Would you like a good smack?

I once smacked my daughter. She was the first of our four children and she’d done something I told her not to, so I smacked her. She howled, her mother appeared and comforted her, and I exited feeling like a bullying brute. That was the first and last time I struck any of my children (Addendum to any of them reading this: so far...)

I hadn’t thought about whether I should or shouldn’t smack her - it was an instinctive reaction. Or rather one I’d learned from my own upbringing, where at home and at school smack and strapping and worse were the norm. And I remember in the early 1980s, when physical punishment was still permitted in schools here, there were teachers who warned that if a ban was placed on such punishment, teachers would be left helpless and an appalling vista would open up. But it hasn’t. That’s not to say that teachers don’t struggle on a daily basis to cope with youngsters who think it’s their right to say and do the first thing that comes into their head. But thinking about teaching and learning and the respect that one human being should show another has evolved. Schools manage.

The Irish Time  this morning notes that the southern government is under increased pressure to introduce a ban on smacking children  at home as well as at school. At present it’s legal for parents to strike their children. The Minister for Children in the south, Frances Fitzgerald, says that in recent years “considerable progress” has been made in “encouraging parents to use alternative non-violent forms of discipline”.  Frances Fitzgerald of course wants to keep as many of her voting constituency as possible on-side. What might be better would be if she were to forget about considerable progress and the pressure from Europe, and ask herself if she thinks big people hitting small people is a good thing. Then act accordingly. 

It’s not that most parental chastisement is physically dangerous or that parents don’t think they’re acting in the child’s best interest. It’s a failure of imagination. As with the plague of marching in this jurisdiction, the question that needs to be asked is “So you’d also be OK with things happening the other way round?” Few Orange marchers would agree to have thousands of republican marches throughout the six counties every year, and few parents would agree that it’d be all right for their children to strike them when angry. It's not rocket science.  Simply apply the do-unto-others-etc. rule.

A man without malice

It’s funny the way one death can eclipse another. On 22 November 1963, Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis both died. That same day John F Kennedy was assassinated. Most people remember not just the day of Kennedy’s death but what they were doing at the time. Few could tell you when Huxley or Lewis died, let alone what they were doing. 

I experienced this overshadowing more closely than I would have wished at the weekend.  Along with the rest of the world I was assimilating the death of Seamus Heaney on Friday.  On Saturday morning I was in the BBC in Belfast at 7.15,  about to go on air with a newspaper review. My mobile rang and the screen showed it was my wife. I knew at once it was something serious - normally on a Saturday she wouldn’t be awake at that time, let alone calling me. Her voice was clotted with unhappiness: her sister’s husband, John Delahunty,  had died suddenly.

They’d been on a holiday in Spain. They’d stayed near the place where they’d spent their honeymoon some forty years earlier. It had been a happy return - swimming, sunbathing, remembering. Their flight brought them back to Dublin airport at midnight on Friday. Trolleys loaded, they’d headed through the crowd for the exit; and as is the way of Gavin women, his wife was ahead of him by several yards. Then she heard frightened cries and someone calling “Help that man!” When she finally pushed through her husband was lying on the ground. There was blood coming from his nose and mouth. When she took his pulse he was dead. 

It’s easy to let the passing of the famous overshadow the loss of what some  foolishly called ‘ordinary people’.  John Delahunty lived a quiet life. He provided for his wife and children, he liked a drink (we once famously polished off a full bottle of brandy between us), he had a fine singing voice which he rarely used, he disliked ostentation and hated being the centre of attention. As his wife said, he would have detested having a  rubber-necking crowd around him in his final moments.

“Just another death” you say. True. But for him and those who loved him it was the most significant, the most calamitous of deaths.  I knew him for nearly fifty years and I never heard him speak ill of anyone. A quiet life ending in a sudden death, surrounded by strangers who, having seen what there was to see, moved on. John Donne had John Delahunty as much as Seamus Heaney in mind when he wrote: “Each man’s death diminishes me/For I am involved in mankind/Therefore, send not to know/For whom the bell tolls/ It tolls for thee.”

Slán abhaile, John, agus ar dheis Dé go raibh d’anam.

Bill's sum: 1 +1 = ?

One of the ugliest commemorative sites I have been to is that at Béal na Bláth. But let’s leave the aesthetics for another time.  It was at the Michael Collins memorial site a week ago that Bill O’Herlihy made a speech which  got a lot of attention. In it the Fine Gael man echoed Fianna Failer Mary O’Rourke’s suggestion a few weeks’ ago that  a Fianna Fail and Fine Gael coalition would be good for the ‘country’. 

First, Bill’s opening remarks:  “Michael Collins was a great man, a nation-builder, a visionary, a deep thinker about the future of Ireland and someone whose ambitions and aspiration is (sic) still, tantalisingly, unmet”.

You’re right there, Bill. Collins was also the man who organised the group known as the Twelve Apostles, who shot dead numerous officers in the Dublin Metropolitan Police before killing fourteen British agents in the early hours of 21 November 1920.  But Bill doesn’t want to linger with  - or even mention - stuff like that. He moves smoothly from the past to the present and evaluates three political parties. 

“Sinn Féin deserves credit for the slow and tortuous progress that has been made in Northern Ireland and the party deserves the maximum encouragement to continue the process. But only Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have the proven trust of the people of the Republic over the past eighty years. They should examine and if necessary pool what they share and allow the people of this country to reap the benefits”.

While BIll was telling Sinn Féin to stay up north and was dangling the prospect of a Fianna Fail- Fine Gael coalition before the people of the south,  the TD for Louth, Gerry Adams, was making a speech at the McGill Summer School. The Sinn Féin president  sketched what the “proven trust of the people” had delivered in the south over eighty years: 

“Religion was hijacked by mean men who used the gospel not to empower but to control, and narrow moral codes were enforced to subvert the instinctive generosity of our people...Those who suffered were mostly poor. The arts were censored. Our language undermined. Our culture corroded. Millions fled to England, the USA and Australia. A lesser people would not have survived.”

To give Bill his due, he’s not saying it was roses all the way for the past eighty years. Speaking as a Fine Gael man, it seemed to him Fianna Fail had made some mistakes. And maybe even Fine Gael.

“But in spite of all these reservations, I believe coalition of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail has much to offer at a time of huge challenge for Ireland. I suspect the Irish people would like to see this development. I would like to see this development in a new political landscape true to the ideals of Collins”.

Do you know, I think Bill’s right. Or half-right anyway. It would be a good idea for Fianna Fail and Fine Gael to get together. Historically they may have been different, but in practice they produced and produce the same results. And as Gerry Adams noted in his speech, they both have their “backs to the border” so why shouldn’t they join hands?

“But that’d mean a state with a permanent Fianna Fail-Fine Gael coalition government!”  you cry. I think not.  A few years of Fianna Fail plus Fine Gael would open the eyes of the most dim-witted, trusting voter. Fianna Fail has plunged the southern state into bankruptcy, Fine Gael has jumped in and is busy screwing the most vulnerable to the wall.  Put the two parties together and think  what a toxic mixture you’d have. Somehow, I don’t think that’s quite the vision Collins had. As that fine Fianna Fail leader Bertie Ahern once said in a different context: “Do they take the people for eejits altogether?”

Remembering Seamus Heaney

I remember Seamus Heaney. He was a Senior when I was a Junior in St Columb’s College, where he became (predictably) Head Prefect. He used, as I remember, walk round the grounds of the College with among others Kevin and Leo O’Neill, older brothers of the more famous Martin. Frequently as they strode past you’d hear them talking in Irish.

Part of his duties as Head Prefect was to keep order in the study hall before the supervising priest or teacher arrived. The traditional way to do this was to stand by your Head Prefect desk and periodically bang its lid and roar “Shut up!” This usually brought the hum of noise down for a while, until the next bang and roar, or the arrival of the study supervisor. 

I sat at the far end of the study hall beside a boy called Murphy from Bellaghy. On one memorable occasion, we were whispering, maybe laughing at some witticism. Suddenly I had a sense that someone was standing behind me. It was Seamus Heaney. Occasionally the desk-banging and roaring would be seen as insufficient, and that’s what had brought the Nobel Prize winner to my side. He thumped me about the head  a bit, which hurt, but not as much as the fact that  Murphy the Bellaghy man, my co-conversationalist, got off scot-free. A failure in parity of disdain, I felt, although I hadn’t the words to go with it. Injured pride more than injured head.

For years I thought I was unique, and sometimes after a few pints would boast that I had been roughed up some by a Nobel Prize-winner. Then I did an interview with Eamonn McCann, for my book Tales Out of School: St Columb’s College Derry in the 1950s, and he revealed that he’d had an almost identical experience. “I met him at a festival down in Clare a few years ago and confronted him with it” Eamonn told me with that signature grin of his, “but of course he affected not to remember it. I heard later he went into poetry, no doubt in an attempt to cover up his thuggish past”.

Thanks, Eamonn. Now I can’t even claim a monopoly on Nobel Prize-winner bashings.  Damn. 

They say the work of the poet is to make the ordinary extraordinary, and in that Heaney was consummately successful. I’d rank him with Keats, in his early poems at least - that ability to recreate the smell and touch and look of ordinary things -  raw potatoes, frogspawn, a blacksmith’s forge, a mother’s grief. And of course he made being from Bellaghy and every country place a matter of pride rather than uneasiness. As someone said, before Seamus Heaney the people from the bog tried to avoid mentioning it; now half the country is claiming to have been reared in bogland.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal

Men of violence

Yesterday I asked you how you felt about the IRA. Today let me expand that a bit and ask how you feel about ‘men of violence’. You know that phrase well - it was used by unionist politicians and the SDLP to describe paramilitary groups here, particularly the IRA. Men of violence. Rejectionists of democracy and the peaceful resolution of difference.

I ask this because I was listening to Nigel Dodds on the radio this morning and he made it clear that he is a man of violence. Not a paramilitary, I hasten to add, and not even one of those who voted yesterday in the British House of Commons for military ‘intervention’ in Syria.  Nigel was against Cameron’s request for carte blanche. And Nigel’s side, mercifully, won. Nigel conceded that he’d favour a ‘surgical strike’ in Syria, but that wasn’t on the cards. That’s why I say Nigel is a ‘man of violence’. If he believes the conditions are right, he’ll use violence. (And I hope you haven't missed the irony of 'surgical strike'. Surgery is normally used to removed diseased tissue and help the patient live. Surgical strikes are normally used to identify undesirable areas and help kill everyone there. 

Meanwhile those on the other side of the House from Nigel were reassuring us that there was ‘incontrovertible’ evidence that the Assad regime was responsible for the use of chemical weapons. Under pressure, it emerged that while the UN team has found no evidence that Assad did the vile deed, ‘intelligence’  had assured the Yanks that it was definitely Assad  who dun it. In other words ‘We say it happened like this, so it happened like this. Trust us’.

Right. Like we trusted the US when they used napalm in Vietnam in the 1970s, or in the 1940s when they used the atomic bomb (there’s the ultimate example of terrorism, if that’s what you’re looking for) or any of the other ghastly ways the West has of killing people. 

Which brings us to something near the nub of things: what’s so different about chemical weapons? Yes, they’re forbidden by the Chemical Weapons Convention and international rules of war, but I repeat: what’s so different about them? Cluster bombs, drones, nuclear weapons, plain old bullets -  all of these things are designed to rip apart the human frame or to end its functioning as a living entity. So the West’s embargo on Iraq which killed so many Iraqi infants because of lack of medical supply - that’s more or less OK. But chemical weapons: uh-uh. Red line. No cross. 

At the danger of sounding like a broken record: Syria is all about oil. It produces a healthy amount of oil itself, but its geographical positioning is what makes it really vital to the West’s interest. It’s close to pipelines and sea routes that carry much of the world’s crude oil. Like the Suez Canal, or the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline, which moves oil from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. An attack on Syria could disrupt these vital channels, which is why the Americans and others are so keen to stick their oar into the conflict in Syria. 

And you thought it was because the suffering of the Syrian people had touched the hearts of Barack Obama and David Cameron, Virginia. Alas no. The truth is, Obama and Cameron don’t have hearts. And the place in their heads which would normally house a conscience is, I’m afraid, Virginia, quite empty. 

What's your view on the IRA?

One of the core problems faced by unionists is the IRA.  Even though that organisation has  quit the scene it's still a problem - a problem that soon gives rise to a range of contradictions. 

Unionist opposition to the IRA is often rooted in personal or family experience. It’s hardly surprising if your father or uncle or other relative has been killed by the IRA, you’ll think of them as a conspiracy of murderers.  And even if you haven’t had that personal loss but have been used to seeing the unionist/Protestant people as the spine of this state, with Catholics/nationalist/republicans as comparatively feckless and opposed to the state’s very existence, it’s again not surprising if you take a dim view of the IRA. The fact is that there were at least  four combative groups here during the Troubles: the IRA, the loyalist paramilitaries, the RUC/UDR and the British army. If you were a unionist, it’s easy to see how you’d view the last two as the good guys, the loyalist paramilitaries as misguided but provoked into defending their communities, with the IRA the sole source of the Troubles and, in a phrase, murderous scum.

If that position is held,  and I think it is by many unionists, the question is, how do they regard Michael Collins, the anniversary of whose funeral was yesterday? How do they regard Tom Barry,  who fought the RIC, the Black and Tans and the other forces of British rule in Ireland? How do they see Cathal Brugha? de Valera?  Because all of these engaged in activities almost identical to those used by the IRA during our more recent Troubles in the north. If the IRA of the 1970s and 1980s were murderous scum, what were the people I’ve listed above? Were those who initiated the Easter Rising murderous scum, without a mandate from the people for their actions?

If you say yes, then you’ll see the centenary events for 1916 and after as honouring murderers with a contempt for democracy.  If you see Collins and Barry and Brugha as patriots, how do you combine that assessment with dismissal of the more recent IRA and all its works and pomps?

And it’s not just unionists in the north that this presents a conundrum for. Many people in the south - most recently and memorably  Dervla Kirwan , whose great-grandmother was Collins’s sister. She got herself in a terrible knot trying to applaud the heroics of her ancestors and the IRA of the time, while condemning the more recent conflict and all violence generally. 

And to be bang up-to-date, I wonder what she thinks of the violence  in Syria at present, and how she sees the proposed use of cruise missiles by the US and the British as contributing to the peaceful lives of those on whom they may rain down. 

I am open to the opinion of others,   even when I don’t like them and/or their opinions. But what has me near despair is when people risk a hernia trying to hold mutually-exclusive positions simultaneously. 

"We all know" says Joe Biden. Oh really?

It’s always a risky business to speak for other people. “We all know” Vice-President Joe Biden declared yesterday “that there’s been a chemical weapons attack; we all know that the Syrian government are responsible for that attack”.

Well, include me out.  There may have been a chemical weapons attack, it may have been carried out by the Syrian government, but I haven’t  a clue whether there was or not and who was responsible. What I’ve seen has been a number of men, women and children milling around and acting more or less the way people reacted in the Bogside in 1969 when the RUC attacked them with CS gas - people dabbing at their eyes, looking distressed, some flat on the ground. 

Nor has Joe Biden or any other leader convinced me that there is now justification for a military intervention. I saw a Syrian government official on TV last night and in halting English he said something very significant: “Show. Me. Evidence. Of. Chemical. Weapons. Use. By. Our. Government”.  Oddly, over something as distinctive as this, the media here seem very unforthcoming. You’d expect them to lay out in detail what a chemical weapons attack looks like, how it differs from other attacks in its effect, and how Britain or the US or anyone else can know that it was the Syrian government. 

If it happened, it could have been US agents. You think that’s laughable? US agents have done worse things in, for example, South America. Remember Chile and Allende?  Remember the regime change in Iraq?  Remember, on a massively greater scale,   HIroshima and Nagasaki?  We know that, if they deem it necessary, the British government of any hue will concoct any story about the dangers to Britain and will use that as justification for invasion and slaughter. 

On a much more local scale, I heard an equally skewed version of events yesterday evening as I drove home. Seamus McKee had Brian Feeney and Paul Bew  (Lord Bew to you) talking about the writing of recent history here. Former UUP adviser Bew believes that we have an ‘infantalized’ take on recent history here, which points the finger of blame to an excessive degree at Britain; he also insists that the NIO were the true progenitors of the Good Friday Agreement. Feeney was in fine form and noted how the British government has continually fallen  over itself in its efforts to keep hidden the record of what happened here during the Troubles.  I’m not a historian but I do know that the NIO were not the people who created the Good Friday Agreement. I also know that efforts to  present Britain’s role here as a benevolent ring-keeper is totally bogus. If you don’t think Britain was a central player, ask the relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday or died in Ballymurphy. However hard unionists like the good Lord Bew may try to argue otherwise, they trip over their own fake narrative.  And I keep coming back to the thoughts of Jeremy Paxman as he interviews yet another politician: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Britain would be the poorer without such men.

PS Did I mention that according to the Oil and Gas Journal, Syria had 2,500,000,000 barrels of petroleum reserves as of 1 January 2010? How remiss of me. Although of course it’s a concern for the well-being of Syria’s citizens, not a lust for oil, that has the US and Britain straining at the leash these days.