A divided society? You betcha

Peter Robinson figures that Catholic schools are standing between us and an integrated society.  Sorry, Peter, there’s more to it than that. A lot more.

Take your daughter. Let’s assume she’s middle-class – been to university, has a degree, is working maybe as a teacher or a doctor or an accountant. And she announces she’s getting married to this chap. He works for the local council. He’s a bin-collector.   Your reaction? Right, none too ecstatic. That’s because Daughter has breached the line, the very very firm line, between middle-class and working class. In fact, if you had to choose between a chap who kicks with the other religious foot and one who kicks with the other class foot, nine times out of ten I bet you’d choose the religious foot difference.

I thought about this as I went for a walk around lunchtime today. It’s along the edge of Belfast Lough and in the sunshine, people appeared good-humoured as they walked along and chatted or called their dogs or just leaned on the rail, looking out onto the Lough and beyond, in the distance, Scotland. But while people were talking to those they’d arrived with, not a word was exchanged with those they met on their walk. Dozens of people, passing within inches of each other, not even establishing eye-contact let alone communication. And I was the same. Myself and the present Mrs Collins talked like billy-o to each other but we didn’t crack the invisible wall between us and all the other walkers.

After we’d finished the walk we went home. To suburbia. That’s the place where people keep themselves to themselves. I’ve been there thirty years now and while I know the names of most of my immediate neighbours, don’t ask me what they’re children are called or what they’re doing. And don’t ask me anything, once we leave the cul-de-sac. In short, there are people into whose living-room I could literally throw a stone and I don’t know who they are. And they don’t know who I am.

I know, I know. You don’t want to have people crowding in on you, living in your pocket or whatever the phrase is. But there’s something weird and sad about a society that organizes itself so that people pass each other by, live squeezed up against each other, and yet know and care next to nothing about each other.  There must be a better way.  Catholics and Protestants not meeting? You’re mistaking a clump of whin bushes for the forest, Peter. 

Put em up or else...

Switch on your TV and you can’t miss it.  Since last week every presenter who inserts him or herself into the glass rectangle in the corner of our living-rooms has the crimson symbol pinned in place. It’s poppy-time again.

Our most famous poppy-wearer – and for a brief time, non-poppy-wearer – was/is of course Donna Traynor.  Thinking it was a woman’s right to choose, the BBC Northern Ireland presenter chose not to wear a poppy. It didn’t last long. Quiet management words were inserted in Donna’s ear and today the poppy is attached to her breast as to every other screen-visible BBC breast. It may not be always worn with pride but it’s worn without demur. Some say Donna was rescued from a false consciousness about the poppy; others that she was she told to either wear it or take a hike.

Some awful guff has been been written about people like her who dislike the idea of poppy-wearing. In the south,  the official line is that the state was guilty of a historic injustice by failing to honour those Irishmen who gave their lives in the two world wars and we must now do all we can to redress that.  In the north, unionist politicians like David McNarry tell us we owe a debt:

“Locally we also remember the bravery and sacrifice of the men and women of the Regular Army, the Ulster Defence Regiment, the RUC and PSNI who risked their lives to protect this community from anarchy and who are still engaged to this day in the fight against terrorism. Supporting the Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal and wearing the Poppy with Pride is a small token of our thanks and gratitude and a public way of saying ‘We will remember them’.”

Succinctly put, David. Firstly, we’re being urged to honour ‘the men and women of the Regular Army’ – that is,  of the British Regular Army, those Irish people who became part of the British Army and fought with it. Secondly we’re told to honour the UDR, the RUC and the PSNI.

I know it’ll come as a shock to David and others like him, but  those who believe in Irish independence from Britain have a logical difficulty with honouring those who fought world wars in the ranks of the British Army, an army that for decades and centuries has enforced British rule in Ireland.  And it’ll come as an equal shock to the Dublin 4ers to discover that those who believe in Irish independence as well as civil rights have a difficulty honouring the UDR and the RUC, who for decades were part of a system that ruthlessly repressed one-third of the north’s population.

The McNarry/Dublin 4 strategy is to paint those who disagree with them as recidivists, unreconstructed romantics who nurse a psychopathic streak. George Bush would have liked them: if you’re not for us you’re against us, and so a friend of murder.

Meanwhile,  on Donna’s breast the poppy sprouts, year after year.  The organisation she works for prides itself on its tradition of even-handedness and balance. Except, of course, you try to resist the party line. Then it’s ‘Get back on song or there’s the door’.

Will I tell you something really shocking? Not a single liberal voice in our society has been raised to denounce such Stalinist treatment.

Why did Gerry Bradley die?

Why did Gerry Bradley die? The 56-year-old ex-IRA man was found dead in his car at Carrickfergus Marina yesterday. He’d been prominent in the IRA during the 1980s and 1990s; last year the story of his involvement, told to VO columnist Brian Feeney, was published. Today Feeney is reported as saying Bradley may have seen the Brendan Hughes programme on TV a couple of nights ago, attacking the Sinn Féin leadership. He may then have felt the whole IRA campaign had been for nothing and taken his life. That’s a double or is it triple set of hypotheticals. If he saw the programme he may have thought X and Y, and if he thought X and Y he may as a result have taken his life. The truth is, nobody knows why Gerry Bradley died.

Can we say then why he got Feeney to write the book about his time in the IRA? He’s reported as saying ‘To put on record the truth of life in the IRA, before I die’. If that was his motivation, it was different from that of Eamon Collins (no relation), another ex-IRA man whose account of his exploits appeared in print before his death. I knew Eamon fairly well: he was a former mature student of mine at the University of Ulster, and at one point he asked me to help him write the account of his IRA experiences. I declined, someone else took him up on it and A Killing Rage sold well. What was Eamon’s motivation for wanting to get into print? Because, he told me, he saw no reason why ‘some people should get everything ‘ and he should get nothing. Put bluntly, Eamon was hungry for fame and wealth. It’s a common condition.

Let’s try a third question, then: why do people want to read about IRA exploits? That’s easy: because they like to experience violence at a safe remove. You could call it violence pornography or paramilitary voyeurism, but by whatever name there’s something of it in all of us and it’s a sad, shameful urge. But if longing to peek through the curtains and thrill to violence and death is depraved, what word would you use for those people who arrange for us to indulge our warped tastes?

Paedophile Priest: it's easier to say than 'paedophile clergyman', isn't it?

Well, better late than never. Some slightly-less-lazy hack in the VO came up with the news yesterday that the Free Presbyterian Church didn’t bother respond to a Department of Health audit into child protection. That’s the Free Presbyterian Church whose former head, one Ian Paisley, went all the way to Scotland to protest the Pope’s failure to respond properly to child abuse. Mind you, the Health Department audit took place in 2006, but sure you can’t go rushing the reporting of such things. Today’s VO reports Dr Margaret Kennedy, who heads up Ministers and Clergy Sex Abuse Survivors, as saying “The survivors who contact us come from all denominations. Abuse is not just confined to the Catholic church”.

If you check an earlier blog, you’ll find I report an occasion when I was verbally mugged by three Protestant clergymen. It happened afer I had asked a question about sexual abuse among Protestant clergy on a UTV programme hosted by the late Jim Dougal. The irate pastors informed me with some force that child sexual abuse by clergy was unique to Catholicism and came from the celibacy ruling in that Church. When I asked for evidence to support this claim, I was told there was no need for research, they drew on their experience.

So now the wall of silence has been broken by Dr Kennedy. Why it couldn’t have been broken by an enterprising journalist years ago comes down to two factors: laziness and fear. If you’re lazy, it’s easier to run after the main story, which is that the Catholic Church is heaving with paedophile priests and here’s another case. If you’re cowardly, it’s clever to go with the anti-Catholic clergy flow. Do otherwise and people may begin to think you’re somehow sympathetic to preying priests.

So is there evidence that Catholic clergy abuse children more than their Protestant counterparts? It’s extremely difficult to get data in Britain – the NSPCC has done a survey but it’s vague on the extent to which Protestant Churches suffer from the same horrors as the Catholic Church. In the US, things are much clearer.

Since 1950, an average of 228 credible accusations of child sexual abuse per year have been brought against Catholic clergy. The nearest comparison is provided by the three insurance companies that cover 165,000 Protestant churches. They typically receive 260 reports every year of children being sexually abused by Protestant clergy or other staff. In short, in the US there are on average 32 more cases of child sexual abuse in the Protestant churches than in the Catholic. Professor Philip Jenkins, a respected religion and history scholar from Pennsylvania State University – and a non-Catholic – has studied church abuse problems for twenty years. He’s found that among Catholic clergy in the US, between .2% and 1.7% of Catholic priests are paedophiles. The figure among the Protestant clergy in the US is between 2 and 3 per cent. “There is no plausible evidence that Catholic priests are gangs of sexual predators, as they are being portrayed” Professor Jenkins says.

There’s no reason to believe things are radically different on this side of the Atlantic. Which means that for the last ten years or so, journalists in Britain and Ireland have been digging vigorously in one corner of the garden, crying out in horror as the latest skeleton is dug up. Now let’s see them tackle the rest of the garden with equal vigour, especially when there are indications even greater horrors await them.

I said earlier that the failure to investigate Protestant churches and paedophilia was the product of laziness and/or fear. There’s actually a third reason, and one the Rev Ian Paisley would know something of: good old-fashioned anti-Catholicism.

The most frightening sound in the world: silence.

We all talk too much. You, me, everyone. Watch people in the street or on a bus, in a restaurant or in a theatre interval: yap yap yappety-yap. What are they saying? What is so important that they say it with such intensity? As for politicians, whether in or out of the Assembly/Dail/Parliament: besides being very tedious, they rarely shut up, even though so much of what they say, as the Beatles put it, is meaningless.

Which is one reason I found the BBC2 programme The Big Silence so interesting. (If you haven’t seen it yet, tune in to BBC2 on Friday at 9.00 pm and you’ll get the second in the series of three.) It’s a simple idea: five people spend eight days in silence – with a daily break for a chat with a sort of mentor - at a Jesuit retreat house. The five are not particularly religious people and there’s no intention (as far as I can tell) to win them to Christianity, let alone Catholicism. But we watch and learn as these people with busy lives try to cope without the comforting distractions of modern life – TV, the internet, mobile phones, radio, newspapers. Even after a single day, the effect is striking: disorientation, self-questioning, tears.

So is it that, in silence, we find some kind of wisdom? Or is it, as one young woman in the group said, we’re ‘bored out of our tits’? Certainly plunging into an ocean of silence, even for a matter of days, looks like having a profound effect on these people. In the silence they’re faced, like it or not, with the meaning (or meaninglessness) of their lives.

So listen – a modest proposal. Given that we’ve all sorts of Weeks – No Smoking Week, Poetry Week, Breast Cancer Awareness Week - why not have a Big Silence Week? Seven days when everybody, with obvious exceptions like vital emergency services, switched off their phones, unplugged the TV and the internet, stopped talking. If the BBC2 programme is anything to go by, the effect on how we run our society and our lives would be radical. Things assumed to be vitally important would shrink, things buried or ignored would rise up and demand attention.

Unfortunately, I know it’ll never happen. The one thing we human beings are terrified of is looking inside ourselves. Because if we did, we’d have to revolutionize not just ourselves but the society in which we live.

Sri Lanka, stooping down low and cultural cringe

It’s a dreary, damp October afternoon as I write this. If I raise my rear-end six inches from the chair I can see the back garden – an overgrown tree, a badly-mowed lawn, in the distance Carrickfergus Castle and beyond that a grey strip of Belfast Lough. Bleak. So I turn my gaze back to the room and pick up a Ph D thesis I’ve been asked to read. It’s about teaching English literature in Sri Lanka and I soon discover that, in Sri Lanka, they teach Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Matilda’.

Mmm. On the face of it, a heroic and worthwhile enterprise – taking two quintessentially English poets and making their work available to pupils on the other side of the globe. A bit like exporting cricket to India or Pakistan or the West Indies. Doing the locals a favour through a precious import. Yes, Tennyson’s poem has nothing to do with the history of Sri Lanka, and Belloc’s bourgeois tale of false alarms for London’s fire brigades is a million emotional miles from Sri Lankan society. But both poems are put together wonderfully well and form a noble export one-third of the way round the world.

Yes, except that, along with admiration for the rhythm and the playful tone and all the rest of it, Sri Lankans are ingesting a heavy dose of cultural cringe. That’s the imperial medicine which convinces you your experience, the experience of your community, the art and song and literature of your country are all, well, really second rate. Maybe fifth-rate, even. Certainly more than a bit embarrassing, when set alongside the perfection of English artistry, as seen in these two poems. It’s a centuries-old trick. Load people with enough bales from the golden harvest of English literature and they’ll end up thanking the coloniser for sharing a superior culture and way of living.

My old schoolmate Seamus Heaney has his limitations but he did us all – all Irish people – at least one very big favour. Through his poetry, he’s made it possible for people who’ve spent a lifetime hiding that they came from the bogs of Ireland to celebrate that fact, even glory in their uniqueness.

It’s nearly fifty years since Heaney began writing about the rural life of South Derry. Today, most Irish nationalists north and south have learnt how to crawl out from under the suffocating weight of Mother Britain’s superiority, in literature and in other areas of life. Most Irish unionists, alas, still have some way to go.

Royal leg-up

Great news! What with funding for the arts being cut, promised hospitals being reneged on, jobs being eliminated all the way to the horizon - hooray! QE2 and her ever-faithful husband are among us! Well not quite among us but up at Hillsborough with Owen Paterson and down at UTV with Frank Mitchell yesterday. Frank showed her his weather secrets and the various backdrops he could create for her to stand in front of - Buckingham Palace, the GPO in Dublin, that kind of thing - and QE2 said to Frank, quick as a flash ‘You could take me anywhere in the world’. Well! Frank nearly passed out with pleasure. ‘Such a witty thing to say!’ he’s reported as gasping. Your OBE is in the post, Frank.

And as if that weren’t enough, blimey, what do I read today on the BBC website? She’s COMING BACK for the annual Maundy Service! Jeepers – is there any end to the morale boosts this woman can deliver?... No please, don’t show your ignorance by asking what a Maundy Service is. It’s a Church of England/Church of Ireland thing that happens on what the rest of us would call Holy Thursday. QE2 comes into the church – this year it’ll be in (Halleluia and Begorrah!) St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral in Armagh and she’ll be giving out 82 ‘traditional Maundy purses’. Not to smelly beggars from the street or anything - no, these’ll go to 82 activists in Church and community. And it’ll be 82 because QE2 is in her 82nd year.

So now aren’t you pleased? Royal jam today AND royal jam tomorrow! Apparently the British monarch used to do a bit of foot-washing as well as purse-giving-out (washing other people’s feet, not his own – the man who squeezes the royal toothpaste ablutes the royal feet as well) but they stopped the podiatry stuff back in the 16th century. Still, QE2 is a kind of saviour as well, isn’t she? Her visits are timed to save us from gloomy thoughts about jobs and food on the table and how in the name of God we’ll manage. Granted, the QE2-Jesus parallel gets a bit harder to maintain, placed beside Jesus’s command to give, not Maundy purses but all you have to the poor. Awkward, because QE2 is worth, oh, £200m, and if she gave all that to the poor, they’d only spend it on drink. But let’s be honest: the lift that hard-working woman has given us one and all, well, it’s just a pearl beyond price. I do hope those people south of the border get to hear. They’re in even worse financial shape than we are, so a QE2 visit would be received with even louder and more unanimous shouts of joy. Wouldn’t it?