Running and cogitating

Well phew. And pant and gasp. Yesterday I did the Omagh Half-Marathon on behalf of Trócaire ( and thanks yet again to the generous sponsors of my run, we smashed the £1000 target and are currently sitting around £1750. If you haven’t donated and would like to, you can do it at  http://www.trocaire.org/sponsor-me/judejcollins/omagh-half-marathon .

What was it like? Long. And painful. I gather there’s a torture technique, used in places like Iraq, which involve slapping hard on the soles of the victim’s feet. That’s what it was like. There must be an answer in terms of cushioning your ageing soles against ground-smack. If you know tell me, or my running career just did its swan-song yesterday. 

This morning I was on BBC Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster’s ‘Sunday Sequence’ with Andrew Dougal, CEO of NI Chest Heart and Stroke.  Appropriately enough we were discussing - no, not torture - charities and their place in our society. Andrew naturally argued the case for them and the good they do. Who could quarrel with that? Seeing a need and responding to it goes back to the Good Samaritan. But - and this was what I argued - this often opens the doors for government to cut back on funding for the area in question. What does it say about a society when it spends billions on weapons of death and leaves the purchase of cancer-treatment equipment to local generosity? Reverse it for a year and let’s see. Have the government pump money directly into hospital equipment/addressing poverty and have a Defence-Forces-in Need day, where celebs can dance and sing and dress up, and the donations be passed on to the Defence Forces. Or does our society believe in giving death-dealing equipment more support than it does life-giving? 

What we didn’t get round to discussing - and I wish we had - was the philanthropy of massively rich individuals. In one sense as well as being fashionable in the US of late,  it’s a good thing; in another it’s a display of power, of the loaded one’s pity for unfortunates not as rich as him/herself. Doing good, as someone once said, “with thunderous stealth”. With probably some tax advantage lurking in the shrubbery.  Until governments decide to arrange long-term policies so that the injustice at the heart of these matters at home and abroad are addressed, we'll be saving one beaten-up beggar and there'll be another ten thousand waiting down the line. 

We see people’s principles, George Bernard Shaw said, not by what they profess but how they live their lives. If the same goes for societies, the Western World has some pretty ghastly principles.  

President Obama: should we listen but not see?

I sometimes have to struggle to stop myself going with the more-pleasing vision of things,  rather than accept the sadly-more-sour reality. An example? I found myself moved when Barack Obama made his victory speech after being elected president for the first time. That huge crowd, those Afro-Americans in tears, the great hope of a bright new day after the bumbling and bellicose Bush.  I was glad, too, to see him win out over Mitt Plastic-man Romney. In his second and final term, I thought, Obama'll come through. He'll live up to that bit about talking to one's enemies rather than resorting to force against them. 

And today I feel myself being nudged towards the more-pleasing vision. The American president tells us  "The people of Northern Ireland and their leaders have travelled a great distance over the past fifteen years. Step by step, they have traded bullets for ballots, destruction and division for dialogue and institutions, and pointed the way toward a shared future for all...On behalf of the American people, I salute the people and leaders of Northern Ireland and the model they have given to others struggling toward peace and reconciliation around the world."

Gives you a warm glow, doesn't it? The man who overcame all the odds to become American President, supporting us in our peace-and-reconciliation efforts. A warm glow providing, that is,  you don't look at Obama's drone-work in Pakistan. No, not home-work, drone-work.  There, well over 3,000 people have been killed during his time in office. The claim is that the drone-attacks are taking out  (aka killing) the bad guys - al qaeda activists. There's truth in this. There's also the awkward fact that if a drone demolishes a house containing an al qaeda activist and at the same time demolishes a house next door containing, say,  six adult males who are leading peaceful lives,  those six adult males are counted as al quaeda activists. This gets round the tedious notion of having to talk about drones doing "collateral damage". Mind you, we're still left with a lot of dead women and children but hey, nobody's perfect.

So that's the reality. The man who's praising us for our drive towards peace and reconciliation, and promising his support and that of his country as we do so, is in charge of a foreign policy that kills people in their thousands, many of them innocent people, and then lies about what's been done. This man is also ultimately responsible for Guantanamo Bay,  a torture centre which he promised he would close if elected. 

I know the world of politics and power is a rough old world, but I think there's a strong stench of hypocrisy comes with high words from a man who presides over so much continuing pain and death, much of it inflicted on innocent people. And I know T S Eliot said humankind cannot bear too much reality. But sometimes you have to grit your teeth and see the world as it is. Fifteen years ago a peace process was put together, with considerable American help.  It looks as if the Yanks were implementing a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do policy. 

Alan Shatter, his wife and some gardaí

The south’s Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, has a soft voice and an ego as big as the Ritz. When four representatives of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors ( AGSI) walked out on him at their conference, he said he was glad he hadn’t brought his wife, presumably since she was even more sensitive to the “discourtesy” of the garda representatives than he is.

AGSI president Tim Galvin sees things a bit differently. With more than a hundred garda stations closed last month, he said to Shatter: “You told us the lack of consultation in relation to the first series of closures would not be repeated and that we would be updated and kept informed. Twelve months on nothing has changed. Your words were lies”.

And wouldn’t you know it: power sucks up to power. Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan has expressed his outrage at the “discourtesty” to Shatter and there’s talk of tough disciplining of the four representatives who walked out. 

All this bluster, of course, is to put the frighteners on the upcoming conference of rank-and-file gardaí who are traditionally more militant than the AGSI. We can only pray that they tell Shatter where to put his umbrage.

Of starfish, masochism and a final call

OK people. Der Tag minus 2 and counting. Forty-eight hours from now will find me girding what are left of my loins and heading towards my native town of Omagh. Shortly after getting there I will force my ageing body into two hours of serious pain which will end either with a discreet funeral (no flowers please) or my form collapsed in a corner of Omagh Leisure Centre sucking on a free bottle of Lucozade and trying not to slip into unconsciousness.

Either way it'll all be in, as they say, a good cause. I'm indulging in this masochism to raise some money for Trocaire, who do sterling work in the developing world. OK, OK, I know - it's all only scratching the surface of things, governments should be driving global reform, trade should be organised so that charities to developing countries become superfluous. But they aren't and it isn't.

It's like the man who came on this young boy on the beach.  There are hundreds of starfish hpelessly stranded in the sand and he's picking them up one by slow one and throwing them back in the water. The man says "I can see you've a kind heart but you do realise  there are thousands, maybe millions of these stranded starfish all along the coastline? What you're doing will really make no difference".  The kid picks up another starfish and lobs it back into the sea before replying: "Well, it made a difference to that one".

So please, please, PLEASE click your way to the donation site. You'll see my goal is £1000 - not a lot of starfish there - and I'm still that bit short of it. If you don't want to think of your contribution as pushing me over the line, think of it as pushing me over a cliff. OK? But. Just. Do. It. You'll be literally saving/making lives that, without you, would struggle to get through another day.

The site is   http://www.trocaire.org/sponsor-me/judejcollins/omagh-half-marathon

Time is running out. I'm in your hands.

I'm doing this for you. Honestly.

It’s a clenched-teeth laugh, the way politicians try to dress up self-interest as selflessness/ sacrifice in the party’s/country’s interests/ a decision taken with a considerable degree of reluctance.

Take David Milliband. He’s quitting British politics and going to the US.  His wife is American, both his children were born in America. But nice young(ish) David still makes it sound as though he’s clearing off for the benefit of his brother and the Labour Party.  It seems he ‘passionately’ wanted Labour to return to power and that he’s ‘proud’ of his brother Ed’s leadership. (David’s wife, on the other hand, is mooted to have described Ed winning the Labour leadership as an act of ‘unforgivable treachery’.)  While David’s been kicking his heels on the back benches of the House of Commons, he's managed to make near to £1million (on top of his MP's salary) on the speech-giving circuit  (£20,000 a pop, apparently). But if you think that's nice money, get this.  In the country he’s heading for, CEOs in big companies earn an average of nearly $13 million. You don’t need to be a mathematical whizz-kid to spot the difference. David’s on record as saying he felt he could be “most helpful to the [Labour] Party on the front line, in South Shields and around the country”. It’d be reasonable to assume that pulling  an annual $13 million salary would be even more helpful to the David Milliband household. 

Meanwhile, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness were in Downing Street, trying to persuade David Cameron to let them lower the the corporation tax here. The south of Ireland has a 12 1/2% rate, as you probably know, while the north here is saddled with the British rate of  24%. Again, you don’t need to be a mathematical genius to see which is more attractive to investors. Cameron didn’t say yes - he said I’ll tell you after the Scottish referendum, which is well over a year away. Did he say that because he’s concerned for our economy here in the north? Uh-uh. He did it, not surprisingly, in Britain’s interests - or more specifically in England’s interests. Peter and Martin were disappointed, it’s said. They shouldn’t be. Yes, they’re right that a corporation tax of 12 1/2% , like that enjoyed by the south would have been beneficial here in the north. But surely they weren't  surprised that Cameron acted with an eye to England/Britain’s welfare rather than that of the north. Self-interest: that’s what David Milliband went for, that’s what David Cameron went for, that’s how the political world works.

Which is another good reason for us running our own affairs. 

Immigrants - what a shower, eh?

I’ve just come off the Nolan show on BBC Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster and I’m still hopping mad. Not because of the show itself but because of the topic. It was David Cameron’s immigration speech yesterday. 

David McNarry, who quit the UUP and, in search of a home, found UKIP, was also on, doing his best to make a case for (i) a lock-down on immigration into Britain; (ii) an exit from the EU by Britain. Both daft proposals, but UKIP have got the wind up Cameron, especially since the Eastleigh by-election, when UKIP took a massive 14% bite out of the vote. 

Cameron in response used his tough-on-immigrants speech - not unlike Enoch Powell’s infamous rivers-of-blood speech in 1968.   The impression left by Cameron’s speech was that immigrants were entering the UK and sucking on its life-blood through abuse of its social services. What's more he, Cameron,  was the man who would put a stop to it.

As is often the case with the British prime minister, pure waffle. The facts from his own government departments contradict him. Contrary to Cameron and popular mythology, immigrants to Britain over the past ten years are not welfare scroungers. Of the two million immigrants , a total of some 13,000 claimed Job Seekers’s Allowance - about half the rate of the indigenous population. Contrary to Cameron and popular mythology, immigrants are not a burden on a sorely-stretched NHS.  In fact, most immigrants are healthy young people who have little reason to use the NHS. All of 0.06% of the NHS budget goes on immigrants. 

Their contribution to the British economy, meanwhile, is considerable. The people who come to that country are in the vast majority of cases intent on securing a job. When they do, they pay taxes, they help revive the economy, they add energy and hard-work to the drive to bring Britain out of recession. And as the British population continues to age, they add their number as young people to support the increasing number of old people.

On the Nolan Show, David McNarry said he hoped I wasn’t associating him or UKIP with “rivers of blood or anything like that”. I didn’t get a chance to answer that so let me do so now. I am.  Powell’s speech and Cameron’s speech and the thrust of UKIP policy is anti-immigration. That’s not just misguided. It’s dangerous. 

Irony? No thanks, we're English

The English comment from time to time on the American inability to do irony but from time to time they show themselves numb to its existence. There’s a good example in this morning’s Guardian. The headline is ‘England-only MP votes needed for English legislation, commission says’ and it’s a report which looks at that old chestnut, the West Lothian question. Why, for example, should Scottish MPs be able to vote in the House of Commons on an issue affecting England but not themselves? This of course is what happens when you have devolution, so a commission headed by Sir William McKay says there should be restrictions on the rights of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs to influence or determine purely English legislation. It seems 81% of English voters either agree or agree strongly that Scottish MPs shouldn’t be allowed vote on English laws. 

You can see their point. No country likes to feel that foreigners are making decisions for them. The article goes on to remember how this controversy erupted a number of times in the past - “Once when John Reid, the Labour MP for Hamilton and Bellshill became English health secretary in 2003”.  You could see why the English were cheesed off - Scottish health was a matter for the Scots in the Scottish parliament, but English health was a matter for the English and the Scots in the UK parliament. 

And the irony? John Reid was Northern Ireland Secretary of State from 2001-2003. In other words, the people of the North of Ireland were having their affairs looked after by a Scottish MP. Although the Scottish bit was a coincidence - mainly they’ve been English. Humphrey Atkins, Peter (Clementine) Brooke, Douglas  Hurd, Tom King, Peter Mandelson, Theresa Villiers...To list more is beyond my energies. But while Northern Irish MPs are as much use in the Commons as a gaggle of eunuchs in a harem, the (usually English) Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has all sorts of powers -including the power to send people to prison.  Ask Marian Price if you don’t believe me. Meanwhile the scorching irony of the  situation - the endless procession of English/Scottish/Welsh Secretaries of State flying in to decide the affairs of the people on this side of the water - just passes the English by. 

You’d laugh if it wasn’t so serious.