Do you now or have you ever condemned...

I’m not sure you’ll want to read this blog today. You see, the truth is, I haven’t condemned what happened at Auschwitz during the Second World War. And I haven’t condemned the annihilation of hundreds of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki either.  You probably didn’t know that but now that you’ve heard, I expect you’re clapping your brow with one hand and pointing a shaking finger at me with the other as you gasp the words “You beggar belief!” 

That’s the headline in the increasingly-tabloidy  Venerable Organ this morning: ‘You beggar belief’  under a photograph of Independent councillor Martin Connolly, who has refused to condemn a bomb attack on his niece...

Hold on. His niece? So the reprehensibility is linked to his having a blood-relative involved?  Good news – I had no relatives involved in Auschwitz or Hiroshima or Nagasaki, so it seems I’m off the degenerate hook for not condemning them. Actually, I didn’t condemn them because I didn’t feel it’d make a bit of difference. Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Nagasaki have happened and condemning them won’t make them un-happen. Nor will condemning them make any difference to the men who performed the deeds, or to others who continue that tradition of great statesmen and generals ordering the slaughter of innocent civilians.

That’s why I felt Martin Connolly’s refusal to condemn the attack on a policewoman made sense, really. Why go through a pointless public ritual that will change nothing?  But now that I know there was a blood relative involved, that makes all the difference. Shame on you, Mr Connolly. As the VO with its instinct for a fresh phrase puts it, you beggar belief. 

Only a game?

When I attended University College Dublin in the 1960s, the  boys from St Columb's College, Derry used to hang around together.  They were a bright bunch but they felt a little intimidated by the free-talking southern students, especially the ones from Dublin. So they (and include me, alas) used to gather at the radiator inside the main entrance at Earlsfort Terrace and scoff among themselves at the people who ran things in UCD -  Henry Kelly,  Anthony Clare, Sinead Cusack,  Patrick Cosgrove. These people dominated the L and H debating society, Dramsoc and  any other clubs and societies that required you to stand on your hind legs and address an audience. "Bloody idiots!" the Derry boys would mutter, then go back to doing the Times crossword or reading an old edition of The Derry Journal.

I thought of them and my younger self yesterday when I was out at Stormont at the Poc Fada competition. It was blessed with good weather, it was a good laugh, but most of all it was a good PR exercise by Sinn Féin.  It told anybody present that nationalists and republicans had finally arrived and were clumping all over the good lawns, once the sole preserve of solid members of the Unionist party.  There wasn't a unionist in sight, except you count the security man who asked some of those coming in "Are you here for ...the...event?"  Or maybe the  stony-faced cop who moved around not speaking but looking as authoritative as he could. But while you could argue the Event never happened because there were no unionists to witness it,  you may be sure they knew it had happened. It was on the TV, it was in the newspapers, it caught the media's imagination the way a good PR exercise should.

The kids playing hurling, the celebrity poc fada, the Edward Carson trophy - none of this changes the north's constitutional position within the United Kingdom. But Events like this have a subversive effect: they hollow out unionism as a dominant force.  If people you've been taught to see as your enemy begin to share all the authority and spaces that were once exclusively yours, it gets a bit bewildering. You begin to think that while their day may not have come, yours in some significant sense has gone.  What a pity we hadn't the gumption back in the Sixties to leave the sidelines and transform UCD in a similar, final way.

Good fences make good neighbours...

As a youngster I was fascinated by the philosophical notion of what is necessary before you can have an event. For example, if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, is there any noise?

I thought of this yesterday as I was attacking the hedge between me and my neighbour. It’s a twisted, hard-core brute and even after I’ve gone at it for an hour or more with a heavy-duty electric hedge-cutter, it still comes out looking the muscle-pattern on a loyalist prisoner. My neighbour calls encouragingly to me as I stand tiptoe on a chair, trying to put manners on the top bit: “You’re putting me to shame with your work on that hedge!” I tell him he’s got the wrong man. It’s logically impossible to arrive at a number lower than the lowest number.

The thing is this: would I cut my hedge if there was no one there – if I had no neighbours? I’m surrounded by Protestants,  in whose genes is a historal drive towards order and cultivation. My genes tell me that Mother Nature wanted hedges and grass to grow, and there’s something perverse about slashing and strimming and hacking at her efforts. So although I pick up my heavy-duty hedge-cutter every so often, my heart and my history aren’t in it.  My father was a cattle-dealer and increasingly I see how wise he was. If you want vegetation kept under control,  set a dozen head of cattle grazing on it.

Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking: if no unionists are about,  will the Poc Fada competition at Stormont exist?  More on that tomorrow...

The Main Event

I was at West Belfast Talks Back last night – the highlight probably of Feile an Phobail. I’ve been going to the event practically every year for the last ten years and each year when I enter the crowded gymnasium of St Louise’s Comprehensive College, where the event is held, my heart rises. Around five or six hundred people, crammed in, hungry to hear the views of politicians, at least one of whom will hold views sharply divergent from their own. Could there be a better advertisement for the tolerance and public-mindedness of the West Belfast population?

Last night’s panel was Ian Óg Paisley of the DUP, Barry McElduff of Sinn Féin, Naomi Long of the Alliance Party and Fintan O’Toole of The Irish Times. The man who merits applause, which he got, is Paisley. Like other unionist figures before him, he came into an audience which was 99% critical of him and his party: that requires a fair amount of courage. Not that he was treated with anything other than fairness by the audience – a number of his statements were greeted with applause.

The truth, though, is that not all of the speakers were effective. Naomi Long is a fluent and reasonable woman but I find her delivery washes over me in a pleasing, non-controversial way, leaving little trace behind. Ian Óg has some trace of the plain-speaking eloquence of his father but only some: essentially he’s a lightweight. He works hard at cultivating a laughing, laddish image, with talk of his motorbike and sporting events, but his ability to construct an argument is weak. Fintan O’Toole can construct an argument but he usually builds it so high, gives his views in such an over-wordy, abstract way, I find myself longing for the end of his sentence at the expense of the ideas he’s offering. Barry McElduff, though, as someone said to me afterwards, knows how to tell a story. Ninety per cent of the time when he addresses an issue, he finds a way to anchor it in real events. He also is unremittingly cheerful, which helps.

And yet when I left last night, I felt vaguely dissatisfied. Was it that I hungered after the old days, when big issues like cease-fires and Agreements and cross-border institutions were still in the making? Maybe it was the absence of a strong, challenging view from those who spoke from the floor? None of those, I suspect, or none of them principally. The problem was that both the issues presented and the solutions offered lacked originality. Yes, in the past discussion focused on life-and-death matters. But what I felt was missing last night was a speaker who could address the audience with passion and clarity, and offer a fresh, an ORIGINAL solution to the given issue: ‘Here is the problem you thought intractable; here’s what needs to be done. Whaddyatink?’

Fire in the belly, ice-cool in the brain: maybe next year.

Doing a Darren Gibson

One of the funniest things in sport this summer has been the futile efforts of the IFA to stop players from the north playing for the Republic. Darren Gibson of Manchester United is the best-known case. He’s from Derry and after playing at youth level for Northern Ireland, he opted to play for the Republic of Ireland. It didn’t go down well in Belfast. More recently the IFA took a case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne to stop Daniel Kearns doing exactly the same thing – and lost. At this stage the IFA are getting seriously worried about the speed of leakage. This past year alone, two other notable players – Marc Wilson and Shane Duffy – have crossed the border to join up with the Republic.

What the IFA fails to see – or maybe pretends to fail to see – is that this is about more than football. The truth is that half the population in the north feel no sense of loyalty to the Northern Ireland football team. I remember being in Lagan College, a Protestant-Catholic integrated school, on a day when the Republic of Ireland were due to play Northern Ireland. The youngsters were engaged in good-natured banter but their allegiances divided with laser-like precision: Catholics were rooting for the Republic’s team, Protestants for the Northern Ireland team. Footballers do have their careers in mind when they switch to the south – if you play for a team with a high profile and some prospect of success, you’ll have a higher chance of show-casing your talents. It’s also about the instinctive loyalty many northern players feel towards the south alongside a distaste for the sectarianism still rooted in the support base of the Northern Ireland team.

There’s a simple answer to the problem, just as there’s a simple answer to the decline of club soccer north and south of the border: get rid of the border. An island this size hasn’t the luxury of dividing itself in two and then trying to organize club and ‘national’ teams as if the other lot weren’t there. Whether the south’s body, the FAI, would be for such a move is uncertain; the top people in the IFA would certainly be implacably opposed. The Windsor Park lot would prefer their leaky tub to go down with all hands rather than join hands with the rest of the island. So they go on stabbing themselves, leaking top-footballer life-blood, and blaming everyone else for what’s happening. Clever. Very clever.

Dervla's Dilemma

Dervla Kirwan had a problem last night. She was featured on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ and the producers clearly decided that they weren’t going to waste the fact that Dervla is Michael Collins’s great-grandniece. Dervla herself said she was very proud of the great man and of his brother, her great-grandfather, who also fought in what’s commonly called the War of Independence, although since it didn’t achieve independence, that’s an odd name for it. The thing was, Dervla wanted to get some vivid detail on her great-grandfather’s role in things, but she didn’t want it to be, um, too vivid. So she knew he’d been part of a flying column in West Cork, and she knew that he’d been involved in violent operations, so what did she choose to highlight? An encounter where he waved a burning brand to warn his comrades and so saved their lives. You get it? He was in the flying column to save lives, not to take them.

We got more of the same when Dervla pored over her forebear’s records. After the establishment of the twenty-six county state, her great-grandfather joined the Irish army, and on his records he had to fill out ‘Previous Service’. He wrote ‘I served in the IRA for three years’. Cue alarm bells. Dervla looks worried and says that that word, IRA, makes her feel uneasy. And she wanted to stress that the IRA being talked about was a very different IRA from that involved in the Troubles in the north and elsewhere over the past forty years. Not the same at all. Completely different. The old IRA fought for Irish independence and the more recent IRA fought for, um, well, Irish independence, yes, but in a different way, they shot people and killed them and exploded bombs, whereas the old IRA, um, shot people and…Look, they’re different. And yes, there was a Sinn Féin party back then, just like now, but that Sinn Féin party was different from the present one because they, well, they believed in Irish unity, a 32-county republic, whereas ….

It’s a hopeless, hilarious argument, trying to convince yourself and everyone else that, as my late mother-in-law used to say, the old IRA “were nice” and the more recent version was un-nice.

There are just two possible reasons why people march up this logical cul-de-sac. The first is that, because the IRA violence of the 1970s, 80s and 90s was more recent, it also looks a lot rawer. The second possible reason is that people see clearly the link between the goals and methods of the old IRA and the more recent one, but willfully close their eyes to the link because, as Dervla says, it makes them very uncomfortable.

The closest Sinn Fein come to having an intellectual?

Is Andrew Lynch right? In a review for The Sunday Business Post eighteen months ago, Lynch described Eoin O Broin as “the closest thing Sinn Fein has to a full-blown intellectual”. Two days ago I interviewed O Broin as part of Feile An Phobail, and while I can’t testify to the full-blown bit because I’m not sure what it means (and neither does Lynch, in all probability), if being an intellectual means you’ve got lots of ideas, O Broin is indeed an intellectual.

In the course of his talk the former Belfast city councillor made a number of interesting points, notably that the DUP are not the central obstacle to a reunited Ireland and a new republic. O Broin insists that the role of road-block is taken by Fianna Gael and Fianna Fail. The two southern parties would of course deny this, insisting that they are republican, but then the SDLP do the same thing so clearly that can’t be treated seriously. In fact, O Broin argues, FF and FG are passionately committed to maintaining the status quo – that is, partition.

It’s a persuasive argument, and the FF and FG position is understandable if not forgiveable. After all, the two parties have been in existence for close to a century now. If you and the people before you had laboured long and hard to built up a fighting electoral machine, with all the attendant memories and companionship and privileges, do you think you’d want to see all that dissolved with the arrival of a new, all-Ireland republic? The other side of that is, if Fianna Fail and Fine Gael were serious about their desire to end partition, there’d be a pan-nationalist front in Ireland that would expose the DUP as the nay-sayers that they are. The drive towards powerful cross-border bodies would become turbo-charged and, especially with the heightened consciousness of 2016 as the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, there’d be a new attitude to what is possible throughout Ireland.

O Broin made one other point that particularly caught my attention. He said that securing a majority in the north for constitutional change was possible, but only if those seeking change stop thinking in terms of converting, say, 10% of the DUP. Think instead, he argued, of the 50% of Protestants who don’t vote. They’re clearly open to something better than what currently is on offer. It’s up to those believing in a new republic to present a vision that will win their attention and ultimately support.

Not bad for someone condescended to by a Sunday Business Post reviewer. But then as O Broin himself might say, he’s been patronised in his time by people of better judgement and higher standing than Andrew Lynch.