Ruth Dudley Edwards, I think I love you...

I’ve felt even lazier than usual today because yesterday I drove to the K-Club in Kildare and ran in the BHAA 10K race. Yes, we running scruff were kept well away from the glitterati. They probably didn't want us to suffer from seeing them suffer in their £350-a-night accommodation. What's that? Well yes, I did do a mind-bogglingly good time, but modesty would forbid me to....Oh OK, you’ve forced me, just under 47 minutes. Now can we get on?

Even had I felt fresh today, I would have been weak from laughter after reading my old university classmate Ruth Dudley Edwards’s column in the Sindo. The woman really is God's gift to humour. Today she was on about the French ban on Muslim women wearing the burka in public, and you're probably wondering is she outraged by it. Ha ha ha ha HAAAAAAA! Of COURSE she isn't. In fact she hates any kind of covering of a woman's face. On what grounds? Because it’s not a mandatory part of the Muslim religion! Mind you, there's no religious law that says I have to wear underwear or that the head of the Church of England has to wear godawful hats, but we do. I mean, I wear the underwear and she wears the hats. Although I'm sure she wears underwear too. When I say 'she', I naturally mean the head of the Church of England, not Ruthie. Though of course she wears underwear as well. I think.

Ruthie isn't just a fan of banning the burka in every country IN EUROPE (I told you this woman is funny), she's also as you probably know a big fan of the Orange Order. It fits. The Order always does what the law allows it, like marching through places where there are loads of people for annoying, although if the law stops allowing it to march in some of those places, it gets a bit upset. At least that's how it looked on my TV screen, the time of Drumcree. Upset. Very very upset.

Right now Ruthie's the teeniest bit upset herself because she'd prefer that all the European countries ban burka-wearing in public, not just France. She claims she wants this because if you're a lawyer or a teacher or a civil servant, working with the public, you can't do your job properly in a burka. I don't know if Ruthie's ever taught a class but I have, and if I could stop laughing long enough I'd tell you why I think she's pulling our collective leg. If she weren't, I know she'd have mentioned the wishes of pupils and parents and the school itself, and she hasn't. It's called straight-face humour. Like Woody Allen or Buster Keaton.

I tell you - my bones are aching from my near-death experience in Kildare yesterday, but none of them half as much as my funny-bone, after reading Ruthie’s weekly word-dose. To paraphrase another old classmate of mine, Eamonn McCann, in another context: How would we know what to laugh at if we didn't have her?

Can you lend your vote? And if so, will you get it back?

“Friends, Romans and countrymen” Mark Antony said, “Lend me your ears”. Note the lend bit. They’d get their ears back – he just wanted them for now.

Recently in politics here, the ‘lending’ of votes has become a current idea. Voters are urged, not to give their vote to a particular party, but to ‘lend’ it. In other words, you don’t really like us but you like your man or your woman less, so ‘lend’ us your vote and we’ll stop him/her getting in. In West Belfast in 1992, Joe Hendron defeated Gerry Adams with the help of votes ‘borrowed’ from unionist voters in the Shankill. In 2010, unionist voters in South Down lent Maggie Ritchie their votes, sending her and her red blazer to Westminster. And in the same year, Sinn Féin’s Michelle Gildernew kept her Fermanagh/South Tyrone Westminster seat yes, because a carload of Shinner students drove down from Belfast and cast their votes but also because, according to Dan Keenan in today’s Irish Times, a number of SDLP voters ‘lent’ her their vote and pushed her home to a squeaky-bum victory.

But to talk about ‘lending’ a vote is daft. If you lent me a tenner, I’d have it and you wouldn’t, and you’d probably have to come looking for it if you wanted it back; in the meantime you’d be tennerless. Not so in politics. There, a vote isn’t really ‘lent’. You normally vote for another candidate or party. As soon as this particular election is over, you go back to voting for your traditional candidate or party. Certainly that’s what happened in 1997 – Shankill voters appear to have returned to the unionist fold, because Gerry Adams recovered his seat.

So more properly described, it’s a one-off vote. Or is it? My old chum Eoghan Harris had the notion that Sinn Féin had borrowed their Dail seats from Fianna Fail and would have to return them in the elections earlier this year. It didn’t happen. The Shinners have a knack, once they get a seat, of holding onto it. Those who vote for them seem to come back for more.

The Old Firm, tit for tat and Glasgow city blues

If it hadn’t been for four or five asthma seizures, I’d probably be talking with a Glasgow accent and voting Scot Nat. Immediately after they were married my parents moved to Glasgow from rural Tyrone and Donegal, a brother and sister were born there, both my parents loved the place (“All those shops!” my mother would recall. “And you could watch people walking about!”). Then my father started getting severe asthma attacks, his doctor told him he’d be more likely to get better back where he came from, and so they returned to Tyrone.

Like most people, I get a warm glow when I think of my parents as a young married couple, but that’s not the point here. The point is, they were told to go back to Ireland, where they came from, and they went. Every week, tens of thousands of Scottish people of Irish descent are told to go back to Ireland, where they came from – except the argument given is that the Famine – more accurately An Gorta Mór – is over. This is the famous ‘Famine Song’ which Rangers supporters and other dunderheads howl at their fellow-countrymen week in, week out. And it’s not just having Irish origins that offends the dunderheads – it’s the Catholic religion. You may remember the BNP tried a similar line in England, urging the Catholic Irish there to go back to the bogs from which they came. There were some good jokes at the time as to who would be nominated to tell Roy Keane, but to the credit of the English the pathetic affair fizzled out.

In Scotland, it continues to flourish. Glasgow Celtic manager Neil Lennon’s walls are daubed, he’s attacked on the street, his life is repeatedly threatened. And yet the cowardly British media insists on talking about The Old Firm and both teams are at fault, and the arch-rivalry, and that’s football. When there are bust-ups such as we saw during and after a recent Celtic-Rangers match, it’s very much tsk, tsk, both sides quarreling again, what a pity, what can we do? No mention of the fact that sectarianism among Glasgow Celtic supporters is dwarfed by that of Rangers. Do you recall Rangers’ manager Allie McCoist getting death threats? Can you imagine the reaction if week after week, the Jewish or Muslim or black section of the Scottish population were told, in a chorus of thousands, to go home? Would the reaction of officialdom “You know, we’re working really hard on this problem, doing our best” be seen as good enough?

It's primitive: people of Irish and Catholic background being subjected to triumphalist, mocking chanting and singing for nine months of the year. Where else in the world would tolerate it?... Oh, I see. Mmm. When did you say the marching season begins?

Me First or Me No Play?

I feel a link to Liam Clarke. Two links, actually. I believe he’s from my own home town of Omagh and he once sent me a message with a little winky icon thing in it. You can’t help but feel close to a man like that. Where was I?... Oh right. The other day Liam was writing in the Bel Tel about the dangers of Martin McGuinness becoming First Minister after the next election. Check it out – it’s a good laugh. Peter Robinson is reported as saying that when he does the doorstep thing, people are worried about the bread-and-butter stuff, granted, but they are also fretting something awful about Martin McGuinness becoming First Minister. Jim Allister’s solution to this appalling vista, as you probably know, is to have all unionist leaders right now swear a holy oath on the King James Bible that, if McGuinness becomes First Minister, they won’t serve as his Deputy First Minister. This, Jim says, will render McGuinness impotent as First Minister – like love and marriage used to be, you can’t have a First without a Deputy First Minister. That’s Jim’s cunning plan. Peter’s solution is rather more, um, party-centred: vote for the DUP, for God and Ulster’s sake.

It’s all a bit reminiscent of the Martin-McGuinness-is-Minister-for-Education-and-he’ll-eat-your-children! routine that unionism went into, when Sinn Féin announced him as their Education choice in the first Assembly. In fact, of course, Education ministers don’t get within miles of working with children, so even if Mr McGuinness had had flesh-eating proclivities, all those Protestant youngsters were quite safe. And they still are, even though the Wicked Witch of the West Caitriona Ruane was depicted as tryiing to get in their classroom window to start chewing their bones.

But it’s a frustrating one, the First Minister affair, for Peter and unionism in general . That’s in general – there are a growing number of unionists who think McGuinness is OK and a smaller number who think he’s pretty damned effective. But the FM issue is frustrating for some because Mr McGuinness has said two annoying things recently. One, he doesns’t lose much sleep wondering if he’ll become First Minister, and two, if he did happen to get the FM nomination, he would immediately want to abolish Deputy First Minister and have two First Ministers, so emphasising the togetherness and equality of the position held by the top nationalist and the top unionist in the state. Who was it advised that you should love your enemies, it drives them mad?

In fact, unionist reaction is beginning to look like anti-democracy on steroids. Not only do some unionists – and I stress ‘some’ again – do some unionists not want to have a republican in charge, even if what puts him there are democratic rules they themselves devised. They're also agin the idea of having a republican and a unionist leader as true co-equals – joint First Ministers. As Marcellus might have said had he been living here: “There’s something rotten in the state of Northern Ireland”. Certainly it's got more than a whiff of the croppies-lie-down to it on this one.

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Martin McGuinness and Oddjob's hat

Feeling sorry for politicians isn’t a habit of mine but I felt a twinge last night for Mary-Lou McDonald and Martin McGuinness. I was interviewing them (or ‘in conversation’ with them, as the Sinn Féin publicity promised) and prior to the public interview (about 100 people turned up for it at the Wellington Park Hotel in Belfast) I could detect a general anxiety about what would follow. Who was in the audience, were there tape-recorders and cameras running, would the whole thing work to Sinn Féin’s credit or would something be asked or said that led to damaging publicity.

I can’t speak for either politician or the audience but I enjoyed it. I like asking questions and I like working with large groups of people – old teaching habits die hard. I also enjoyed meeting up with some people I hadn’t seen in a while, including an ex-student of mine who, if energy and talent were properly rewarded in our warped education system, would by now have been promoted to a point where her abilities could show.

Several things struck me during the interview. One, how short a time an hour is; two, how difficult it is to include audience questions while maintaining some semblance of shape and pace; three, how important eye-contact is if you’re trying to stop a politician galloping off madly on a favoured hobby-horse. My sight-lines were neck-wrenching.

Of the questions responded to, the one about media bias was my favourite. Both McDonald and McGuinness were unambiguous in their criticism of Independent News & Media - Tony O’Reilly’s newspaper and other media outlets. As for the North, McGuinness figured the VO had an SDLP-slant and that his photograph was more likely to appear in the unionist News Letter than in the supposedly-nationalist Irish News. Deary deary me – the things politicians come up with.

Final thought. A fellow-blogger - a nice young man called Alan in Belfast – was in the audience tape-recording the whole session and afterwards did his own brief interview with McGuinness, using a nifty little Flip videorecorder. Alan's posting is on sluggerotoole.com if you’re interested, and he's kindly let me copy his sound-file of the 'conversation' (see below). I was struck by his slugger headline: “I would go so far as to say that Ronan Kerr voted for Sinn Féin”. Alan in Belfast declares this comment from the Deputy First Minister made some people in the audience feel very uncomfortable.  He doesn't say how many but I wasn't among their number and in fact  it never crossed my mind that there was anything tasteless about the rermark. On the contrary: McGuinness seemed to be pointing out, in response to a question, that young republicans were as likely to be found in the ranks of the PSNI as were Catholics with, let's say, more tepidly-nationalist views or none. He added in passing that he would have been equally outraged if a young Protestant policeman had been killed.

Alan's take on the answer if anything reinforces McDonald and McGuinness's case. North and south, there are media outlets traditional and new, ever-ready to report an event or comment so it spins into the public's perception of republicans like Oddjob’s bowler hat zipping straight for 007. (OK, OK, you're too young. Forget it.)



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Young Rory: Northern Irishman, an Ulsterman, an Irishman, a British man - or all of the above?

Before poor young Rory -  oh, OK, let me rephrase that – before rich young Rory went into meltdown on the last few holes last night, I posed the question on Facebook as to whether, were he to win the US Masters, he would be described as  British or Irish or an Ulsterman.  In typical Irish fashion, my question was answered by another Facebooker: “Could he not call himself all of the above?”

In fact I wasn’t talking about what he called himself, I was talking about what the media would call him. Maybe I’m remembering a long time ago, when we got “And yes, the British lad breasts the tape and has done it! He’s won!”  or “Oh dear, the young Irish lad comes in a disappointing fourth. What a pity!”   Does that still obtain? Maybe not. Although Irish boxers like Barry McGuigan have always had to become British if they were to make their way in their sport.

But since I asked my question and got my answer in the form of another question, I’ve begun to wonder if you CAN call yourself all these -  Ulsterman, Irishman, British.  Louis MacNeice added ‘European’.  Literally speaking you can, of course,  but it’s dodging something, isn’t it? Just a whiff  of the Alliance Party to it.  If I describe myself as an Omagh man before describing myself as an Irishman, it  has no political meaning. But if I describe myself as an Ulsterman before I add that I’m an Irishman, I’m making a political statement.  Just as I am if I say I’m Irish and add that I’m British.  In both cases the Ulster and British, regardless of positioning, dominate. They are saying that my loyalties lie with Britain, leaving Ulster or Ireland something that’s an incomplete part of that British identity. And what if I say I'm "Northern Irish"? Is that a dilution of my Irishness?

In the end, it comes down to whether a person can claim to be fully Irish while maintaining a British identity. I would say no.  In fact I  find it hard to see how an Irish person claiming a British identity can maintain his/her self-respect. Ach sin sceal eile, as we say at our Beginners Irish class.  

Castration in Kenya and other thoughts

If you read this blogsite regularly (and you should, you should, you’ll feel better and have nicer skin)  I recently recalled 1952  when my class was allowed out of school to see a film.  It featured Elizabeth Alexandra  Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (although she may have gone under a different name then) and a trip she made to Kenya. The film showed how really awful the Mau-Mau savages of Kenya were,  going around eating worms and killing people, unlike the royal visitor who was nicely dressed in hat and gloves and was friendly to everyone.

So then a few days after my blog, in fact the other day, what do I read?  Newspaper reports that  just before Kenya got independence, the British took 1500 files back to London because they “might embarrass her Majesty’s Government”.  No kidding. Some of the men and women mentioned in the files are now suing the British government because the files verify they were held in concentration camps and were subjected to unspeakable acts of brutality, including severe sexual assault and castration.

And now Elizabeth Alexandra  Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is all set for another visit, this time to the twenty-six counties in mid-May. Why? Well, you could say she will come in an effort to, um, how shall I put this, do a public-relations castration job on 1916 before its centenary comes up. With willing media support  (Well hello  Ruth Dudley Edwards!) we will be taught to see the centenary as a harmless, neutered commemoration, a kind of greenfest,  one that’s colourful, yes, but has nothing to say to today. Because there really is no big ape called Partition, it’s an illusion, it’s certainly not running round our living room defecating on the lampshade, the sofa,  the mantelpiece  and in Uncle Andy’s  hat.  No, no, no. All that’s a trick of the light. There is no Irish question any more, it’s been resolved,  and there is no ape called Partition.

Or if there is, we must learn to love it.