Malachi and his moral high horse

You’d think that with our history of injustice, from discrimination to internment to Diplock courts to the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four,  we’d be careful about declaring someone guilty without clear evidence. Well, you’d think wrong, then.  I’ve just finished reading an extended assault on Cardinal Sean Brady by Malachi O’Doherty, and in the course of it he describes him (Doherty does Brady)  as a man of moral ineptitude,

Now I kind of like Malachi – always have. There’s something about his terrier quality, his pint-sized spunkiness that appeals. And agree with him or not, he can write -  a gift not always possessed by the clergy-assaulting ranks to which he belongs.  But he’s full of the brown stuff on this one because his argument is based on one presumption: that Fr James Chesney was involved in the Claudy bombing and other violent activities.

There’s no evidence of that. There’s the word of a Special Branch officer who claims that he was all set to raid Fr Chesney’s home when his superiors pulled the plug on it. There are RUC claims, reported by Al Hutchinson, that say  Chesney was actively involved in IRA operations. But nowhere does anybody produce a fragment of evidence that Jim Chesney was involved in a single violent act.

And yet several times in the course of his article Malachi lashes both Cardinal Conway and Sean Brady for their response to the Chesney affair. Cardinal Conway was guilty of ‘a gross violation of innocence’. He (Malachi, not Cardinal Conway) declares Fr Chesney to have been ‘a murderer’, ‘a mass murderer’ and insists Cardinal Conway knew this to be so.  And he (Malachi, not Conway or Brady) believes Brady should have resigned long ago if, well, if he doesn’t agree with Malachi about child abuse as well as the Claudy case.

Was Fr Chesney a member of the IRA? I don’t know. Neither does Malachi. Thousands of young men at the time were members of the IRA. But whether Jim Chesney was or was not, no one is entitled to get on a high moral horse and declare him a member, let alone a mass murderer, except they can adduce evidence to support their claim.  That’s what a system of law – innocent until proven guilty -  is about,  and that’s what moral integrity as distinct from moral relativism demands.

You’ll notice that on several occasions above my syntax became so clotted, it may have seemed I was talking about Malachi when I was in  fact talking about William Conway or Sean Brady. So it’s just as well I didn’t borrow the title of Malachi’s article for this piece, or the confusion between the two clergymen and Malachi might have deepened. The title of Malachi’s piece was ‘A Moral Dullard’. 

Figueres and private property

Is stealing morally wrong? As I child I was taught it was. You couldn’t even get forgiveness in Confession if you didn’t first give back whatever you’d stolen, which in my book made it a seriously-stupid sin. After an experience in Figueres yesterday, I’m not so sure it’s a sin and I’m certain it’s not worth the effort.

Figueres is  across the Spanish border from Perpignan;  you’re still in Catalonia but there’s a stronger Spanish flavour.  It’s a nice little town with two claims to attention. It’s the birthplace of Narcis Monturiol Estarriol who invented the submarine,  and it’s the birthplace of Salvador Dali who had a slightly weird moustache and did a lot of very weird paintings.  People queue for over an hour to get into the Dali museum;  hardly anybody queues to check out the submarine man.

Anyway, we were in the Dali gift-shop  - always the most crowded place in any cultural location  - when I bumped gently against a woman. She murmured ‘Perdone, senor’ and that was that. Or it was until three minutes later, when I swung round to say something to the present Mrs Collins only it wasn’t the present Mrs Collins by my side but the perdone woman and she wasn’t just by my side, she had her hand in my bag. Or had she? Almost as soon as I registered her hand was in the bag, her hand wasn’t in the bag and she was talking to her friend. I checked:  keys, phone, satnav, all safely in the inner zipped compartment where I’d placed them.  Nothing gone. So I told the p Mrs C, in a loudish voice, what I thought had happened. About  twenty seconds later the Spanish woman and her friend made an unhurried but firm exit from the shop. We followed, equally unhurried but firm. The Spanish woman and her friend dawdled at a shop window for  3.5 secs, then with a quick backward glance, set off down the street. We followed. They quickened their pace and turned a corner; we trotted after them.  When next seen they had done some real speed work and were disappearing at the end of the street, again with that non-furtive-but-definitely-checking glance over the shoulder.

And that was it. I’m not sure what we’d have done if they’d turned round and come back – probably started to sprint away ourselves.  Was this woman Catalonia’s worst pickpocket?  Maybe.  If she hadn’t been dipping into my bag, why did she and her friend clear off soon afterwards and go barreling down a number of streets at near-Olympics pace?  The p Mrs C and I  gathered our breath and agreed I’d been guilty of tempting a Spanish woman to break the seventh commandment.

There is another explanation. Somewhere in Figueres today, two respectable middle-aged women are telling their friends about the near-escape they had after being chased for no reason down a series of streets by a pair of clearly-crazy but frighteningly-fit old gringos.  

Is stealing morally wrong?  I dunno, but  considering the high level of skill required, not to mention the physical and emotional expense, I’d hate to have to do it for a living.

Cars and being young

One of the good things about being on a house-swap is you get to drive someone else’s car.  This is good for a number of reasons but especially because it reassures me. I find that despite what the present Mrs Collins says,  I’m not the only one who eats food in the car and lets little bits, crumbs and broken crisps particles and the odd M and M fall down into that little gulley between the driver’s seat and the gear-stick, to lie there for months on end. I’m also not the only one who regularly cleans the outside of his windscreen but leaves the inside because it’s harder to do, until a light, scummy surface develops and you don’t notice it until you reach forward one day to give the inside of the windscreen a wipe with the back of your hand and find your knuckles come back smudged grey.

Driving my counterpart’s car has also taught me quite a bit about French drivers.  Unlike the Italians who are only marginally less mad than several million bushes, French drivers are generally courteous. They don’t cut you off, they don’t tail-gate you, they don’t  nip in and grab the parking space you were waiting for several minutes to occupy. They’re a decent driving people but they do have one irritating habit.  They horn-fart.

It happens at traffic-lights. If you’re in front of them and you don’t get out of there quicker than a greyhond with electrodes attached to its genitals, they start horn-farting. This involves using the horn in a high-pitched, staccato way. Think of a fat man breaking wind in a I-wish-I-hadn’t-had-those-beans manner. Not so much mmmbaaaaaaaaaaaaamp or  even paaarp-paaarp-paaaaaaarrrrrrp    as peerrmp-peeerrmp-peerrmp-peeerrmp-peeerrmp-peeerrmp-peeerrmp-peerrrmp. If  you’re not too upset  and find time to glance in your rear mirror, you’ll see the horn-farter lifting both hands off the wheel to give you an Arsene-Wenger throwing-invisible-balls-in-the-air shrug before going back to his flatulent horn.

But it was yesterday afternoon that I had my most absorbing encounter with a French driver. The sun was shining with its usual four-o’clock intensity and I was sitting at the traffic lights near where we’re staying.  The light was red and I was half-musing over how clever it was of the French to put a small  light half-way up the traffic-light stem so you don’t have to twist your neck to peer up to see if the signal has changed, and how smooth the surface of even their minor roads are compared to ours, and how a  big ice-cream cone might be nice later, maybe vanille et chocolat. Then next thing I'm aware that a car – a small black muscular-looking car – has emerged from a side-street near the lights.  It is crossing the road slowly, as though the driver might be going to nudge gently into the side of my vehicle. But he doesn’t.  Instead he points the nose of his car at a space I have left between me and the concrete base on which the traffic-light is planted.  Having pointed, he is now driving slowly but relentlessly  towards that small space.

I am frozen, speechless.  He’s going to bash into my front wheel and we’ll both be immobilized and here for hours. He’s going to horribly scrape my front bumper and he won’t have insurance and it’ll cost a fortune. He’s going to…

But he doesn’t.  He drives the two right-hand-side wheels of his car up onto the concrete base on which the traffic lights are mounted, so for some five seconds his car is at an angle of about 35% degrees. Then as he levels out and pauses for the next stage, I see him up-close.

If I say he looked like Theo Walcott’s very tough older brother, it’ll probably be misleading. He was tough-looking, true, but in an assured, relaxed way. As  our gazes met  this breacher-of-every-highway-code-ever-invented raised his eyebrows two millimeters and his chin four.

I wouldn't have thought it possible for so much non-verbal information to be conveyed with so little effort.  The tiny movement of the features and head said ‘That was a particularly tight space I’ve just manoeuvred through – thanks for leaving it, friend’.  At the same time,  with no malice it was saying ‘Hey, you sit there like a stunned sheep staring at a red light if you want to, grandpa, but there ain’t a chance in hell I’m gonna. I’m Theo Walcott’s tough older brother and I got things to do and places to be, so screw rules and screw traffic lights and screw you too, grandpa, if you think I’m going to sit around obeying any  mother-obscenitying highway code'.

And then he was gone, roaring across the space, through red lights, past other stationary drivers gawking at him, off up a hill and into the hot early evening. Seconds later  the  air was filled with the sound of breaking wind  -  peerp-peeeerp-peeerp-peeerp – as the law-abiding drivers tried to cope with the fact that a wild free spirit had just shown them how you could if you liked flaunt authority,  how you could if you liked live life with a calm contempt for rules, and how you could if you were young and tough go roaring off towards pleasure, leaving horn-farters and old foreign grandpas glued to rules and regulations at a traffic intersection.

I’ve been trying to reproduce that chin-and-eyebrows movement in the mirror since, but I don’t think I’ll ever get it.   

The Rose of Tralee and the need to bum-clench

Is The Rose of Tralee the most toe-curling, buttock-clenchingly embarrassing TV programme ever devised by humankind, or a brilliant and uniquely-Irish festival that taps into something important about being Irish at home or abroad? Maybe (to be balanced for once) both.

The bum-clenching bit used to be reflected in the sweaty embarrassment of the man doing the emcee thing over the couple of nights. I still remember with a faint nausea the sight of Gay Byrne trying to chat up the contestants, ending with him getting down on one knee and getting dangerously close to fetishism as he removed their shoes so they could lep about and do some high-kicking Irish dancing. Then there were the shots of the proud mum and dad in the audience, grinning in an embarrassed, everyone’s-looking-at-us way, the tales of work with mentally-handicapped children and dedication to world peace, and did I mention how maaaaaaaaahhhh-ingly silly the male escorts looked when the camera turned on them?

Against that there’s the fact that the competition skips the bathing-suit bit. It does put a decent emphasis on the young women having personality as well as looks. Gay Byrne is gone. It brings much-needed revenue into Kerry. Some of the young women are good-looking, confident and smart to a level that does produce something like pride that Ireland (or at least Irish people) can produce such quality. The Festival tells us much about emigration and how people who’ve emigrated still maintain the ties that link them to Ireland. And as important as anything, like the ‘Back to school’ signs in the shop windows and the political conferences, The Rose of Tralee tells us the summer is just about over and it’s time to turn thoughts once more to autumn chill and darker nights and, yes, omigod, can that be …Christmas up ahead?

We need such signposts to help us make our way through each year. As summer festivals go, The Rose of Tralee is a lot less ugly and threatening than some.

Considering Claudy

As the clamour over Claudy swirls and booms, let me list five points about that event in 1972. I know they will have no impact on those who smell a chance to further discredit the Catholic Church and republicanism, but I still believe making them might bring some hint of reason into discussion of the case.

1. Comparisons between Claudy and Bloody Sunday are invalid. What made Bloody Sunday stand out was the fact that the fourteen killings were inflicted by the forces of the state, whose job it is to protect citizens, not kill them. The IRA, a subversive force, has never claimed any such role.
2. Fr Jim Chesney (if allegations are true) was not and is not the only clergyman to support violence as a means to political ends. We might list off the many Protestant clergymen over the decades who’ve stirred the sectarian pot, particularly in Belfast, inciting young men to violence. Better, though, to focus on army padres. Such men don’t spend their days trying to dissuade the soldiers with whom they come in contact that they should beat their swords into ploughshares, learn to love their enemies rather than train to kill them. Instead, they bless the soldiers in their warlike endeavours, sustain them in battle and hail their heroism when the battle-smoke has cleared. No moral distinction can be drawn between such unequivocal support of those engaged in violence and the alleged actions of Fr Chesney.
3. The Claudy deaths were the result of IRA bungling, not calculated intention. Had the intention been to inflict maximum casualties, no attempts would have been made to warn the authorities. That still leaves those who brought in the bombs morally guilty of behaviour that might (and in their case did) result in terrible death and injuries. But their level of guilt is exactly comparable to those who planned and executed explosions where warnings were successfully given and no one was killed or injured.
4. The fact that Fr Chesney was a Catholic priest should not shock us. Admittedly the Catholic Church has never been supportive of the IRA and throughout history it’s been consistently opposed to violent outbreaks of Irish nationalism. Its non-violent stance loses credibility, however, when we look at the Church’s attitude to the British army in Ireland. The Church has never condemned as immoral either the British Army’s commitment to violence as a way of resolving political issues or its presence on the territory of a neighbouring state. So if they are true, the allegations that Fr Chesney supported political violence puts him out of step with the political-violence grouping he supported, not with the notion of supporting political violence.
5. Finally, politicians such as Ian Óg Paisley and Gregory Campbell, who responded to the Saville Report and the Ballymurphy Massacre campaign by calling for the book on the past to be finally closed, cannot now do other than urge people to leave behind the allegations of blame and cover-up over Claudy.

Simple soul that I am, I believe that if you use reason when addressing an issue rather than sloganeering or bigotry, you’ll acknowledge the rational argument behind the five points listed above. But then reason has rarely been employed by those opposed to republicanism and/or the Catholic Church.

Enemies and liars

OK, OK, I’m becoming a bore about Orwell, I know I am, but this’ll be the last reference to him (at least for a little while).

The great man says two things in the course of Homage to Catalonia that have lodged in my brain and have triggered some contemporary thoughts.

The first was his claim that he harboured no romantic image of the working man, unlike some liberals; but when it came to a clash between the worker and ‘his natural enemy’ the policeman, he Orwell knew which side he was on. The second attention-snagging claim he made was that most journalists ‘lie for a living’.

Let’s take the first one, that the police are the ‘natural enemy’ of the worker. Brendan Behan said that there was no situation so bad, the arrival of a policeman couldn’t make it worse. That’s generally true if the people involved are poor/working-class. The police are the muscular arm of the state; they exist to make sure that the laws of the land are enforced – or at least, that they’re enforced among the less-well-off. If you doubt me, think how many cases you’ve read which involve the arrest and prosecution of a working-class/poor person for theft. How much was involved? What penalty was handed down? Now think of how many occasions you’ve heard of the arrest and prosecution of people for white-collar theft…Not quite so many, eh? Just like the penalty handed down to such people is frequently less draconian. And maybe sometime do a survey of how many working-class people are in our jails and how many middle-class…You probably see that Orwell’s point still thuds home with telling veracity.

And the second one – that most journalists lie for a living. Orwell was talking about eighty years ago, of course, so that can have no relevance to journalists today, can it? … Well, that depends on what you call a lie. If you take a lie to be the flat statement of something that’s not true, well, most journalists tend to be careful about that sort of thing. Though mind you, if you consider the Troubles, the number of times journalists regurgitated as fact a self-serving, lying report from the British Army or the British government, you'd end up with a tidy total of down-right full-frontal lies. But generally with journalists, lying today involves the way they describe or treat events and issues: always it’s as though the status quo is the only possible option. Over the last twenty-five years, for instance, I can’t remember reading a single mainstream journalist who argued the case for a socialist state. Virtually all of them bought into the Thatcherite/Blairite premise that the market, with some light controlling, was what made the mare go. Any more state-controlled approach was bad for business and bad for decent citizens like their readers. Now I’ll give the acquiescing journalists credit for knowing that the market-is-king was only one way of looking at society, and a pretty seriously-flawed way at that. But I won’t give them credit for opening their little beaks and telling their readers that there were other, better ways and that we should press really really hard for them, if we hope to ever bring some semblance of equality to our society. I won’t give them credit for doing that because they didn’t open. In short, they lied by omission, which for people who like to present themselves as the guardians of democracy is a fairly serious failure.

The same of course goes for their presentation of the Troubles. The overwhelming number presented the conflict as some bad psychopaths who were intent on killing people versus the governments who were trying to protect us from them. Anyone with the feeblest grasp of history knows that’s bunkum but it didn’t prevent our heroic hacks from dishing it out for decades.

Funny, isn’t it, how what was true nearly a century ago is true today. That Orwell was some boy.

Top Gun twaddle

Ryanair fly here. As we sit on the balcony having our evening meal, the occasional harp-tailed plane drones overhead, on its way to Perpignan airport. Typical Ryanair, mind you - they don't fly from either Belfast or Dublin, so if Irish people like myself want to fly with them, you have to first get to one of their airports in England. I wasted a lot of time checking out possible connections before stumbling on the fact that Aer Lingus fly here direct from Belfast. Michael O'Leary may say insulting things about Aer Lingus but it looks like they've wiped his eye on this one.

Ryanair and Aer Lingus aren't the only planes to occupy the Catalan evening air. Yesterday and the day before, I was at the cheese-and-liqueur stage when a sound louder and more insistent than normal filled the skies. Six fighter jets in tight formation, with a seventh bringing up the rear, whined across the deepening blue sky. Passenger planes aren't allowed within three miles of each other but these testosterone-fuelled beauties looked to be no more than thirty metres apart.

Why? I presume it's something to do with acting as a unit if they're in a conflict situation. Like a squad of soldiers, they start off close together, go off individually or in smaller teams to do their dirty work and then re-group. Although it still seems to me terribly risky to have people flying so close to one another.

The other why of all this is more baffling. The French defence budget is roughly the same as that of Britain, which is an annual £40bn (mind you, that's not including the £130bn the British plan to spend to replace the Trident nuclear submarine programme). Why does either country spend so much money and who are they protecting their people from? In France, it goes back to de Gaulle. He looked at the Spanish Civil War, when the American politicians refused to support the Spanish Republicans because they figured it might cost them votes. De Gaulle vowed that France would not allow voters in the American Mid-West to shape its future and so he developed his 'force de frappe' - a nuclear strike capability that gave France, he argued, independence from the United States.The fighter planes I saw overhead the other evening are not capable of carrying nuclear weapons but they're part of that same mentality, one shared by Britain, that national independence demands a really strong - in the case of nuclear weapons, suicidally strong - war machine you can call your own.

It's all rubbish, of course.There's the hypocrisy of a country like Britain preaching to Irish people, for example, that they should resolve their differences peacefully. Meanwhile they themselves spend £40bn a year on ways to kill people. Then there's the notion that France or Britain could go it alone in a major war. They're both members of the EU, they both have close ties with the US. There isn't the remotest chance that an attack on a major European country wouldn't provoke a lethal response from the other EU members and the US. And we haven't even asked the most obvious question: who's going to launch a major attack on France or Britain?

The whole notion of national defence systems, and particularly go-it-alone systems, requires serious rethinking, particularly at a time when thousands are becoming unemployed because stupid and greedy people screwed up a stupid and greedy capitalist system. As things stand, the fighter planes that streak high above our balcony and the nuclear submarines that Britain is about to replace are cripplingly expensive and morally contemptible displays of Colonel Blimp thinking.