Lead, kindly politician...

I was on my way back from Culdaff, Co Donegal yesterday when I heard a BBC Radio 4 profile of Yvette Cooper. She’s the wife of the unfortunately-named Ed Balls and by all accounts she’s sharper than several whips. She’s now Britain’s shadow Foreign Secretary, and the only thing that held her back from running for the leadership of the Labour Party was that hubby Ed was alreadyrunning and she’s got three young children. (So has hubby Ed, of course – the same three children - ach sin sceal eile).

As I listened, I found myself thinking about leadership. For example, anyone who gets appointed to a cabinet post – Minister of Education, Minister of Finance, Minister of Regional -  is deemed to be suited to that post, capable of leading. When Martin McGuinness became Minister of Education,  I remember a secretary in the University of Ulster telling me with some force that she had as much or more right to be Education Minister than Martin McGuinness, since she had more qualifications than he had.  Similarly, when the SDLP’s Sean Farren became Minister of Finance, I  sucked in my breath and bit my tongue. Sean had  been for many years a colleague of mine in the University, where he’d taught – no, not economics or finance -  English. When I asked him how tough it was, in there with all the money,  and him a literary rather than an economics man, he told me it was OK. “You’ve got lots of other people in there to guide you”.

Martin McGuinness did a good job at the Department of Education, taking the Eleven Plus by the throat and bringing it to its knees, something funked by predecessors for decades. Sean Farren did OK in the Finance post  - at least he wasn’t in charge when the financial meltdown we’re all now living through  occurred. So what do you need to lead?

Well, you don’t need to be an expert in the area. If that were the case, Martin and Sean would never have been appointed and Cabinet reshuffles would be the height of absurdity.  You need courage and intelligence and judgement, and the ability to hold your nerve in tough times. If you’re going to be a truly useful leader, you need to have a vision of where you’d like to take things and some practical thoughts on how to get there.  And there are people who, looking inept when appointed, look great when they get their feet; and, of course, vice versa. Remember how excited so many Americans were with Barack Obama when he was first appointed President two years ago, and note how many are contemptuous of him now.

All this, mind you, ignores the Peter Principle. You know about the PP: people get promoted to their level of incompetence. If you were really good at your present job, you’d be moved to something higher. The fact that you’re staying put means you’ve reached the point where you’re not very good at what you do.

An example?  Poor Tom Elliott, freshly-anointed leader of the UUP. With every word he speaks, he shows he’s out of his depth and insensitive to public opinion.  But then that applies as well to the party he’s failing to lead.

Oh please - say I'm normal

Is this a normal society? Will it ever be a normal society? Signs aren’t promising.  Peter Robinson is back at his favourite motif of complaining about the number of government departments and how expensive they are. He has a point; unfortunately it’s the same point that Gregory Campbell had about the cost of the Saville Inquiry.  Yes the cost is exorbitant in both cases but why did the Inquiry and why do the many departments exist in the first place? Because of the stupid and cruel way in which this artificial state was run. The roots of the cost of Saville run into the barrels of the Para guns which killed  so many on Bloody Sunday. The roots of the many  government departments twist down into the decades of discrimination and gerrymander.  There’s not much point in complaining about the expense you’re being put to, getting the carpet and walls cleaned, if you're the one responsible for the slaughter that stained them in the first place. None of that makes the bloated administration at Stormont any easier to put up with; but maybe that’s the price you have to pay for a statelet that wobbles on only because it’s propped up by an annual £8 billion hand-out from Britain. 

A normal society? Sure we are. Just like the Lock-keeper's Inn on the Lagan towpath is a normal café. 

The News Letter gets a half-nelson on Logic

I’m glad I was smuggled into Bill Clinton’s talk at Magee College last week because if I hadn’t been, I’d have missed hearing him say that he thought every young person coming out of school or college should have a sound grasp of the economic system under which s/he lives, and know how it operates at local, national and international level.  When you see how the bankers and the governments have screwed up the entire economic system, you think it mightn’t be a bad idea. On the other hand, presumably the people who did the screwing up were educated in economics. Hardly an advertisement for pushing the rest of us into the same system.

Personally, if we’re talking about adding to the school curriculum,  I’d have one subject  ahead of economics,  and that’s logic.  Not that it’d solve our problems but it would help  spot and defuse some piercing voices, and maybe protect ourselves.

Take yesterday’s News Letter.  It whipped itself into a froth-mouthed frenzy about the research findings of Professor Jon Tonge.  The prof asked people whether they had sympathy for the reasons why some republican groups like the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA continue to use violence. He found that 14% of nationalists said they did.  You got that? They said they had sympathy for the reasons  some republican dissidents use violence.  In the next paragraph, the News Letter goes all moral and expresses concern over ‘the support for the dissidents’. 

The same sort of contortionist logic was popular when John Taylor was stalking the land. Taylor warned unionists that when they met their Catholics  neighbours, they should keep in mind that one in  three supported the IRA.  How did he know? Because at that time, something like one in three Catholics voted for Sinn Féin.

It’s hard to know whether a brotherly arm around the shoulders or a firm pair of thumbs on the windpipe would be the best response to such eejits. There is a difference between being sympathetic to the reasons for republican dissident violence and approving of that violence. Honest. The reasons are that dissidents long for a united Ireland and don’t believe one is on the horizon or anywhere near it.  Lots of people completely opposed to violence would sympathise with that reading of the situation.  I’ve some sympathy with it myself.  But only a logical contortionist would equate such sympathy with support for killing or injuring people.  Likewise with the good Lord Taylor or whatever he calls himself now. Lots of people voted for Sinn Féin – and still do – but to deduce from that that those people supported or support the IRA is to reduce your logical skills to the level of a half-pissed parakeet.

But hey, why bother with logic when you can hype up the never-trust-a-Fenian quotient in the knuckle-dragging community.

Who's that knocking on the door?

Did you see where the Tories invited an ex-IRA man to talk at their annual party conference?  The VO has  a photograph of him this morning and you’ll probably recognise him, since  besides being a former IRA man, he’s also Deputy First Minister of this state.  The VO, naturally emphasises that he was once in the IRA.

Should Martin McGuinness have been invited? Well that’s a matter for the Tories. Norman Tebbit, who along with his wife was caught up in the IRA bomb at the Brighton Tory Party conference in 1984, thinks not. The majority of the Tory Party, presumably, think it was right to invite him, and even in the Tory Party, the majority usually have the final say.

Why was he invited? Ah – a much more interesting question. Difficult to put into words but probably as a visible sign that this Tory government isn’t, if at all possible, going to set itself on a collision course with the Irish nationalists of the north. It’s saying ‘I know there was a time when we’d have cheerfully killed this man but that time is past. We accept him as a politician and welcome his contribution to healing old wounds’.  And of course  the desire to be nice to Irish republicans like McGuinness is sharpened by the fact that dissident republicans are looking more and more successful in their attacks on targets of different kinds. There’s no one speaks with greater firmness and self-confidence after such attacks than Martin McGuinness.

Changed times? You betcha. Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, the VO used an editorial column to explain right and wrong to its readers:

‘To admit Gerry Adams and colleagues to the public halls of civilized democratic debate is increasingly and properly perceived as deeply offensive and repugnant to Christian and humanitarian standards’.

 Reads a bit like a press release from a Tory Party conference back then, doesn't it? 

Road-works barriers - shock horror!

Is the VO having another fit of the vapours ? “CHAOS” is its big, big front-page headline this morning, with underneath a big photograph of people milling around street barriers. At first I assumed this was a picture of that bomb in Derry last night, but then I looked closer and it was Belfast city centre. No bomb. Just people going about their shopping, threading their way through a few road-work barriers. Nothing pass-remarkable, really. 

But  inside, the VO  was getting itself in a fine lather: ‘Look at the state of this place’ it yelled,  sounding a bit like my mother when she’d come home to find we’d been making toffee and had spilled half of it over the kitchen floor. Underneath the big headline were  half-a-dozen pictures of, yup, people strolling around Donegall Place, doing their shopping. Plenty of space for everyone, you’d think. Ah no. The VO says this work was supposed to have been completed last month and now it’s going to take another six months! Strewth. It quotes the former Alliance mayor Tom Ekin, who says this’ll make a laughing stock of the city. You got that?  A member of the Alliance Party is talking about a laughing stock and not pointing at his own chest. Stop, you’re killing me, Tom.

Maybe it’s a virus or something. Gay Byrne used to go similarly mental on RTE from time to time. His voice would get increasingly irritable and he’d sigh and click his tongue as he got deeper and deeper into denouncing people who dropped litter or chewing gum on pavements, or who didn’t take the kind of pride in their appearance that he did. Mind you Gaybo had a point, if you ignored the fact that on the list of public concerns his concerns ranked about 487^th. It reminds me of the teacher in a New York ghetto, who was interrogating his primary school class. “Leroy, tell me please: how many legs has the Venezuelan widow spider?” Leroy looked at him  with big sad eyes, shook his head and murmured ‘Maaaan, I wish I had your problems!’

But hey. Maybe the Irish News  has a problem it doesn’t want to tell us about. That'd explain the grocer's apostrophe on page 6, wouldn't it? 

School inspectors or suicide bombers: take your pick

Is there a species on the planet, with the possible exception of suicide bombers, less loved than school inspectors? It’s one thing to read about them in Irish short stories, where the schoolmaster likes a nip of whiskey and the kindly inspector turns a blind eye; it’s another to encounter them in their suppurating flesh. My working life involved weekly contact with teachers. Never once did I hear a member of the profession say ‘That visit by the inspectors really helped me’.  That’s because inspectors don’t offer help – just judgement. They point to deficiencies in the way the school is run or in the performance of a teacher or in the cohesion of a school department. But don’t look for advice from them on how to do better:  they won’t give it. Not allowed, they’ll tell you.

And while I’ve never met a teacher who was helped by an inspector, I’ve met quite a few who spoke with quavering voices of the stress the inspectors’ visit put on her/him.  Some I know became ill and missed months of school as a result. In short, if you’d like to inflict damage on your local school and the teachers who work there, arrange a visit from a Department of Education team of inspectors.

Or that may not be necessary,  if we’re to believe latest reports. If  they have their way, school inspectors will soon be turning up at schools unannounced. Knock knock, who’s there, it’s the inspectors!  The reason they’re opting for  unannounced visits is, they say, is that giving several weeks’ notice  can be too stressful for teachers.

Ha ha and ha-ha-ha-ha.  How very droll. This isn’t by any stretch of the imagination about avoiding stress – it’s about laying it on.  You know how we’re always being warned the Real IRA or Al Quaida or someone of that nature is about to launch another offensive and to beware? The inspectorate may not bring  primed explosives with them but the principle is the same: keep the population in a state of constant fear and anxiety. That way, they’ll be too busy fretting to have time to wonder if the whole stupid system of inspection shouldn’t be abolished.

 And one last point: please, do us a favour.  Don’t blame Caitriona Ruane for this anti-learning system. The inspectorate teams who suck the oxygen from learning were up and sucking years before Caitriona arrived on the scene. What’s more, until  teachers and the public stand up to them and yell ‘Enough already!’ they’ll go on doing so long after she’s gone.  

All men are moral, but some are more moral than others...

I see my dear old friend Ed Moloney has been writing about when it makes sense to negotiate with terrorists.  Ed and I, as they say, go back a long way  - back to the days when Anthony McIntyre was a republican critic to be reckoned with. That is to say, he was critical of republicans other than himself and a few mates because he didn’t think they – all the other republicans – were republican enough.  I wrote a piece about Anthony in the late lamented Daily Ireland and almost immediately got an emotional and tired email from Ed on the other side of the Atlantic, telling me that if anything were to happen to Mr McIntyre, I’d be responsible.  Cheesh. We then had a kind of verbal war for a while on the pages of DI, which was good fun but irrelevant to this blog.

Right. Ed’s now giving his thoughts to the issue of negotiating with terrorists and is waving the flag for Mitchell Reiss,  over whom Ed is weak with admiration.  You see, Reiss figures that the time to negotiate with terrorists is when you know and they know that they’re not going to win, before that there’s no point. All of which is relevant to the agonising now going on in the US as to whether they should negotiate with the Taliban. Do they see the futility of their cause, do they have a single leader (like Gerry Adams) with whom negotiations can take place?  Dick Cheney didn’t go in for any such softy stuff.  The US, he has declared, doesn’t negotiate with ‘evil’.  The US defeats  evil.

Sometimes when you read about  the American right-wing, you figure you must have fallen down a rabbit-hole and are now in  an Alice-in-Wonderland situation where things are their opposite.  Post-war US foreign policy has been what looks very like a series of disasters – Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia,  Iraq, Afghanistan -  which have left millions dead and nothing really changed.  Yet  the cry still goes up: It’s Good vs Evil, Us vs Them. We got the same here for years from the DUP – until, that is, Big Ian realised it was McGuinness or worse, and hopped into shared-power. Before that  republicans were so evil and the DUP so good, a single studio couldn’t contain them because that would have been to mingle darkness and light.

Maybe the American right could make a start by doing some thinking about the word ‘terrorist’  (and the DUP, come to that).  A couple of hundred thousand civilians dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – who was terrorising who there?  Fifty thousand Americans dead in Vietnam,  some two million Vietnamese – who was terrorising who there?  That shock-and-awe assault on Baghdad -  who was terrorising who there?

Until the Americans can face the facts about their role as well as image in the world,  the political moral debate is going nowhere. Not even with my good chum Ed out and pushing.