the queen” door, so what? When Alex Salmond meets her and reaffirms her as head of state, it adds if anything a spring to his step as he swings away and takes another purposeful stride towards a door marked “Exit”. You may be sure McGuinness is having similar thoughts.

Personally, though, if Ma'am asks to meet me, I’m going to have to turn her down. No, Ma'am, I'll say, not tonight. Or any other day or night. In fact, it's my conviction that every freedom-loving country should be working tirelessly for regime change on the big island next door. An unelected head of state, a family that has amassed vast wealth and lives in eye-crossing luxury, the death in mysterious circumstances of a hostile daughter- in-law, plus Prince Charles's views on architecture.: if you ask me, NATO tanks should have been sent in years ago.

Pssst! Want a degree?

2012-01-26T09:32:00.000Z

J B Priestley, Philip Larkin,L S Lowry – two writers and a painter whose work it’s impossible not to admire.And, whatever they may have been in the rest of their lives, men with at leastone element of good sense and integrity. How so? All three – and over a hundredothers – refused the offer of honours from Buckingham Palace. Apparently the royalbaubles-givers tried to keep these refusals under wraps, even after the 30-yearperiod of traditional secrecy had passed. Now the cat’s out of the bag and weknow who had backbone and who hadn’t. Well done J B, L S and old Phil.

Which brings us to RoryMcIlroy. Eh? Great young golfer. GREAT young golfer. Even a non-golf personlike myself can see the grace and accuracy of his game. And what about AlexFerguson. Some manager, eh? Unrivalled in his achievements with Aberdeen and then Man United. And haveyou heard Gary Lightbody, eh? Plays with Snow Patrol. Great with the old guitarand voice, I believe.

No quarrel with any of that.But according to today’s Irish Times, all three are soon to be transformed,transformed utterly. McIlroy and Ferguson in one bound will become Doctors ofScience, Lightbody a Doctor of Letters. The University of Ulster, it seems,have found a few spare degrees lying about, so they’ve decided they’ll givethem to the three chaps.

Now I can see the Universityof Ulster or any institution wanting to offer public applause to the achievements of the three men(although Ferguson is a bit odd, not being from this parish). But degrees?Ordinary people have to study for their degree. For three or four years, and adoctorate could mean about seven. Examinations, assignments, dissertations,viva voces - it’s a long, hard slog, and when you get ityou feel you’ve deserved it. Done the work, read the books, done the thinkingand writing and rewriting. And, these days, you’ll have shelled out up to£50,000. So isn’t it a wee bit odd that a doctorate, which by definitionsuggests study, should be given to people who probably never cracked a book? Doesn’tit kind of, um, devalue the degree? And all degrees? The fact is, Rory and old Fergie probably wouldn’t know oneend of a test tube from the other, and while Lightbody is no doubt a good penner of songs, he’dhave a hard time getting an A in a postgraduate assignment.

Surely somewhere out there is a sportsman or woman, a singer or an actor who’ll have the guts andcommon sense to respond to an honorary degree offer and tell the university inquestion to put it where the monkey put the sixpence.

Footnote: on a related butdifferent topic, I still haven’thaven't managed to find a list of all the loyalist ex-prisoners who studied and gotOpen University degrees. John Kyle says there are loads of them. Some names,John, some names, please.

The daring somersault of Comhaltas's Ulster Council

2012-01-25T09:26:00.001Z

"On mature recollection" -wasn't that how Brian Lenihan senior phrased it, when he was trying tocorkscrew his way out of something he'd said? It looks today as though theUlster Council of Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Éireann have done abit of mature reflection if not recollection, and have reversed their decisionnot to support Derry's bid for the All-Ireland Fleadh. The claim was thatthey'd given a thumbs-down in the first place because of security concerns.That might have been a factor but I can't rid my mind of another factor : next year, Derry will also be the UK City of Culture.

Now there's a topic of division. Which end of the title doyou focus on: is it the City of Culture side, which Derry has always regardeditself as having - and with some right to do so. I know it annoys some of thoseliving east of the Bann but pound-for-pound, Derry really is a city with morethan its fair share of quality performers in the arts. So of course they'reready to take on and beat all-comers for the title of 'City of Culture'. But then there's that awkward 'UK' bit attached to the title. What's in aname and all that, but if you accept a title that says you're part of the UK,you can be seen as acquiescing in that position, affirming it or even implyingyou're happy to be in that state. I'm sure you'd have to tie an UlsterCouncil Comhaltas member to an ant-hill and smother his/her softer bits inhoney before you'd get him/her to admit that the UK thing was a factor in theiroriginal decision to shun the city on the Foyle, but you may be sure itfeatured prominently in their discussion.

You can sort of see their point. If you keep on accepting UKadornments, where do you stop- when you're a lolling Lord orBaroness on the padded benches of the House of Lords? On the other hand, do youcut off your nose to spite your face and reject an opportunity like the UK Cityof Culture title because you're a purist and you don't want a speck onyour immaculate nationalist garment? In fact, it's the same dilemma that SinnFéin are currently struggling with: they want to be in mainstream politics andquell unionist fears, while at the same time remaining true to theirrepublican ideals. Like Comhaltas, Sinn Féin initially went one way- no meeting or greeting of the queen when she visited the south; now MartinMcGuinness has made it clear that he may well one day meet and greetMa'am.

Me, I'm a non-purist to the brink of impurity. I know the powerof words but I'm damned if I'll let them block my way from achieving somethingthat's important to me. So good for the Ulster Council and their maturerecollection and good for Martin McGuinness and his second thoughts on royalencounters. With one proviso: that their second and final decision moves thecause of Irish culture and politics forward in some significant way. And thatremains to be seen.

Loyalist ex-prisoners with university degrees?

2012-01-23T10:03:00.004Z

Alan in Belfast’s blog today has anextended interview with John Kyle, a GP and former leader of the PUP. In it Kyle talks about the intersection between faith and loyalism, but I found another aspect of his interview more interesting. He says that themedia portray the typical loyalist unfairly as “muscled, perma-tanned,tattooed, gold-necklaced, numerous ringed, male, with a pit bull terrier and atight t-shirt”. He goes on to lookat the notion that in Long Kesh, republican prisoners studied and tookuniversity courses, while loyalists were busy pumping iron in the gym. “In actual fact, more loyalists prisoners left Long Kesh with university degreesthan republican prisoners did”.

Really? That’s the secondPUP leader I’ve heard make that kind of claim. The late David Ervine once told me that loyalists in LongKesh were some ten years ahead of republicans in their emphasis onstudy and education. At the time, I didn’t believe him. Now that John Kylehas effectively repeated the claim, I’m not so sure. There must be facts and figures on this matter: where arethey? And if Ervine and Kyle’sclaim is accurate, where did thestudying-republican/iron-pumping loyalist idea come from – and why? If it’s not accurate, why have theymade it?

The truth is out there. It's a question of finding it.

Eoghan, Aengus, Anne and the Indo too

2012-01-22T14:35:00.001Z

As far as I know, my old friend Eoghan Harris never wrote for Mills andBoon, but judging by his column in today’s Sindo, the Dublin organ’s gain is Mills and Boon’s loss. Theeditor of the Indo, Aengus Fanning, died recently. Some years back he marriedAnne Harris, who had been Eoghan’s wife. So Eoghan has written an appreciationof the man who edited the Indo andwon his wife, and his bodice-ripper writing potential shows immediately.Check this for a final sentence: “So I will always cherish a memory of themsailing past me one Sunday morning, waving from a convertible with the hoodslightly stuck, the left wheel wandering towards an empty bus lane, theirblonde manes blowing in the breeze, heading for the distant dark blue of theKerry Mountains”.

Woo-hoo, as they say. Give the man credit: he doesn’t hold a grudge inthe ex-wife category.Or, I might add, in the lost-bet category.

But I did a small cheaty-thing back there – I left out the last part ofthe last sentence. Which was? After “the Kerry Mountains” Eoghan put the cherry so to say on hisMills and Boon cake with a final sixteen star-dusted words: “their labour of love selling well on the streets,spreading sweetness and light across the land”.

No, you haven’t gone mad and I didn’t make that up and yes, he istalking about the Indo. Sweetness and light. Across the land. In fact, earlier in the piece he explainswhat in part made the Indo a sweetness-and-light spreader: it was Fanning’s “unbending,unflinching, unwavering opposition to the IRA, which he sustained without stintfor nearly 30 years, and which played a crucial part in ensuring they did notenter Irish democracy without giving up their guns”.

Didn’t make that bit up either. Swear I didn’t. Bet you were assurprised as me that it was theIndo Wot Won It, the ‘it’ in this case being decommissioning. Astonishing. Kindof astonishing as well that Eoghan didn’t add something about the Indo being anti-nationalist as wellas anti-IRA. Remember the unbending, unflinching, unwavering attacks, wave after wave, that paperlaunched against John Hume for daring to have talks with Gerry Adams in the1980s? Talks which led eventually to the Good Friday Agreement. But I suppose thereisn’t room for everything in a column.

Besides, note how Eoghanforgot one final tribute that Fanning and the Indo might have claimed. Working with its fine journalists,Fanning’s newspaper was in no small measure responsible for convincing the south’s populace that the north was a nasty,vicious place which they should see as ‘up there’ and essentially foreign. Nowthere’s an achievement. But I suppose if Eoghan had included that, he might have hadto scrap the blonde manes bit at the end. Which I for one wouldn’t have missedfor anything. In fact, even as I type, I can feel my manly bosom start toheave. At least I think it’s my bosom. Could be my stomach.

Colin Duffy and that not-guilty verdict

2012-01-21T09:41:00.001Z

Well, thatwas a shock result, wasn’t it? All the focus had been on Colin Duffy and not onhis co-defendant, Brian Shivers. Then yesterday, the judge (it was a Diplock, jury-less court) pronouncedthat Duffy was not guilty and Shivers was, so Duffy went free and Shivers got alife sentence. To complicate matters, Shivers is suffering from a terminalillness.

I don’tknow the detail of this case but I was struck by a number of things. Thejuryless court is one. They’renecessary, we’re told, to avoid intimidation. The question is, of whom? Is the argument that if there wasa jury, there’d be more people who might be intimidated? What if youwere on a jury and you believed passionately in the innocence of those chargedwith paramilitary attacks – wouldn’t intimidation be counter-productive?And how would those who intimidated you know whether you were arguing for theinnocence or guilt of the accused?

The otherside of a juryless court is that it’s a judge-deciding court. So the judgebecomes judge, jury and executioner, as it were. Is there not somethinginherently anti-civil rights about that? That one man (they appear to be alwaysmen) can determine guilt AND deliver sentence. That’s an awful lot of power toput into one man’s hands. Are our judges such super-beings that we can allowsuch distilled power to be passed to them? Most of them were previouslylawyers, and it’s not unfair to say that most people think most lawyers areruthless and cunning. They certainly don’t rate highly on our Top Ten morallist.

Thenthere’s Colin Duffy. This is the third murder charge he has, as they say on theTV reports (which of course are always neutral) “walked away from”. The judgeseemed to take a similar view: he conceded there wasn’t evidence enough toconvict Duffy but that there were traces of his DNA in the car – the latex glove tip, the buckle of a seat-belt. Duffy’s supporters say the authoritieshave it in for him and are determined to get him on some charge or other, andthey point to a kind of DNA testing which has never been used here before. And of course his previous lawyer, Rosemary Nelson, was killed by loyalists.

The onlyperson who knows whether Duffy is guilty is the man himself and, I suppose, afew intimates. He has always insisted on his innocence, claims he was abused byprison authorities and spent much of his time in prison on a dirty protest.There can be no doubt he cut a striking figure, with his long flowing locks andbeard, as he was ushered to a car yesterday after release. It was like the eyeof the storm – all around him the churn of supporters and the press, at thecentre this tall erect figure looking a bit like an Indian holy man.

There aresome people convinced that Duffy is guilty as hell, and the sooner he’s putaway for keeps the better. There are others who see him as a heroic figure,persecuted by British authorities because he’s fearless in hisrepublicanism. Since none of usreally knows, whichever of those positions we take may tell more about usthan about Duffy.

How to deal with terrible pain

2012-01-20T08:28:00.001Z

I never stop being amazed at the human capacity to absorb suffering and to move on from terrible injustices. Below is an edited version of an interview I did last week with Mary Enright, the mother of Terry Enright. And if you don't remember the case of Terry Enright, get your heart checked - something isn't working properly in it.
****

Mary Enright and her husband Terry are cheerful people. When I visit them, Mary chats about the weather, Terry has a little laugh at how different my head looks when I take my cap off. Then he leaves and I sit down with Mary. It’s 12 January 2012: the day before, 11 January, was the anniversary of their son Terry, who was shot dead by the LVF. Mary tells me how she heard the news.

“One of our neighbours said ‘Your Terry’s been shot, they have him at the Mater’. It never entered my head he was dead, even though I knew he was shot. Sure nobody could shoot our Terry – our Terry’s a big strong fellah! I remember going into the hospital and saying ‘Can we see him now?’ I just took it for granted he was alive and I was going to see him. They said ‘We’re just waiting for his wife coming down’. So we waited until Deirdre came down and that’s when the doctor brought us into a room and told us. We should have known when they brought us into the room. I remember standing outside afterwards – I had to go out and get a bit of air, I thought I was going to faint – and this cop came over to me. I don’t know who he was, but he came over and he said ‘If it’s any consolation, he didn’t suffer’. I suppose it was nice of him to say it. But officially no one had contacted us to tell us it had happened.

Her son was twenty-eight when he was shot dead. What kind of person was he?

“Terry was funny – he liked the style, that kind of thing. This time he’d been to the barber’s, they must have been keeping him going, saying he had a bald spot. He said to me ‘I think I’m going a bit bald’. Here’s me: ‘No you’re not!’ Then he said ‘I’m near thirty’. I said ‘How are you near thirty?’ He says ‘I’m twenty-eight’. I says ‘You’re not near thirty until the day before you’re thirty!” He was funny, and you have those things to think about.”

What about his killers – how does she feel towards them?

“We don’t know who killed him. But we had a phone call years ago to say that some man had rung and said that he was in some pub in East Belfast, and these people were boasting about doing it. I don’t even think about the people who did it – to me they’re nothing. They’re more to be pitied. What had they to offer anyone?”

So now, fourteen years after his murder, when she closes her eyes and thinks of Terry, what does she see?

“There are times you see him as a kid. You see him doing the dancing - he did Irish dancing and he loved it. And there are times I see him with a hurl in his hand - he was very sporty. And he never forgave me for taking him away from the boxing! They had started to talk about brain damage, and I said to him “You know, Terry, you could end up getting damaged, you’re not going back to the boxing!’ But he loved it. So I see him looking at me with the wee boxing vest on him – because he was quite a skinny kid. Then he sprouted up big, in a matter of months it seemed.”

Does she visit his grave very often?

“I’d be down at his grave every week. I would go down and sometimes I say a prayer and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I talk to him, and then I say ‘What am I talking to him for, sure he’s not there!’ I remember speaking to a woman in Ardmonagh who’d lost a son. I think it was the first year after his death and it was the winter-time. She says to me ‘How’re you doing?’ I said ‘It’s crazy. I remember going down to the cemetery and saying ‘He shouldn’t be lying here, with the snow and all’ . She said ‘I know , it happened to me too. I remember going down to the graveyard with a blanket, and then saying ‘What am I doing?’”

Even when she’s sleeping, her dead son can be in her thoughts.

“I’ve had several dreams about him. They were all nice dreams - he was totally alive and was as happy as Larry in them. I remember waking up with the tears tripping me, because I was convinced he was alive, that he was here. And I said to my husband Terry ‘It was so real!’. At the same time it just leaves…an awful emptiness. No one knows the pain.

But I’m also a strong person, and I was determined they weren’t going to destroy my family. I said to my three boys ‘We need to be strong. It’s unfair, Terry had so much to offer, it’s unfair that we let anyone destroy us. We need to work together and help each other. And they did, and they have to be congratulated. Great lads”.

Well hello, tourist! Wanna good time?

2012-01-19T09:48:00.000Z

Arlene Foster is excited. She’s in charge of tourism hereand apparently last night they had quite a do, with Van Morrison and all, topush the north as a tourist destination. Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh this morninginterviewed her and Dermot Murnaghan, late of this parish, so they could both express theirexcitement and remind everyone of the many tourist attractions we have. Likethe Giant’s Causeway and the Titanic (sort of) and, um, the Antrim Coast Road. Oh,and apparently if they get off thebeaten track visitors can discover all sorts of hidden gems as well.

God knows we need every penny we can get, but the wholetourism thing makes me feel uneasy. Kinda soiled, even.

Firstly, Ireland abroad, in terms of tourism, is nowmarketed as one. So is Arlenecomplaining that visitors who’ve come to check out Killarney or the Burren orthe Dublin pubs are being encouraged to take in the north as well? Emphaticallynot. But if visitors ask over half the population here if they’re Irish,they’re likely to be told No. Eh? I’ve come all this way to Ireland and now youtell me you’re not even Irish? That should encourage them to come back.

Secondly, I know tourism is a vast industry throughout theworld. But when I hear a visitor on, say, Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh asked if theylike being here, I close my eyes and shove the nearest cushion in my mouth.What do they expect the poor divil to say – that they can’t stand the place? Orthat they wish they’d gone to Disneyland instead? Or that the much-vauntedMerchant’s Hotel is over-priced and far too-red-plush? The term ‘emotionalblackmail’ springs to mind.

Thirdly, there’s something about tourism that borders onprostitution. In Ireland particularly, we pride ourselves as being welcominghosts to any visitors to our shores. In fact we scour the world looking forpeople, do all we can to persuade people to visit our shores, give them thecome-on. Why? Because we really like them? Because we want to spread happiness?Because we feel guilty enjoying all this beauty on our lonesome? Uh-uh. We seekthem out, lure them here so we can show them a good time, but only if they’ll thenleave a sizeable part of their wallet on the bedside table before they leave. And when they do quit the premises, it’snot unknown for us to imitate the way they talk or the things they say, and havea quiet snigger to ourselves.

You find the prostitution comparison too harsh? Maybe you’reright. Maybe it’s more like encouraging people to pay a visit to the zoo andmarvel at the antics of the monkeys.

Yes, you’re right, we need their money. But some day, I know, we’re going todiscover something better to sell than ourselves.

Advice to government: bring your cheque-book

2012-01-18T09:52:00.000Z

A bit of a barney in the Dail yesterday, by all accounts. Itseems that three years ago, government advisers were handed over one millioneuro of tax-payers’ money; at present, that has shrunk to an annual €576,000. Hooray, hooray, hooray.Only then a barney was raised by Gerry Adams and then Micheal Martin because,apparently, Enda Kenny had been caught breaching the cap that’s been put on payto government advisers, by intervening so the adviser in question got a highersalary. Micheal Martin said that eight out of fifteen salaries had broken the government’s ownguidelines. Meanwhile the Minister for Education, Ruairi Quinn, explained whyit was “simply not possible” to intervene regarding cuts in education, including cuttingstaff levels. Not good news for the 1,000 guidance counselors in the south who maywell lose their jobs. Quite a few in languages and science may also go.

Clearly these special advisers are really classy people.Guidance counselors and language or science teachers spend around five yearsgetting equipped for their jobs, so presumably the special advisers must havetrained for even longer. Funny, though, that I’ve never actually heard of aSchool of Government Advisorship in any university. Have you?

Meanwhile here in the north we had our own brouhaha a whileback over a special adviser having once been an IRA member. As, of course, werethe Deputy First Minister, the Minister for Regional Development, not tomention the criminal record of both the present First Minister and hispredecessor. All great fun to talk about, but of course what special advisersare judged by - should be judgedby – is the quality of their advice.

For example, Steven King, late of this parish, advised DavidTrimble and the Ulster Unionist Party. So too did the former Paul Bew, now elevatedto the dizzy heights of being Lord Bew, presumably in recognition of thequality of his services. The fact that their advice coincided with a periodwhen the Ulster Unionist Party did a Costa Concordia, never to sail again, waspurely coincidental. Wasn’t it?

Ah, advisers. You knowwhy they get paid so much. Because they’re worth it.

The Costa Concordia - no, Virginia, it's NOT like the Titanic

2012-01-17T09:01:00.002Z

Quite a sight it made: the luxury liner Costa Concordia on its side like some giant mechanical whale, beached with no hope of escape. Who's to blame? The owners for not seeing to it that everything was shipshape? The captain for sailing recklessly close to shore to give a bravura salute to those watching from the land? The people who constructed the ship so that there was a fatal weakness that has now resulted in, what, nearly thirty people dead?

One thing we can be pretty sure of: in a hundred years' time, no city or port will bust a gut trying to remind the world that the Costa Concordia was built by them. No city or port, in their desperate bid to win world attention, will construct a ship-shaped building to remind people that this was where the Costa Concordia was put together. No city or port will shell out on that building £20 million which, if what we hear is right, may never be recovered. No city or port will spend millions refurbishing the boat that ferried passengers to this ghastly vessel.

How different, then, from the way our own dear city of Belfast has responded to the Titanic gravy-train: "Let us on, we've as much right to a seat as Cork or anywhere else. I mean, look at us - we're terrific, we built this ship! No one else can say that!"

If you want proof positive that Belfast is an Irish rather than a British city, try following the logic of that one. Listen, guys: it sailed, it sank, get over it. And stop shovelling millions into the memory of this sea-going coffin for the super-rich.

BBC's Sunday Sequence - better and better

2012-01-15T16:09:00.001Z

Sunday Sequence's William Crawley

If BBC Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh's Sunday Sequence gets any better, it'll be a must-listen and half the church-going population will arrive late. This morning it had David Vance and Finola Meredith on, talking about those recent images of American soldiers urinating on dead Taliban. To say they differed would be to put it mildly. Finola thought that urinating on dead bodies was disgusting, inhuman and totally defenceless conduct, which struck me as a fair description. David thought that...well I found it hard to tell what David thought. He talked about how bad the Taliban were and how he had a website called 'A Tangled Web' that didn't have racist stuff by him on it, and how putting those images on Youtube or wherever was inhuman, or was it terrible, or maybe deserving of punishment, but the urinating itself...No I'll stop, I'm afraid I'm an unreliable witness. I kept having this red mist at the notion that someone was whataboutering around this ghastly act. Finola Meredith, from what I've seen of her, is not a woman who loses her temper easily, but she came near to it this morning with Vance.

And then, as if that wasn't enough, the programme produced Anthony McIntyre and Danny Morrison talking about the Boston tapes - those recorded interviews with a selection of participants, loyalist and republican, where they talk about who did what in the Troubles. The people used were given an assurance that what they said would not be made public until after their death; unfortunately, this was an assurance no-one could give, as Boston College apparently knew and Anthony McIntyre and his colleague Ed Moloney should have known. Now it's looking as though the tapes may pass to the PSNI ; what was to remain confidential will no longer be so.

Morrison, who believes he was slandered on the tapes, argued that Moloney and McIntyre shouldn't have encouraged people to make claims about what others did as well as what they themselves did, and that they should have been warned the information could be seized and passed to the authorities. McIntyre said they'd been more or less misled by Boston College and that in hindsight yes, they should have sought legal advice before embarking on the project.

Just two comments - for the moment. One, if I'd been doing such interviews, the first thing I'd have checked would have been the legal possibility of anyone else having access to this stuff? It's almost inconceivable that Moloney and McIntyre didn't think of knocking on a very sharp lawyer's door before they started recording.

The second thing is, Moloney and McIntyre really should stop referring to this project as "research". A basic ingredient of research is that the sample you use reflects the larger population; in this case, only those with an anti-Sinn Féin perspective on the Troubles got used. Sorry, chaps. Skewed sample, skewed research. There must be a better word for the Boston project.

The royal visit - because She's worth it?

2012-01-13T07:33:00.000Z

I’vebeen accused of having a thing for QE2, so to even mention the woman who makesmen walk backwards out of rooms is to invite criticism. But given the latestIrish tourism figures, she has to be factored in.

Doyou remember those glorious days last May? When the people of the south ofIreland queued up for the honourof being near the British monarch? There were hard-headed people who objectedto that visit because, among other things, they thought that money spent onbanquets and massive security - €7million, was it? - would have been better spent on hospitals or the lengtheningdole queues. The short-sightedness of these people was quickly corrected bythose in authority, when it was explained that her visit would give publicityto the tourist industry that money simply could not buy. The millions spentwould be returned in increased tourist numbers, pressed down and running over.

Well,the tourism figures for last year have just been released and yes, there hasindeed been a change in tourism figures. But according to The Irish Times yesterday, “visitors from Britain – Ireland’s biggest sourceof overseas visitors – dropped by 2%”. During the first three months, before the south was graced by theroyal presence, the figures were stronger; the figures after she visited, in the latter part of theyear, showed a falling-off. Fewer, not more people came to Ireland. Where there were positive figures, the tourism people are attributing theincrease to the government’s reduction of VAT rather than the aroma left by theroyal presence. What’s more, a lot of criticism has been directed at the tourism people for focusing too muchon existing markets like Britain and not going after tourists from growingeconomies like China and Brazil.

Since I have a thing for Her Majesty,I’ve done what I can to see the numbers in a positive light but they stubbornlyresist. It very much looks like those days in May not only cost the southernIrish taxpayer millions s/he could ill afford, but the pundits who went onabout reaping a royal harvest either lied or got it spectacularly wrong.

Butlet’s be positive – let’s try to learn a lesson. A suggestion: this year, thesouth’s government might want to offer the royal coffers say, €3 million, onthe promise no royal person will set foot on Irish soil in the coming year andthe hard-pressed tourism industry will be given a chance to get off its knees. Becauselast time out, Her Majesty appears to have delivered tourism, not a boost, but aregal boot in the face.

Should Britain chair our examination of the past?

2012-01-12T09:47:00.000Z

There are areas I feel uncomfortable talking about and one is,how we should respond to the victims of our Troubles. My unease springs fromthe fact that I’ve been lucky enough not to have lost a loved one, and when youhaven’t suffered that kind of pain you don’t really know what’s involved. That said, there are a few general points worth making onthe topic, even for someone as ignorant as I am of the suffering involved.

1. TheBelfast Telegraph todayreports that Sinn Féin have agreed to take part in talks about dealing with‘the legacy of the Troubles’. Since the British Secretary of State is chairingthe talks, I doubt very much if Sinn Féin will be happy to proceed very farwith this arrangement. I hope they don’t. By taking the chair, Paterson isimplicitly offering the old lie that our Troubles are about a pair of crazytribes with Britain the civilized referee, detached, above all this hatred andkilling.

2. Some of the combatants involved in the Troubleswill be willing to tell the truth about their part in particular killings,others won’t. This applies on allsides, but nowhere with more completeness than on the British side. You maypoint to David Cameron’s apology for Bloody Sunday as contradiction; but keepin mind that the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday cost the huge sums it didbecause the British government fought with fist and boot to avoid releasing anydocuments which might show their forces in a bad light. We still don’t know whowere the people killed the fourteen shot dead on Bloody Sunday. And that’s justone example. Britain has cast itself in the role of peace-keeper not combatant inour Troubles, so how can a party with clean hands be expected to have anythingother than chairmanship to contribute?

3. The loved ones of different victims havedifferent needs. Some simply wish to have the truth recounted; others demand justice. Both are understandable stances, but is it sensible to allow those whohave suffered to be the ones who decide if the perpetrators will be punished? Beingso emotionally involved, they are the least likely to produce a dispassionatedecision on the matter. And justice requires dispassion.

4. We pride ourselves on how our peace process hasbeen a model for other conflicts in other areas of the world. Are there anymodels from elsewhere and the past that wemight follow in coping with victim pain? And don’t say “South Africa”:there are a lot of people in South Africa profoundly unhappy with their truthand reconciliation format.

5. It’s a hard thing to say but it may be that timewill provide the answer. Not that time will produce a blueprint to be followed butthat time will pass, those who have suffered will grow old and die, andeventually the pain now felt will diminish very, very slowly. That’s whathappened with the Irish Civil War, a brief but truly brutal conflict. It’s apoor solution but maybe the only one we can really rely on.

Enough generalities - the Village area can deal sectarianism a deadly blow

2012-01-11T09:45:00.001Z

It’s a long way from the Villagearea of Belfast to Stormont. Youcan work at an official level towards a shared – and improved – future, but youcan’t legislate for the conversion of sectarian morons like those who attackedyoung James Turley the other day and left him for dead. Why did they do this?Because he was ‘a taig’. If you’d been looking for an example of full-frontalsectarianism, you’ve just found it. These knuckle-dragges weren’t lookingto settle some old inter-community score – they just wanted to attack/leave fordead a taig.

I’m just off theNolan Show on BBC Radio Ulster /Raidio Uladh, where this topic was discussed. Dawn Purvis, former leader of the PUP, was keen to stress thatsectarianism runs right through all classes of our society in the north, andshe’s right. Where she’s wrong is in putting the emphasis at this moment ondesegregated housing, desegregated schools, desegregated communities. The focus now should be firmly on this primeval attack which is bad for the reputation of the decentpeople of the Village area, bad for the film industry here and bad for thereputation of the north in general.

So what to do? Two simple actions wouldhelp considerably. First, it wouldtake no more than five minutes for Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness, asFirst and Deputy First Minister to appear before the cameras together, as theydid when PC Ronan Kerr was killed, and label these thugs and their actions in emphatic terms. Second, this attack happened in broad daylight – thereare bound to be people in the Village area who know who they were. If theytruly detest what happened, they should identify the troglodyte attackers to the PSNI, they should be arrested and they should learn that actions have consequences and that vile actions have very, very uncomfortable consequences.

We alllearn best by example. If the top of our society – Stormont – and theground-level of our society - theVillage area – were to act as one in this case, make it clear that they totally disown such peopleand their stupid, vicious actions, you’d be surprised how that co-ordinatedaction would send ripples of approval and attitude-change throughout our society. If they don’t, then let’s hear no morepreaching from the top or pretence that sectarianism isn’t welcome and nurturedat community level.

Whither Sinn Féin?

2012-01-10T11:15:00.000Z

Where is Sinn Féin going? "Nowhere, in the south anyway" was the answer Eoghan Harris gave, a few short years back. Then at the last election Sinn Féin almost trebled its numbers in the Dail. Even this was a minor disappointment for some of the more ambitious party members.

Writing in The Irish Times today, Paul Cullen reckons the party have a five-year plan and are working "with a view to further gains in the next general election and the pivotal role in forming the next government that would accompany such success".

Since that statement could be made about nearly any political party, Cullen has hardly produced a major insight. If you listen to the Shinners' opponents, and to some extent to Cullen, you would conclude that their goal is power and that they have ditched and will ditch any principle to acquire that power. But power to do what?

Ask the average punter on the street what Sinn Féin stands for and you'll be told "A united Ireland". How would gaining power or sharing power in the south advance that ambition? Well, some people believe that the sight of, say, a Sinn Féin Minister of Education in the south meeting with a Sinn Féin Minister of Education in the north would be a powerful symbol of the strides the party has made towards Irish reunification. Those opposed would say that like the cross-border bodies, such a meeting would be a meaningless gesture, the kind that Fianna Fail and other southern governments have been making towards Irish unity over the last eighty or ninety years.

It depends on how you see Irish unity coming. If you believe it will come, if at all, in one intense, probably violent short period, as did the establishment of the Irish Free State, you'll dismiss Sinn Féin in government in the south and north as sell-out window-dressing. If you believe that Irish unity will come gradually, as more and more powers shift into the hands of Irish people, then you'll see Sinn Féin's five-year plan and beyond as important and so far, in the teeth of fierce opposition, successful. The increasing integration of the party into mainstream politics north and south can be seen as the betrayal of everything Irish men and women fought and died for over the past forty years, or the practical, patient movement towards realisation of their dream.

One thing is sure: the major barrier to Irish reunification now lies south of the border, not north of it.

Is David Cameron West Lothian in disguise?

2012-01-09T10:30:00.001Z

Scotlandhas always interested me, and not just because, like Sarah Palin with Russia, Ican see it from my upstairs window. My mother, a Donegal woman, used rememberthe excitement of her “Scotchy” cousins coming each summer and sleepinganywhere and everywhere in the house. Back in Scotland, one of them played for Glasgow Celtic forsome ten years. When they got married my parents went to live in Glasgow for atime, where two of my siblings were born. And of course there’s thatfascinating dialect Ulster-Scots (no, Virginia, it’s not a language), Donegaltattie-hokers and a myriad of other links.

Which iswhy I’m interested to see David Cameron this morning doing his damnedest tohobble Scottish nationalism. AlexSalmond’s party, last time out, ran for election on the promise of a referendum onindependence in the second part of their term of office, and it was elected with a firm majority. Now Cameron hasdecided he’ll tell the Scots when they’re going to hold their referendum, how many questions will be on the ballot and what the wording. Salmond wants it in 2014and wants two questions – one on whether full independence is favoured, theother on whether, short of independence, Scotland should have more powers devolved to it. Cameron saysno, there’ll just be one independence question and it’ll be a lot earlier than2014.

Both men,of course, are politicians, keen to further their aims; but it doesn’t take a politicalphilosopher to figure out who should decide when and what kind of referendumthe Scottish people will face: theman whose party was elected by the Scottish people with an emphatic overallmajority or the man whose party has half as many MPs as there are pandas inScotland (yes, Virginia, there are two pandas in Scotland).

According to the polls, the numbers in Scotland favouring full independence are growing but still well short of a majority. With that in mind, Salmond is keen that hispromise of a referendum be left until 2014 , and there’s talk of having it held on theanniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, a famous Scottish victory over theEnglish. For the same reasons Cameron wants to force a referendum of hischoosing at an earlier date with no historical reverberations.

But what’smost interesting is the way this matter lays bare the nature of the union. Asfar as Cameron is concerned Westminster as the senior partner calls the shots, not the Scots. In thenorth of Ireland, on the other hand, the opposite applies: any movement out ofthe union with Britain can only come from the people in the north-east ofIreland. The views of others in the UK are deemed irrelevant.

Youprobably see the consistency in Cameron’s position vis-à-vis the two regions.Me, I’m going to need three or four years to think about it – say until around Easter of 2016.

Joe and the Sindo have a go

2012-01-08T12:50:00.002Z

If it hadn't been for Joe Duffy, I might have missed it. Joe was on his RTÉ 'Liveline' mid-week, getting upset about the TG4 series 'Mna an IRA'. Well, actually about the first in the series, which concerns Dr Rose Dugdale. Joe must have repeated at least four times that Dr Dugdale had said "Fair play" to the people, including her partner Eddie Gallagher, who kidnapped Dutch industrialist Tiede Herema back in the 1980s. Joe then got Mr Herema himself on the line to denounce those who'd put him through such an ordeal back then. Perversely and to Duffy's obvious frustration, Herema sid he'd found Gallagher intelligent, friendly and cool under pressure, for which he was glad, since otherwise he, Herema, might today be dead. That wasn't the answer Joe wanted so he brought the conversation to a speedy conclusion.

Today the Sindo takes up Joe's lament, reporting a TG4 board member who thinks 'Mna an IRA' is a "serious stain on the character of TG4". Eh? I watched the programme last week, thanks to Joe's head's-up, and the "Fair play" remark blended to near-invisibility into an interesting if overly-brief programme. It presented a portrait of a woman from a highly privileged English background - wealthy parents, happy childhood, 'came out' as a debutante, went to Oxford and studied politics, philosophy and economics (PPE), became an academic. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she then applied the theories she read to the reality of her own life and that of those around her and concluded that injustice dominated. And so a woman who could have led a well-cushioned life at the elite end of English society became instead involved with the IRA's armed struggle - or on the fringes of it, since the IRA apparently never quite accepted her as a fully-fledged member. What the documentary showed was a beautiful and highly intelligent young woman who today lives in rural seclusion in Ireland,\ and who regrets nothing of her commitment to the struggle against what she saw as injustice by the British state forces in Ireland.

Obviously some people will condemn her actions, others applaud them. In the programme she talked of the pain her path in life brought to her parents, and widened this out to note the destructive effect on children and families which commitment to a political cause often exerts. Certainly Joe and one TG4 board member not only don't approve of her choices, they even disapprove of the programme about her being made.

All publicity, even bad publicity, is in some ways good publicity. Lots of people like myself who would probably have missed the programme have now been alerted to its existence. Should it exist? Or are Joe Duffy and the TG4 board member right to lament that such things be given an airing? The answers, in order, are Yes of course it should exist, if you believe it's important to examine the motivation behind the actions of people who resorted to arms during the Troubles; and No, Duffy and the board member are misguided at best if they believe we should erase any explanation of IRA actions during that time. Because if the Irish people aren't considered adult enough to listen/watch and then make a judgement about the sacrifice or scurrilousness of people like Rose Dugdale, then Joe and Co should really go the whole hog and campaign to have the vote removed from such morally-inept morons as the general Irish public.

The English? Make 'em laugh

2012-01-06T08:34:00.001Z

It’s a striking fact and a source of pride to some: the number of Irish comics who make it big in Britain. It’s been thatway for decades at least: Frank Carson, Dave Allen, Jimmy Cricket, Dermot Morgan, Dara O Briain, BrendanO’Carroll – and, of course that old perennial, Sir Terry Wogan. They’ve allmade the British laugh.

On a BBC interview on Monday last, Sir Terry revealsthat back during the Troubles a parcel-bomb was sent to him at the BBC inLondon. Typically, he chuckled the event away: “Whoever sent in the bomb withmy name on it cannot have been much of a fan because I was on holiday”.

Why do so many Irish funny-men make it big in Britain? Because Britain is big and because it’s there. If you confine your ambitions to thisisland, as the showbands did, you’re limited to drawing your fans from apopulation around six million. If you go for it in Britain, you’ve a potentialaudience that’s ten times as many. There’s also the fact that in England you’rea relative rarity – your accent makes you stand out. I remember a unionistacademic colleague of mine years ago telling me she hated going to conferencesin England, because as soon as she spoke, people picked up on her accent andturned round to stare. For a comedian that’s a plus: you’ve a voice that’squickly identifiable.

But as in most things, George Bernard Shaw gets to the heartof the matter with a deft phrase or two.. He said that the English expect theIrish to play the fool, and the Irish usually try to reward that expectation. It’s true. I spent a couple of years living in England andthere’s a shameful temptation to fit into the pre-assigned broth-of-a-boy role.Had I spent five years there I’m sure the begobs and begorrahs would have bubbledup in my vocabulary to meetexpectations.

Why do the English have this expectation? They may or may not do it deliberately,but there are few more effective ways of decomissioning or at least devaluing someone’s point of viewthan to cast them in the court jester role. Old Sir Terry made a verycomfortable living playing that part over the years, as to some extent did Shawhimself. But unlike Shaw, Wogan made sure that anything interfering with his good-natured whimsy image wasquickly pushed away: Looking backto the Troubles, he declared “What was being done [IRA violence] was not beingdone in my name”. In other words,“There are lots of decent Irish people like me who disown the IRA”. That kind of message was useful to theBritish authorities. It helped maintain a public image of IRA people as a bunchof psycopaths who gloried in killing and were detested by their own people.

But it’s thedaft-paddy image, not the anti-violence stance, that the English people really love in us Irish. It allowsthem the comfort of believing that to be English is to be normal, and to be anything else (Scots or Welsh as well as Irish) is to be raw material for joke-telling. They talk so quaintly, don’t they, and,bless ‘em, they have such a weird and hilarious way of lookingat the world!

On that belief in the amusing oddness of others the British built their empire.

Remembering the war fought to end all wars

2012-01-05T09:43:00.001Z

Sometimes what peopleavoid saying is as important or more important than what they do say. A topical example: those Irishmen from the south of Irelandwho died fighting in the First World War. For decades there was little publictalk of them. The spotlight between 1914 and 1918 shone steadily on the memory of the men ofthe Easter Rising, not on the men who fought in the First World War. As thesaying goes, they had been erased from history.

Nowadays things have changed.Last night Belfast City Council voted on a motion by the SDLP that the Irishgovernment be invited to ceremonies to commemorate the Battle of the Somme andto Remembrance Sunday. Councillor Pat McCarthy said things were changing andthat a decade ago the visit of the Queen to the south wouldn’t have beenenvisaged. “For a long time in the history of the Republic that period [World War I] wasforgotten and was something which was never talked about”.

Wrong, CouncillorMcCarthy. The Irishmen who foughtand died in the First World War were not forgotten and were talked about. I hadtwo grand-uncles who died in the conflict and I remember my mothertalking about them quite openly and frequently. Speaking to other Irishpeople whose relatives died in that war, the same story emerges – the framedphotograph in the hall, the story of his leaving to join up, the news of the death at some remote front. What Councillor McCarthy presumably means – and mostcommentators like him – is that those Irishmen from the south who died were forgotten and not talked aboutat an official, public level. There is a difference. At the private, familylevel, those men were never forgotten, frequently spoken of.

Another fact not talkedabout when this subject arises is thatthe men who died in the First World War weren’t wearing German uniforms – theywere wearing British uniforms. Slap bang in the middle of the First World War the Easter Rising occurred, and from there to the Black and Tan war was a shortstep of a few years. Who were the men of 1916 and those involved in thestruggle for independence fighting against? Men wearing British uniforms. Thusat a public level it became very difficult to reconcile the value of those whohad opposed British soldiers and the value of those who had joined with Britishsoldiers. Not surprisingly, thesouthern state chose to have public remembrance of those who had fought Britishsoldiers and to ignore those who had fought as British soldiers. That's thereason why the there was public silence on those Irishmen who died fighting in the First WorldWar, other than the occasional murmur of “Shameful!” The reasons behind the official silence– as distinct from private/family remembrance –was and is rarely addressed.

A final point: those Irishmenfrom the north and south who died in WWI battle are talked of as heroic, and theghastly number of fatalities at the Somme and other battles are cited inevidence. Indeed - I certainly feel terrified even thinking about the conditions inwhich those men lived and died. But the notion that they all “answered thecall” in a heroic way, keen to serve King and country, is to forget, erase,elide the memory of all those men - very likely the majority, if the history of recruitmentover the centuries is looked at – who joined up because they had little or noalternative if they wanted to earn a living. The war itself was a pointless, imperial conflictsold as the war to end all wars.

So let’s watch if theremembrance of the Somme will include those awkward facts, when, as they're certain to do, representativesfrom the south come trooping up. The way thatRemembrance Sunday is normally observed, I’d say the chances of complete honesty about the war and the men whofought in it are zero.

Big wave coming: what to do?

2012-01-04T09:33:00.000Z

Having confidently stated a blog or two back that predictions are a waste oftime, let me contradict myself: on one issue this year there will be lots ofpredictions. I’m talking sectarian head-counting here.

It’s started this morning in TheIrish Times .There’s a detailed article by Gerry Moriarty talking about the rising tide ofthe Catholic population in the north which will have obvious constitutionalimplications. If not managed “properly and creatively” (whatever that means),he believes it could land us all “back in the mire”. He quotes figures from the NI Department of Education forthe last school year: 120,415 Protestants and 163,693 Catholics. At thirdlevel, the University of Ulster has just over 11,000 Catholics and just over7,000 Protestants. The teacher training colleges tell the same story. Overallat third level education, students from a Catholic backround represent 59.3%and Protestant background 40.7%.

So clearly the notion of a permanent Protestant majority inthe north is on its way out – it’s merely a question of how soon. For thosealarmed by this prospect, it’s important to present this kind of calculation assectarian head-counting and therefore sectarian, while at the same time finding reasons why Catholic votes= nationalist/Protestant votes= unionist won’t holdwith the rising generation. Peter Shirlow of Queen’s Universityis quoted as saying the younger generation “feel politics is too sectarian or toonationalist”. (No, Virginia, it’s not clear if the ‘sectarian’ refers tounionists or to nationalists.) “They [young people] are in many ways – but notcompletely – sectarian blind, or tradition blind”.

There’s more stuff – I’ll give you the link at the end – butit’s hard not to conclude that a number of people are going to be tryingawfully hard to convince the world, including young people and themselves, thatthe rising tide of Catholic-background young people will not emerge as a risingtide of nationalist/republican voters. That’s what it boils down to. My ownresponse would be, where’s the electoral evidence that this will happen? Young Catholics, if we judge by election returns, are if anything more republican in their thinking than their predecessors.

And did I mention that the results of the 2011 census willbe released in the autumn of this year?

One last point: the Good Friday Agreement says that therecan be constitutional change in the position of N Ireland only when a majorityso decide. Moriarty’s article and lots of other people believe that for nationalists/republicans toact on a 50+1 basis would be a recipe for disaster, that only when a majorityof unionists favour change should there be change. One question: if that's so, why didthey put in the Agreement a clause that meant nothing?

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0104/1224309780877.html

Obama's greatest consolation: the Republicans

2012-01-03T09:38:00.000Z

When he sang at theinauguration of one-term US President Jimmy Carter, Paul Simon had the chutzpah to choose his song ‘AmericanTune’, which includes the lines “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered/Idon’t have a friend who feels at ease./I don’t know a dream that’s not beenshattered/Or driven to its knees.”

A lot of people must havebeen humming that over the last four years, as they watched the first (andmaybe only) term of Barack Obama’s time in office. The great black hope, the man with grace and intelligenceand eloquence to rival JFK - whathas he achieved? The answer is not a lot. He hasn’t stopped the US (like therest of the world) from plunging into recession; he hasn’t left Iraq in anybetter state than he found it; he hasn’t brought a proper programme of Medicareinto being; and he still hasn’t closed that affront to civil and human rights,Guantanamo Bay.

Being an intelligent man, Obama probably realizes all this himself. If so, he’ll be comforted by the sight of what’s happening in Iowa today. There theRepublicans are gathered to begin choosing their man (or – less likely- woman)to oppose Obama in November. The man in front in the polls is Mitt Romney andone of the major problems with him is that he looks too much like apresidential candidate - thelooks, the clean-livingand of course the money. Unfortunately for him he’s a Mormon, which’ll turn offa significant number of Republicans. He’s also got a record of being tooliberal – he now says he’s rethought his position on these matters, but at one point in his career he wasopen in his support of abortion and gay rights. He’s also not a man to get the blood pumping in Republicanveins.

Then there’s NewtGingrich, a man who could hold hisown in a debate with anyone, including Obama; unfortunately Newt is on histhird or is it fourth wife, and that kind of thing doesn’t go down well inRepublican core-vote territory.

There were other Republican starsthat shone briefly – Governor Rick Perry, until he couldn’t remember the thirdof the things he had very very strong feelins on; there was Herman Cain, untilhis sexual past caught up with him; there’s Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, who afew weeks ago was predicted as finishing last but has recently surged.

In short, the Republicans,faced with a Democrat president who is deeply unpopular, can’t seem to make uptheir minds who would be the man to take him on. All those available areseriously flawed in some way, so amazingly in twelve months’ time, a deeplyunpopular Barack Obama may manage to hold on to the White House.

If that happens, Americanshave one comforting thought. American presidents in their secondterm of office, free from the fear of non-re-election, sometimes cut free andactually do the things they promised they'd do. It’s a bit like a class thatisn’t faced with a tough examination at the end: the fear removed, there’s the possibility of somethingreal and important happening. Orso we may hope. Although don’t forget what Paul Simon sang about hope, above. Maybe that's in the nature of political expectation: it gets driven to its knees by reality.

The New Year and some crystal balls

2012-01-02T12:33:00.000Z

New Year predictions? I’ll give you New Year predictions.Back in the early 1970s, republicans would sometimes encourage each other witha posting in a local newspaper declaring “On to 1973 – the year of Victory!” Or1974 or 1975. Those who survivedlearnt that it hadn’t happened. Those who didn’t survive didn’t know it hadn’thappened.

Another prediction: John Hume in in 1972, in the aftermathof Blooday Sunday. His heart heavy with that cruel slaughter, the SDLP leader issaid to have declared “It’s a united Ireland now or nothing”. It hasn’t happened.

Or this one. Ian Paisley in the 1980s, standing with a sledge-hammer, waiting to have his photograph taken sothey could make posters with the slogan “We’ll Smash Sinn Féin!” It hasn’t happened. Or Ian Paisleyaddressing a vast gathering at Belfast City Hall, roaring defiantly that as far as interference in NorthernIreland’s affairs by the south of Ireland was concerned, it wouldn’t happen -not “Never, Never, Never, Never!”. It has happened.

Brian Feeney, columnist with the VO, predicted - took a bet, in fact - that there’d bea dramatic rise in Catholic numbers when the 2001 census figures for here wereannounced. It didn’t happen.

Eoghan Harris, columnist with the Irish Independent, predicted some years ago that Fianna Fail would‘mop up’ the four remaining seats of Sinn Féin in the south at the nextelection. It didn’t happen ( for a thousand reasons, ach sin sceal eile).

By now you’ve probably noticed a pattern in all these predictions:they were all wrong. In fact, I can’t remember any outstanding prediction whichactually proved accurate. I can think of a lot of commentary which explainedevents and pointed to signs which clearly indicated what was going to happenbut that was always AFTER the event. Media people are particularly good at this. They’re not so hot at looking ahead. Which of them foresawthe collapse of the Soviet empire? Or the Arab Spring? Or Barack Obama? Or Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness?

The truth is, future events are uncertain because they’reshaped by human beings, and human beings are an infuriating, baffling,maddening, totally unpredictable bunch. What is to be is hidden from us, and will continue to be until ithappens, and if we can recognize and accept it when it does, we’ll have doneOK.

Bliain ur mhaith daoibh - Happy New Year. But no predictions, nopromises.

The New Year's Honours List and getting lucky

2011-12-31T20:19:00.000Z

I wonder how many football referees are made knights? I ask because one thing most footballreferees are good at is running backwards - occasionally there’s a collision but most manage it perfectly most of thetime. Which means being made a knight would be tailor-made for them, since apparentlywhen you get a knighthood, you’re supposed to back your way out of the room. That’sbecause the room contains Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, better known as Queen Elizabeth II. Thereasons for the backward movement are rooted in English history. Some have suggestedit was because the English monarch was originally a big robber baron, so other smallerrobber barons made a point of backing out of a room that contained them toavoid ending with a dagger lodged between their shoulder-blades. This is almostcertainly black propaganda. The reverse is more probably true, you might say:people reversed from the room containing the English monarch because turningtheir back would have been disrespectful,not dangerous. (Although being disrespectful can also be dangerous).

In the south of Ireland, poor people, they do not have amonarch. They have Michael D Higgins which is not quite the same thing. Which means they are deprived of the NewYear’s Honours List that we in the north enjoy. There is talk down there of inventing an honourslist, and perhaps some fakeantique practices to go with it, like leaving Michael D’s presence whilehopping on one foot or doing a leap-frog over the honour-recipient behindyou. Hopelessly fake-sounding, ifyou ask me. Unlike all the ceremony that surrounds Her Majesty ElizabethAlexandra Mary, which is steeped in centuries of antique stuff, most of it fashioned toremind people of their place in society. If you must bow or curtsey or kneel or back your way out of a room,you’d be quite thick not to get the message of who’s important around here.

Besides, even the south hada monarch of its own, it still wouldn’t have an Empire, would it, and that’s really builtinto our awards. OBE does not meanOut of Body Experience, it means Officer of the Most Excellent Order of theBritish Empire. That’s what Darren Clarke got. Rory McIlroy, being younger, hadto settle for becoming an MBE – Member of the Most Excellent Order of theBritish Empire. When Ronnie Flanagan got his thing a few years back for allthat good work in the RUC, he became a Knight Commander of the Most ExcellentOrder of the British Empire. KCB, in short. Not the British Commonwealth, younote. Empire. That brought civilization all over the world. EMPIRE! HUZZAH!

God, I’m getting misty-eyed and I haven’t even touched adrop yet. Let me end, my dear blog-readers, with a poem from one of our own –Paul Muldoon. A good Ulsterman. It’s called ‘Meeting the British’ and it’sabout honouring some North American native people in the seventeeth centurywith a few well-chosen gifts. Thespeaker, of course, is one of the primitive but loveable native people.

We met the British in thedead of winter.
The sky was lavender

and the snowlavender-blue.
I could hear, far below,

the sound of two streamscoming together
(both were frozen over)

and, no less strange,
myself calling out in French

across that forest-
clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst

nor Colonel Henry Bouquet
could stomach our willow-tobacco.

As for the unusual
scent when the Colonel shook out his hand-

kerchief: C'est lalavande,
une fleur mauve comme le ciel.

They gave us sixfishhooks
and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.

Athbhliain faoi Mhaise Daoibh - Happy NewYear to everyone.

1981 papers and Thatcher's wobble

2011-12-30T10:08:00.002Z

So what are you - British? Irish? From time to time those commenting on my blogs tell me it's truly stupid to talk about Britain running Irish affairs, that they (unionists) are British, do I think one million people are going to be evicted?

This is an old argument and one used by the SDLP as well as unionists: that talk of 'Brits out' is absurd, the block to a united Ireland is not the British government but the one million unionists living in the north. Those who share this view should find government papers from 1981 instructive this morning. The Financial Times reports that Thatcher and her cabinet were very worried about a speech former PM James Callaghan was due to deliver, suggesting that, in the face of the hunger strike and increasing unrest, Britain should rethink its relationship to Northern Ireland.

"His views might well receive massive support from public opinion in Britain where there was already a widespread feeling in favour of British withdrawal. Many people in Britain now believed that a settlement of the complex problems of the area would be more easily reached by the Irish on their own and that continued British involvement could only mean the futile sacrifice of further British lives".

It looks as though Thatcher & Co had no difficulty in spotting a qualitative difference between "British lives" and the lives of people living in Ireland, including unionists. Which of course there is.

Response to the release of the 1981 papers will no doubt lead to further drum-banging by those who desperately want to attribute the deaths of most if not all the hunger-strikers to Sinn Féin rather than Thatcher.The Financial Times, in contrast, sees the central issue as being the possibility of British withdrawal from the north - in short, the beginning of the break-up of the United Kingdom.

But here we are 1981 and British withdrawal hasn't happened. Or should that be qualified? The UDR has been effectively dismantled, as has the RUC. A power-sharing Assembly now operates in Stormont ; justice and policing powers have been transferred here. That appears to be the policy of Sinn Féin - transfer as much power as possible from Westminster to Stormont, and in that way move towards ending the political union with Britain. They haven't achieved that goal - control of the key powers of taxation and foreign policy still rests with Britain; but a look at Scotland is instructive. There, the Scottish National Party has eviscerated the opposition, has some control of taxation if not of foreign policy, and while its leader Alex Salmond is much more popular than his key goal of Scottish independence, informed British analysts like Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian see a Scottish Yes for independence in 2015 as a distinct possibility: "Salmond may be the Times's choice of a great Briton, but his ferocious talent could yet prove to be Great Britain's undoing".

A final note: Salmond plans on having a second question on the 2015 referendum, in addition to the one asking Scots if they favour total independence. It's being called "devo-max", which would give Scotland every power short of a total break from Britain. In other words, his second-best would be to transfer as many powers as possible from London to Edinburgh, thus moving closer to total independence. Sound familiar?

Getting physical with the little people

2011-12-29T07:07:00.002Z

So – FrancesFitzgerald, the Minister for Children in the south, is considering an outrightban on the smacking of children by their parents. Me, I’ve done more punchingthan smacking. I’ve punched priests, lawyers, teachers and even a nun or two.And been punched back. At the time of punching, I should add, we were all underfifteen so no court casesensued.

My parents smacked me, only we called it “hitting”. My father kept a stick propped behind apicture of the Sacred Heart in the kitchen. He rarely used it but the threatwas there, every time you looked up from your porridge or bacon and cabbage. My mother normally used the flat ofher hand when tried beyond endurance (it happens when you’ve eight children),but occasionally would reach for the nearest implement. Sometimes a clotheshanger, sometimes a hair brush, sometimes a wooden spoon.

At school, slapping was an integral part of education. A short leather strap was applied tothe open palm, held out from your body. Four slaps you got off lightly, six wastough enough, ten was rare. In addition, you could expect to get a slap acrossthe face, or several slaps, usually for poor work. I had an Irish teacher whoencouraged me to love my native tongue by gripping a fistful of my hair (Iswear I once had it) and shaking my head from side to side. As my desk was besidea radiator, this sometimes involved a clang-thud sound.

Here is where I should say “And it never did me any harm”but I’m not totally inane. I firmly believe – have done all my life - thatsmacking children is both stupid and cowardly. You get people who say “But Iwas tried beyond endurance!” and having taught teenagers for ten years andhelped rear four children, I know what they mean. However, on the one occasion I did smack a child (my own, asit happens), I immediately felt so ashamed I never repeated it. People whosmack children, be they parents oranything else, are cowardly (would they do it if the child was 6ft 2 ins andweighed 14 stone?) and stupid (do they really believe that thumping peoplemakes them better?).

In the south of Ireland at present, parents can plead“reasonable chastisement” and get away with physical punishment of theirchildren. The UK allows parents to smack or spank their children providing theyleave no marks on the body.

Great to be living in or near such civilized countries,isn’t it?

For God's sake put on your clothes, Ma'am

2011-12-28T09:44:00.004Z

I don’t usually think of women in their eighties wearing noclothes, but RTÉ’s Tommie Gorman had a programme on last night which forced meto. It started off with Luka Bloom, brother of Christy Moore, singing a songcalled ‘The Seed Is Sown’. Itwasn’t about seeds at all, it was really about the visit of Her Majesty QueenElizabeth II to Ireland earlier this year. The camera came away from Luka and there wewere again in the Garden of Remembrance on that day in May, Queen of Englandand President of Ireland side by side, heads bowed in memory of menexecuted nearly a century ago by the British Army.

The no-clothes bit? Well it’s the Emperor thing, innit? Orin this case Empress. The entire media world, as far as I can tell, sees thisheads-bowed moment and the visit in general as terribly, terribly significant.That and Her Majesty using that bit of Irish at the banquet. Why? Because itsignals a “flowering” (D Cameron’s word) of real friendship between our twoislands. It puts the cherry on the cake that celebrates the end of centuries ofcruelty and conflict.

Eh? Am I missing something? Is Ireland now an independentcountry? Has Westminster handed back financial and foreign-policy control tothe Irish people? Have 5,000 British troops gone home for Christmas and stayedthere? Is the map on the BBC’s Newsline630 about to change its Isle-of-Man shape? Because that’s what I was underthe impression was the source of the centuries-old conflict between our twocountries – that Britain continues to exercise jurisdiction over a part of Ireland. Howdid Her Majesty, fully-clothed or otherwise, standing with bent head for a fewseconds, change all that?

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a party-pooper, nor do Iwish to drizzle let alone rain on anyone’s parade. But if we’re all going tosink with a contented sigh into a pink cloud of fantasy, where optics count for more than awkward facts,we’re never going to solve this thing.

Fings ain't wot they used to be...

2011-12-27T09:14:00.000Z

I watched DowntonAbbey for the first time overChristmas and immediately had a sense of déjàvu . It was just like Upstairs Downstairs forty years ago, except the colour was better and thestory-lines more dramatic: faithful servant set to be hanged, sweet young ladyhas a fling with a Turkish chap. Watching it was like sinking into a well-padded armchair while theChristmas dinner settled into the digestive system: no effort required, all thethrills and spills strictly controlled by the sense of order and good-natured kindnesssupplied by the lord and lady of the house.

There are two things worth saying about aprogramme like Downton Abbey. One is that the British do it superblywell. The great house itself, the rolling lawns, the whiskeys by the fire before or is it after dinner: all theseare as important a part of the product as any of the plot-lines or characters. The second thing worth noting is howevenly balanced plot and character is. There may be a bounder among the upperclasses who has been trying to win the hand of that nice dark-haired woman, but he’s got his counter-part in the mocking, ambitiousyoung footman who hides milord’s dog so he can find it for him and thus receive thegratitude his career needs. The final touch of balance is provided by the way friendships and caring span theclasses, like the way the master of the house and his soft-eyed wife (shades ofMiss Ellie in Dallas) are terriblyupset about one of their servants being charged with murder – so upset they’reprepared to risk a social cloud over their house and family if only justice canbe done.

It’s all a bit bread-and-circuses, a bitPremier League football –done well and offering a powerful if passivethrill, so that most of us don’t much mind that we kinda know we’re being solda myth. In football the myth is that the players are modest and manlysportsmen, shaking hands at the end of a hard-fought contest; in Ancient Rome,it probably was that the Emperor was an essentially nice man, if a bit given tomaking the thumbs-down gesture. In DowntonAbbey it’s that the British past was warm-hearted and orderly, and thatwhen faced with a crisis, personal or national, the lord of the manor is sure to stand shoulder to shoulderwith the faithful family retainer. Oh, and that accepting life as it is, iswhat makes for happiness,

No, that background music, it’s not Jingle Bells. you're hearing. It’s There’ll Always Be An England.

Babies call the shots

2011-12-24T12:04:00.001Z

Funny how religion and politics can criss-cross. Here we are in the mouth of Christmas which celebrates the birth of Jesus with all its implications, and within days of that feast the Economic and Social Research Institute in the south has come up with some new and slightly startling research about babies. According to the ESRI, the calculations about fertility made by the south’s Central Statistics Office are off-mark. What the CSO eejits have done is, they’ve confused two things: women postponing having babies to a later point in life and women having no babies at any point in their lives. “The official figures appear to have mistaken a delay in childbirth for a reduction” a spokesman for the ESRI says As they see it, there will be about 400,000 more babies born “in the coming decades”. So while other countries in Europe are struggling to keep their population replenished and avoid having too many oldies and not enough youngies , the south of Ireland may have the opposite problem: how to provide classrooms and teachers and the myriad other services an unexpected population bulge demands. There was a time when a recession would have made people think twice about having a baby. Not this time, apparently - in the south of Ireland they look as if they’re going to keep on keeping on. I suppose they have to pass the time some way.

How much does this matter politically? A great deal. If a political party can’t offer a programme that meets the needs of all the population – not just a privileged section or the population they thought would be there as distinct from the population that actually is there, then that party’s not going to get many votes. Ideally, the expense of schooling and health provision gets balanced by a birth-rage that puts enough young people into the income-earning population to take care of both young and old. But if you do your sums wrong, as the Central Statistics Office appear to have, you’re going to be faced with the problem of a population bulge: too many needs, not enough income.

Those of us north of the border have our own fertility problems. Always have had. Hard-core unionists used to enjoy claiming that Catholics bred “like vermin” as they tossed their pennies from Derry’s walls into the Bogside. More civilly put, they noted that Catholics/Nationalists had markedly larger families than Protestant/Unionists – a worrying fact, since the state had been created in the belief that its borders would shelter a permanent Protestant majority. That looked to have been another population miscalculation, some ten years ago. Back then, many people were convinced that a great leap forward in Catholic population numbers was imminent and would show in the census, bringing it perilously near to matching the Protestant population. In the event, the leap was more of a small hop. There was an increase but much smaller than anticipated. (It cost one well-known columnist a bottle of champagne. No, not me – I confine my bets to certainties and cold cash rather than wishful thinking and chilled champagne.)

Why was there this expectation of a Catholic population surge? Because the school-going population showed a sharp increase in Catholic numbers, relative to Protestant pupils. It didn’t happen – but that was ten years ago. What of this time? Catholic schoolchildren in this state still outnumber their Protestant peers. We had a census earlier this year. When published, it could be that the anticipated leap had been postponed, not cancelled. Then it would be interesting to test in a referendum the oft-repeated unionist claim that one third to one half of the Catholic population here are in fact unionist.

Babies – they look so small and helpless. But they can change our world.

Nollaig shona duibh - Happy Christmas.

Evidence? What need have we of evidence?

2011-12-23T12:58:00.000Z

A few decades ago I was trying to make a radio programmeabout people who’d been interned on the prison ship Argenta during the1920s. I was tipped off that one 80-something survivor might give me aninterview, so I found my way, after some searching, to his house. Wasted journey. He told me – a plain talker,this man – that he’d never liked my father, or any of his many brothers andsisters. No, tell a lie – therewas one sister he liked. But the rest of them, including my da, he’d no timefor. So no interview. Innocent that I was, I suggested that I wasn’t really toblame for anything my father and/or his siblings had done some sixty yearsearlier. Didn’t matter. I was my father’s son, so forget it.

I thought of that old man as I read an article in the Irish Times this morning. It was about a son of the late INLA leaderDominic McGlinchey (also called Dominic). Mr McGlinchey has felt the need to deny “in the most strenuous terms possible” thathe was the driver of the getaway car involved in the killing of two Britishsoldiers in Antrim in 2009. Whydid he feel the need to do this? Because counsel for one of the accused declared in court that the PSNI had“reliable information” thatone of the late Dominic McGlinchey’s sons drove the getaway car. This information, apparently, has beenwidely reported in the Irish media and beyond, without the additionalinformation that the PSNI has no forensic evidence to support their claim.

So what’s your reaction? Do you say “Why, that’s outrageous – to claim a man isinvolved in a double killing, without evidence to back it up!”? Or do you say “Dominic McGlinchey? Ason of Mad Dog McGlinchey? Not one bit surprised”? I venture to suggest that most people will have the secondresponse. I’ll leave aside thecontemptible habit of the media for linking animals, often rabid animals - MadDog, the Border Fox, King Rat – with human beings, and say that most of us are stuffed with prejudice.We assume that because people come from a particular place, or a particular family,or have particular friends, that they must share the political views and values of thoselinked with them. If the PSNI have evidence to implicate Dominic McGlinchey or anyoneelse in the killings in Antrim, they should produce it and prosecute. If theyhaven’t, they should shut up. And equally the Irish media should realize that they have a responsibility toreport ALL of the relevant facts,and not allow themselves to be used as a channel for malodorous andunsubstantiated leaks.

And when you're finished thinking about that one, you might want to ponder the fact that the two men charged with the killings are being tried in a juryless court. Mind you, the men imprisoned on the Argenta got there without benefit of evidence or jury as well. Plus ca change...?

Spies like us

2011-12-22T06:25:00.000Z

I’m baffled. Honestly. As a non-military orspook-person, I don’t understandthe latest claims that nearly half those in the IRA leadership were in fact British agents. We knowthat some IRA people – the various supergrasses, Denis Donaldson – were workingfor the British from within republican paramilitary ranks. But nearly half?

My first bafflement is, how all those agents must have beencentral to all the things the IRA did - shootings, explosions, killings. If they'd kept coming up with excuses for being elsewhere each time violence was planned or occurred, wouldn’t somebodyhave smelt a rat? And if they were directly involved, wouldn’t that have placed them in Alice in Wonderland? In order to bringan end to the IRA’s violent actions, they were…um…performing violent IRAactions. Or master-minding them. Or both. Am I missing something here?

The second bafflement is, how on earth was the IRA sosuccessful for so long? As a paramilitary force, it was acknowledged as one ofthe most effective in the world – very often by people who detested it. But howin God’s name could a force like that have so many of its leading figures British agents? Imagine if half the British forces thatsailed to the Falklands had been in fact Argentine agents. Is it likely thatThatcher would have been able to arrange the sinking of The Belgrano withoutinterference? Wouldn’t the British forces have been hopelessly confused, withall those agents in their ranks?

My third bafflement relates to cui bono - who gains from this kind of claim? Certainly notrepublicans – it undermines what they would present as a heroic campaign against the British forces that went on for decades. If this heroism could be transformed into instead a pack of fools continually deceived by their shrewdBritish enemies, think what a wonderfully demoralizing effect that might haveon republican energies and ambitions today?

If you can pollute the waters in which your enemy swims, you’vegot him licked. But you have to be sure that what you’re pouring into those waters isconcentrated, 100% garbage.

Suarez - outrageous, eh?

2011-12-21T09:29:00.002Z

Whowould be in Luis Suarez’s shoes this morning? Or boots. The Uruguayan, who's been central to Liverpool F C’s recently revival, has been banned foreight games and fined £40,000 for racially abusing Patrice Evra, a black Man United player. It seemsSuarez admitted to calling Evra “a negro”. (Evra, on the other hand, toldSuarez “Don’t touch me, you South American”.)

Timeschange, don’t they? When I was young, to refer to a black man as a negro wasconsidered polite, and to refer to him as a black man was near toinsulting. Now it's the other way round. Readers of the work ofMark Twain will know that he features in HuckleberryFinn a character referred to affectionately as “Nigger Jim”. And theearliest joke I can remember featured Paddy the Englishman, Paddy the Irishman,Paddy the Scotchman and a bottle of whiskey. In short, what’s acceptable and even commendable in one ageis far from permissible in another. So- didSuarez’s offence merit an eight-match ban plus a £40,000 fine?

I believe No. The FA would claim they're sending a signal that racistabuse will not be tolerated on the football field (or off it); but while I’dapplaud their objective, their means in this case is a sledge-hammer cracking a nut. “Negro”isn’t politically correct nowadays but it’s hardly abusive. Then there's the fact that Suarez himself is of mixed race – his grandfather wasblack. Does that matter?

Well,there’s an unwritten code which allows members of a minority to use pejorative terms which, if used by those outside the group, would invoke outrage. It’s not twelve months since I heard an Irish joke told byan Irishman to a company of Irish people, and everyone appeared to enjoyit. Had it been told by an Englishman he'd have been lucky to get out of the room alive. So is Suarez’s grandfather afactor in his favour?

Reluctantly,because I think Suarez is a truly gifted footballer and Kenny Dalglish a truly impressive manager, the answer is no, Suarez’s grandfather shouldn’t bea factor. If it’s wrong for outsiders to insult a group, then it’s stupid andself-harming for a member of that group to abuse the group. Back on the soccer field, in the intervals between kicking each other or rocketing snot from a nostril, you see (but don’t hear) footballers effing and blinding each other with real feeling. Why isn't that kind of abuse the subject of equally fierce fines and bans?

Because ours is an era of selective moral outrage. You can denounce homophobia and expect applause but should you denounce abortion you'd better be ready for castigation. Likewise in the world of football, a great range of words and actions are reprehensible, but it's those that are identified as racist or sexist which receive immediate denunciation.

What’sthat – you say I forgot to add religious abuse in my reprehensible list? Oh come on – sure everyone knows that’sonly a bit of banter and fun. Ask Neil Lennon.

Dead men, tale-telling and history

2011-12-20T10:51:00.001Z

Dead men, they say, tell no tales. But if they’re part ofthe Boston College oral history project, they do. The project, you’ll remember,was the series of interviews organized by Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre with a selection of former combatants inour Troubles. The promise was thatthese would be recorded and kept under lock and key until after the interviewee haddied. Now, however, a federal US judge has ordered Boston College to let himhave access to those recordings . Having heard them, he’ll decide if the USgovernment will turn the interviews over to the British authorities inconnection with the killing of Jean McConville. Boston College has said they’llpass the tapes over tomorrow.

There are a number of problems with this whole affair,starting with the description of it as “oral history”. The implication behind such adescription is that the people speaking are telling the truth, which they mayor may not be. Besides that, any historical account if it’s to be takenseriously has to include as much evidence, oral or otherwise, as is available.This includes particularly testimony or evidence that runs counter to thehistorian’s own loyalties. That hasn’t happened here.

Another and more pressing problem is that the people whocontributed to the project did so on the clear undertaking that their wordswould remain confidential until after their death. The US federal judge’s ruling and Boston College’sacceptance of it show that undertaking to have been either naïve or a sham. TheUS authorities claim they’re looking for information about Jean McConville’sdeath; when and if they listen to the tapes, they’ll surely find statementsabout other people and maybe other killings. This, of course, may be the wholeidea – a fishing expedition. But isthis what we mean when we talk about “dealing with the past”? Those who contributed to the BostonCollege project, as far as I know, were to a greater or lesser extent criticalof Sinn Féin and its present leadership. It’s an odd idea of research, let alone justice, that allows the voiceson one side of the argument only to be included.

In fact there’s a touch of pantomime about the whole thing: heroesand villains, secrets and surprises. Any minute now, Miriam O’Callaghan is going to jump from behind acurtain and ask everyone mentioned in the tapes if they go to confession.

If only they had listened to the voice of the Church...

2011-12-18T14:35:00.000Z

On the BBC's 'Sunday Sequence' this morning, they were talking about the extent to which churchmen had or hadn't actively worked for peace (and, you'd like to think, Virginia, justice and liberty as well, but you can forget those two, Virginia, you naive little fool you) during the Troubles. It was lively stuff and got me thinking to the early days of civil unrest. After the Battle of the Bogside, the two bishops of Derry (Catholic and Protestant) did a little tour together, picking their way through the rubble and murmuring sympathy. Had they ever been there before? I doubt it. Why were they there then? I think as they used to say "to set a good example". Look, we're not throwing petrol bombs and stones at each other, why should you? The impact of their tour was zilch. And it'd be tempting to say that the same applied right throughout the Troubles - that the various churches here were damn all help in resolving the mini-war, other than issuing condemnation (almost always directed at the IRA, practically never at the security forces). But that wouldn't be totally true. Cardinal Tómas O Fiach, for one, was a man who spoke up when he saw horror and injustice, and not just when it was attributable to republicans. Individual clergy worked behind the scenes and/or spoke out against injustice and cruelty from whatever source. But as institutions, the churches here didn't do much other than wring their hands. The Catholic Church, as personified by the late Cardinal Cahal Daly, of course, was relentlessly anti-republican.

In today's radio discussion, my old colleague at the VO, Brian Feeney, pointed out that those who called for the Catholic Church to excommunicate republicans involved in violence were misguided. Republicans had never been deterred by excommunications over the decades and centuries, and the present lot were unlikely to have their minds or politics changed by some church judgement. But where the Catholic Church was successful was in limiting, for a time, support for republicanism. Wars big and small raise questions of morality, and it's perfectly possible that when the Catholic Church urged people, in so many words, not to vote Sinn Féin, some listened. In fact, if the Church of England is the Tory Party at prayer, the Catholic Church here came close to being the SDLP at prayer. There are Catholics who, if a bishop or cardinal says something, believe it must be so. But far from everyone. When the Pope read the script written for him by Cahal Daly, and begged on his knees to the people of Ireland to stop shedding blood, as Denis Bradley pointed out, it didn't work.

Ultimately, whatever about other churches (and unlike some, I am almost totally unimpressed by the contribution of the Church of Ireland's Robin Eames), I think the Catholic Church's contributions were either unimportant or misleading. They were unimportant because they stopped, as Feeney pointed out, at condemnation; they were misleading because they helped convince outsiders and some simple people that the conflict here was essentially sectarian. I'd call that abuse of the truth.

Bottom-up or top-down - which way are we heading?

2011-12-16T08:38:00.001Z

My son inLondon has bought a house – or to be more exact, the bank has boughtit for him and he’ll be paying it off for a lifetime. There were some repairsneeded doing, so like the concerned father I am, I was on the phone to him urginghim to be sure and get reliable people to do the work - London is not a city that is gentle withgullible paddies. As often happens, I found he was ahead of me and my advice.He’d gone online, punched in his post-code, and immediately got a range ofcompanies capable of doing the work, plus commentsfrom people who’d used each company in the past. It takes just one bad online report to muck up a company’sreputation and deter future potential customers, so it’s in everyone’sinterests to make sure they do a decent job. In this way people like my son now have real control over the qualityof work paid for. P T Barnum mayhave been right about one being born every minute, but today’s technology makes it more difficult to takeadvantage of the uninformed sucker. Everyday life, for the bread-and-butterconsumer, has suddenly become more controllable and democratic.

However, atthe apex of the power pyramid, things are strengthening too. Ask David Cameron.Whether through naivety or stupidity, he thought that his veto could stop thefiscal plans of the EU in their tracks. Now he knows otherwise. Hehas a veto all right but there are ways round it, as we saw when the rest ofthe EU states calmly left him out in the cold and continued with their plans toexercise central control on each country’s budget. Fiscal power that had beenin the hands of the government of each country will be moved to a centre-pointand the south of Ireland can start taking German lessons any time.

Which force– the one at the bottom or the one at the top - is the more powerful? I’d like to say that Sean Citizen, asexemplified by my son, is winning. I’d like to, but I know it’s not true. It’s asif a zoo-keeper had given a lion the illusion of freedom, by putting him in abigger cage. The czars of the EU are only too happy to leave us with increased controlof the small things, as so long as they get to make the big decisions thatreduce national sovereignty to a papier-maché fraud. Parnell may have believedthat no man has the right to fix the boundary of a nation, but Berlin isn’t a man. It’s a European super-power and it’s incharge.

Maybe JohnHume wasn’t so much wrong as premature in his remarks about a post-nationalistera?

Death at Easter

2011-12-15T09:35:00.000Z

If you encountered a burglar in your house, would you shoothim dead? And feel justified in doing so? I wouldn’t. I might feel like pulverizing him but burglary isn’t a crimewith capital punishment attached. Neither is car-stealing.

But if you’d listened to Terry Spence of the PoliceFederation on BBC Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh this morning, you might have beenled to think otherwise. He was on defending the actions of a PSNI officer, whoshot dead Steven Colwell. ThePolice Ombudsman (himself under some heavy fire these days) reports that in 2006 near Ballynahinch,23-year-old Steven Colwell “was facing the officer with its (a stolen BMW's)engine revving, in what appeared to be an attempt to escape a vehiclecheckpoint”. The officer drew his gun and shot Colwell through the frontwindscreen and again through a side window as the car tried to drive away. Itwas Easter Sunday and did I mention that Colwell, a Protestant, was wearing aGlasgow Celtic jersey?

Terry Spence with, what shall I say, some vigour insistedthat the officer’s life was in danger as were the lives of other citizens, withthis young car-thief careering around recklessly. You’d havethought presenter Karen Patterson had herself been guilty of a crime, the wayTerry responded to her mild suggestion that the young man maybe didn’t have tobe shot dead.

Enough already. The police here have an Everest of a task toearn the trust and respect of every citizen. Today the Irish Times reports onthe Miami Showband massacre, and new claims that not only were two of those convictedmembers of the UDR, but that among the killers was an RUC agent. Take the distrust produced by incidentslike that – and an awful lot of people believe there were hundreds of them- andyou see how important it is that the PSNI act to support the law and act clearlywithin the law. The fact that the killer of Steven Colwell still serves in thePSNI makes a lot of people uneasy. Why couldn’t a simple barrier or stinger oreven a police car have been placed in the path of Colwell, rather than an officer with a pointed gun? Yes, stolen cars arelethal weapons but they’re lethal weapons that can be decommissioned by othermethods than bringing a young life to a hopeless Easter Sunday end. Even if,wearing a Celtic top, he was assumed to be a Catholic.

How green are you?

2011-12-13T09:52:00.002Z

The lane into our house was lined with big trees and onenight, one of these giants fell right across the lane. The next day my fathergot some men to help cut down all the trees in the lane, so the path to ourhouse looked like a mouthful of stumpy teeth. When asked, my father said he hadeight children going in and out that lane to school every day and he was damnedif he’d have a tree fall and kill one of them. He valued his family above anyfancy talk about the look of the lane.

There, in a different time and circumstance, you have thefracking issue. Today’s Irish Times reportsthat Leitrim is one of the poorest counties in Ireland, with just 17% of thepopulation it had in pre-Famine times. Now it emerges that there could bebillions of euros worth of extractable gas in the county. The neighbouringcounty of Fermanagh is in the same position.

What to do?

Those opposed to it say that the fracking process to extractthe gas would pollute the water supplies as well as the air, as well as ruiningagriculture and tourism in the county. Those in favour say these are hardtimes, Ireland north and south is up against it and a bonanza like this couldbe the fast route to new prosperity. Pat Rabbite, the Energy minister says everybody thinks they're an expert. Arlene Foster, the minister in the north, says there's been too much scare-mongering about fracking.

What to do?

In today’s Guardian, it’s reported that Canada has pulled outof the Kyoto protocol, which committed signatories to lower pollution levels.Canada says it’s done so because places like China and India are ignoring it.The truth is, Canada has the third-largest store of oil reserves in the world,but the process of extracting it from the tar sands of Alberta takes anenormous amount of energy and water and plays merry hell with greenhouse gasemissions.

Whatto do?

Fromthe long-term point of view, playing fast and loose with the environment will damage, perhapsirreparably, the planet we live on. At the same time, if your son ordaughter was jobless and faced with the dole or the emigrant airplane, wouldyou still feel so green? Would you sacrifice their future for the possiblefuture of mankind?

I knowwhat my father would have said.

Alex Salmond and fog on the Channel

2011-12-12T10:15:00.001Z

I like Alex Salmond. He’s overweight, he looks a bit like apanda that’s wandered in front of a camera lens and he’s totally unflappable.Besides which, he has this idea that Scotland would be better off as anindependent nation within Europe. He always adds that last bit – “withinEurope”. And now that DavidCameron has managed to put Britain outside the tent with the rest of Europepissing out on him, Salmond has beenhanded an opportunity to further query the wisdom of continued presence in theUK.

Just back from China where he was trying to drum upinvestment in Scotland, Salmond has fired off six questions to Cameron abouthis arse-like performance in Brussels. In essence they ask “What the hell doyou mean by screwing up prospects for Scotland as well as the rest of the UK,without even consulting us?” Hetells Cameron that it’s not just his coalition partners the Lib Dems that arevery dubious about being pushed to the edge of Europe, there are the people ofScotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who have been left stranded in the sameleaky rowing boat.

Good point. Ipresume we haven’t heard yells of protest from Stormont because the DUP andSinn Féin are the two lead power-sharing partners. We know what Sinn Féinthinks of the deal in terms of the south of Ireland – Gerry Adams has beentelling Enda Kenny he’d better let the Irish people make this decision. ButSinn Féin in the north are more muted because the DUP are almostcertain to hold back from kicking Cameron.

Why? Because they see the danger. If Salmond was ever tosucceed in his ambition of achieving Scottish independence – and Cameron’s bulldog-balls-upin Europe has considerably strengthened that ambition – it would spell curtainsfor the area known as the United Kingdom. What would be the point in staying ina building that has started to collapse around your ears, while at the end ofthe street there’s a 26-storey building that at least has the strength ofnumbers?

It’s like that old megalomaniacal headline from the London Times, when heavy mist was engulfing the south of Englandand the Channel, making travel impossible: “Fog Cuts Off Europe FromBritain”. Has anything changed?

David Cameron - how I became a lamp-post

2011-12-10T14:36:00.001Z

Mother of God – what now? I don’t know whether to turn cartwheels or break down andcry. David Cameron has followed instructions from hisConservative party and gone out to Brussels as a British bulldog, only to come back knowing what it feels like to be a lamp-post used by 26 dogs in quick succession. Imean, did you see the way Sarkozy snubbed him? He must have been watching Youtubeand caught the bit where Ruth Patterson responds to Niall O Donnghaile's out-stretched hand. But while theclash of personalities was a bit of a giggle, the facts and their consequencesare a bit less so.

Take Ireland, or the southern part of it. Enda Kenny has decided to be really really good and go along with what everyone else is saying – firm fiscal rules, balanced budgets, punishment for anyone who steps out of line. The smackof firm government. Except then you realize that Kenny (and all the other countries) arehanding over control of things fiscal to the EU, which in effect meanshanding over political power to Merkel/Sarcozy, or Marcozy as we’re all supposed to saynow. The south has allowed itself to be cast as scullery-maid to the Great House of Germany. All that talk about having a veto inEurope? Just a little German joke, as Cameron quickly learned t’other night. Onthe other hand, if Enda had decided to be a bold boy and had stepped out of thefiscal club with his mate David, he’d be in even worse dodo–he’d be permanently tied to lamp-post Britain, whichis not a good place to be. Except you’re a northern unionist, in which case youthink of it as really good, even as the next dog cocks its leg.

There’s a terrible symmetry to it all: the south is scullery-maid to Berlin/Paris, the north scullery-maid to London. Youmight, in your gloom, ask yourself why this should be – why can’t both Irelandand Britain and all the other EU countries be dignified equals in a Europe ofequals? Because, dear Virginia, there are no fairies at the bottom of your garden and because might is right. The EU is run byGermany and France. They're the big boys and they call the shots, as Cameron nowknows to his cost. And part of Ireland is run by Britain because Britain,vis-à-vis Ireland, is the big boy. Co-equals, friendly neighbours? Eat myshorts.

It’s a hard lesson, Virginia, and God knows we’relearning it again in the hardest of ways. Worst of all, having been consigned to the role of scullery-maid, the south doesn’t know if this latestMarcozy wheeze will work. Cancel the cart-wheels, would you?

'Tis the season to be jolly?

2011-12-09T08:34:00.001Z

What a world, eh? People being laid off, shops shutting up shop,the air thick with the crunch of bankruptcy. Even the Christmas trees are lookingsmaller and sadder this year. But if it’s bad here in the north it’s worse inthe south. When a government has to break the budget bad news into bite-sizechunks and feed it to the public in instalments, you know things are bad, bad, bad.

And yet out of the deepest pain comes a generosity ofspirit. It shows in politics:ex-combatants, those who have suffered most, find a way of working together forthe future of all. It shows again when there’s a natural disaster: the Irishpeople respond with a built-in generosity – and of course it’s those who haveleast who give most readily.

But tight as our family budget may be, we’re in economic clover compared to much of theworld. Take the US, that land of plenty: more than a million of its children goto bed hungry every night. In the developing world every year, fifteen millionchildren die from malnutrition and almost a billion people endure chronichunger. They don’t die or suffer because there’s been a drought or some otherdisaster. They die because a political and economic system is in place whichkeeps the world lop-sided. In the developed world we eat so much, our overweightchildren have become a problem; in the developing world, millions scavenge for acrust and children’s bellies bloat as they sicken and die.

There are three ways you can react to these horrifyingfacts. You can throw up your hands and admit defeat. You can work to change thesystem. Or you can put your hand in your pocket and change life for at leastone family.

A couple of weeks ago I was privileged (I know, I know, butit’s the only word) to be in BelfastCity Hall at a Trocaire event organized under the auspices of our excellent youngBelfast mayor Niall O Donnghaile (yes, Ruthie, you heard me - EXCELLENT). He’s madeTrocaire one of theofficial charities for his term in office, and at the event the audience heardfirst-hand accounts of that organisation’s work throughout the developingworld. As the slides flashed on the screen I squirmed and hoped no one knew about the trivialthings my money had been spent onduring the past year.

A particularly enlightened aspect of Trocaire is that it stressesthe need to work for social justice. Fifteen million children die of hunger eachyear not because there’s not enough food in the world – we’ve more food perhead now than ever before. Norbecause there are some “naturally poor” countries. It’s because the powerful ofthe world have organized things so we burp and wonder how to cope with our wastewhile the wretched of the earth grow gaunt and suffer.

Where most of us shake our heads and cluck our tongues;Trocaire rolls up its sleeves tohelp the dispossessed find a way to live. They’re good at marketing too. Thatlittle RTÉ ad, for example. VoiceA: Granny wants a goat for Christmas. Voice B: She wants a coat? Voice A: No, a goat. Voice B: A GOAT? Oh OK. She’s the boss.” They even break downtheir appeal so there’s one for each family member. Get Gran and Dad one of those goats thisChristmas (a goat-for-a-goat sort of thing) and a family the DemocraticRepublic of Congo will find life transformed. Get Mum safe motherhood forsomeone in Somalia, where more infants die at birth than nearly anywhere else onthe planet. Get youngsters to buy school fees and lunches, get farmers to givea gift of chickens - there’s even a gift for a budding entrepreneur to help buy a house for a Honduranfamily who’ve been living under plastic since being evicted from their homes.

God knows we all need to warm our hands round the fire, and thisChristmas especially. But if we close our ears to the knocking of the forgottenof the world, we lose our right to curse the pension-grabbers in our owncountry.

Go on, get Granny a goat and tell her to pass it on. Itreally is better to give than receive.

Recession? Time we invaded somewhere

2011-12-08T10:08:00.001Z

I have a soft spot for British soldiers, the ordinary guy onthe ground. He’s probably joined the army for the same reason that men havedone for hundreds of years – because it was a way to earn a living, even thoughearning that living meant beingtaught how to take the life of other human beings. That’s what soldiers do –follow orders to kill or be killed.

At the moment, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer is being criticized by other MPsfor trying to freeze the pay of British soldiers. Which makes you wonder whatsort of world those arguing for an increase in armed forces pay live in.Because you reveal your values as a society by where you put your money.

And it’s not small money. According to the StockholmInternational Peace Research Institute, Britain in 2010 spent nearly $60 billion on ‘defence’. In 2011 Liam Fox, the British Defencesecretary, said the price of constructing replacement nuclear submarines couldrise to more than £25 billion. Greenpeace figures the renewed Tridentprogramme will cost, over 30 years, £92 billion. Contrast that with the NHS,which is being told to make “efficiency savings” – code for cuts – of£20 billion.

It all ties into the arms industry, of course. With theending of the Cold War, weapons manufacturers and share holders were in a sweat– they needed something to replace the gap left by the implosion of the USSR. Hence Iraq, Afghanistan and now phony claimsthat Iran is manufacturing nuclear weapons and may need an invasion.

Of course, many of us remember another British primeminister, who knew what you do when you find that things are falling apart abit at home – giant unemployment, industry collapsing, the government increasinglyunpopular. You invent a foreign adventure to distract the masses. You invent the Falklands.

Iran is today’s Falklands. We know that country hasn’tactually any plans to develop nuclear weapons and we know that it’s surroundedby countries with nuclear weapons and US bases – Israel, Russia, Pakistan,India. We know Iran hasn’t invaded anyone this past 200 years and we know that forover 100 years Britain exploited, occupied and overthrew governments in Iran.But none of that matters. Look out, Iran.

See the Anglo-Irish Treaty online - and weep?

2011-12-07T07:16:00.001Z

What pricehistorical documents? Or to be more accurate, what impact if any do they haveon those who view them? Yesterday Enda Kenny put online the signed document of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Thenames are all there – Collins, Griffiths, Lloyd George, Birkenhead. Lloyd George told Collins that if heand the others didn’t sign it, there’d be an immediate resumption of armedhostilities. Collins signed, noting that he'd signed his own death-warrant. And the rest, as they say, is the history of adivided island.

What impactdoes Enda think the viewing of this document, online now and later on real-lifedisplay, will have? Maybe he thinks it’ll have no impact, although I doubtthat. More likely he hopes it will distract people from their present European throttlingand, as citizens of the Republic of Ireland, feel some pride in a document thatmapped them into existence. Unionists, I would guess – but only guess – willfeel something similar, if they bother to look at it. This document was thebasis for the foundation of the northern state.

De Valerasaid that when he waned to know what the Irish people were thinking, he wentoff and looked into his own heart. If I were to follow Dev’s dictum, I’d say alot of people looking at that document must feel a sadness. It was created bythe spilling of a lot of Irish blood in the years preceding it, and it wasfollowed by the spilling of more Irish blood, this time in a vicious Civil War.Collins talked about it as thedocument which gave Ireland the freedom to achieve freedom – in short, gettingtwenty-six counties would make possible an independent thirty-two county republic.Whether he believed that or notwe’ll never know, but certainly the vision he and so many others believed in hasnot in fact been achieved.

Will itever? It depends on who you talk to. Speak with unionists and they will tellyou – except they’re Jim Allister – that the union is safe. Speak tonationalists or republicans, and they will tell you that we are on our way to athirty-two county republic, look at the vibrancy and self-confidence of thecoming natioanlist/republican generation, look at the brimming vigour in themembers of the GAA and those involved in the Irish language, as well as the transformationthrough power-sharing in the north. National unity is coming, but in a form andat a pace that those who signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty couldn’t have imagined.

Who'sright? Search me. I’ve never met anyone yet who was good at predicting ourpolitical future. But I do know the signed Treaty that Enda put online theother day gives off, ninety years later, an unmistakeable air of sadness and asense of something incomplete.

An Taoiseach cois na tine

2011-12-05T09:40:00.001Z

I blame Franklin D Roosevelt - he started it. On Sunday 12 March 1933, shortly after his inauguration as US president, he began a series of radio broadcasts known as the "fireside chats". His first one was on the banks crisis, the second on his plans for recovery and others on similar topics like the currency situation and economic recovery. Apparently the American people really enjoyed them and they contributed to FDR's massive success as president.

Maybe Enda Kenny is hoping some of that success will rub off on him. His first TV fireside chat (more may come) happened last night on RTÉ. Actually it wasn't by the fireside - he was at a desk, hands clasped in an odd manner, on his left an EU flag, on his right an Irish tricolour that looked as though it could do with a wash. What did he say? Well, things like "Let me say this to you all: you are not responsible for the crisis". And "Let me be clear - Ireland supports stronger economic governance throughout Europe". Or, rephrased: "I'm on your side" and "Germany will decide our financial affairs for us from now on".

We'll know whether Enda's chat last night was prophetic or just a load of guff by 2015, because that's when he figures Ireland (he used "Ireland" and "the country" quite a bit ) will be once more up and punching its weight in the financial markets. And jobs and all the rest of it. He did concede that the path he was outlining would be a thorny path: "We have not so far been in a position to do everything we promised". Or, rephrased: "I know we said during the election campaign that we'd do certain things but, um, unfortunately we can't. Or won't. That was then, you see, this is now. We are where we are."

Now those flags. They were appropriate, I thought. The EU flag, because Germany with France is about to set things up so it decides financial arrangements in all EU member states. It's called revolver-to-the-head politics. We had it on this little island ninety years ago when Lloyd George told Michael Collins and Co what would happen if they didn't sign on the dotted line. So it was only fit and proper that an EU flag dominated in Enda's office.

The Irish tricolour was even more appropriate. The white between the orange and green was, well, kind of grubby-looking. Symbolic, perhaps, of the failure of successive southern governments to do anything beyond rhetoric about national unity. Or you could link the grubby national flag with Enda telling us that he travelled throughout the country when he really meant he travelled throughout the 26-county state. Because as far as Enda is concerned, we in the north don't exist. Like the man said, the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference.

Lighter moments? I can think of only one: "I want to be the Taoiseach who retrieves Ireland's economic sovereignty". Well, you have to laugh, don't you?

A good deed in a naughty world...

2011-12-04T10:47:00.001Z

Sometimes, when you've nearly given up on human nature, something small but perfectly formed will pop up and flicker for a moment and tell you yes, there is hope, there is a thing called progress.

Plenty of reason for thinking otherwise this week - not least the tone of Ruth Patterson's voice as she lectured the Mayor of Belfast about how he Must Do Better. "Live and learn, Lord Mayor!" she told him, in a voice that didn't so much drip as stay deep-frozen in resentment and clenched-teeth animosity. I've gone over the Duke of Edinburgh award to a British Army cadet thing already so I'll stay off that well-worn path, but it's hard not to think of words like "kettle" and "pot" and "black" when you hear Ruthie lecturing someone about openness and acceptance of diverse views. And I'm amazed that no public commentator has seen fit to utter a single critical word on an army, particularly the British army here, having a hand in the development of young people like this 15-year-old. If a tobacco company came in to sprinkle its dubious stardust over children, we'd surely hear the yells of protest, and quite right too. But the British army? Nah.

If anything, more depressing this past week: the HET findings leak (if such it be) about what happened at Loughgall in 1987. Whatever you may think of the IRA, there can be no doubt of the suffering families left behind after that particular massacre. One of them was on air this week with Wendy Austin and you could hear the pain in her voice over twenty-five years later.

But then this morning I switched on BBC Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh's Sunday Sequence. The William Crawley/Finola Meredith/Tim Brannigan take on the D of E award thing was Alliancethink gone mad, and yet when I switched the programme off a few minutes later, I felt oddly cheered. Why? Because before he passed over to the Sunday Service from wherever, presenter Crawley, a man from a Protestant background, wrapped up with "Sin é, that's it for this Sunday". It was easy, it was natural, it was good to hear. Now if we could get poppy-wearing on BBC TV opened up in a similar way - opt in if you want, opt out if you want . Or better still, if the same approach could be applied to Easter lily-wearing on BBC TV - now that would be a move to real even-handedness. It'll probably never happen but still, I'm feeling dangerously cheerful this winter's morn over Crawley's cúpla focal. Maith thú, William.

Loughgall and moral justification

2011-12-03T09:29:00.001Z

History, they say, is written by the winners. If that is true, then republicans appear to have lost. If Liam Clarke is right and if the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) report next month that the 8-man IRA unit in Loughgall in 1987 fired first on the 24-man SAS team lying in wait for them.

Which is a fair few ifs, but Clarke seems very confident that his source has spilled the beans accurately. The concern over who fired first puzzled me a little at first, but now I gather it means that the SAS were justified in firing back and killing the eight men. The ninth dead man was, of course, an unfortunate accident.

This particular incident from the Troubles brings a number of matters swirling to the surface and not all of them are nice to look at. One is the view that the IRA men got what was coming to them - that they had been sent, as one judge put it on one occasion, to the ultimate court of judgment. This is usually said in a fairly measured way but it's hard not to think there's a bit of hand-rubbing and fist-pumping behind the scenes. You want war? We'll give you war.

Another point that strikes me is the reasoning behind the moral view that since the IRA fired first, the SAS were justified in returning fire. Mmm. Sounds reasonable. Only then I think of a term that's used frequently of Israel in relation to the Palestinians - "disproportionate response". The SAS fired over 600 rounds at Loughgall, the IRA men 70. Do the math, as the Yanks say. Would it be possible that the SAS were intent on putting a metaphorical horse's head into the bed of those who thought they could take on British forces?

The final point worth mentioning might be that, for better or worse, if the HET reports that the IRA men opened fire first, it won't make a blind bit of difference to the response of most people to the event. The hand-rubbers will feel even more satisfied that time and expense wasn't wasted arresting the men and putting them through the courts. Republicans and nationalists will continue to believe that the SAS lay in wait and when they had the IRA men in their sites, opened fire and didn't stop until all of them were dead. Many of them will see the HET as discredited.

Ultimately, maybe, it doesn't matter who opened fire: the eight men are still dead. The one question that itches at the back of my brain for an answer is this: if the IRA men hadn't fired first, what would the SAS have done?

Ulster - a breath-taking place

2011-12-02T06:30:00.001Z

Sometimes radio can simply suck your breath away - leave you gasping on over breakfast or in the car. I had two such moments earlier this week; I'm surprised I wasn't hyperventilating by tea-time.

The first came when I was listening to an item of BBC Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh's 'Good Morning Ulster' programme. Mark Carruthers was discussing the interesting question of what the word 'Ulster' meant to people. The historian Jonathan Bardon who's flogging a new book said he tended to think of it as the historical nine counties, Denis Bradley said yes, he was an Ulsterman, proud to be so, he was from Donegal and you couldn't get much more Ulster than that. And there was other discussion of terms and nuances - was it the six counties, the Province (which Mark said seemed to have fallen out of fashion) and/or Northern Ireland? They could have added the north of Ireland, the north-east of Ireland or even just 'up there'. But what sucked my breath away was that at no stage did ANYBODY point out that the the station from which the discussion was being broadcast was called 'Radio Ulster' and that the programme in which the discussion was set was called 'Good Morning Ulster'. Why didn't someone ask Mark what his station meant when THEY used (and called themselves) Ulster? Better still, why didn't Mark himself mention it? (Note to readers: for a clue, check the Isle-of-Man-type map at the start of 'Newsline 6.30')

My second gasp-making moment was on BBC Radio 4's 'Today' programme, where John Humphreys was interviewing Peter Robinson about his DUP convention speech, where he said that an attitude of 'No surrender' ("Which served us so well in the past") was no longer appropriate. The last thirty or forty years, Peter said, had created division between people, and it was now time to bring them together again. What must be tackled were things like peace walls which divided people and segregated education which divided children. My jaw dropped and my lungs went on strike.

No wonder the English don't understand this deformed little corner of Ireland. The last thirty or forty years CREATED division? Gimme a break, Peter. Some of us remember pre- the last thirty or forty years and the divisions were well and truly in place then. In fact, the state of Ulster/NI/ six counties/ etc was created on exactly that - the division between Protestant and Catholic with, it was presumed, a permanent majority for Protestants. But since that wasn't mentioned, Peter's little point sounded very solid. Then Peter and John got to talk about those peace walls, neatly confining the problem to the unwashed working-class areas. You don't get peace walls about Malone; or Holywood; or the middle-class estates of Derry's Waterside. But do a little head-count or check the statistics - over 90% of people here CHOOSE to live separated from their Protestant or Catholic fellow-citizens. When middle-class Catholics moved into Malone, for example, the air was thick with the sound of Protestant bags being packed for North Down. But since that middle-class thing wasn't mentioned, Peter's working-class peace-wall-point sounded very solid. As for segregated education - well, no matter how many polls Peter may cite showing a majority in favour of integrated education, the fact is that the vast majority of Protestants CHOOSE to send their children to Protestant schools, and Catholics to Catholic schools. But since that wasn't mentioned, Peter's little point sounded very solid. What's more, I know from experience that neither Protestant nor Catholic school staff inculcate sectarianism - in fact most of them work very hard against it. But since that wasn't mentioned, Peter's little point sounded very solid.

But the most air-sucking-out moment of all was at the end of the Humphreys interview with Peter. As I chewed my final mouthful of toast it suddenly hit me: not once in the course of the Peter-John dialogue was it mentioned that Britain claims the right to jurisdiction over the six counties (or the north or Northern Ireland or Ulster or the Province) and that that claim is the hard-core, terribly uncomfortable source of division here. But since that wasn't mentioned, the English audience probably stood up from the breakfast table shaking their civilized heads and murmuring "Those Irish and their religious wars - tsk, tsk, tsk. When will they ever learn?"

Sorry - gotta dash. The man with the oxygen mask is at the front door.

The Mayor of Belfast and a shameful affair

2011-12-01T09:44:00.001Z

It’s good to see for once that the public of Belfast appearto be united against a shameful affair. I’m referring, of course, to the caseof the British Army cadet who wasn’t given a Duke of Edinburgh award by the Lord Mayor Niall ÓDonnghaile. There really is a point where people have to say enough is enough,whether that’s by words or actions – or in this case refusal to act.

Because what we have here is a 15-year-old who has beenencouraged along the path of organized violence. This child has barely reached the age of puberty, yet she hasbeen enlisted in an organization where people are taught to kill other people –with guns, with grenades, with tanks, with rockets, with bombs. Last year cash-strappedBritain spent over £38 billion on training and equipping people to kill orthreaten to kill other people. To that you can add another £34 billion for theTrident nuclear replacement, a death-programme designed to kill civilians bythe million. Meanwhile there are nearly three million people out of work inBritain today, while those who are in work are having their pensions gutted andtheir pay slashed to fill the pockets of bankers and bond-holders.

It’ll be three more years before this cadet child is allowedto vote. It’ll be three more years before she can get married without hisparents’ consent. Yet right now, without a murmur from anyone, she is beinginducted into the world of weapons, violence, mutilation and death. Thank God someone at last has had thecourage to refuse to lend his office to this corruption of the young. Maiththú, Lord Mayor – well done!

Peter Hain and the horrible hackers

2011-11-29T09:14:00.001Z

The Germans have a word for it - schadenfreude. Loosely translated, it means taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. So how did you feel when you heard about Peter Hain this morning? Apparently bronzed Peter's computer, which may have contained "sensitive security information" was hacked by people working for newspapers while he was British secretary of state for this warped corner . This follows yesterday's testimony to the Levison Inquiry, when the British intelligence officer Ian Hurst aka Martin Ingram, who is understood to have run informers within the IRA , said that his computer had been hacked by people working for The News of the World. Both Peter and Martin are seriously upset by this fact.

I'm not. Yes, I know that's socially irresponsible, and I know Peter and Martin have all our interests at heart, but I don't feel upset at the news. There was a time - there may well be still a time - when an awful lot of people here assumed their phone-calls were being monitored, their emails intercepted, their movements tracked at every turn. You didn't have to be a criminal or a terrorist - it was enough if the authorities thought you might, um, bear watching. Have criminal tendencies. And now that you and I have access to Google Earth for free, which can let us see into our neighbour's back garden, imagine what the security boys can do with their professional, paid-for-by-you-and-me equipment. That little nick on the back of your thumb? Right now somebody is probably studying that through a satellite spy-camera. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were those who were highly insulted if they thought their phone-calls weren't being tapped. Whaddyamean, I'm not important enough?

So there is a delicious kind of irony at Hain and Hurst/Ingram going all puff-cheeked about News International taking a look at what they were up to. Is that because H and H had important information to conceal and we hadn't/haven't? If that's the case, what were they doing spying on us in the first place?

Chomp. That's the sound of the biter being bitten. Put on your party hat - it's schadenfreude time.

The BBC, a woman in a shower and your head's cut

2011-11-28T09:54:00.001Z

I once knew a woman who talked aloud in the shower. Her husband said she did it to rid herself of the torment of l'esprit de l'escalier. Which means literally 'the staircase wit'. It's when you are on your way home, or just before you fall asleep or, yes, going down the stairs from somebody's place, and you suddenly think of what you SHOULD have said during that argument when thingummybob said whatever it was. Grrrr and feck, you say. Dadblame it anyway, why didn't I? I gather that's what this woman used to say, except that she used far more colourful and forceful words.

I thought of her on my way home from BBC Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh yesterday. I'd been on Sunday Sequence and the subject under discussion had been RTÉ's treatment of Fr Kevin Reynolds which has cost them (actually cost the southern tax-payer) a seven-figure sum. Allegedly. So there I was on Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh, throwing in my little two-cents' worth and trying to sound coherent, even though I was on my way to the A & E at the Royal to get a few facial stitches, having cleverly stood on a dangling trainer-lace while jogging about two hours' earlier. Anyway, I likened the deplorable treatment of Kevin Reynolds with the deplorable treatment of Martin McGuinness by RTÉ, when Miriam O'Callaghan saw fit to single him out and ask him, during a live presidential debate, "Do you go to confession?"

So what triggered my thoughts of that woman and her l'esprit d'escalier? Well, when I raised that "Do you go to confession" point as deplorable RTÉ journalism, presenter William Crawley brushed it aside: "Oh not at all, a perfectly acceptable question, John Kerry was asked the same question in a presidential debate in the US some years ago". So I came back, quick as a flash and said "Uh er um, ah, mmm,ugh". Very intelligent, you got that one. It was only when I was turning onto the M2 that l'esprit d'escalier struck: why in the name of all that's rational hadn't I responded with "How does doing it in America make it right?" Simple question, which would have exposed the flimsiness of Crawley's comment. Grr and feck and dadblame and some other more colourful and forceful words. There's no flagellation like self-flagellation.

Catholics voting for the union

2011-11-26T14:21:00.001Z

Compared to television, radio is a discussion-friendly medium. That’s because you don’t have to have interesting pictures to go with every word spoken. But only when it's compared to TV. When compared to real-life, radio discussion is thinner than Twiggy.

An example. On Monday last I was on The Stephen Nolan Show on BBC Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh. The topic was a recent claim by Peter Robinson that the future of the union with Britain may depend on Catholics voting for it. A startling claim and one that bears examination. Why might the First Minister have come out with this when he did?

Demographics might be one reason. Figures out last month showed that in universities here, Catholics comprise nearly 50% of the student population, Protestants around 35%. The Times (in which Robinson originally made his claim) cites a recent national audit where children here were asked how they saw themselves: 53% of girls and 55% of boys said Catholic. So with the rumble of that particular demographic tumbril sounding in his ears, maybe Peter is hoping, that not only will Catholics learn to live like Protestants, as Terence O'Neill once famously claimed they could, but that they’ll learn to vote like them too.

Or maybe it's the unionist opposition Peter has his eye on. There's what's left of the UUP and there's the Alliance Party, which you’ll remember whipped his Westminster seat from under him last time out. If you picture Catholics having to choose between say, Nelson McCausland (DUP) and Mike Nesbitt (UUP) or Naomi Long (Alliance), there’s little doubt either the UUP man or the Alliance woman would get the nod. So maybe this is Peter trying to smooth the Catholic-rough corners of the DUP and snooker the opposition.

Meanwhile back at the Nolan Show on Monday, the switch-board was lighting up as a number of Catholics phoned in to say they’d vote to maintain the link with Britain rather than join a bankrupt republic. What held them back from voting for unionist parties here, they said, was the stink of sectarianism coming off them. Maybe Peter hopes his statement will get the air-freshener working on his party and that nose-holding Catholics will troop in.

But what if economics isn't at the heart of this at all? I talked to a unionist politician a while back and he swatted away the economic argument for union. When the south was booming, he said, unionists were against re-unification; now it’s bust and they still don’t want to join. Might it be that nationalists feel the same way about breaking the link with Britain? Maybe when the chips are down it’s not actually the economy, stupid, after all.

Certainly economics wouldn’t be my first or sole reason for favouring Irish re-unification, free from British interference. Were the man living next door to me to move in and start running my financial affairs, he’d probably make a better fist of it than I do. But I still wouldn’t let him cross the threshold - in fact I'd brain him if he tried. Why ? An old-fashioned thing called self-respect. I figure I’m all growed-up now, and as a grown-up I must make the decisions, not some next-door-neighbour, however pleasant or rich he may be.

One last point: you hear a lot of talk these days about people in the north not wanting to become part of a bankrupt republic. Fair enough; but then nobody’s suggesting they do. When you mix green and orange you don't get all-green, you actually get brown - a totally different colour. Were we to re-unite the amputated bits of Ireland, free from outside interference, you’d get a new republic. Talk about a fairly-run-down northern state being swallowed up by a totally-run-down southern state is painting a pretend-ogre.

But as I say, radio discussion doesn't leave room for much elaboration or nuance. The guy that phones in and sounds fighting mad - it's his voice that hogs the air-time. It doesn't cast much light but the heat is terrific.

Arlene Foster - What fracking interest?

2011-11-25T16:37:00.001Z

I once went to a movie called Giant in the County Cinema in Omagh. It starred Rock Hudson and wasall about Texas and ranchers and cowboys and oil and stuff. I’ve forgotten everythingin it except one moment where Rock is in a field on his own. Looking verysoulful, he bends down and lifts a handful of soil and holds it against thesky: “The good earth!” he murmurs.

Maybe that’s what Arlene Foster’ll be at down in Fermanagh thisweekend - or maybe she’ll leavethat to her husband. Arlene’shubby, you see, owns a little parcel of 54 acres down there. Arlene’s department has granted a licence for shale gas exploration in thearea and whaddyaknow, the area includes her hubby’s 54 acres! Arlene wasinvolved in discussion of the licence application and expressed her belief thatthe licence be granted. This had nothing to do with her hubby’s little bit ofground, however.

A number of MLAs begged to differ. They said “You know, Arlene,you really should have told us about this when we were debating the matter –declared your interest, to wit, that your hubby owns 54 acres of theexploration area”. In fact one MLA, Stephen Agnew of the GreenParty, said Arlene should get thesack for keeping the hubby’s land-thing under wraps during the debate. Theright and fitting thing would have been to ‘fess up about a vested interest in the matter at the time. What interest? Arlene demanded, like a woman whosevirtue has been impugned. Sure it’s my husband has it, not me. And when NoelThompson on the BBC's ‘Hearts and Minds’ asked her party leader about the notion ofsacking Arlene, why, he nearly fell off his studio chair. Sack her? Peterdemanded. Why, what rubbish! Arlene has no vested interest. Her husband has,but that’s different.

So now. There we were thinking that down in Fermanagh theytook the marriage vows seriously. Especially the one about “All my worldlygoods I thee endow”. But maybeArlene and her hubby had a different ceremony, or had a little footnoteinserted to the effect that yes, all worldly goods we us endow, share and sharealike, barring the hubby should happen to find himself with a wee 54-acre patchin the middle of a shale-gas exploration area, in which case that particularworldly good will be his and his only.

So this weekend, should you see a figure down in Fermanagh witha fistful of ground and muttering, you’ll know who it isn’t. Hubby can shove his fist in the ground and go on about the goodearth until the cows come home across the fracking area but include Arlene strictly out.

Sometimes, you know, the DUP are just so damned loveable. A marital partner getscaught in the media headlights and they just kind of, well, they go all sowobbly-lipped or uneasy or sort of hurt/angry, you want to kiss the sore spotand say “There, there, little man (or woman), it’ll be better in a minute,don’t oo fret oor little heady-weady about it, before oo know it, those naughty naughty reporter peoplewill have forgotten the whole fracking thing.”

It was never like this for Rock Hudson.

Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich - a life well-lived

2011-11-24T08:55:00.001Z

I don't know what sins the late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich was guilty of, but I feel certain his good qualities will easily outweigh them. TG4 aired an excellent documentary on his life last night and somebody used the word "ebullience" of him. Good word. He had a life-giving energy, a warmth that not all Irish cardinals (or clerics of any rank) share. Two scenes from the documentary stick in my mind. One is of him on the Late Late Show, I think, in the midst of a group of singers, joining vigorously in a chorus of an Irish song. You could tell he was revelling in the company, the song, the occasion. Tim Pat Coogan testified to the fact that he (the cardinal) had "a heavy hand" with the whiskey bottle - that he enjoyed a well-filled glass and he enjoyed sharing with others. Again, not a characteristic associated with all the higher echelons of the clergy - or not publicly anyway.

But it was his response to the blanket protest and the Hunger Strike of the 1980s that was most impressive. At a time when other Catholic clergy, including Cardinal Cathal Daly and even the Pope, were strong in their words of criticism and condemnation of republicans, Ó Fiaich was the only one I remember who actually went into Long Kesh and came out to tell reporters what he saw. He compared conditions to the worst slums of Calcutta - "conditions in which you wouldn't keep an animal, let alone human beings". This didn't make him popular with the British, of course, or with that strand of Irish political thought represented by Garret Fitzgerald. In fact, he was hauled over the coals by no less an ethicist than Maggie Thatcher. For some twenty minutes she lectured Ó Fiaich - a highly respected Irish historian - on the history of Ireland and Britain, ending her harangue with the impatient question "Britain and Germany have become friends - why can't Britain and Ireland?" That, it seems, was the point where Ó Fiaich got fed up and pointed out that maybe an answer lay in the fact that Britain wasn't occupying the Ruhr Valley.

Like Charlie Haughey's wonderfully ambiguous gift of a teapot to Britain's prime minister, that rejoinder alone makes Tomás Ó Fiaich's life worth living.

Mistakes, lies and selective outrage

2011-11-23T08:53:00.001Z

I love the way people use words. Take the word “mistake”. At present it’s being used by RTÉ. Theyspeak of “One of the gravest editorial mistakes ever made” by the nationalbroadcaster. They’re referring, as you probably know, to the showing of a PrimeTime programme where they presented as fact that a Fr Kevin Reynolds had raped a minor and had a child by herwhen he was working in Kenya 30 years ago. This, despite the fact that FrReynolds had offered to take a paternity test prior to the programme’s airing.

Abuse of words frequently, as George Orwell liked to pointout, reflects abuse of truth. What was made by RTÉ over the Reynolds programmewas not a mistake, except you see getting caught out as a mistake. It was adecision. They decided to bash on regardless, very likely on the assumptionthat the public would lap up without question yet another case of clericalsexual abuse. They did this, knowing that the programme would destroy FrReynolds’s reputation and inflict mental and emotional suffering on an innocentman. Their “mistake” wouldn’t havebeen unearthed if Fr Reynolds hadn’t taken them to court, and he wouldn’t havebeen able to take them to court if he hadn’t been supported by some decentlawyers working ‘pro bono’.

Pat Rabbitte, never a man to shirk a big word, says we need anindependent inquiry to know why such an “egregious error” was made. “There isextensive public disquiet about the case and it involves the nationalbroadcaster. Taken together, this provides the basis for the decision that wastaken”. The decision, that is, to hold an inquiry.

But there wouldn’t have been any public disquiet if FrReynolds hadn’t pressured RTÉ by taking them to court and the facts of the casebeing made known.

There is a disquieting, not-too-obvious-but-still-thereanti-Catholic Church strand in the Irish media. If this case does nothing else,it might give the Irish public cause to question if they’re being told thewhole truth about the Catholic clergy. They’re a far-from-perfect group ofpeople, the clergy, but I find myself wondering how many other Fr Reynoldsthere are out there who were denounced for sexual abuse of minors but didn’thave the good luck to have evidence that stopped his persecutors in theirtracks.

And I find myself still thinking of Rabbitte’s “extensivepublic disquiet” and the involvement of the national broadcaster being the keyelements in mounting an independent inquiry into the matter. Can you think ofanother recent event where there was “extensive public disquiet” and theinvolvement of the national broadcaster? I can. It involved a politician who, in the course of a politicaldebate, was accused – without evidence - of murder and asked if he went to confession. It happened on– would you believe it? – the same programme series, and it provoked not justdisquiet but seething rage, particularly north of the border. Which meant, inRabbitte’s egregious way of thinking, it didn’t count.

It’s called selective moral indignation. Nice mouthful, isn’t it? You should tryusing it next time out, Pat. Or even try thinking about it.

The British army - Gone (sort of) but not forgotten (ouch)

2011-11-22T09:26:00.001Z

My father, a conservative man without a bigoted bone in hisbody, didn’t like the British army. A brother of mine puts this down to a clashhe had with a British officer and his wife, when the pair were billeted in ourhouse for a time during WW2. Another sibling claims it had to do with ribaldremarks some British soldiers directed at one of my sisters, then in her earlyteens. Whatever the reason, my father had no time for the uniformedfigures that lived in the armycamp across the river from us. That was decades ago. The camp is gone now but when I think of it, the shadow of myfather’s hostility and the reasons for it remain.

I mention this because reports from the N Ireland auditoffice today say in so many words that the Stormont Executive were taken for aride when they were handed back sixformer British army bases eight years ago. How so? OK, in some cases they hadto pay for the transfer, but still – prime sites and all that.

Well you see, the the catch is, the British army left thesoil contaminated with fuel spills, lead, asbestos and other harmful chemicals, and it slipped their minds to mention this when they were passing over thesites. To decontaminate Long Kesh the cost is over £8,000,000. To decontaminate the Fort George armybase they figure it’ll cost somewhere between £4,000,000 and £5,000,000. TheBritish MoD, a kindly body, hasagreed to pay some of the cost, but it’s protected under the settlement fromcontaminations which it claimsweren’t its fault.

Sounds like something from an Ibsen play, doesn’t it? The ground is taken over by the British, then years later givenback with no mention of the factthat the place is now in a poisonous state that’ll take millions todetoxify. With Ibsen, the pollutionof the water and landscape was symptomatic of the unhealthiness of the society.The British army have left us a costly and lasting reminder of what theirpresence here meant for us.

Did I say meant? Sorry, that was a slip, I should have said‘means’ – there are still over 5,000 British troops still here. They haven’tgone away, you know.

Pat Finucane - why his death matters so much

2011-11-20T14:44:00.001Z

So – what do you think of the Finucane case? I heard someoneon radio today saying the Finucane family had been caught flat-footed by DavidCameron’s refusal to hold an independent inquiry into the killing of theBelfast solicitor. I’m not surewhat was meant by “flat-footed” but if it meant they were disappointed, the observation’saccurate. The family had beengiven to understand an inquiry was forthcoming, they were called to DowningStreet and then told that nothing of the sort would be happening, they’d haveto depend on the integrity of a British judge. ( Excuse me a minute, the catneeds putting out, he’s having a fit of some sort…)

Where were we? Ah yes, the Finucanes. Every time I see members of that familyon-screen I’m struck by two things: a kind of bleak grief that shows on alltheir faces, and by theirgritted-teeth refusal to give up on their quest for the truth about their husband/father’sslaying. I sympathise with them onthe first – to have witnessed the dinner-time horror that they did would havedriven lesser people insane – and I marvel at their dogged refusal to let theBritish government palm them off with anything less than the total, uncomfortable/unforgivabletruth. It’s over twenty years since that horrifying evening and the Finucanes stillare searching for the truth of what happened.

Some time ago the British government gave up on pretendingthere wasn’t state collusion in the loyalist killing of the Belfast solicitor.What the Finucanes and a lot of the rest of us would like to know is, how highdid that collusion go and is the British government stalling on an independentinquiry because the trail might even go as far as Downing Street? Enda Kenny, if you want to be charitable,continued his interest in the case by meeting with the family last week when hewas ‘up here’ and spoke of securing American backing for the family in theirquest. (If you want to be uncharitable, you could say Kenny got himself filmedwith the Finucanes to counteract his arm-punching mateyness with such as thePUP’s Billy Hutchinson during the same visit). Anyway, Kenny’s good deed, evenif you believe it was for the wrong reasons, kind of blew up in his face when anumber of unionist families wanted to know what he was doing about the loss oftheir loved ones, and what they see as at least negligence by the Irish authorities in the pursuit of their killers. A classic case of what the late and loveable David Dunseith would havecalled what-aboutery but a turbulent experience for Kenny just the same.

There are two uncomfortable facts linked to the Finucanecase. One is that his killing differs from killings of unionists by the IRA inone crucial respect: the state was involved in his death. The forces that weresworn to uphold the law and protect the people in fact broke the law and in this case murdered a person. Nomatter how cruel or unjustified any killing by the IRA – and there were anumber - they were carried out bywhat the state would deem terrorists. By being a part of the killing of PatFinucane, the state has struck at the heart of organized society and any notionof order, let alone justice. Thestate’s involvement makes the Finucane killing qualitatively different from allIRA killings.

The second uncomfortable fact about the Finucane case isthat it has received enormous publicity in part because he was a solicitor.What you usually hear, and with justification, is that the killing of a solicitor who by definition works touphold the law is particularly heinous. That’s true. But another, less oftenacknowledged reason was that Pat Finucane was an educated, middle-class man,and in our twisted view of things that somehow makes his killing worse. Had hebeen, a lorry-driver or a brick-layer, it’s doubtful if his death would havereceived the same headlines.

It’s worth keeping that in mind because there are dozens,maybe hundreds of cases from the conflict years where people have lost a lovedone and are convinced that the forces of the state were implicated in theirkilling. These deaths are far from as well known and their chances of findingout the truth are even more remote than those of the Finucane family.

Of course a family’s grief is equally painful, regardless ofthe status of the person killed and/or the source of the killing. But the deathof Finucane, an upholder of the law at the hands of the government’s own forces, has abitter irony that is unique. Provided, of course, that you don’t believe Rosemary Nelson, anothersolicitor, was a victim of state collusion as well.

From free will to the Good Friday Agreement

2011-11-18T08:20:00.001Z

You may not have heard it –you may have been busy greasing the cat’s boil or doing some equally usefulwork - but Monday morning last callersto The Stephen Nolan Show on BBC Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh werediscussing free will. “Eh?” you say. “A free will phone-in on a Monday morning?Bit airy-fairy, that”.

Well no, not really. Yousee the issue under discussion was whether there should be a ban on smoking incars. Nobody was saying it’s good to blow smoke into the lungs of your childrenin a confined space; the debate was whether not doing so should be left to ourown free will or whether there ought to be a law.

Big issue, that, because itboils down to whether we believe doing the right thing is best left to eachindividual or whether the state through its laws should pressure us into doingthe right thing.

What do I think? Well, letme first point you to two public issues that have undergone a totaltransformation in my lifetime.

The first is smoking. WhenI was young, everybody smoked. The school I went to even had a special shed forus Big Boys (15 and older) wherewe allowed to stand and suck on our Gallahers Blues or Sweet Aftons. As youngadults, when you went into somebody’s house, you automatically reached for thefags, passed them round. We smoked in cars, in houses, writing, playing poker,on the toilet, in the pub. If we could have smoked while asleep we wouldhave. We knew it was damaging us(we even called them ‘coffin nails’). And now? All changed. Now the few whostill smoke stand huddled outside buildings, indulging their vice and looking miserable.

The other big change hasbeen in drink-driving. When I first got my licence, the guy who could lower sixor eight pints and then drive home was not exactly a hero but certainly novillain. He was a laugh, that’s what he was. A rogue. Wobbling all over theplace, God, did you see him! Thenotion of phoning for a taxi just because you were half-cut would have soundedlike the actions of a madman. All changed. Now, anybody who drinks and drives is seen as a public menacewho deserves the stiffest of sentences and his licence revoked.

In both cases, the publicopinion turnaround didn’t happen because it was left to people’s free will –laws were passed that forebade smokingin pubs and restaurants, other laws were passed which said that if you drank andgot caught behind a car wheel, you’d be a sorry boy or girl. The laws acted as a kind ofscaffolding that made public opinion turnaround possible.

And in politics? Well theAlliance Party, bless their little cotton socks, have historically urged us allto be nicer to one another – Trevor Ringland’s “one small step” philosophywould eventually lead us away from separateness and sectarianism. Nice idea.But it took the muscle of the McBride principles to persuade employers to enddiscrimination, it took laws against incitement to religious hatred to dampdown the uberbigots, it took aminimum-wage law to make sure employers paid their workers half-properly. Once the law’s in place, of course,people begin to see that decent pay and non-sectarianism and not poisoningourselves make sense. Social responsibility grows after legal protection hasallowed it to emerge.

Otherwise there are alwaysexcuses, aren’t there? Left to our own devices, the drag is downward – we optfor the easy, the self-pleasuring option. Only after we’ve had a law passedthat protects us from our worst impulses does the public mood change.

But here’s the bad new,politically speaking. The Good Friday Agreement says that there’ll be aconstitutional change here only when a majority in the north want it. In theend, the Agreement leaves an end to partition and its attendant absurdities toa change of political thinking by a sizeable number of unonists.

Do you see signs that, thirteenyears after the Agreement, unionists have started to stop puffing the politicalfag in confined spaces or driving the political car while legless? Can’t sayI’ve noticed it myself.

Tackling sectarianism - the roots are deep

2011-11-17T09:47:00.001Z

There was an article in yesterday’s Irish Times, drawing uncomplimentary comparisons between what theScottish Parliament has done to stamp out sectarianism in that country and theabsence of an effective policy against sectarianism here. It’s a daft article – sectarianism hasbeen here since at least 1784, when in Co Armagh they established the Peep O’ Day boys - also known as the Protestant Boys orWreckers, which eventually morphed into the Orangemen.

The article mentions two areas here as sources of sectarianism – housing and education. Oh really? I spent my workinglife going into Catholic and state/Protestant schools, working with Catholicand Protestant teachers and students. Never once did I hear a bigoted commentfrom any of them. The reverse in fact. The notion that Catholic schools foster intolerance is somuch facile bunkum. Catholic schools work to offer Catholic values to theirstudents, and as that good East Belfast Protestant C S Lewis said, “Educationwithout values, as useful as it is, seem rather to make Man a more cleverdevil”.

As to housing – it’s true that the overwhelming percentageof housing here is located in areas that are overwhelmingly Protestant or Catholic – i.e.,not mixed. Regrettable, I believe, since variety is always more interestingthan monotone, but it’s where people choose to live – the middle class as wellas the working class. Regrettable, perhaps, but other than the social equivalent of ashotgun wedding, I don’t think there’s much can be done about it.

What can be done is for our leaders to lead with good example. When we see theDUP and Sinn Féin working together, we tend to take our cue from them. But for this to work, both sides have to be equally committed to opennessand friendliness, and the unhappy truth is that the DUP team sometimes seems to be digging its heels in. Witness Peter Robinson’s by-nowfamous “Not on my watch!” remark, when the possibility of change to the badge ortitle of H M Prisons was raised.

Unfortunately you can’t legislate for people to cleansetheir hearts of sectarianism; you can only show them the benefits of gettingrid of it, as (paradoxically) the same Peter Robinson did when he attended theinauguration of Michael D Higgins as President of Ireland. Above all, we needto listen to each other, work together and show each other equal respect,whether it's a question of wearing poppies or Easter lilies. The factthat two major centenaries are approaching – the signing of the Ulster Covenantand the Easter Rising – would be a good opportunity to exemplify good behaviour. Maybe set up a cross-party group to explore the facts and the bestway to commemorate these events. Realising that all of us on this island are bound together by our history would be a good practical start to tackling the roots of sectarianism.

Peter and the prisons: commitment or intolerance?

2011-11-16T09:21:00.001Z

"It's not about the Boyne in 1690 or Dublin in Easter 1916. It's about dragging a small minority of folk in our country into the twenty-first century".

Sounds like something by a politician or other worthy in this part of Ireland, doesn't it? But it's not - it's Scottish National Party's justice minister Kenny MacAskill, talking about sectarianism in his country. Equally applies here, you say? You could be right.

Except the problem is distinguishing between sectarianism and commitment to a particular faith/political position. If you're a Protestant/unionist, chances are you think you've a right to commemorate a centrally-significant date like 1690. Ditto if you're a republican in terms of 1916. But does that mean you're living in the past or being offensive to others?

Well, one way of evading such a charge would be to show respect for others in the way you celebrate/commemorate your view of the world. Such as? Such as holding your commemoration in your own place, not outside the front door of somebody else's house, so to speak. You'd also do well to avoid talking or singing in an abusive or threatening way about those with different thinking from your own.

Which brings us to Peter Robinson's threat to resign if the badge or name of the prison service was changed. The First Minister didn't say "Not an inch!" but his threat came as near as dammit to that in its intolerance of other views. He's entitled to argue the case for badge and name retention, of course. That's commitment. But he could have made that case when the matter came up for Assembly discussion, rather than to an array of greedy media microphones. And since cross-party support is necessary, he could have successfully defended the badge and name then. But instead he chose the now-hear-this-not-an-inch route. And you're right, Kenny - that kind of attitude needs dragging and kicking into the twenty-first century.

Sam and Miriam - being dropped and being fair

2011-11-15T09:39:00.001Z

Sam Smyth

Miriam O'Callaghan

Two big media stories reported in The Irish Times thismorning. In the first, Denis O’Brien, who owns the two radio stations Today FM and Newstalk , hasrejected claims by Eamon Dunphy that he interfered in the editorial workings ofNewstalk and that he “hated journalism”. O’Brien says he’s being subjected to “a disturbing trend ofnastiness and cynicism” by the south’s media since he dropped presenter SamSmyth (late of this parish) from Today FM.

The second media story concerns RTÉ. Press Ombudsman John Horgan is going tocarry out a review of RTÉ’s editorial process. This follows the airing of a‘Prime Time’ programme (presenter one Miriam O’Callaghan) which claimed that aFr Kevin McReynolds had had sex with a minor and fathered a child by her whilehe was working in Kenya. Fr McReynolds denied the claim and prior to theprogramme going out offered to take a paternity test. RTÉ ignored his offer andaired their programme. Fr McReynolds has since taken the paternity test, provenhis innocence and is now taking a High Court libel case against RTÉ.

Both cases show how murky the workings of the southern mediaare. I like Dunphy – he’s a far better soccer commentator than anyone I canthink of in England – but on this one, like most of the south’s media, he’sbarking up the wrong tree. Presenters don’t like being dropped, especially ifthey’ve been presenting a particular programme – in Smyth’s case a politicsprogramme – for a long time. If you’ve listened to him, you’ll know Smyth has aslight speech impediment but that’s not why I’m glad O’Brien dropped him. I’m glad because (i) Smyth was dull and(ii) on any topic about the north, he was, um, what shall I say, not my favourite commentator (there, I think that keeps me on the right side of the law). His many mates in themedia may consider him a terrible loss; I suspect the rest of us will struggleon without him.

The RTÉ story is truly shocking. This wasn’t just a case ofbeing biased or dull – this was a case of wrecking a man’s life. We now know that Fr McReynolds wasinnocent of the crimes RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan presented him as guilty of.Even worse, RTÉ and presumably O’Callaghan refused to let Fr McReynolds defendhimself before they smeared filth all over his reputation. Which raises three points: how manyother bogus charges of clerical sexual abuse are there, did the question “Do you go toconfession?” cross O’Callaghan’s mind as she presented this glaring example ofall that’s wrong with southern journalism, and will anybody lose their RTÉ jobfor their part in this despicable frame-up? I don’t know the answer to the first two questions but I’llbet I know the answer to the last. It’s No.

C S Lewis - the pride of East Belfast

2011-11-14T16:27:00.001Z

I’ve spent the last week or so reading and re-reading thewriter C S Lewis, because last night I had to take part in a radio paneldiscussion about him on Newstalk . Given that Lewis was a goodEast Belfast Protestant, they’ve erected a statue to him somewhere on theNewtownards Road, complete with wardrobe as seen in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’. There are so many aspects of the man you couldtalk about, such as his intelligence (three Firsts from Oxford), his courage(fought and wounded in the First World War but never dwells on it in hiswriting) or his relations withwomen (he lived with a woman 26 years his senior because he’d made a war-timepact with a fellow-soldier that if he survived and the fellow-soldier didn’t,he’d look after his mother).

But it’s his contradictory attitudes to England and theEnglish that I find particularly intriguing. He went from Holywood, Co Down to England for the first time and hewas not impressed by the natives or their landscape: “The strange English accentswith which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons. But what wasworse was the English landscape…I have made up the quarrel since; but at thatmoment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal”.

Having like many another Irishman a heavily-Anglicisededucation, he came late to Irish writers, particularly W B Yeats. By this time he was anestablished don at Oxford: “I amoften surprised to find how utterly ignored Yeats is among the men I have met:perhaps his appeal is purely Irish – if so, then thank the gods that I amIrish”.

And he’s particularly good on Irish people living inEngland: “Like all Irish people who meet in England we ended by criticisms onthe invincible flippancy and dullness of the Anglo-Saxon race. After all thereis not doubt that the Irish are the only people: with all their faults I wouldnot gladly live or die among another folk”.

But of course that’s exactly what he didn’t do. He actuallylived and died in England, and hisfriends were English academics like J R R Tolkein (yes, the Lord of the Rings man) and Neville Coghill. He’d been brought upin Holywood, he tells us, never to trust a Papist, and was happy to discoverthat one of his best friends at Oxford was just that.

He was a brilliant, kindly man, who wrote about everything -wonderful children’s books, science-fiction books, books about Christianity,books about why bad things happen (TheProblem of Pain), books where he pretended to be the devil (The Screwtape Letters) and books wherehe described and analysed the loss of his wife (A Grief Observed). Reading him is like encountering a mind that’s going off like aCatherine wheel, ideas lighting up the sky in every direction. Sometimes as Iread, it felt as if I was reading that other great Protestant Irishman, George BernardShaw. In my book, there’s no higher compliment.

The day partition died

2011-11-12T11:40:00.001Z

Sometimes it's easy to believe that the partition of Ireland has worked. In the north for fifty years, it allowed unionists to discriminate and gerrymander at will; in the south, Fianna Fail became so used to power, cronyism and corruption, they rotted the state. And as if that weren't bad enough, there were nominal nationalists in the north who not-so-secretly adopted a, what will we say, an attitude of superiority to the people in the south. They don't have our quality of education, they tend to be more devious than we straight-talking northerners, they aren't as hard-working or reliable as we are. That's so-called nationalists, remember. In the recent presidential election, the south returned the compliment in spades, Mary McAleese was an intruder from 'up there' but somehow she'd turned out to be the exception that proved the rule and really was pure gold. Martin McGuinness, however, was definitely from 'up there' and he was just bringing his northern 'baggage' of violence and division, the man can't even tell the truth, we want no part of him - or any of yez. Go back up where yez belong. The border might not be visible when you drive from Derry to Buncrana or Belfast to Dublin, but the sense of difference is alive and kicking and hoping to grow stronger every day.

Or so it can seem, until a day like yesterday comes along. I still have reservations about Michael D Higgins - far from being humble, as Enda Kenny suggested, he obviously is a small man with a very big opinion of himself - but there was no doubt in yesterday's inauguration ceremonies that he was indeed the President of Ireland. Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness, Alasdair McDonnell, Tom Elliot - they were all there, and there was a sense of rejoicing in the Irishness that unites us all. A good day, for all its dampness.

And then, to round things off, there was last night in Estonia. The team may call itself the Republic of Ireland, but it could save space and ink by calling itself simply 'Ireland'. They were cheered on by thousands of southern suppporters and northern supporters who'd made a 17-hour journey together to get there; they were cheered again by tens of thousands of Irish people north and south here at home, who punched the air and kicked imaginary balls around the living-room and woke the baby with off-key choruses of 'The Fields of Athenry'. Was this our team? You bet it was. Were we not uneasy about supporting the team from the south? Not for a moment. Just as players from anywhere on the island of Ireland are eligible to play for Trappatoni's team, so supporters from anywhere and everywhere on the island of Ireland were so filled with delight and pride and anticipation of even better things to come, they could have floated to the ceiling and stuck there.

That's sport for you, particularly team sports. It draws us all in, and the divisions that some politicians and a considerable section of the media would like to nurture between north and south - they melt like morning mist in a strong sun, like the glorious sun that's shining in my wet garden as I type these words.

They say the very basis of logic is that a thing can't be true and not be true at the same time. True. But life is sometimes larger than logic. Yes, partition exists; at the same time and on glorious, golden occasions like yesterday, it doesn't.

OK, the temptation's too strong - I'll say it. Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time?

The past - it's difficult, mainly because it's over

2011-11-11T09:15:00.001Z

I've been asked to meet with some visitors to Belfast later this morning. They're here to gather material for a drama production relating to our ways of dealing with the past, so I'm trying to pull together my thoughts, such as they are, on the subject.

The most important thing, I think, is to admit that the past is past. When we say we're 'dealing with' something, it suggests we're in a position to shape it, get it under control, mould it. The past is pretty resistant to that - it's happened, and, if as has been so often the case here, that past is full of suffering and loss, that suffering and loss have happened and no amount of manoeuvring is going to change that. At the same time, I remember being in the Guildhall Square in Derry when David Cameron was beamed live from the House of Commons with his famous apology for Bloody Sunday, and the crowd cheered and clapped. I suggested to someone with me that if I'd had a loved one shot dead by the state, an apology over thirty years later wouldn't begin to satisfy me, but he insisted it was very important for the victims. It may well be. But it's certainly not justice.

There are two parties involved in our history of conflict - the combatants and the victims. Anything that can be done, however illogical, to help them cope with their pain must be applauded. One line on this is that if we had a South-African-style truth and reconciliation commission, people could tell what they'd had done to them, combatants could tell what they did, and the truth would out. And that would be some comfort to victims.

I don't know, and not being a victim or directly related to a victim, I can't speak with authority. But my speculation is that, contrary to popular belief, talking about what's happened to you isn't always the best way of coping with it. I'm sure all of us can bring to mind moments of pain, self-inflicted or inflicted by others, that we carry with us. Would airing these help us 'come to terms' with the hurt? I'm not sure it would.

One of the characteristics of old soldiers is that they rarely seem keen on talking about what they did, what happened to them. I'm convinced a lot of the combatants in our conflict feel likewise. Certainly the British government doesn't seem to believe in telling people about its role in the conflict, otherwise the massive expense and time devoted to the Saville Inquiry would not have happened. And Cameron's government would have held a full inquiry into the Pat Finucane case, rather than dodge it again and again.

In past conflicts - when the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan, when Germany over-ran France, when the Russians lost millions of men in the Second World War, when well over a million Vietnamese were killed in horrible ways by US troops - in all these cases, the only healer appears to have been time. Helped, I should add, by the refusal of those most wounded to allow hatred or thoughts of revenge to consume them.

Would a truth and reconciliation commission here help victims reach that desired state? Would all those who inflicted the suffering tell all that they'd done and ask forgiveness? I think the confident answer to both questions is No.

How (and when) to bury a new road

2011-11-09T20:12:00.003Z

Now this is what I’d call a very good day for burying aroad. The day after yesterday, sort of thing. When you’ve cancelled all thosefancy Fianna Fail plans fordigging tunnels and sending fast-speed trains through them and all round Dublin,there couldn’t be a better time tofollow up with the cancellation – oops, sorry, follow up with the postponement of that damned A5 linkingDerry and Aughnacloy. Well yeah sure, there’ll be a bit of yelling, but we’ll hardly hear it with yelps stillcoming out of north Dublin getting their stuff cancelled. Yes, yes, yes, I knowI promised half the money, and yes yes yes, I know the A5 would have shown cross-borderco-operation working for everyone, I know it would have created jobs, I KNOW it would haveinjected mobility into that part of the country. Oh, and right, it would have saveda fair number of car-crash fatalities as well. But hey, you have to take the rough with the smooth, there’s people are dying all the time. Besides, the unionists will be delightedwith us – there are no votes worth talking about for them west of the Bannanyway. We keep our money in our pocket and at the same time we show we’resensitive to unionist political sensitivities.. A win-win situation, really.

Donegal, did you say? Ah yes, Donegal.Time was when they’d have returned a decent Fine Gael TD but look what theywent and did last time out – elected a pair of bloody Shinners, that big ginkDoherty and his friend MacLochlainn. Well maybe this will soften their coughfor them. Sometimes, what's more, you have to be firm with a section of theelectorate. Show them that actions have consequences. “We’re too far away from Dublin!” – God,if I heard them whining that once I heard them fifty times. “We’re cut aff uphere!” In that damned annoying accent of theirs. Well, they’ll stay cut aff, they’ll stay thesame distance from Dublin and everywhere else for the next ten years minimum.Let them keep that in mind the next time they go to the polls. Thing is, lads,next time out, you play ball with us and whaddyaknow, we might, we just might play ball with you. Meanwhile , pull the plug there, Leo,would you? And for feck’s sake remember to say ‘postponed’, not the c –word. Andif you can say something about ‘up there’ as well it’d be appreciated. Goodman.

Vincent Browne, Michael D Higgins and Father Jack

2011-11-09T09:47:00.001Z

Vincent Browne is a man I like. I remember him at UCD where he was an active Fine Gaeler,but he was free from a certain condescending swank that infused others such asHenry Kelly and Sinead Cusack. But like the rest of us, Vincent gets carriedaway occasionally and he does so today in the Irish Times.

He reports on Michael D Higgins’s last speech to theDail under the heading ‘Vision ofinclusive republic was Higgins’s parting shot’ and he concludes that we nowhave an Irish president who’s better than we deserve. In support of this, he points to Higgins’s insistence thatthere’s a helluva lot more to democracy than voting once every four or fiveyears, and if you want to effect radical change, you have redistribute power atevery level of life: “A highly participative, inclusive republic was the one inthe vision of those who made the case for Irish independence at the end of the19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century. Itwas this which was stolen from the people after the foundation of the State”. Browne cites two TDs who were in thechamber and who said it was the best speech Higgins had ever delivered and thatit was a privilege to be there to hear it.

Sometimes what you don’t say is even more important thanwhat you do say. The most important word in the Higgins quotation above is thesixth-last word, and to save you the bother of counting back, it’s“after”. In other words, the problems arose after the partition of the country. So Higgins makes the speech ofhis life about an ‘”inclusive republic” and doesn’t mention that one and a halfmillion Irish people on this island are excluded from it. Browne hails thespeech and Higgins, and doesn’t even mention the word ‘partition’.

Are these people for real? Do they not know the boiling resentmenta lot of northern nationalists and republicans feel about being air-brushed outof history and out of contemporary consideration? Compared to us, the Irish whofought with the British Army in the two World Wars received massive recognitionby the south.

Successive governments in the south spent fifty years givinglip-service to national reunification, culminating in Jack Lynch’s pathetic ‘We will not stand idly by’ speechin 1969. If we’re to judge by Browne or Higgins, they’ve now dropped even the lip-service.As Fr Jack might have pithily put it: “Inclusive republic my arse”.

PSNI - How are we doin'?

2011-11-08T18:05:00.000Z

Ten years, eh?Doesn't seem that long since they devised that ghastly PSNI badge that has somany symbols on it, you feel like you're on drugs, just looking at it. They hadDeputy Chief Constable Judith Gillespie on radio and TV, being blonde andsmiling and telling us how muchthings have changed and how hard it was to scramble from the back of aland-rover when wearing a skirt. Her take on the old RUC? Vaseline-lensednostalgia, start to finish.

Understandable,I suppose, since over three hundred RUC officers were killed in the Troubles.And certainly she has reason to smile, and not just because she'scareer-confident enough to turn down a £500,000 retirement lump sum (no, Ididn't insert an extra nought back there). The police service she heads up today is a lot differentfrom the one that sat astride the population here in the 1970s and 80s. Butthere are a number of things which, as I said on the BBC's 'Sunday Sequence', still bother me.

1. Numbers. The proportion of Catholicsin the service is now just under one-third. Good. But not good enough. Thepercentage of Catholics in the population is nearly half.

2. Rank. We're told the increased number of Catholics in the servicebut we're not told what rank they occupy. Why not? Is there a mechanism inplace to show the proportion of Catholics/nationalists/republicans holdingsenior positions? Not much point recruiting moreCatholics/nationalists/republicans if they stay at thehewers-of-wood/drawers-of-water level.

3. Class. Of the Catholics recruited,what proportion come from,say, the Bogside? Crossmaglen? The Falls Road? Apolice service that's filled with middle-class Catholics makes little sense - the conflictdidn't centre on the leafy suburbs. Is anyone monitoring class intake? And ifthey are, will they tell us? Because they should.

4. Class exile. When a youngworking-class man or woman joins the police, they quickly become middle-class.Why wouldn't they, with that salary? While this, policing-wise, is better than being middle-class born and bred, it still creates a gapbetween that person and the community from which they come. We're back to theproblem of the police officer as alien or semi-alien in the community s/hepolices.

5. Servant. Brendan Behan once saidthere is no situation so bad that the arrival of a policeman does not make itworse. An exaggeration butcontains a truth. How can police officers be made to see that they are theservants of the community and not its supervisors?

What all thiscomes down to is the way the police are seen by the community which they aresupposed to serve. It's a problem in most western countries but that's littlecomfort. Those in theleast-well-off areas see themselves as being at the bottom of the heap and thepolice as part of what maintains the status quo - i.e., keeps them there.

How to solve allthese difficulties? I haven' t a clue. But I know that patting ourselves on theback for how far we've come while keeping our heads in the sand about thedifficulties remaining is to ask for trouble. Or Troubles.

The SDLP : the torch passes...

2011-11-06T15:11:00.000Z

Pffffffftttt. But more of that later.

I've shaken a fair number of political hands in my time. I shook hands with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (ask your ma). If I'd jumped over the top of four guys in Newcastle-upon-Tyne I could have shaken hands with US President Jimmy Carter. I've shaken hands with Taoiseach John Bruton, with First Minister Peter Robinson, with Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, with Gerry Adams TD, with Paul Berry ex-MLA (remember him?), with Jim Allister MLA, with Bernadette McAliskey ex-MP, with Gregory Campbell MP. But I've never shaken hands with Alasdair 'Turn off those lights I'm blinded' McDonnell.

But my wife has. Some time ago we were at a book launch and I was mooching about, trying to find some free drink, when my other half found herself being introduced to the MP for South Belfast. The person doing the introducing mentioned that she was married to me. The good Doctor extended the hand that had tended a thousand wounds and spoke in that big-chested carrying voice of his. "Oh dear" he said. "You have my deepest sympathies, Mrs Collins".

A couple of hours ago I watched the good Doctor's SDLP-leader speech live on TV. Now that I've managed to stop laughing I can only say "Oh dear. You have my deepest sympathies, SDLP".

What about pffffffftttt? That's the sound of a political party tearing itself to pieces.

And this is a clip of Alasdair hard at work in Westminster:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiEUDeLX-hY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Being an SDLP leader - Lord, you know it ain't easy.

2011-11-05T11:05:00.000Z

The SDLPmust think they’re living under a curse. It started around the turn of thecentury, when Sinn Féin moved out and passed them on the electoral road, andvaroomed off into the middle distance. More immediately they must feelparticularly jinxed. They were arguing over their leadership as Sinn Féinrolled into Belfast and held its first ring-a-ding Ard Fheis in the north, inthe nice new Waterfront Hall. Then the prospects of the SDLP leadershipcandidates were forgotten as Martin McGuinnness grabbed the headlines by joining the race for the Aras. Thatwent on for weeks, and the fact that McGuinness didn’t win was small enoughconsolation. Now the SDLP are holdingtheir annual conference, not in the Waterfront Hall but the Ramada Hotel inBelfast. Not quite stage centre, really. And yes, the air this weekeend isfilled with excited cries and interviews and TV cameras, but they’re not for Patsy McGlone or AlexAttwood, they’re for Justin Bieber and Lady Ga-ga. That massive stage in frontof Belfast City hall has been constructed, not for Conall McDevitt but for MTVperformers.

So you betit’s tough when you’ve been No 1 and now you’re a distant No 2. A bit like being in a game where youknow, no matter how hard you sweat or how much you urge your men forward,you’re going to be beaten. Discouraging. Makes you want to tear off your jersey, puncture the ball and head forthe changing rooms with a shouted “Aw, fuck the lot of yis!” over yourshoulder. But there must be asmall corner in the heart of the SDLP candidates that is comforted, that feelswarmth. Because the SDLP does have its die-hard supporters. They still electMLAs.

That’sbecause there are those nationalist voters who have always identified with theSDLP. Like the candidates for SDLP leadership, they’re, getting on a bit inyears, but that doesn’t mean their opinions have softened. In fact, as their arterieshave hardened, so have their opinions. Not so much in favour of the wreckagethey see when they look at the SDLP as in the contempt they feel when theythink of Sinn Féin.

There’s the violence thing of course. Some ofthese people have, directly or indirectly, been damaged by IRA violence, andthey lay responsibility for that solely at the feet of Sinn Féin. Theysubscribe to the thesis, successfully propagated south of the border, that theIRA were the initiatiors and the continuers of violence for more than twodecades. This despite the fact that early black-and-white TV images show civilrights marchers being beaten off the streets,

and later images show bodies bleeding frombullet wounds inflicted by the British Army. None of that counts – the IRA was the cause of it all,start, middle and finish.

Thenthere’s the class thing. You want to vote for political leaders you look up to,and when the SDLP faithful look at Sinn Féin they see people who’ve had limited schooling, people who say‘Done’ instead of ‘Did’ and ‘have went’ instead of ‘have gone’, and theirmiddle-class sensibilities recoil. How could you vote for somebody like that,with their awful English and their equally awful jail-Irish? It’s no accident that of the four SDLPleadership candidates, one is adoctor and one a lawyer, and all four would rather rip out their own tongue,toast it and eat it in small forkfuls than say ‘infer’ when they mean ‘imply’.

So the SDLPgathered at the Ramada have that small consolation, that there are those in thenorthern population who remain faithful to the “dignified protest” days, andwill go on being faithful until their dying day. For a small pool of the northernpopulation, Patsy McGlone, ConallMcDevitt, Alastair McDonnell andAlex Attwood are still big fish. The trouble is, the pool keeps getting smallerevery year and even the bravest fish struggle to breathe as the pool dries up.

Maybe they should listen to George

2011-11-04T10:34:00.001Z

As I write this I’m sitting waiting to be called by the Stephen Nolan Show on BBC radio, to talkabout whether British soldiers from here are being treated unfairly. It appearsthat Scotland, Wales and England all have a specially-appointed advocate to seethat soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress are looked after, followingtime spent in Afghanistan or Iraq. There’s no such advocate for this region. Ifthe debate happens – these things are a moveable-at-the-last-moment feast – Iplan to argue for equal treatment for British soldiers from here.

Not that anyone should be surprised because things here aredifferent –this sad little corneralways has been made an exception. I interviewed a woman yesterday – BernadetteMcAliskey. Decades back when as the youngest MP ever she made In her maidenspeech in the House of Commons, she denounced the British government forlooking the other way while a corrupt, discriminating state was allowed to growand grow until it exploded into violence. So the different treatment of British soldiers from here doesn’tsurprise me.

There’s a terrible irony, too, in the concern for thesuffering of British troops butconsiderably less concern for those who were their victims. The Bloody Sunday families had to wait nearlyforty years for a “Sorry!” from David Cameron, let alone justice. Far fromhelping victims, the Britishgovernment blocked the release of vital documents for decades. It’s done thesame over the Dublin-Monaghan bombings. Or consider the victims in the Finucanefamily, who saw their husband and father riddled with bullets at the dinnertable by people acting with the support of the ‘security forces’. Their pursuit of truth continues, thelatest development featuring another slap in the face from Cameron, who refuses to hold aninquiry into the lawyer’s death. And there are dozens of other victims of stateviolence suffering and we never even hear about them.

Last Friday I saw George Clooney’s latest movie, The Ides of March. It features Clooneyas a US presidential candidate, and there’s one memorable moment where he talksabout how to solve the problem of terrorism. “Stop depending on their oil” he says. “Stop invading their countries. Then theterrorism will stop”.

Maybe Cameron and his cabinet should all be bought a ticketfor The Ides of March. With post-traumatic stress as with somuch else, prevention is the bestcure.

Liam Adams is innocent

2011-11-03T12:01:00.000Z

Liam Adams is innocent. He is, you know. The same as you’re innocent and I’minnocent and Uncle Tom Cobley and all are innocent, until proven guilty. But given the amount of coverage hiscase has been given, if someone today said to you “Liam Adams”, somewhere in the back of your mind thethought might very well tumble around “Oh yeah, he sexually abused hisdaughter, didn’t he?” That’s what highly-publicised charges of misconduct orcrime do: the charge becomes the verdict even before the case has beenheard. And don’t tell me peoplesuspend judgment until the decision is made in court regarding guilt orinnocence. Supposing it was you who were charged with the crime Liam Adams hasbeen charged with. Do you really believe there wouldn’t be ashift in the way your friends and acquaintances and work-colleagues regardedyou? It can’t be said often enough: Liam Adams and every single person chargedwith a crime is innocent, andstays innocent, until found guilty in a court of law. And sometimes not eventhen.

Behind the injustice of assumed-guilt lies anotherinjustice: the injustice of guilt by association. I’ve heard and read mediareports on Liam Adams’sextradition to the north several times in the course of the past few days, andin every case – in print and on air – the fact that he’s Gerry Adams’s brotheris included. What effect does thathave? It sets up in the public mind a poisonous equations: child abuse – LiamAdams – Gerry Adams. Somehow the charge against Liam Adams becomes a chargeagainst Gerry Adams.

You think this guilt-by-association idea – or in this caseblood-relationship – is a fantasy?In that case, why, when you apply for the role of, say, Prison Visitor, orwhatever it’s called now, are you asked to give your parents’s names, includingyour mother’s maiden name? Or why are there people who’ll tell you “PatFinucane – he had relatives that were in the IRA, so…” It’s in the blood, you’re related tosomeone who’s seen as criminal, soclearly you too must be criminal or at the very least have criminal tendencies,better watch out for that guy. It even happens to children. I’ve heard the occasional bone-brained teacher say in thestaffroom :“Oh, you have one of the Murphys/Smiths/McStravicks/Whatever this year – God pity you! I taught both the older brothers –they’re a bad lot”.

Could anything be more unjust than to blame people for whattheir relatives do? Or, as is happening in the Liam Adams case, to form a linkin the public mind which you hope will damage a political party.

The law may or may not be a ass. But the way some peoplemanipulate it is venomous.

How to make a bond-holder happy

2011-11-02T09:38:00.002Z

Maybe it's worked. Maybe electing Michael D Higgins has turned the south of Ireland's luck. Because today - and we all share in this rejoicing, north and south - the southern government has discovered an extra €3.6 billion it didn't know it had! Can you imagine how much money that is? No, neither can I but it's loads and loads. And loads.

You know how you feel when you find a pound coin or even a fiver down the back of the sofa - part of you is delighted, but another niggling part wants to know what the hell you were doing, stupid bloody eejit, letting your money slide out of your pocket like that, time to smarten up and look after your few shekels. That's what the south's government is feeling this morning. The government is naturally delighted but The Department of Finance is blaming the National Treasury Management Agency and the Central Statistics Office is lurking in the background trying to look innocent. The Minister for Finance, though, rises above all that. David Noonan says that "certainly a mistake took place, that to err is human". Well of course. Which of us - now come on, be honest - which of us hasn't mislaid the odd billion euro from time to time? I know I have.

And the odd thing is, this news about the billions down the sofa has come just the day before the south gets ready to pour €750 million into the Anglo-Irish bank. What's that - you thought the Anglo-Irish bank was dead, no longer functioning? Well it is really, but it's clearly going to get a good funeral. Mind you there are some hotheads and economic illiterates who say that this €750 million is to pay off senior bond-holders who invested in the bank with no guarantee attached, and that it's just like you or I might put money on a horse (or en election outcome) and find we'd backed the wrong nag. Except, of course, that the bond-holders will hold onto their money (that's why they're called bond-holders) whereas you or I could go and suck our thumb or kick the family cat, we made the bet and we bloody-well lost.

"But why?" you ask. Easy. The reason the tax-payers of the south are giving the bond-holders all that lovely lolly today is that Europe might think badly of Ireland if they didn't. Next you know you'd get a bad name. People on the international street would point you out and say "See that lot? When foreign investors buy bonds in one of their zombie banks, they haven't even the decency to take the lost money from their tax-payers' pockets and give it to the investors. A cheap, hopeless shower!" And the Irish in Europe would have to hang their heads and shuffle their feet. Our international reputation for being flaithiúil would be shot to pieces.

But the Irish government, God bless them, have made sure no such charge can be made. All day today they'll be shovelling the stuff into the zombie bank, until all €750 million has gone winging back into the pockets of the bond-holders. And I expect you know that next January, they'll be shovelling a bit over another billion euro in the same direction. For the same reasons.

Funny how things come together, isn't it? Ninety-one years ago yesterday, after torture, Kevin Barry was hanged in Mountjoy prison. His last words, according to the prison chaplain, were "Hold on and stick to the republic". I bet he'd be proud of the south's government today.

Wearing the poppy - it's your right, you know

2011-11-01T09:20:00.002Z

That was aninteresting news item on BBC TV last night, wasn’t it? A young woman who’d worn a small poppy-emblem on her shirt was told to remove it as, presumably, her employers wanteda political-emblems-free zone. She refused and won. Now all the Poundland (isthat what they’re called?) stores throughout the UK have given the OK towearing poppies.

Fair play.The young woman clearly feels something for the poppy, which represents thosewho gave their lives fighting in the British Army down the years. Some people think that deserveshonouring, which is why Maggie Ritchie, briefly the SDLP leader, will be wearing one. Myself, I won’t be. Never have and probably never will. But that’s because I have adifferent view of the British Army from Maggie Ritchie and the young woman fromPoundland. Different folks, different strokes. A question oftolerance, really.

But thenyou think about it and you start to see how far tolerance stretches. In the BBCin Belfast, except things take a dramatic turn this year, all presenters appearing on the TVscreen will be wearing a poppy. A few years ago Donna Traynor, I believe, expressed reluctance to wear one butafter a short sharp chat with management, normal service was resumed and sheappeared wearing it.

So to sumup, everyone in Poundland has the right to wear a poppy, everybody appearing on the BBCBelfast screen must wear a poppy.

And thenthere’s the question of the Easter Lily. It honours those who died in the causeof Irish freedom. That’s freedom from domination by Britain. And this is thepoint where I offer a bet. I’ll give you 10-1 that no presenter in the BBC thisEastertime will wear an Easter Lily. You can, you mustwear a poppy, which honours all those who served in the British Army fordecades and centuries; you cannot and you must not wear an Easter Lily (or anysimilar emblem), which honours those who fought and died in the search forIrish freedom.

I hate tosay it, boys and girls, but if you think it’s a long, long way to Tipperary, it’sa damned sight longer way toequality in this sad little north-east corner.

Michael D's victory speech - "Is feidir linn!" or what?

2011-10-31T11:03:00.002Z

I remember Barack Obama’s victory speech in Chicago threeyears ago. Bet you do too. Thevast crowd, the faces gleaming with expectation, the soaring oratory, the tearsof joy and pride. One of our own, the black people said, one of our own.Stirring stuff. There was more stirring stuff in Galway last night – EyreSquare crammed, flags and bands, cheers and tears, and of course Michael DHiggins’s soaring oratory. One of our own, the Galway people said, one of ourown.

Today, with just a year before the US’s presidentialelection, Obama is taking a pounding in the polls. I’m not totally surprised.“Yes we can!” stirred the blood, including my own, but I never quite understoodit. Can what? Beat Al Quaida? Rethink American foreign policy? Start feeding theone in six American children who go to bed hungry each night? What?

So let’s take a peek at Higgins’s victory speech. He refers to the “many valuable suggestions” of othercandidates “which I hope toinclude and encompass over the next seven years”.

He spoke of “an inclusive citizenship, which is aboutequality, participation and respect” and his “vision of a real republic wherelife and language, where ideals and experience, have the ring of authenticity,which we need now as we go forward”.

OK. There’s loads more but that’s enough. Once I hear apolitician say “going forward” I know s/he is doing the equivalent of HaroldWilson lighting his pipe during a TV interview – playing for time so he can think of the next thing to say.

Right. Those many valuable suggestions by other candidates that the President-elect is “hoping to include and encompass”. Which ones? And why did he not tell us they were valuable until now?

That “inclusive citizenship” thing. I'm anIrish citizen. How will the new President work to make sure I’m included in, for example, voting for his successor? Can I have an example as to how I will be treated withequality and encouraged to participate in (presumably political) life ‘downthere’? And is the “real republic” he has in mind the same one thatTone, Pearse and Connolly talked about? At a basic geographical level, how many counties will it have?

What does a republic “where life and language, where idealsand experience have the ring of authenticity” look like? Come to that, whatdoes the statement mean? Anything? Or is it another “Is feidir linn!” – “Yes wecan!”?

You're quite right - it's not the done thing to be critical of someonenewly elected, but frankly I don't give a damn for the done thing. Higgins himself would surelyagree that words must mean something. Emotionally I thought his victory speech, like Obama’s,was eloquent and passionate, and you could see why those Galway people were getting choked up. In terms of meaning his speech was mainly smoke and mirrors.

A letter from the Park (or near as dammit)

2011-10-29T13:55:00.002+01:00

Dear comrade,

Thank you for your letter of congratulation and you are indeed right, Ireland couldn't possibly have elected a more intelligent or cultured man than myself, or, let me add, one who has published more books. So, dear Comrade, this grey October morning, I unite myself with you in the solidarity of being over the moon. It was as you point out a singularly bruising contest but let me add that I maintained my dignity at all times, don't you know, even when that nightclub bouncer creature looked home and, as the cliché has it, dry. Happily most of the blows aimed at me went over my head and struck an opponent which was, as they say now, a bonus. And so today, I gird my loins (such as they are) for movement into the highest office in the land.

Which is as it should be. Mine, as you doubtless are aware, has been a life dedicated to things of the spirit rather than the flesh, to the cause of culture and not cute-hoorism. I am proud to number among my friends and, might I modestly add, admirers, people from all over the world, not least the gallant rebels of Nicaragua and the Middle East. When called on I was never found wanting in my willingness to speak out in favour of such oppressed people and have stood shoulder to shoulder or, where a box was not available, shoulder to thigh with these men - and women, of course women, indeed - men and women of courage in their search for those pearls beyond price, freedom and equality.

You may ask me what I mean by the word 'freedom' and 'equality, and while I am tempted to respond with the words of my good friend Kris Kristofferson, that freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, I choose rather to use the term as it was used in classical Roman times, that is, as an identifier, an innate feature of the citizen's rights in our new Republic. And let me add to that my complete and utter rejection of the term 'republic' which we sometimes hear prated by the rag-tag-and-bobtail ruffians of Belfast and Derry and south Armagh. These people have the temerity to use such sacred words as 'liberty' and 'unity', when in fact they have never studied Latin as I have, when they wouldn't know their in toto from their ad nauseam. And yet they dare to speak of liberty!

And while I find myself on that subject, under my Presidency there'll be rather more discrimination from now on about who is allowed to tramp over the lawns of Aras an Uachtarain. We will of course maintain our sympathy and solidarity with the oppressed unionist people of Northern Ireland, but if Jackie McDonald or anyone else thinks they're going to be down here deafening the neighbours with their singularly tuneless Lambeg Drums every Twelfth of July they've got another thing coming. Likewise with this presidential habit of continual tripping northwards, sadly a feature of my predecessor. I wish to imply no criticism or censure, but in these times of austerity we must preserve as much as possible of the national budget, not for northern jaunts but for things artistic, for the ethereal joy of sean-nos singing and the glory of the Saw Doctors in full flight. Besides, I once found myself standing beside the aforesaid Mr McDonald (Why incidentally are so many of these people called 'Jackie'?), and let me be honest, I found it an unnerving experience. So no more drum-pounding and parading about the Park, frightening the squirrels and deer every Twelfth. What guests I have will be a carefully selected number, including such sensitive musicians as the Saw Doctors and Bono, and even reaching out as far as the likes of Paul Brady.

Finally, people ask me what sort of presidency will mine be - what will be its distinguishing theme? I must tell them and tell you that if I were to sum it up in one word, that word would be 'Towards a New and Better Republic'. Yes indeed, that's five or six words, but let's not quibble, dear comrade. The point I want to emphasise is that I will help the Irish people rediscover their Irishness and together we will build a new republic, a new Jerusalem you might say, inclusive of all citizens who have documented evidence of an IQ within 10 points mine and who live within the boundaries of this 26-county state we feel proud to call Eire. Together we will imagine a new Ireland, a new age, in which men dare to dream dreams and where those who, like myself, have written and published books of poetry will be given their rightful place as na crionnaí or council members in my brave new tomorrow.

What more can I say, comrade? If it wasn't for this blasted knee I'd be doing a moon dance across the Aras ballroom this very instant. Vincemeros!

Yours in unflinching solidarity

Michael D Higgins

Uachtarán na hÉireann

The Irish Presidential election: five things we now know.

2011-10-28T15:20:00.005+01:00

1. Most of the southern media are a sad, craven lot. If you watched Tonight with Vincent Browne last night you'll have seen an example of how they react when confronted with their own shortcomings. Robert Ballagh told Michael Clifford what he thought and Clifford looked as though he'd swallowed, not a sip from his mug but his own tongue. Ballagh's criticism was that Clifford and Co. dealt with candidates' personalities and ignored the big issues. My own judgement is based on the fact that they spent several weeks standing on coffins pointing at Martin McGuinness and no time examining his record over the past seventeen years. If that's not bias with a capital B, then my cat has five legs.

2. McGuinness's entry transformed the contest. It sent a surge of electricity through it - the type surgeons produce when they put clamps on the patient's chest and shout "Stand clear!" When McGuinness announced his candidacy, what had been a half-dead affair was suddenly pulsating, brimming with life.

3. The Irish electorate shouldn't be let out without a grown-up. With three days to go, with the state on its economic knees having its softer parts squeezed tighter and ever tighter by Europe, the electorate decided it would be a wonderful idea to elect a life-long member of the party that banjaxed them.

4. Sean Gallagher didn't follow Martin McGuinness's career at Stormont. For decades in the north, the question of the 11+ examination was tossed around. It shouldn't be held, yes it should, maybe there's something to be said for it, no there's not, we've the highest A Level results in the world, we've the highest level of non-qualifieds, etc, etc etc. Then McGuinness was made Minister for Education and within weeks he'd abolished the ghastly examination. Vested interests screamed and still scream, but the ridiculous exam is gone and it ain't coming back. Over Gallagher's financial and Fianna Fail dealings, the southern media spent ten days and more making tut-tut and oh-dear and well-now noises. McGuinness went onto RTÉ's Frontline on Monday night and cut through the waffle. He confronted Gallagher with a single clear case of chicanery, Gallagher went ooer, recollection, envelope, I did, I didn't, where can I implode, please? I bet Gallagher wishes he'd paid more attention to how Martin McGuinness the politician works.

5. Michael D Higgins owes his place in the Phoenix Park to McGuinness's intervention. The Labour party is denying it already but the facts speak for themselves. On 24 October - three days before election day - paddypower bookies had Sean Gallagher at 1/4 and Michael D Higgins at 5/2. Three days before. There was a giant gap between them on the three consecutive polls. McGuinness confronted Gallagher about that cheque and within 48 hours, all bets were off, the gap vanished and Higgins was home. Today, it's a formality - Michael D Higgins will be the ninth President of Ireland.

Why did McGuinness do it? Well, partly to enhance his party's standing in the eyes of the electorate. No politician acts without an eye to the effect on voters. But also because that's the kind of man McGuinness is. When he sees something that he believes needs changing, he applies all his formidable power to it - whether that's as an IRA leader, a Minister for Education, a Deputy First Minister or a Presidential candidate. He has indeed done the state some service. Granted, we're back 21 years with an over-the-hill politician being sent to the Park; but think what nearly happened - seven years of Gallagher representing Ireland. Phew - close one, that.

Try to avoid tabloid-think, Terry

2011-10-27T11:11:00.000+01:00

Terry Spence of the Police Federation

Since the chances are you're not a total fool, you'll know that the performance of the southern media - not all but a large section - has been warped to a shameful degree during this election. The fact that they put on a gentlemanly/ladylike act by having an election moratorium for the day or half-day before the polls open should deceive no one. It's the posturing of hypocrites. That said, you'll get people that believe they weren't warped enough. Yesterday's Indo had a column lambasting RTÉ for being too gentle in their treatment of Martin McGuinness. I'm going to have to hide that last sentence from our cat in case he takes a seizure.

But let's park the election and the Indo, and turn our thoughts to Terry Spence. He's the chairman of the Police Federation here and he's all over the front of the News Letter this morning, calling for the withdrawal of benefits from parents of children/teenagers who riot. I was on the BBC's Stephen Nolan show this morning with him and you could have got a more reasoned discussion out of Frank Spencer. If Terry Spence's unspoken assumption that rioting and poverty are linked is true, would we not be better to treat poverty rather than cut benefits? Pass. Is cutting the family's benefits not like the teacher who punishes everyone in the class because one person did something wrong? Pass. Is there any connection between rioting and the coat-trailing of an anti-Catholic organisation, to wit the Orange Order, in places where it's not wanted? Pass. What parent ever created by God was able to control their child/teenager's actions all day and all of the night? Pass. Wouldn't withdrawing benefits encourage other teenagers in the family to be hung for sheep rather than lambs and join the rioting as well? Pass.

People like Frank Spen - oops, Terry Spence, should confine their attention to seeing that the police service here, with its ghastly record over the past forty years, conduct themselves in a manner that'll win public trust on all sides. They should also resist the temptation to mouth populist platitudes - "Hit them in their pockets!" "I blame the parents!" Leave that to the tabloid rags on both sides of the border.

What Hugh says happened, what Sean told Rachel

2011-10-26T12:25:00.000+01:00

Hugh Morgan press release:

I wish to clarify and set therecord straight in relation to the dealings I had with Sean Gallagher whichresulted in my attendance at a Fianna Fail fundraiser in the Crown Plaza Hotel,Dundalk, on the 1st July 2008.

Sean Gallagher , who I hadnever met previous to this, contacted me by phone. He first phoned me on the6th June 2008 and invited me to attend the above fundraiser. In the course ofthe call he requested a donation of €5,000.00 for Fianna Fail. He advised methat this type of fundraising would replace the annual Galway Tent Fundraiser.In return for the €5,000.00 donation I was promised a private audience with theTaoiseach and I would get a photograph taken with him.

He told me that the Taoiseachwould give an up-date on the economy in the South which in his words was'beginning to wobble'

On the 9th June he againphoned me to confirm my attendance . I confirmed that I would attend and wasprepared to give the donation he requested. He left two mobile phone numbersfor me to contact him on these numbers are 0878293028 and 0879763122.

On the 27th June SeanGallagher visited my business premises at Killean, County Armagh. I wrote acheque for €5,000.00 and gave it to him personally. The cheque number is 13014.I still have the stub of the cheque , This payment is declared in my Companyaccounts and was cleared through my bank on the 1st July 2008.

I then attended thefundraiser which was also attended by other businessmen from South Armagh,North Louth and across the Northeast. Sean Gallagher greeted the guests onarrival and directed us to the room at the top of the Hotel where thefundraiser was held.

Brian Cowen gave a speech onthe economy and predicted a soft landing. At the end of the night Sean Gallagherintroduced me to Brian Cowen and facilitated a photograph to be taken of myselfand him. Approximately one week later Sean Gallagher called back to my businessand gave me the photograph.

It is a fact thatapproximately fourteen years ago I was convicted of tax evasion in relation tofuel smuggling in Northern Ireland. As a consequence to that, I have repaid theExchequer and paid a substantial fine. I was never investigated by CAB or anyother agency in the Republic.

Since that time I havedeveloped a successful international business known as Morgan Fuels.

I employ over eighty peoplein Ireland ,both North and South. I have business interests in Ireland ,Britain and Europe and the Morgan Fuel card can be used up to 4,000 servicestations in fourteen countries across Europe.I am also the official sponsor ofthe Armagh County teams of the GAA.

Sean Gallagher interview with Rachael English on RTÉ’s MorningIreland on

20/10/2011:

Gallagher: Iwas asked by Fianna Fail Headquarters of which I was a party member at the timein 2008 which is no secret if I would mention it to local business people whichI did.

English: Soyou rang people up and invited them?

Gallagher: No,people that I met, I explained that there was this event coming up. I have tomake it very clear, I sought no money, I received no money from anybody, thatwas dealt with by Headquarters Fianna Fail Headquarters. I also want to make itvery clear that while I attended the event I was not asked for money, I made nocontribution myself in either a personal capacity or as a corporate donationeither before the event, during the event, or after the event.

English: Howmany people did you invite?

Gallagher: Ithink I mentioned to possibly three or four people, and I have no idea to thisday whether or not they made a donation whatsoever.

English: Doesthis not though invite further scepticism about your links with Fianna Fail?

Gallagher: WellI think that has been well trashed out and it's an ongoing issue that keepscoming up. I mean I have made it clear numerous times that I was involved inFianna Fail in 2007, 2008 and for a short period in 2009.

Sean Gallagher's defective memory

2011-10-26T09:45:00.001+01:00

Well. This election was dull, dull, dull. Until, that is,one Martin McGuinness announced that he was running. Then there was a sharp intake ofbreath in Dublin 4 and the media went into frenzy mode. This graduallydiminished to a lower, near-tedium level (“These bloody debates, I’ve had abellyful”) until Monday night when once again, a move by Martin McGuinnessraised the temperature sky-high and all bets were off. Or at least those onSean Gallagher the non-Fianna Fail candidate.

The Gallagher case is full of more zig-zags than a BertieAhern news conference but a number of things do stand out.

1. Gallagher has refused to answer questions aboutthe €83,000 loan he took from his own company. The law says you can take aloan of 10% from your own company.Gallagher took a loan of 70% and so clearly breached the law, which could havelanded him in jail. He says it was all a misunderstanding.

2. In 2001, Louth Enterprise Board put a loan of over €25,000 into a firm co-ownedby Gallagher. In 2004 the LouthBoard came looking for its money but in the meantime Gallagher’s firm hadchanged its name and claimed its right to pay back nothing. After a legaldispute, Gallagher’s firm paid back some but not all of the money. Nobody knows how much. Or little.

3. “I sought no money. I received no money fromanybody” – Sean Gallagher during Monday’s debate.

4. “It’s very feasible that if I did deliver to his(Hugh Morgan’s) premises a photograph, he may well have given me acheque”. – Sean Gallagher on RTÉyesterday.

5. “I think I mentioned it to possibly three orfour people, and I have no idea to this day whether or not they made adonation”. – Sean Gallagher on RTÉ, 20^th October.

Sound familiar? Mmm. Quite. So what now?

Well, either the electorate in the south will awaken from thedeep slumber into which they’d fallen and smell not so much the coffee as thestink of ancient Fianna Fail fish and tell Gallagher on Thursday to getlost. In which case we’ll be backwhere we started about 21 years ago, when the Áras was a rest home for clapped-outpoliticians. Or the awakening will have come too late for enough drowsy votersand Sean Gallagher, who if we’re to believe reports has contradicted himself ona number of occasions (what weethicists sometimes refer to as “lying”), who has been a Fianna Fail man all his adult life and whoacted, it seems, in the proud tradition if not the exact practice of the GalwayTent, will lead the south of Ireland for the next seven years.

Finally, a word or two about the duties of MartinMcGuinness. In the media’s constant questioning of him over severalcarefully-selected but unsolved killings which the police and the gardaihaven’t cracked, it’s clear they expect McGuinness to do this work for them –bring those responsible to justice. McGuinness the politician should becomeMcGuinness the policeman. So whatare we paying the police and gardaí for?

Plus. For ten days or so, the media had the story listedunder No 1 above. But while therewere vague rumblings, no outcry was heard. It wasn’t until Monday night andMcGuinness’s questions to Gallagher that the media suddenly woke up and beganshouting their heads off about Gallagher’s odd business practices. So inaddition to policeman/detective, it appears McGuinness must add the work ofbeing the media’s alarm clock.

So that’s detective, alarm clock and politician, all rolledinto one man. Sounds to me like a multi-talented person we could usefully electto the Áras.

Martin and Sean and that awkward envelope

2011-10-25T09:50:00.004+01:00

Well – that was adebate. No need for the strong coffee or smelling salts to keep the eyes openuntil the end of RTÉ’s Frontline programme with Pat Kenny. How did they do?

1. Higgins: he kept his head down for the mostpart, only raising it to go on about ‘a new Ireland’ and imagination and thearts and how he wouldn’t say anything about Denis O’Brien other than that hewouldn’t be on his list. At times he looked old (nothing wrong with that) butalso a bit tired. Or maybe it was bored. Hands fidgety, eyes blinking a littlemore than usual. He did OK.

2. Dana: continued herloveable-little-girl-from-Derry bit, which is of course her strongest suit. Andthat she’d “stand with the people”, which was fair enough. The family row thingdidn’t get raised so she did OK.

3. David Norris: he had a good night. At times hetried to force his way into the conversation and the braying note asserteditself and you – well, I – remembered what a pain in the bum he can be when heplays, is the toff. But like a team with nothing to lose, he performed in arelaxed and at times witty way. If he’d had outings like that every time hecame on TV, the story would be different.

4. Mary Davis: something of the same relaxation wasto be seen in her responses, although she got a wee bit snarled up in thatquestion about Denis O’Brien being on her committee. I’m not totally clear on the Mary-Denis thing but I guessfrom last night that Denis is/was one of her backers.

5. Gay Mitchell: cheesh. And double-cheesh.Something in Gay’s clockwork has gone seriously wrong over the past few weeks,and there were bits of his inner machinery pinging all over the studio at onepoint. It’s real baffler – he’sactually a hard worker, I’m told, and some of the points he made last night andother nights were sound ones. But he just came across as a bit, um, hysterical.Null points, I’m afraid, Gay.

6. Martin McGuinness: his best debate of thecampaign by a country mile. His most impressive feat was to take over PatKenny’s role – he was the one that asked the questions of Sean Gallagher. PatKenny at one point tried to convert some reference to a knock on the door intoknocks on the door in the north, but maybe half-way he realized oops, the 5o’clock knock thing was a loyalist gang speciality rather than a republican one,and pulled back. McGuinness’s two best bits were his ‘Just answer the question,Sean’ as poor old Gallagher got panicky and started talking about being given,of all things, an envelope; and the bit where he responded to the young woman who was atypical you-up-there-should-stay-up-there Southerner. If he’d paid her (in anenvelope, of course) he couldn’t have asked for a better chance to bat thepartitionist ball clean out of the studio, over Dublin and into every home inthe country.

7. Sean Gallagher: near-total disaster. I say nearbecause most of the time he did manage to sound calm, in a kind of – and I saythis with no insult to our four-legged friends – bovine way. Which was goodthinking, except that the occasion called for some return fire which he appearednot to have. There was an effort to make The Man With The Envelope into a fuelsmuggler and mate of Gerry Adams, but Kenny smelt blood and whacked in with wanting to know why Gallagherhad invited such a miscreant to a FF-er banquet.

Will McGuinness’s man-with-envelope story sink Sean G? It could well do, and I’d not be surprised if tired MDHiggins didn’t break into an elfin dance of joy, once the missus pulled thecurtains last night. The bookies think Higgins will win and the bookies are rarelywrong. And McGuinness will now have evidence of that leadership quality he saidhe brought to his presidential bid. Who’s the person everyone’s talking aboutthis morning? Gallagher, and he must wish to God they weren’t. Who’s the otherperson on everyone’s lips? McGuinness, the man with the awkward question thatchanged the whole shape of the presidential race. And I’ll bet there was theodd roar of approval north of the border when he reminded Dublin 4 that Derry, Antrim, Down, Tyrone,Fermanagh, Armagh are as Irish as Cork, Dublin and any other county on theisland

It should be an interesting couple of days ahead.