RAAD - different from a distance?

Why does RAAD flourish? Or even exist? The authorities would say because they’ve cowed the local population, people are afraid to speak out against them or name them. RAAD would say it serves a community purpose: it puts the fear of God, or at least of pain and/or death, into the drug-pushers. Who’s right?

Well, maybe both. If you lived in a community where you knew who was administering punishment beatings, who was sometimes killing people, would you stand up and denounce them, name names? It’s always easier to wax moral about matters from a safe distance.

But it’s not all based on fear. Even where drugs aren’t concerned, people can feel driven to distraction by some social problem that nobody in authority appears willing to take on. I once knew a woman who moved into a new house. For a time she and her family were thrilled by their new setting. Then the next-door neighbours began to make their children’s life hell. Taunts, abuse, even stones. The woman brought her case to the police but was politely told to get lost. If these people weren’t caught in the act of making her existence and her family’s hell, there was nothing could be done. She even thought of selling the recently-bought house and moving out again but the practicalities of life made that impossible. Then someone suggested she have a word with Whatshisname.  If she had a genuine complaint and was in despair,  Whatshisname might have an answer. So after weeks of agonizing, she had a word with Whatshisname. One morning  a week later the family from next door woke to find all of their windows had been broken.  Inside forty-eight hours they’d moved out.  From that day to this, the  woman is full of praise for the window-breakers who solved her problem.

Morally dubious? Rough justice? You betcha. But when you’re faced with a problem that’s driving you and your family crazy, and when those appointed to solve that problem shrug their shoulders, maybe you’d be less fastidious about who solved it for you and how.

Maybe RAAD is a bit like the Duke of Wellington’s troops.  You remember how he famously said  “I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me”.

That handshake - big deal, small deal, no deal?

John Hume’s famous line about not being able to eat a flag has always struck me as odd, given that flags aren’t for eating. At the same time I think that we here in the north sometimes attach too much importance to symbols. And symbolic acts.

Take the flag that flutters…I nearly said flutters proudly, but flags don’t have feelings so I’ll just say flutters above Belfast City Hall, above Stormont and half-way up a lot of lamp-posts here in the north. In one sense they matter, since they leave no room for a similar flag reflecting that portion of the population that sees itself as Irish.  On the other hand it’s only a bit of cloth, so running it up or running it down or leaving it to rot doesn’t change the people below or the beliefs they hold.

The same goes for symbolic acts. The one that’s obsessing a lot of people at the moment is the possible meeting of Martin McGuinness with Queen Elizabeth and the possible handshake they could exchange. The word at present is that Sinn Féin are a bit iffy about it until they’ve received some quid pro quo – they’ll look for some concession from the unionist side in return for what Gerry Adams calls “a big ask” of republicanism. 

Whether or not that’s what they’re doing, I remember when Sinn Féin used to…not complain, but point out that  DUP people refused to share eye-contact with them, let alone a hand-shake. As far as I know there still isn’t a photograph of Peter Robinson shaking Martin McGuinness’s hand. Or any other major unionist come to that.

Personally, I don’t think it matters a damn. When communism prevailed in the USSR,  Western leaders including QE2 and the President of the US  used to meet with its leaders and shake hands. Nobody accused the Royal One or the Prez of having turned communist. It was seen as merely civilized behaviour with those whose ideas one rejected. They shook hands because that was the way people normally act when they meet someone. If I shook hands only with those whose ideas matched mine, my fists would stay in my pockets a lot of the time..

So to come back to Martin McGuinness and the queen. It's not the act of hand-shaking that is significant, it's how people interpret it. Dissident republicans would – if it happens – point to it as another example of Shinner capitulation to  British rule in Ireland. So too would die-hard DUPers.  But if you think about it, if I or anyone else were to shake hands with the queen, it would occupy at best thirty seconds. There’s nothing about the digit-squeeze that’d preclude me from spending the rest of the day, month, year planning the downfall of British rule here. I don’t say that’s what Martin McGuinness is doing, but I do say there’s nothing in that handshake to prevent such activity. If you’re going to read significance into an act of hand-shaking, you’d be as well to make sure your reading is accurate. 

Mr Nelson goes to Dublin

There are two ways (at least) of looking at the invitation to the Grand Master of the Orange Order, Drew Nelson, to address the Irish Seanad. One is to go with the argument of Senator Martin McAleese.  He believes that to engage with those like Nelson who are “pivotal to the success of upcoming centenaries”  will allow the Seanad to contribute successfully to the centenaries and result in reconciliation between the unionist and nationalist traditions.  Another, contrasting argument would be that Drew Nelson heads an anti-Catholic organization with a shameful history and rules which make clear that sectarianism is still a strong element in its make-up, and to allow him to address the Seanad is to confer a misplaced honour.

I tend to the second line of thought. It is possible to treat with the Orange Order as though it were a benevolent organization that makes possible an annual day of music and ice-creams. And there is some truth in that view of the Order. For thousands, maybe tens of thousands, that’s what the Twelfth is. But of course the Orange Order doesn’t march only on the Twelfth, there is much more to it than music and ice-cream, and to pretend that its history and ordinances don’t exist or are entirely benevolent is to be one-eyed at best and blind at worst.

However, Senator McAleese is following a path prepared by Sinn Féin. That party has chosen what Gregory Campbell, I believe, describes as “love-bombing”. That’s an inspired phrase. It catches the determination of republicans to turn former enemies into friends, and it pin-points the fear some unionists have that such an approach could prove destructive of unionism. Senator McAleese himself has a good track-record in making friends with people such as loyalist leader Jackie McDonald, which, when you think about it, is an amazing turn-around. It’s also Christianity in action: love your enemies, do good to those that hate you, etc.

There are two ways that all this -  Sinn Féin’s outreach to unionism, the Seanad’s embrace of Duncan Nelson and the Orange Order – could end.  For the first time in Irish history, the goal represented by the Irish tricolour could be achieved: reconciliation between the nationalist and unionist traditions in Ireland. Were that to be whole-hearted and permanent, political reunification would be a logical final step.  On the other hand, it could end as Animal Farm  by George Orwell ends. The animals, who thought they were on their way to freedom from human tyranny, peer through the farmhouse window at a meeting of their pig-leaders with the humans. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”.

Dissident republicans believe that is exactly what has happened and continues to happen; the rest of us hope and pray they’re wrong.

Sovereign - what a big word!

Some words have, what’ll I say, a complete sound to them. Like “sovereign”.  The word rolls around in  your mouth like a gob-stopper. There was quite a bit of sovereign talk over the past week. 

There was sovereign as in “Her Sovereign Majesty The Queen’s Cor-blimey-don’t-time-fly Diamond Jubilee”. There was a lot of that, and of her loyal subjects getting quite moist, not just from excitement but from the rain pelting down on the Thames and them, turning what should have been a sunlit royal procession of stately barges and choirs of fragrant babes into a wind-and-rain-soaked multitude, singing babes turning blue with the wet and cold as the the non-heir to the throne and his second wife grinned and did little knee-bends to the sodden strains of “Land of Hope and Glory”. Normally the BBC can make this kind of occasion sound like a fairytale with prefabricated ancient elements laced in, but this time even it was struggling to avoid televising a total royal washout. 

The thing is, like Danny Morrison said on Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh last Saturday,  not all of us get the point of monarchy. Why use  genetic Russian roulette to appoint your head of state? Anything could pop out. A lovely surprise. Or a nasty shock. Granted,  the British people do seem pleased with the present incumbent – more than pleased, they’re weak-kneed with pleasure that she’s spent sixty years of selfless “service” to the state. You might think that unimaginable wealth and luxury and working about eighty days a year and being transported and entertained and fawned on everywhere you turned  – you might think or even say “That sounds like a very, very cosy number”. But it’s not, apparently.  It’s selfless service. 

Anyway most British people appear to like it. Gives them a sense of continuity, apparently. There’s the occasional blip or even earthquake, like the Diana business; but who thinks of Diana now?  On the other hand, there’s Charles. They’re not too keen on him. They’re even talking about skipping a generation to avoid him, which would of course be to move the hereditary goalposts a teensy bit, leaving you with  a monarchy that’s hereditary except when you don’t too much fancy the cut of the jib of the next in line, in which case it’s kind of hereditary leap-frog. 

The other sovereign thing featuring last week was Irish sovereignty. As in “Goodbye Irish sovereignty, hello Frankfurt”. Of course, long before the invention of the EU,  ‘way back in the 1920s,  the Irish people got a kind of sovereignty south of the border and no kind of sovereignty north of the border. More recently we’ve had all those treaties – Maastericht, Lisbon and now the Fiscal Treaty. All with one thing in common: they took a big bite out of Irish sovereignty. 

But hey, maybe we just have to learn to live with it. Maybe those who say we must never have another European war are right, and maybe first fiscal union and then political union are the price that must be paid.  Certainly there’s no doubt that Germany is now leading a drive towards a more integrated Europe, and since Germany went from a handful of states to a united country in the second half of the nineteenth century via monetary union, you can be sure a United States of Europe is getting less unthinkable with every treaty. 

Some of us, of course, remember a time when the EU mantra was that as much power as possible should be devolved to the local level. Now we’re headed in the opposite direction: power is getting sucked to the centre, with the rich and powerful dictating the European tune. 

Except, of course, enough people say “Not another red cent” and mean it, and freeze that movement in its tracks. But that’s unlikely. Isn’t it? 

Stop, Sydney, you're depressing me

Sometimes I feel depressed, occasionally by personal matters but more often by public. One such occurred a couple of decades ago, when Gerry Adams helped carry the coffin of Thomas Begley, one of the two IRA men caught up in the Shankill bomb blast. There was a relentless onslaught on Adams for doing this which showed ignorance, wilful or otherwise, of the republican movement and how it thinks and operates. The Shankill bomb, as most people know, was intended for a meeting of UDA members above the shop where it exploded; that it exploded prematurely and resulted in appalling carnage of ordinary innocent people was obviously not the intention. So as far as Adams was concerned, carrying Begley's coffin was a mark of respect for someone who'd died on an IRA operation. Except you were outraged that Sinn Féin and its leader should be supportive of the IRA in general, it's hard to see how you could view Adams's carrying of the coffin as anything more than an outward manifestation of what everyone, including unionists and loyalists, had always known.

As I say, I get depressed when I hear this kind of irrational outrage. Today I'm a bit down in the dumps to note where John O'Dowd, the Education Minister, is under fire for having given a lift to a funeral to Martin Corey.  Corey was imprisoned for involvement in the killing of two RUC men in 1973. He was released under the Good Friday Agreement, but had his licence revoked and is at present imprisoned in Maghaberry.  According to the Portadown Times,  O'Dowd drove (or was driven) in his ministerial car to Maghaberry,  where MLA  Raymond McCartney collected Corey and drove him to his brother's funeral. (I know it sounds confusing - was it O'Dowd or McCartney who took the man to the funeral? But that's how the Portadown Times  presents the story.)

Now for the depressing bit. Unionist MLA Sydney Anderson  is, yes indeed, outraged. "This was a public failure of every child in Northern Ireland on the part of the Education Minister as he is tasked with overseeing the education of children so that they can make a positive contribution to future generations"

In the name of all that's sweet and true, what sort of gobblydegook rubbish is this? Corey is in prison because the British Secretary of State has decided that's where he wants him, just as Marion Price is in prison on the same grounds. The prison authorities sanctioned Corey's temporary release to attend his brother's funeral. O'Dowd and/or McCartney gave him a lift to the requiem Mass and burial. And Corey has returned to prison. End of story.

Or should be, except that Anderson sees this as a failure of all the children here. A word in your shell-like, Sydney: ninety-five per cent of the children here won't even have been aware that Corey existed, let alone got a lift from O'Dowd/McCartney. And even if they had, the man had been sanctioned to travel and attend his brother's funeral.  Nothing illegal has happened, a close relative has been buried, the terms of release were observed. Somewhere, somehow, Sydney, there must be something more deserving of your outrage. Meanwhile, if you could stop using the burial of one man and the attendance at his funeral of another as an occasion for talking Grade A tripe, it'd lift my spirits no end. Good man, Sydney. I knew you'd see sense in the end.

Mops sweated brow...

Phew! That was a close thing. Well no, not really a close thing – a win by nearly  20%  isn’t close. At the same time, I thought for a while there that that damned Adams and his crowd, not to mention that stuck-up amadan Shane Ross, between the pair of them and the Cusack love-child with a face on him like a cherub with crow’s-feet  – between them I thought for a while we were for the big drop. I did, as sure as I’m standing here I did. The heart was cross-ways on me – it’s bacon-slicer time, says I to myself.  If we hadn’t produced the goods, Angela would have had my arse for breakfast. But thanks be to the dear divine God and his blessed mother we’re home and hosed, that’s the important thing. I know we could have done a Lisbon and run the whole thing again if nip had come to tuck, but that’s a last resort. Wedon’t want to keep using it too often or people might notice.

Hogan, the big baldy culchie,  was all for a public victory bash, give the troops an arm round the shoulders and a pat on the rear for all their efforts, but I told him straight I was having none of it. Hogan reads too many bloody papers telling him he’s the real head honcho and is the man that pulls my strings. Well let me tell ye, it is I,  An Taoiseach, that’ll be doing any pulling’s  in need of doing around here. I move on a different plane and the sooner that big latchico gets that straight, the better. And I know lepping about shouting yee-ho only gets up the noses of the ones you’ve beat, and by God they don’t forget. “Get you in the long grass” is what that brings on you. So far better, says I to myself, far better do  the dignified restraint thing. In public, that is. In private is another matter. Once we got the door locked and the curtains pulled on Friday, Fionnuala and myself were doing somersaults and high fives and a number of other things I’m not going to discuss.  Just let me tell you, it was only mighty. Pure mighty.

I’d half-intended to invite Gilmore over, have a kind of discreet  hooley, make as if I actually like the little gobshite.  Only after watching the way he conducted himself during the campaign, I made damned sure I didn’t stand within so much as a hundred yards of him.  Didn’t he spend most of the campaign leaking support, losing practically every voter he ever had to those bloody Shinners? You’d think by now he’d have worked out how to get the upper hand on his erstwhile comrades but no, he let Mary Lou and that schoolboy one with the glasses, Peadar Toibin, run rings round him,   rings I’m telling yeh.   And  him turning purple  on the television when he couldn’t think what to say next.

Anyway, thanks be to the dear sweet Jesus and his divine Mother, the whole thing is out of the way at last. From here on we can cut  cut cut, and none of them can blame us for we’ll just point at the Treaty, it’s the Fiscal Treaty, lads, ye voted for it and ye got it. It’s the ones in Europe are playing the financial tune entirely now, it’s the Germans are doing the sums, so don’t bother blaming me any more.

God, I think I’ll sit down for a bit,  the oul’ heart is hammering. Post-traumatic stress,  it must be. Here, would one of ye get me a double whiskey.  And isn't it the mercy of God we'll have no more voting for a couple of years itself.

Getting mad about the jubilee badge

I’m back. And I was barely awake this morning when I found myself on the  Nolan Show, Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh discussing the latest piece of local absurdity. It seems Tesco issued some Royal Diamond Jubilee badge to its staff in Britain but didn’t do likewise here. OMG – the INSULT of it. The CONTEMPT of it. There were callers saying they’d never shop in Tesco again (it’s called cutting off your nose to spite your face). Gregory Campbell – a man I like – was on saying it was absurd to have no Tesco/Jubilee badges here, because “everybody” here was agreed about celebrating the jubilee. Crikey, Gregory. Gisssabreak.

Tesco’s make decisions on purely commercial grounds. What will sell more stuff, what will keep the customers happy? In Britain, for reasons best known to themselves, most people seem to think that giving the job of head of state via genetic roulette is a good idea. Here, however, QE2 is, waking and sleeping, a constant source of joy to some half of the population, while the other half get a pain their tender parts just thinking about her. So Tesco  don’t want to go doing something that might at best irritate and at worst outrage half the population. Not good business, that. So they decided to just skip the badges-for-staff thing.  Eminently sensible, I’d have thought.

But no. There were chaps ringing in saying any staff that wanted to wear the jubilee badge should wear it, others who didn’t shouldn’t bother. Mmmm. Sound like a great recipe for division among staff and for identification of the unionists from the nationalists/republicans at the check-out.  Hardly the stuff of harmony. Another guy wanted to know what was my problem with Protestants and why couldn’t I “let Protestants live”. I hadn’t said a word about Protestants and wham bam, here’s this guy David telling me I’ve got a shocking down on the prods. Pu-lease, David. Some Protestants I like, some I can’t stand. As is the case with Catholics. But this is politics, remember. And all I’m saying is, Tesco made a good decision by keeping their stores here jubilee-badge free.  If David or anyone else wants to dance in their street because QE2 has been on a throne for 60 years, fine. Although do keep in mind,  she never would have been where she is only her uncle cleared off with that weird-looking American woman.  But  that’s how monarchy works – they allow women (or have allowed: I gather it’s going to change)  to pull on the crown when they’ve run out of men. And of course I’m hugely cheered by the  possibility that if I can get a sufficiently high-up royal to marry me,  the fact that I'm a taig will be no bar on my royal wife getting her rear-end lodged in that throne. As it would have been in the past. A major worry removed, I promise you.

Like I say: it’s a weird system, royalty.  Tesco’s, on the other hand, have one sole aim: to separate you from your money. So don't take the non- badge thing  personally,  guys ; it’s only business.