The past - it's difficult, mainly because it's over

I've been asked to meet with some visitors to Belfast later this morning. They're here to gather material for a drama production relating to our ways of dealing with the past, so I'm trying to pull together my thoughts, such as they are,  on the subject.

The most important thing, I think, is to admit that the past is past. When we say we're 'dealing with' something, it suggests we're in a position to shape it, get it under control, mould it. The past is pretty resistant to that - it's happened, and, if as has been so often the case here, that past is full of suffering and loss, that suffering and loss have happened and no amount of manoeuvring is going to change that. At the same time, I remember being in the Guildhall Square in Derry when David Cameron was beamed live from the House of Commons with his famous apology for Bloody Sunday, and the crowd cheered and clapped. I suggested to someone with me that if I'd had a loved one shot dead by the state, an apology over thirty years later wouldn't begin to satisfy me, but he insisted it was very important for the victims.  It may well be. But it's certainly not justice.

There are two parties involved in our history of conflict - the combatants and the victims. Anything that can be done, however illogical, to help them cope with their pain must be applauded. One line on this is that if we had a South-African-style  truth and reconciliation commission, people could tell what they'd had done to them, combatants could tell what they did, and the truth would out. And that would be some comfort to victims.

I don't know, and not being a victim or directly related to a victim, I can't speak with authority. But my speculation is that, contrary to popular belief, talking about what's happened to you isn't always the best way of coping with it. I'm sure all of us can bring to mind moments of pain, self-inflicted or inflicted by others, that we carry with us. Would airing these help us 'come to terms' with the hurt? I'm not sure it would.

One of the characteristics of old soldiers is that they rarely seem keen on talking about what they did, what happened to them. I'm convinced a lot of the combatants in our conflict feel likewise. Certainly the British government doesn't seem to believe in telling people about its role in the conflict, otherwise the massive expense and time devoted to the Saville Inquiry would not have happened. And Cameron's government would have held a full inquiry into the Pat Finucane case, rather than dodge it again and again.

In past conflicts - when the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan, when Germany over-ran France, when the Russians lost millions of men in the Second World War,  when well over a million Vietnamese were killed in horrible ways by US troops - in all these cases, the only healer appears to have been time. Helped, I should add, by the refusal of those most wounded to allow hatred or thoughts of revenge to consume them.

Would a truth and reconciliation commission here help victims reach that desired state? Would all those who inflicted the suffering tell all that they'd done and ask forgiveness? I think the confident  answer to both questions is No.

How (and when) to bury a new road

Now this is what I’d call a very good day for burying a road. The day after yesterday, sort of thing. When you’ve cancelled all those fancy  Fianna Fail plans for digging tunnels and sending fast-speed trains through them and all round Dublin, there couldn’t be a better time  to follow up with the cancellation – oops, sorry, follow up with the postponement of that damned A5 linking Derry and Aughnacloy. Well yeah sure, there’ll be a bit of yelling, but  we’ll hardly hear it with yelps still coming out of north Dublin getting their stuff cancelled. Yes, yes, yes, I know I promised half the money, and yes yes yes, I know the A5 would   have shown cross-border co-operation working for everyone,  I know it would have created jobs, I KNOW it would have injected mobility into that part of the country. Oh, and right, it would have saved a fair number of car-crash fatalities as well.  But hey, you have to take the rough with the smooth,  there’s people are dying all the time. Besides,  the unionists will be delighted with us – there are no votes worth talking about for them west of the Bann anyway. We keep our money in our pocket and at the same time we show we’re sensitive to unionist political sensitivities.. A win-win situation, really.

Donegal, did you say?  Ah yes,  Donegal. Time was when they’d have returned a decent Fine Gael TD but look what they went and did last time out – elected a pair of bloody Shinners, that big gink Doherty and his friend MacLochlainn. Well maybe this will soften their cough for them. Sometimes, what's more,  you have to be firm with a section of the electorate. Show them that actions have consequences.  “We’re too far away from Dublin!” – God, if I heard them whining that once I heard them fifty times. “We’re cut aff up here!” In that damned annoying accent of theirs. Well,  they’ll stay cut aff,  they’ll stay the same distance from Dublin and everywhere else for the next ten years minimum. Let them keep that in mind the next time they go to the polls. Thing is, lads, next time out, you play ball with us and whaddyaknow, we might, we just might  play ball with you. Meanwhile , pull the plug there, Leo, would you? And for feck’s sake remember to say ‘postponed’, not the c –word. And if you can say something about ‘up there’ as well it’d be appreciated. Good man.

Vincent Browne, Michael D Higgins and Father Jack

Vincent Browne is a  man I like. I remember him at UCD where he was an active Fine Gaeler, but he was free from a certain condescending swank that infused others such as Henry Kelly and Sinead Cusack. But like the rest of us, Vincent gets carried away occasionally and he does so today in the Irish Times.

He reports on Michael D Higgins’s last speech to the Dail  under the heading ‘Vision of inclusive republic was Higgins’s parting shot’ and he concludes that we now have an Irish president who’s better than we deserve.  In support of this, he points to Higgins’s insistence that there’s a helluva lot more to democracy than voting once every four or five years, and if you want to effect radical change, you have redistribute power at every level of life: “A highly participative, inclusive republic was the one in the vision of those who made the case for Irish independence at the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century. It was this which was stolen from the people after the foundation of the State”.  Browne cites two TDs who were in the chamber and who said it was the best speech Higgins had ever delivered and that it was a privilege to be there to hear it.

Sometimes what you don’t say is even more important than what you do say. The most important word in the Higgins quotation above is the sixth-last word, and to save you the bother of counting back, it’s “after”.  In other words,  the problems arose after the partition of the country. So Higgins makes the speech of his life about an ‘”inclusive republic” and doesn’t mention that one and a half million Irish people on this island are excluded from it. Browne hails the speech and Higgins, and doesn’t even mention the word ‘partition’.

Are these people for real? Do they not know the boiling resentment a lot of northern nationalists and republicans feel about being air-brushed out of history and out of contemporary consideration? Compared to us, the Irish who fought with the British Army in the two World Wars received massive recognition by the south.

Successive governments in the south spent fifty years giving lip-service to national reunification,  culminating in Jack Lynch’s pathetic ‘We will not stand idly by’ speech in 1969. If we’re to judge by Browne or Higgins, they’ve now dropped even the lip-service. As Fr Jack might have pithily put it: “Inclusive republic my arse”.

PSNI - How are we doin'?

Ten years, eh? Doesn't seem that long since they devised that ghastly PSNI badge that has so many symbols on it, you feel like you're on drugs, just looking at it. They had Deputy Chief Constable Judith Gillespie on radio and TV, being blonde and smiling and  telling us how much things have changed and how hard it was to scramble from the back of a land-rover when wearing a skirt. Her take on the old RUC? Vaseline-lensed nostalgia, start to finish.   

Understandable, I suppose, since over three hundred RUC officers were killed in the Troubles. And certainly she has reason to smile, and not just because she's career-confident enough to turn down a £500,000 retirement lump sum (no, I didn't insert an extra nought back there).  The police service she heads up today is a lot different from the one that sat astride the population here in the 1970s and 80s. But there are a number of things which, as I said on  the BBC's 'Sunday Sequence', still bother me.

1.    Numbers. The proportion of Catholics in the service is now just under one-third. Good. But not good enough. The percentage of Catholics in the population is nearly half.

2.    Rank.  We're told the increased number of Catholics in the service but we're not told what rank they occupy. Why not? Is there a mechanism in place to show the proportion of Catholics/nationalists/republicans holding senior positions? Not much point recruiting more Catholics/nationalists/republicans if they stay at the hewers-of-wood/drawers-of-water level.

3.    Class. Of the Catholics recruited, what proportion come from,say, the Bogside? Crossmaglen? The Falls Road? A police service that's filled with middle-class Catholics  makes little sense - the conflict didn't centre on the leafy suburbs. Is anyone monitoring class intake? And if they are, will they tell us? Because they should.

4.    Class exile. When a young working-class man or woman joins the police, they quickly become middle-class. Why wouldn't they, with that salary? While this,  policing-wise,  is better than being middle-class born and bred, it still creates a gap between that person and the community from which they come. We're back to the problem of the police officer as alien or semi-alien in the community s/he polices.

5.    Servant. Brendan Behan once said there is no situation so bad that the arrival of a policeman does not make it worse.  An exaggeration but contains a truth. How can police officers be made to see that they are the servants of the community and not its supervisors?

What all this comes down to is the way the police are seen by the community which they are supposed to serve. It's a problem in most western countries but that's little comfort.  Those in the least-well-off areas see themselves as being at the bottom of the heap and the police as part of what maintains the status quo - i.e., keeps them there.

How to solve all these difficulties? I haven' t a clue. But I know that patting ourselves on the back for how far we've come while keeping our heads in the sand about the difficulties remaining is to ask for trouble. Or Troubles.

The SDLP : the torch passes...

Pffffffftttt. But more of that later.

I've shaken a fair number of political hands in my time. I shook hands with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (ask your ma). If I'd jumped over the top of four guys in Newcastle-upon-Tyne I could have shaken hands with US President Jimmy Carter. I've shaken hands with Taoiseach John Bruton, with First Minister Peter Robinson, with Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, with Gerry Adams TD, with Paul Berry ex-MLA (remember him?), with Jim Allister MLA, with Bernadette McAliskey ex-MP, with Gregory Campbell MP. But I've never shaken hands with Alasdair 'Turn off those lights I'm blinded' McDonnell.

But my wife has. Some time ago we were at a book launch and I was mooching about, trying to find some free drink, when my other half found herself being introduced to the MP for South Belfast. The person doing the introducing mentioned that she was married to me. The good Doctor  extended the hand that had tended a thousand wounds and spoke in that big-chested carrying voice of his. "Oh dear" he said. "You have my deepest sympathies, Mrs Collins".

A couple of hours ago I watched the good Doctor's SDLP-leader speech live on TV. Now that I've managed to stop laughing I can only say "Oh dear. You have my deepest sympathies, SDLP".

What about pffffffftttt? That's the sound of a political party tearing itself to pieces.

And this is a clip of Alasdair hard at work in Westminster:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiEUDeLX-hY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Being an SDLP leader - Lord, you know it ain't easy.

The SDLP must think they’re living under a curse. It started around the turn of the century, when Sinn Féin moved out and passed them on the electoral road, and varoomed off into the middle distance. More immediately they must feel particularly jinxed. They were arguing over their leadership as Sinn Féin rolled into Belfast and held its first ring-a-ding Ard Fheis in the north, in the nice new Waterfront Hall. Then the prospects of the SDLP leadership candidates were forgotten as Martin McGuinnness  grabbed the headlines by joining the race for the Aras. That went on for weeks, and the fact that McGuinness didn’t win was small enough consolation.  Now the SDLP are holding their annual conference, not in the Waterfront Hall but the Ramada Hotel in Belfast. Not quite stage centre, really. And yes, the air this weekeend is filled with excited cries and interviews and TV cameras, but  they’re not for Patsy McGlone or Alex Attwood, they’re for Justin Bieber and Lady Ga-ga. That massive stage in front of Belfast City hall has been constructed, not for Conall McDevitt but for MTV performers.

So you bet it’s tough when you’ve been No 1 and now you’re a distant No 2.  A bit like being in a game where you know, no matter how hard you sweat or how much you urge your men forward, you’re going to be beaten. Discouraging.  Makes you want to tear off your jersey, puncture the ball and head for the changing rooms with a shouted “Aw, fuck the lot of yis!” over your shoulder.  But there must be a small corner in the heart of the SDLP candidates that is comforted, that feels warmth. Because the SDLP does have its die-hard supporters. They still elect MLAs.

That’s because there are those nationalist voters who have always identified with the SDLP. Like the candidates for SDLP leadership, they’re, getting on a bit in years, but that doesn’t mean their opinions have softened. In fact, as their arteries have hardened, so have their opinions. Not so much in favour of the wreckage they see when they look at the SDLP as in the contempt they feel when they think of Sinn Féin.

There’s the violence thing of course. Some of these people have, directly or indirectly, been damaged by IRA violence, and they lay responsibility for that solely at the feet of Sinn Féin. They subscribe to the thesis, successfully propagated south of the border, that the IRA were the initiatiors and the continuers of violence for more than two decades. This despite the fact that early black-and-white TV images show civil rights marchers being beaten off the streets,

and later images show bodies bleeding from bullet wounds inflicted by the British Army.  None of that counts – the IRA was the cause of it all, start, middle and finish.

Then there’s the class thing. You want to vote for political leaders you look up to, and when the SDLP faithful look at  Sinn Féin they see people who’ve had limited schooling, people who say ‘Done’ instead of ‘Did’ and ‘have went’ instead of ‘have gone’, and their middle-class sensibilities recoil. How could you vote for somebody like that, with their awful English and their equally awful jail-Irish?  It’s no accident that of the four SDLP leadership candidates, one is  a doctor and one a lawyer, and all four would rather rip out their own tongue, toast it and eat it in small forkfuls than say ‘infer’ when they mean ‘imply’.

So the SDLP gathered at the Ramada have that small consolation, that there are those in the northern population who remain faithful to the “dignified protest” days, and will go on being faithful until their dying day. For a small pool of the northern population,  Patsy McGlone, Conall McDevitt,  Alastair McDonnell and Alex Attwood are still big fish. The trouble is, the pool keeps getting smaller every year and even the bravest fish struggle to breathe as the pool dries up.  

Maybe they should listen to George

As I write this I’m sitting waiting to be called by the Stephen Nolan Show on BBC radio, to talk about whether British soldiers from here are being treated unfairly. It appears that Scotland, Wales and England all have a specially-appointed advocate to see that soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress are looked after, following time spent in Afghanistan or Iraq. There’s no such advocate for this region. If the debate happens – these things are a moveable-at-the-last-moment feast – I plan to argue for equal treatment for British soldiers from here.

Not that anyone should be surprised because things here are different  –this sad little corner always has been made an exception. I interviewed a woman yesterday – Bernadette McAliskey. Decades back when as the youngest MP ever she made In her maiden speech in the House of Commons, she denounced the British government for looking the other way while a corrupt, discriminating state was allowed to grow and grow until it exploded into violence.  So the different treatment of British soldiers from here doesn’t surprise me.

There’s a terrible irony, too, in the concern for the suffering of British troops  but considerably less concern for those who were  their victims. The Bloody Sunday families had to wait nearly forty years for a “Sorry!” from David Cameron, let alone justice. Far from helping victims,  the British government blocked the release of vital documents for decades. It’s done the same over the Dublin-Monaghan bombings. Or consider the victims in the Finucane family, who saw their husband and father riddled with bullets at the dinner table by people acting with the support of the ‘security forces’.  Their pursuit of truth continues, the latest development featuring  another slap in the face from Cameron, who refuses to hold an inquiry into the lawyer’s death. And there are dozens of other victims of state violence suffering and we never even hear about them.

Last Friday I saw George Clooney’s latest movie, The Ides of March. It features Clooney as a US presidential candidate, and there’s one memorable moment where he talks about how to solve the problem of terrorism. “Stop depending on their  oil” he says.  “Stop invading their countries. Then the terrorism will stop”.

Maybe Cameron and his cabinet should all be bought a ticket for The Ides of March.  With post-traumatic stress as with so much else, prevention  is the best cure.