Who killed Eamon Collins? Who killed Denis Donaldson?

I’ve known just two informers in my life – or at least two that I’m aware of. Eamon Collins (no relation) was an IRA intelligence officer who turned supergrass. I knew him when he’d left the IRA and was studying at the University of Ulster. He was a stocky, vivacious man who’d been told by the IRA to stay out of the north. He ignored the injunction, wrote a book called A Killing Rage and ended up being brutally killed outside Newry early one morning in 1999. No one was ever convicted of his killing.

The other was Denis Donaldson. I didn’t know him but I met him a couple of times when I was doing some interviews with Sinn Féin up at Stormont. Denis was also small and stocky: he came down and brought us up to the Sinn Féin offices, chatting in a friendly, good-humoured way en route. Some years later he and two others were charged with being part of a republican spy ring “at the heart of government”. It later emerged that, far from being a republican spy, Donaldson had for years been feeding information to the RUC about republican activities. On April 4, 2006 he was found shot dead in a cottage in Donegal. No one was ever convicted of his killing.

The assumption in both cases is that these men were shot by former comrades, enraged by their betrayal. That’s possible but I know of no evidence supporting the belief. However, history provides consistent evidence that once the British authorities had finished using an informer, that informer was tossed aside to fend for himself. In fact, the failure to convict anyone of the murder of either Collins or Donaldson raises the possibility that the British themselves were involved in the deaths of men who knew too much about the dirty war waged here.

The media like stories to be clean-cut, heroes vs villains, the authorities vs terrorists. By now we should be wary of such black-and-white garbage. Two years ago we were told dissident republican groups were hopelessly infiltrated by British intelligence. Then we stopped hearing that. Then we had the killings of two British soldiers at Massareene Barracks and the shooting dead of PC Robert Carroll. Now we have the death of PC Ronan Kerr.

If we’re lucky, history will reveal the truth on all these matters. In the meantime we’d be fools to believe that all ‘informants’ are heroic or that, when no longer useful, they’ll be protected by those for whom they worked.

There’s one word uglier than ‘informer’ – it’s ‘handler’.

Party discipline: tough knuckles or team approach?

                                                                                                                                          

One of my faults ( please consult the present Mrs Collins for a more comprehensive list) is a dislike of rules. I put it down to my years in boarding school, where the day was hedged by regulations that scratched and irritated – polish your shoes, no talking in study hall, no reading novels, no reading newspapers, no comics, no listening to radio, no playing handball in the verandah area, no smuggling cans of baked beans into the refectory to supplement the  vile diet ...  When I followed the rules, it was never because I thought them a good idea, more because I was fearful of being caught and half-killed.  Rules make sense, of course, but they should under normal circumstances be explained carefully and thoughtfully to those asked to follow them.

The same goes for advice. There are those who give advice which sounds suspiciously like a command, and then attempt to soften the impact by saying something like "But in the end of course the decision is yours".  Damn right it’s yours, and if the advice had been offered in a more tentative ‘Would it be worth thinking about it like this?’ way, you might have been open to listening. (When I say ‘you’ I mean, naturally, ‘me’.)

So when I hear political parties  scorn the influence of independent MLAs or TDs or MPs,  I wonder what price is paid for party rules and how are they enforced. Are representatives told “This is the party line, follow it or we'll nail your bits to the barn wall”? Or is there open, non-fearful debate, a decision made that everyone is comfortable buying into, even when s/he doesn't fully agree with it?  And  - important, this one - which approach results in the more effective political fighting force?

Don’t look at me – I’m not a politician.  Try someone in the UUP or Sinn Féin or the DUP or the SDLP. 

My night with Nolan

I was on TV last night. Granted, if you blinked or scratched yourself you’d have missed me but I WAS on. I must  - some other time – go into the whole matter of how some people who see you every day believe you take on a new, more concentrated life when you are part of a media moment (“I heard/saw you on the radio/TV last night!’). But for now, let’s skip that and concentrate on ‘The Big Debate: Dead Fat’ programme on BBC1 NI.

I hated it;  everyone else seemed to love it.  When the studio audience were told to clap their hands off at the start and end, they did. Even when they weren’t told to they clapped. Someone would say something like “I weighed 24 stone and now I’m 16” and the applause rippled all over the place.  And yes, before you ask, I was a hypocritical bastard and I did put my hands together with everyone else, but only because I didn’t want to seem churlish or anti-people who’d weighed 24 stone and were now 16.

The thing is, Stephen Nolan taps into something in people. I don’t think he’s unique in that respect. I’ve attended live broadcasts involving George Jones, Hugo Duncan,  John Daly, and people responded with the same delight to their presence.  Maybe they’re all really good, or maybe it’s that people get excited when they get close to famous faces they’ve hitherto seen only on TV or heard on radio. Which, when you think of it, is the  other way round from their excitement when someone they’ve only known in the flesh is heard or seen on radio or TV – “I saw you on TV last night!”.

Anyway, last night’s programme discussed obesity  (‘The Big Debate – Dead Fat’) and it was all over the place.  There was a man who weighed 29 stone who got most of his stomach removed and now weighs 12 stone  (he got clapped). There was a woman who was some equally enormous weight, and Nolan had a big cardboard cut-out of her when she was really fat, and then he shouted “Would the real  Mary Bloggs (or whatever her name was) come on down!” and a plump but not obese woman came down and stood beside him looking embarrassed and he asked her how she felt when she was fat and how she felt the way she is now and then he asked her to give him a hug. And she did. And everyone clapped again.

There was some stuff about the cost to the NHS of obesity and whether the public should bear the costs of stomach-stapling, and there was talk of whether parents who had fat children should feel guilty. But the programme in general was larded with a sentimentality factor  that had my buttocks clenching with the frequency of a Sharon Shannon squeeze-box.

Three points, the last of which I raised near the end of the programme:

1.    Assuming they’re adult and sane, people have choices. In terms of obesity they can overeat or not overeat, they can get regular exercise or not get regular exercise.  It doesn’t take a psychologist to come on and talk about people’s ‘relationship with food’ to reach that conclusion.

2.    If Tiger Woods had said to his wife “Darling, I really want to be faithful but  even though I try and try, I find I just can’t”,   she’d probably have given him an answer with the heavy end of a golf club. Or if I told a cop “Officer, I really want to keep the speed-limit but however I try the needle keeps hitting 80”, he’d be unlikely to put away his notepad. So how come if we accept that actions carry responsibility in these matters, actions in the fat world seem to carry at best ambiguous responsibility and at worst none?

3.    At last count, WHO figures showed 925 million people in the world are hungry. I mean, hungry to the point where they’re suffering and dying from malnutrition.  Food riots have broken out in a number of places over the last year. Meanwhile in the Western world, we go on psychologizing about our condition as we stuff more food into us than our bodies can cope with.  Future more –enlightened generations will surely look back and condemn us as a shower of infantile, criminally selfish gluttons. (Nolan and the rest of the audience received this point in stony silence. Not so much as a hint of an applause-ripple.)

Two post-scripts.  First, almost all of the fat people I know on a personal basis are kind, cheerful and often physically-attractive (the thing about fat people being repulsive is a load of cobblers). Second, in the chemist’s this morning (yes I know you call it a pharmacy – I call it a chemist’s so SHUT UP) several women were talking and MARVELLING – it’s the only word – at how wonderful the Nolan programme had been last night and what a difference it was going to make.

Everybody out of step with our Johnny, eh?

Dreams of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is on my mind today - I've got to meet a man later this morning for an interview about her. Elizabeth and I go back a long way. When she was made Queen Elizabeth II by the Grace of God, an old aunt of mine who'd spent a lot of years serving the Anglo-Irish gentry sent us a glass Coronation mug. It was so heavy it felt more like a weapon. During the 1950s I used to go to the movies in the County Cinema or Miller's Picture House in Omagh. When the girl had got that big close-up kiss and 'The End' had appeared, up would come Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. On a horse. Sitting, to my astonishment, with both her legs on one side of the nag. 'God Save The Queen' would then play and roughly half the cinema would stand, all square shoulders and hard-eyed respect. The other half would do their bit for Ireland by pushing past them and out into the Omagh evening. Sometimes you'd get a big no-pasarán anthem-respecter at the end of your row of seats who would ignore your efforts to get out. In such cases the only thing was to do a Fosbury flop into the next row of seats and exit that way. Somebody once wrote a short story about this culture clash: it was called 'The Anthem Sprinters'. I wonder if Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ever read it. Somebody told me she wasn't a great woman for the books. 

Then when we got our first television in the late 1950s, I'd watch until close-down time, around 11.00 pm. It was the same drill as the cinema - there was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha on the same horse, or one very like it. She always looked concentrated and serious, which I put down to the effort involved in staying on a horse while sitting that way. Sometime in the 1950s she visited Kenya and they made a film of it. We got out of school to see it, provided, the Brother explained, we wrote an essay  afterwards. It showed  Elizabeth Alexandra Mary talking to smiling respectful black people, and then it showed the horrible Mau-Mau, who in dramatic reconstruction set fire to houses and forced new recruits to eat worms in initiation ceremonies. I can't tell you the contrast between their filthy appearance and the coolness of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary in her nice hat and white gloves. I was astonished ten years later to hear the Mau-Mau had got Kenya independence and their leader Jomo Kenyatta had got tea at Buckingham Palace.

In my teen years, when she was married and started producing those, um, plain-looking children,  Elizabeth Alexandra Mary got a bit dull for some people, and media attention switched to her sister and the very important question of whether she would marry the dashing but oh-dear-divorced ace pilot or the strikingly-handsome hooray-not-divorced photographer? But my heart stayed with the woman married to the Greek guy. Once I dreamed that she’d tied her horse outside our house and come in and started taking off her clothes, saying she was dead hot and needed a bath and would I come up and scrub her back?

So it's with those happy boyhood memories that I'll come to the interview today. The idea of royalty is anti-democratic and wildly costly, and the Queen of England coming to the south of Ireland ignores a big smelly ape called Partition, so I'm agin it. But even I wanted to, I can't forget those heady days of watching Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and her white gloves and pursed mouth and the way she kept her knees together on that horse.

Duffy trumps Nolan (sigh)

There's a danger that I'll become a phone-in obsessive so I'll keep this brief.

This morning/early afternoon I posted a blog about the Stephen Nolan Show on BBC Radio Ulster (see below). I noted some good things about it but more that were not good - in fact, I said they were pathetic. So then I had my lunch and switched on Joe Duffy on RTÉ's Liveline. Stephen, I take it all back. You were brilliant, certainly compared to Joe.

The entire Liveline phone-in was about, naturally enough, the killing of young Ronan Kerr in Omagh on Saturday - may God be good to him. But instead of engaging with the central issue - why did the people who killed him do so and what do we need to do to stop anything like it ever happening again? - Duffy gave around 90% the programme to lining up callers who would attack Sinn Féin. Why, you say, I thought Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams were on air condemning the Kerr killing unreservedly and calling on anyone with any information to contact the police? Have they changed their minds?

Not a bit. Joe's callers were busy bashing the Shinners because the IRA once waged war against the British forces, including the police, and killed people. Duffy's constant guest throughout the programme was the sister of Mary Travers, shot dead by the IRA during an attack on her father Tom Travers, a Catholic judge, in 1984. Naturally enough, the poor woman was carrying pain from the loss of her sister all those years ago. But to take the killing of young Kerr on Saturday, resoundingly condemned by Sinn Féin which has opted unreservedly for politics, into a sustained assault on the Shinners, on the grounds that they once supported violence, seems, well, frankly anti-Sinn Féin. Like Nolan earlier in the day, Duffy missed a golden chance to explore the Kerr killing and suggest strategies for coping with and/or preventing further such horrors.

As I say, I don't for a moment underestimate the pain Judge Travers's daughter bears from her sister's death. But will we hear a similar Liveline phone-in attacking those who killed Pat Finucane? Or Rosemary Nelson? Or any on the dozens of families whose loved ones died in what many believe were British-loyalist murder gangs collusion? Not a chance. Meanwhile, let's use Omagh as a platform for a bit of Shinner-bashing.

To paraphrase the words of W B Yeats to the Abbey Theatre audience, this time directed at J Duffy Esq: 'You have disgraced yourself again'.

Missing the bloody point

I was in the car for ninety minutes this morning, because I had to drive to Saintfield High School with a reference for a marvellous ex-student of mine who’s going for the job of ex-principal today...Yes, yes, I know I should have written and posted it a week ago but I didn’t, ok? OK??

Anyway, it meant I got listening to the entire Nolan Show on BBC Radio Ulster. It was a phone-in about, predictably, the killing of PC Ronan Kerr, and it was wonderful and pathetic by turn.

The wonderful: it allowed caller after caller to come on air and express their grief and sympathy at the loss of what sounds like a cheerful, good young man. There was quite a bit of weeping as well – men and women. The programme allowed people to reveal their pain and their fears over the incident. It was also wonderful because, while 99% of the callers were filled with grief and rage at what had been done, Nolan played an excerpt of a phone-in he did in England on BBC Radio Five Live over the week-end. It featured a man called Edward. That was wonderful because Edward said he didn’t condemn the Omagh killing.

Why did Edward not condemn the killing and what was marvellous about that? Well, Edward is a former IRA man and he said he wouldn’t condemn young Kerr’s death because he understood it. Or rather, he understood the motivation behind this killing and others that, he claimed, would follow. One root problem led to the killing of young Kerr: the interference of Britain in the affairs of Ireland.

As I said, the Edward clip was from Nolan’s phone-in in England over the week-end, so we got some of the English reaction and then some reaction from here in the north. Yep, you’ve guessed correctly: in England and here they were furious with him. English people, people from the north of Ireland, people from the south. “Get that boy off!” one caller demanded, even though Edward was long gone.

The pathetic: the response to Edward. Nolan was at his most inept - “People like you scare me” he told Edward. Others, as I say, wanted him silenced. Others said he was heartless. Others that he was inhuman, others that he had been involved in killing Constable Kerr. A young man of Kerr’s age started weeping and saying that he didn’t care about politics. Another caller said if people like Edward didn’t like it “in this country”, let him go down south and live in Ireland. Another said why would anyone want Irish unity, the south of Ireland was bankrupt. Some said he frightened them because he spoke so calmly. More said he clearly wasn’t right in the head.

It was, in short, a grief/indignation feast, with everyone, including Nolan, failing to address the root cause which Edward had put forward. It was as if someone had tossed a firecracker into a flock of pigeons – shrieks and feathers everywhere, general confusion.

Nolan is a BBC broadcaster and the BBC claims to be energetic in its interviews but unshakeable in its objectivity. He can be very effective – that’s why he’s so popular. But today Nolan failed on both counts – useless questions while making it clear he was opposed to Edward and his thinking.

The claim that Edward should be removed from the air? Very silly. We’ve been down that counter-productive route, when Sinn Féin were muzzled in the 1980s. Edward was a psychopath? Name-calling is no good – they used to say the same thing about the IRA. He should “go down south and live in Ireland”? Mother of God. That’s the language of 1970s DUP backwoodsmen. And so it went on – people coming on-air, firing a volley of verbal shots at a man who wasn’t there and missing him by a country mile. What could have been an absorbing and maybe educative debate and interview subsided into a baying phone-in mob.

Put simply, Edward believes that Sinn Féin are helping administer British rule here, that the only thing which will loosen British control is force, and while he regrets Irishmen killing Irishmen, it’s the only way. No one came on to defend Sinn Féin peaceful strategy for reunification. No one said anything more insightful than “Killing is wrong”. In fact, no one seemed to listen to Edward, they were so busy being outraged.

If you believe in argument and debate as distinct from demonising and name-calling, you owe it to yourself to set an example. When the chance arises to argue with an opponent, it should be grasped and your argument should be clear, logical and convincing. Neither the host Nolan nor his phone-in participants seized this morning’s opportunity. There’s just one word for it: pathetic.

Omagh - my town

I grew up in Omagh and to varying degrees I’ve always loved it. When you’re young, you can’t wait to get away from your home town, especially if you see it as a small, non-metropolitan place. Then as you get older, you swing full circle and find yourself drawn more and more to the place of your roots.

I was back in Omagh on Saturday last to take part in the half-marathon. It was a visit rich in contrasts. As we approached the town in the late morning, there was a diversion; a car had crashed further up the road. So we called over a police officer and asked her which way we should head for the big run. Unlike in the old days, when the cop leaned in with a gun and demanded to know where you were going and why, we asked the questions and she responded. Police service as opposed to police force.

The route of the race took us through the town centre and down Market Street. Past the once-barber’s where I used to be sent for a short back-and-sides every fortnight, past the once-cinema where I went every week regardless of the film, past the spot on the pavement where I finally summoned up the courage to ask a girl – no, not a girl, a goddess – for a date. All of these had been within seconds of the seat of the 1998 bomb. Then, crowds of people running, stumbling, chaos and death everywhere. On Saturday, crowds of people running, clapping, laughing. As the route for the run took us out in loops around the town, it took us past the house where, although we didn’t know it at the time, the young policeman called Ronan Kerr lived.


After the race we got tea and sandwiches and scones and pastries in the Leisure Centre. In 1998 the Leisure Centre was the place where dozens of people waited for hours to hear news of the injury or death of loved ones. On Saturday, it was full of happy, confident people. Beside me a man was busy feeding twins - exquisite eight-month-olds - in a double buggy, smiling and talking to them as he adjusted their bottles. Their names, he told me, were Meabh and Muireann. Over his left shoulder I could see a woman wearing an athletic top that said ‘Gaeilge4mothers’. How at ease fathers are with their role now, I thought, compared to forty years ago; and how at ease northern nationalists/republicans are about their culture and identity. No more hiding the Irish News if you’re walking in the centre of Belfast. And I thought of the twins in the womb in 1998 who, if they’d had a chance at life, would have been twelve years old and probably part of the town’s Big Run day.

Then, the food scoffed and the tea gulped, the speeches made and the awards distributed (yes of course I was robbed), we left the Leisure Centre, got into our car and drove back to Belfast. At almost exactly the same time – although we didn’t know it until several hours later – PC Ronan Kerr left the house where he lived, got into his car and turned on the ignition.

On Sunday, The News of the World , Martin McGuinness and a number of others politicians said the people who killed young Kerr were completely out of touch with reality. It depends on how you see reality. Dissidents believe the Good Friday Agreement is a cul-de-sac so they are determined to drive the Irish people out of it. They’re convinced that next time a young Catholic man or woman considers joining the PSNI, he or she will remember PC Ronan Kerr and think again. In contrast, most Irish people are convinced the Good Friday Agreement has set us on a broad road to reunification where respect and acceptance are the guiding principles.

Which reality prevails, we must wait and see.