Three things about the lolly we get from London

It depends on who you’re talking to. Some people, they say we’d be scuppered without money from Britain. Others say we’re losing millions by duplicating everything north and south.  So let’s make a modest start, look at the economic argument and see how the economic case for union stands up. (Health warning:I tend to get the head staggers if too many sums are thrown at me too quickly, so if you’re that way inclined too, proceed with caution.)

1. Unionists politicians say we get £10.5 billion annually from London. That sum’s arrived at by calculating  the gap between the money we raise here in the north and give to London and what they give us. OK. Pretty solid money, that. Except it’s not solid. That £10.5 billion is calculated by the Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP) here. They do it by using a report that the SNP said in 2006 was pro-union and designed to score over all opponents. The Scots Nats drew this conclusion from information leaked by the same economists who produced this dodgy report. To make things even dodgier, while unionist politicians present this £10.5 billion as money that comes here, the fact is that the sum includes money which is directed by Whitehall departments, not money which is overseen locally. Key point: the claim that we get £10.5 billion annually from London is built on sand. 
2. So why don’t we just ask London how much more money they give us than we give them and be done with it? Get it from the horse’s mouth? Well, that’s tricky because the Brits simply won’t say how much money we generate. That makes it a bit hard to work out the difference between what we generate and give them, and what they give us. There is a local estimate made by the Department of Finance and Personnel  here that says we generate £12.7 billion. But that’s just an estimate. For example it doesn’t include corporation tax that’s paid by companies with headquarters in Britain. And  the calculation of the amount of VAT, of tobacco duty, of alcohol duty paid is based on information drawn from a survey of (wait for it) 147 households here. Once more, shaky figures.  We need firm facts if we’re to do the sums.
3. A final point (for now). The British government says it needs £23.2 billion  to run the six counties. Right. Except that this includes money we never see - money that goes on the British military, royal palaces and royal travel, among other things.  So  that’s another shaky/dodgy figure. 

 The core fact is that for whatever reason, the amount we give the London government in taxes and the amount they give us  - both are shrouded in a mist of uncertainty. If the economic reason is THE reason for union with Britain, shouldn’t Britain quit acting coy and spit out hard, verifiable data so that we can look at it and do the sums? Maybe they’ll come out in favour of continued union with Britain. Maybe they’ll fall well short of favourable.  But it really is time we were told the facts of our financial life. We’re all adults here, aren’t we? 

Northern Irish - Promised land or no-man's-land?

Maybe it’s because it’s still February (how long, Lord? How long?) and the weather’s turned cold, but I find myself this Wednesday morning thinking grimly as to what bright spark came up with the wheeze of including ‘Northern Irish’ as a category in the census forms. Because it clearly is placed with exquisite precision as a middle ground in which, if you’re of a delicate disposition,  you can park yourself. British? Nah - that’s for the head-bangers who get pissed on the Twelfth and love getting into sectarian punch-ups.    Irish? Nah - that’s for the crazies who tried to bomb a million Protestants into a united Ireland and failed. I’m not going to link myself with that  lot. Which leaves me with Northern Irish and sure what could be better? By ticking that box I show I’m not an extremist on either side, but view this wee country of ours, all six counties of it, as the gem that gets my affection-juices flowing. 

Some people don’t like me for it? Makes it sound as though I’m inching away from my Britishness and next you know there’ll be a tricolour flying over Belfast City Hall? Too bad. Some other people don’t like it, because it sounds as though I’m trying to hew out an identity that is peculiar to here  - that I’m answering Thatcher’s question and saying no, we here are not as British as Finchley but at the same time we’re not those muddle-headed bankrupts south of the border either? Too bad there too. 

A long time ago, when the Ulster Unionist Party was just beginning to feel the DUP pinch its bum, they devised a slogan “Decent people vote for the UUP”. That’s really what the Northern Irish people are saying: We’re decent balanced people, we see our Irishness but we also see our Britishness, and what’s wrong with that?

Well nothing really. It’s just another way of saying “I’m a unionist but a nice, liberal one. And I’m pleased to say that some very decent people - including Catholic people, for goodness’ sake - think like me”.

What was it the Bible said about this sort of thing? Ah yes, Revelations 3:16: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth”. “

Concern with bread-and-butter. Oh, and flags too.

It’s interesting the illogical knots in which people can tie themselves sometimes. When Sinn Féin people talk about the need to hold a border poll, their unionist opponents tell them to wise up, a re-united Ireland is far from the minds of most people. The days of emotional dreaming are done. It’s jobs and mortgages and the other bread-and-butter issues that people are concerned with now, not some out-moded impractical allegiance. “Fair enough” you might say. “Sometimes you need to get food on the family table and other things must be suspended”. It’s a view I don’t share but I can see why it makes sense to some people.

If you’re one of that some,  ask yourself: what issue in the past three months has stirred people here most profoundly?  The horse-meat scandal? Child sex-abuse? The dearth of jobs?  Uh-uh. It’s the flags issue. That’s the one the DUP- UUP leaflet urged people to get mad as hell about. That’s what brought people onto the streets, blocking roads, singing songs, attacking the police. Flags. It doesn’t even have to be a sensible issue: the 17-times-a-year vote has no more to do with ‘ripping down’ imperial culture than my big toe has, but it still got hundreds if not thousands of law-breakers onto the street. 

So approve or disapprove, it’s something other than jobs that moves people from time to time. There was no spilling onto the street to protest about lack of investment or jobs. It was the flag issue. The truth is, for better or worse, people can be worried sick about their job and at the same time indignant about non-economic matters. It’s seen in the flags issue and, since you ask me, Virginia, in the indignation felt that people like Marian Price can be incarcerated or released on the whim of a British Secretary of State who shows few signs of being pleased to have the job she has.  But the lovely Theresa is learning - she must be - that you don’t need a weatherman or an Oxbridge degree to know which way the wind blows. Because you’ve concerns about an empty belly doesn’t mean your neck supports an empty head. 

Looking for something stupid and cack-handed? Try Portstewart

OK - no politics today. Well, sort of but not full frontal politics.

A year or so ago I found myself in what some geographical illiterates call  'the North-West' - in Portstewart, to be exact. Up for the day, a nice walk along that fabulous beach, a bit of lunch. Now as you maybe know I think golf is a dumb game but I’ve no objection to their club-houses as somewhere to get a bite to eat, especially Portstewart Golf Club which has a nice view of that amazing beach.  Anyway I was inside and heading up the stairs to the restaurant when I heard a loud voice from below calling “Remove the hat, sir!” I looked down and it was an official-looking chap staring up at me. “No hats to be worn in the club-house” he informed me. As one easily over-awed by authority, I immediately plucked off my sun protector and went and had my meal. But with every biteful I kept kicking myself for my compliance and wondering why on earth they had this rule. So on the way out I put my hat defiantly in place and headed for the exit, and there was the chap who had demanded my hat-removal. So I asked him why the rule. “It’s the policy here, sir”.  Yes I know, but why? After a couple of more versions of ‘It’s the policy here’, he confessed that he hadn’t a clue but he was under instructions.

That was some time ago, and I’m old enough and ugly enough not to let these things bother me. But a case I heard of recently has made my blood simmer if not boil. A family group went for a meal in Portstewart Golf Club restaurant. As it happened a young boy in the family suffers from alopecia - his head is totally without hair, and so he habitually wears a cap.  No sooner were they in Portstewart Golf Club than the official was on the spot telling the youngster to remove his cap, adding by way of explanation “For the ladies”. So the boy, who is understandably attached to his hat in emotional as well as physical ways, was forced to remove it. Alopecia on view.

Now I don’t blame the guy who carries out this dumbest of club-house rules-  he’s following orders and probably glad of the job. I do blame the nineteenth-century ninnies who devised the rule and who appear to believe that respectability has something to do with taking off your hat on their holy ground. And who, in implementing that rule, show all the flexibility and sensitivity of a rhinoceros’s arse.  Is there some reason these people  would rather bully a vulnerable child into compliance than use the space between their ears where other people have a brain? Maybe you can think of one. I can’t.

Malachi, me and that movie

I'm just back from a debate (?) on  BBC Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster's Sunday Sequence. My sparring partner was Malachi O'Doherty, who is a good example of someone whom I like but whose opinions on most things I disagree with. This time we were disagreeing about the film Mea Maxima Culpa, which is (or certainly was) showing at the Queen's Film Theatre.

The film is about a Father Laurence Murphy of Miwaukee, who abused a group of deaf children in his care over a  number of years. Some of the boys, now elderly men,  told their story through sign language, with actors doing a voice-over. There was something truly chilling about the little gasps the men made and the slap of their hands as they signed the story of their suffering. The film brings to life yet another shameful episode of clerical sexual abuse of children and the arrogance of some of those in power in the Catholic Church at the time (1960s/70s).

Where I part way with Malachi is over the fact that the film presented the Catholic Church as a uniquely corrupt institution from top to bottom, with corruption allowed unchecked and its lay members held in check by the threat of damnation. This is simply untrue. To take the Murphy case (two other cases featured as well), the film notes that in 1974 some boys from the home went to the police and then the District Attorney's office with their complaint against Murphy. So too did Fr Thomas Brundage, the judicial vicar for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The film notes the fact that the boys went to the civil authorities and were ignored, and leaves it at that.  It doesn't follow-up on this failure by the civil authorities, which could have stopped Murphy and his abuse in its tracks. Nor does it mention that Brundage contacted the District Attorney's office with his concern. Nor does it mention Brundage's claim that many of the other boys from the home not featured in the film contacted him and expressed their gratitude for his efforts on their behalf.

The other point of difference that I have is a wider one, and one rarely referred to. The film overall gives the impression of an institution, the Catholic Church, which is peculiarly prone to the crime of sexual abuse. This is not the case. Figures on this matter are hard to come by, and when you ask for them you are sometimes greeted with hostility. I recall a UTV programme a few years back, in which I was one of the audience. The panel was a group of experts, including Dame Nuala O'Loan  (and my apologies that I can't recall other people). I asked the panel if anyone knew how the level of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church compared with the level of abuse in other faiths and in the general population.  No one could or would give me an answer. Immediately following the programme, I was approached by three Protestant clergymen - two Presbyterian, I think, and one Church of Ireland. They admonished me sharply for daring to raise such an issue - the problem was one unique to the Catholic Church, they explained, because of the rule of celibacy for priests. When I asked for some research that would support this claim, I was told it was unnecessary - they knew it was so.

In fact there are some figures. A study from Stanford University scored the incidence of Catholic clergy sexual abuse over the second half of the twentieth century at somewhere between 2-5% of clergy. The rate of child sexual abuse in the general population is about 8%. The US Department of Education reported that nearly 10% of students in Grades 8-11 had reported incidents of sexual misconduct by teachers.  Yet none of this has prompted attention or investigation from the media.

It would be safe to say that most people believe with my Protestant clergymen that child sexual abuse is unique to the Catholic Church, as is cover-up of these crimes by the Church. Films like Mea Maxima Culpa  go a long way to reinforcing this impression. Which prompts the question 'Why?' Perhaps it's lazy journalism. Or maybe it makes a better story to set child abuse exclusively within the the Catholic Church - all that stuff about crucifixes and confession and candles and the rest. Or maybe it's a plain old-fashioned desire to put the boot into the Catholic Church. There are people in our society who made their names doing just that.

If the Jimmy Savile scandal inflicted suffering on untold numbers of vulnerable children, it also did one good thing. It showed that widespread sexual abuse of children and minors isn't confined to the Catholic Church and that other institutions do just what often happened in the Catholic Church: they experienced child sexual abuse and they tried try to cover it up for as long as possible. Mea Maxima Culpa brings alive real suffering and baffling evil. The existence of such suffering and evil to an equal or greater extent in other areas, it ignores.

But don't take my word for it. Newseek  in 2010 quoted Ernie Allen,  president of the National Center for Missing and Exploted Children in the US: "I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others",

Not many people know that. Some don't want to.

An interview with Davy Adams

[This is an edited version of the interview in my book 'Whose Past Is It Anyway?']

Davy Adams was involved in the struggle from his earliest years. No, not the political struggle - the struggle to put bread on the table. He is one of ten children and that was their everyday worry - getting the money to survive and endure as a family.

But his home was a political one, in that his mother always insisted that they vote: “She said it was the one time everyone was equal”. Although his home was the only Protestant one in a small row of houses, it was set in a wider predominantly unionist area. “Three-quarters of the population could have sat at home and the unionist guy would still have swept home with the vote”.

His parents never had any fear that their children would be swept into paramilitarism or “become enthralled by Paisley or any of his people”, because they believed their children were too sensible. They were right, with one exception: their son Davy, who joined the UDA. He speaks of a resentment among working-class unionists about how deprived other people were. “We had nothing either, and it was as if we were living in the lap of luxury. And then you would know people who were killed, people who were in no-warning bombs or shot on the least excuse or no excuse at all...I joined the UDA very late, in relative terms - I would have been in my early twenties - and it flowed from knowing people who had been murdered and decent people who had done no one any wrong.”

He says his thinking these days is massively changed. “In fact I’m not even sure that I would have a party political mode of thinking. I would be unionist because I happen to think that’s where the best future lies. According to the Good Friday Agreement, and I stick very much by that, if the majority on both sides of the border voted for a united Ireland, they would get no reaction from me. If there was a proper united Ireland out there, that would benefit us all and suit us all, where the pain and hatred and nastiness could be set aside or left behind, that would be no problem for me”.

He doesn’t believe the Stormont Assembly is achieving much in real terms, but “I think they’re doing an awful lot in terms of building understandings and building relationships, not only among themselves, but ones that bleed down into the wider community”. 

A bad way of commemorating centenaries would be to be too militaristic or celebrating subjugation. “There are no more multi-racial,multi-ethnic, multi-religious communities than there are within the UK. That’s what unionism should have been pointing out for years and should be pointing out now. So a bad commemoration would be singular, it would be triumphalist it would be about subjugation, it would be harking back to supposed good old days when unionists ruled the roost completely - that to me would be a bad commemoration”.

He would like to see republicans invited to commemorations of the signing of the Ulster Covenant, but he’s not too optimistic that the invitations will be offered or, if offered, accepted. “It would be great if people from all sections took part in each of the commemorations, but even if that doesn’t happen, I don’t think that’s a recipe for disaster necessarily. I think it can still be handled”.

He thinks 2012 is a good opportunity for unionists to reflect on unionism, although “no one can say that unionism hasn’t spent forty years reflecting on unionism. An awful lot of it had to be forced on them, but it happened none the less”. 

He believes there is “widespread ignorance” in the unionist community about 1916, and a few television programmes about it would help. “What we need is a straight historical piece - or two or three - on the Easter Rising, what foreshadowed it, what brought it about, what followed, the Civil War even. And you know, the state that came from it wasn’t exactly in line with Irish republicanism - I would argue it wasn’t within a beagle’s goul of Irish republicanism.”

He believes we should spend less time dwelling on the pitfalls of the centenaries and more on what can be done with them.

“There’s a great opportunity for education here and understanding other points of view - about how people got to the position they were in, how people ended up with their beliefs and allegiances, and how people who have different allegiances don’t necessarily have to be enemies, even such starkly different allegiances as those to an Irish Republic or those to a Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom”.

He’s very much opposed to “one-eyed presentation” of events - providing a unionist-weighted programme, then a republican-weighted programme, and then claiming you’ve created balance. “Each programme should be a historical analysis, a straight historical analysis pointing out benefits, faults, why people made the decisions they did”.

He believes that what both unionism and republicanism have to learn is Irishness - “the breadth of Irishness. It doesn’t stop at a certain religion or a certain set of political views, and it never did until relatively recent times. My father was born before partition, and a lot of his modes of reference were in an Irish context.  He’d say ‘Ah, you wouldn’t meet a dafter man if you walked to Dublin!’ And if you’d asked him if he was Irish he’d have laughed at you.  ‘Do you think I’m Australian or something?’ That was lost, so we all have to learn that Irishness doesn’t belong to one, almost singular identity”.

He acknowledges that it’s hard to project oneself into the past and understand it. “But it’s not impossible. I think we underestimate ourselves far, far too much in Northern Ireland. We just say, ‘Ah, Jesus, we can’t trust ourselves to do this that or the other’. And often, almost subconsciously,you can attract the reaction that you expect - not that you want but that you expect. Instead, why not go for it? Let’s go for it and do it properly, and do it hoping for the best and planning to get the best from both sides of the community”.

He thinks republicans and nationalists in the north may go a bit overboard “to prove how Irish and republican they are [Laughs]  Whereas down in the south, they’re far more relaxed about it. I think the commemoration in the south will be a relaxed thing - probably far, far better done in terms of presenting different sides of the story accurately”.

The Battle of the Somme commemorations, he believes, have always been something that unionism has claimed ownership of, although that may in part have been due to nationalism “pushing it away”. “It never should have been treated like that. It was a sacrifice made by people from all arts and parts of Ireland, and from all religions and all politics, so I think it has real potential for being commemorated in the proper sense and it has far more legitimacy for being commemorated right across the communities.”

He sees the Great War as being imperial. “You know the old one - ‘Lions led by donkeys’. It wasn’t quite the case but that certainly has got a grip now on people’s understanding of that event”.

But in terms of the centenary commemorations generally? He’s optimistic. “Minds are broadening - I’ve no doubt about that. You’ve only to look at who’s sitting up in Stormont together. That has set a great example to the rest of Northern Ireland. The centenaries are going to happen, they’re historical events, let’s look at them, let’s commemorate them. And let’s try and do it in as reasonable and as sensible a manner possible, with an underlying notion of using them to help better understanding across communities.”

A rose by any other name...

I think Herr S Freud would have enjoyed this one...(No prizes for the eagle-eyed, sorry)