Ride On

Brendan’s funeral was an occasion to remember. So many different political shades in attendance. One of the most memorable aspects of it was meeting so many old comrades from jail and the blanket including lots still in Sinn Fein. Whatever the political differences between us they failed to get in the way of personal warmth as the open handshakes and hugs came in waves. Those of whatever hue who favour ostracism must have been deeply disappointed. Brendan would have been pleased could he have known that he was still able to pull people together.

Ride On

There were many bitterly cold mornings when I pulled myself out of bed to follow the Dark as he led us through successive winters of the blanket protest. It seemed depressingly appropriate that as I rose from my sleep to fall in behind him for the last time, the morning of his funeral should also be freezing. Later in the day as he led the way through the streets of the Lower Falls shouldered by his pallbearers, the cold had abated. It wouldn’t be the wee Dark if he failed to bring some warmth to those around him and thaw the chill of inclement surroundings.

Memories of an old blanket protest ditty pushed its way through as his cortege wound its way from street to street: ‘we’ll follow the old man wherever he wants to go.’ He was a young man when he assumed the leadership of the Blanket men. But he was 29 and we were still in our teens or barely out of them. Two nights earlier outside his sister’s home where he had been waked I sang it to Micky Fitz who immediately traced its origins for me.

I attended the funeral with my wife and our two children. My son, who last year accompanied me to the very H-Block cell where I began my years of blanket protest and also traversed the wings that Brendan had presided over as IRA protest leader, was too young to understand. His older sister was told she was at the funeral of a great man. It was with a deep sense of pride that I learned from her that upon her return to school she told friends about the great man she had followed through the Falls. He knew her, and on the Friday she was born seven years ago had celebrated her arrival in his favourite local with me and the South Belfast republican, Tommy McReynolds.

Ironically the crowds at Brendan’s funeral denied him the one thing in life he craved more than anything - solitude. He had been denied it everywhere he went and was no stranger to the Sartrean concept that hell is other people. In pubs he was pestered by punters, for the most part meaning no harm but nevertheless depriving him of the much needed time he wanted to be on his own. One evening in Southampton we arrived in a bar shortly after a long road trip from Manchester. We were out there lending our support to the families and friends of political prisoners on hunger strike in Turkey. We were tired and in need of relaxation. The first pint had barely started its descent when someone who knew ‘Darky’ spotted him and latched onto him for the rest of the evening. I was fuming whereas he merely took it in his stride, saying that people needed to be listened to. We had listened to people all day and were exhausted but Brendan had a certain stamina that left me behind.

For that reason he would have been unconcerned had he known in advance that there would be crowds at his home and in his cortege seeking out his company for one final time. It would be the last journey through the streets of his beloved Lower Whack that so many of his closest friends would ever make with him. He would never have denied them that.

The mourners made up a mosaic that defied easy definition. It ranged from left to right of the political spectrum. Non aligned republicans, socialist activists from Dublin, the IRSP, former prisoners, Republican Sinn Fein, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, Sinn Fein, all attended. People travelled from abroad just to be there and to stand alongside local people who had fond memories of The Dark as a guerrilla leader with the common touch. Many shouldered the coffin: hunger strikers Marian and Dolours Price, former blanket protest comrades of the Dark like Martin Livingstone and Joe Watson, men who were with Brendan on the 1980 hunger strike -Tommy McKearney and Raymond McCartney, Fra McCann of Sinn Fein – a former D Company volunteer and blanket man, Jimmy McCauley, one of the famed fighting ‘dogs’, big Fra McCullough, another D Company veteran who The Dark adored and endlessly talked about in prison. Jail O/Cs who stepped into Brendan’s shoes such as Seanna Walsh and Brendan McFarlane mingled with the men they had led.

People of different persuasions embraced each other. There was the inevitable ostracism but those doing it are fewer in number while the ostracised hardly notice, there now being so many of them.

Mass said, the oration at the Falls Road Commemorative Garden over, we made the afternoon journey from West Belfast deep into the East of the city. It was a route I had travelled with Brendan before. When my father was cremated he had accompanied me to Roselawn. Thoughts of that day drifted through my mind as I sat in the same room, Brendan’s remains now in front of us. This time I would make the journey back to West Belfast without him. In the pew I sat beside my daughter as she cried. I advised her not to move her eyes from the coffin as it would descend from view very quickly. The words of the Christy Moore song Ride On faded as The Dark was lowered to the sobs of his heartbroken family. This incorruptible comrade and resolute friend had left us for the last time.

Ride on Brendan.

Fear Dorcha

Brendan Hughes was a close friend and comrade. One of the names he was affectionately known as during the Blanket protest was Fear Dorcha – dark man. If he was swarthy in appearance there was nothing dark about his character. He lit up a lot of lives. Knowing that he was seriously ill and that death was imminent was a traumatic experience for those of us who were close to him.

Fear Dorcha

I reached across and kissed him on the forehead. His skin was cold to the touch. I could feel his brow but he was beyond sensing my lips. Fear Dorcha had died the previous evening just after ten o’clock. Now he lay in his coffin, his body draped in the Irish tricolour, IRA beret and gloves on top.

It was a trying week. Eight days earlier I had taken a call from a close friend in Belfast. He tersely explained that the news was bad: Brendan Hughes had just eight hours to live. It was not the first time I had received bad news about his health. Walking through London a number of years ago I was advised to return quickly as Brendan had taken a heart attack. I flew into Belfast the following morning. Brendan pulled through. On hearing of his latest condition I dropped everything and quickly made arrangements to travel to Belfast. A former prisoner and D company comrade of Brendan, Shando, and a friend of his picked me up and we made the journey north. It was heavy on the heart. Each mile was covered to the sound of my phone ringing with people alerting me that Brendan’s time was running out.

Shando dropped me at the Grosvenor Road where I made my way to the home of Brendan’s sister, Moya. There was no answer to the door. Moya was over at the hospital. As I turned away a young woman introduced herself as Brendan’s niece. She explained that he was in a bad state but might have a chance if the medical team at the City Hospital could drain the fluid from his vital organs. Her eyes conveyed a sparkle as she told me he was a cat with nine lives. I refrained from telling her that he had already used up 17 of them. Although Brendan had been through so many challenging experiences from the time he joined the IRA, and the frailty of his physical persona disguised a deeper mental stamina which kept him going against all the odds, even for him there was a vortex that would eventually pull him in.

Leaving his niece, I arranged to meet the friend who had first phoned me. Together we made our way to the hospital. On the numerous other occasions when I had visited Brendan in hospital it had always been at the Royal. Once he had lay on a trolley in a hallway as no bed was available, while a Sinn Fein member was the minister of health. It didn’t seem right. On one such visit my wife burst into tears as we sat beside his bed gazing at the wires and tubes that snaked across his body. Less than a week later he was in his flat laughing and joking as if none of it had happened. ‘Such is life’ his unvarying response to concerns for his health.

Just as we approached the Lisburn Road, I received a call telling me that Brendan had died. My heart sank but I held out hope. After all I had spoken to his niece an hour earlier and she felt he was not at the point of death. On entering the foyer a couple of people we knew were standing there, expressions taut. It seemed they were keeping a vigil for a dear friend. They eased our fears, telling us that the family had just left his bedside and would be briefed later in the day by the medical team. Although we hovered on the edge of the Intensive Care Unit there was no way we could get in. As we stood around a brother of Brendan’s arrived and explained that he had a 50-50 chance. Our spirits lifted in proportion to our bodies relaxing. For now, the crisis had passed. We left the hospital and had a couple of pints in a city centre pub where on occasion Brendan had downed a few with us.

The following Friday my friend rang to tell me that there were signs of decreased brain activity. It did not augur well. He kept me updated over the next 24 hours. The next afternoon as I sat in the local cinema with my daughter I got a message from my wife that the machine supporting Brendan’s tenuous grasp on life was to be turned off. I returned home and rang Dolours Price. She arrived in our home. The rest of the evening saw me sit with three phones constantly ringing Belfast and taking calls. Dolours had been a long standing operational comrade of Brendan and it was in her company that my wife and I received the devastating news that our dear friend had slipped away. He had been with us at the best and worst of times, family bereavements, illnesses, and the birth of our children. It was he who was chosen to give my wife away on the day of our marriage. We fought a losing battle to suppress the tears. My wife put his framed photo on the mantelpiece and sat a lighted candle either side of it. In our living room The Dark shone through.

Our friend

Your laugh still rings in our ears. You led by example, examined your conscience and spoke out when it was needed most. You were a man full of love, an open spirit; you took responsibility when no one else had the courage to own their actions, you were burdened for it but bore your load with dignity. Now you join your fallen volunteers where they wait for you with open arms. You were, and are, loved. Deepest sympathies to the Hughes family circle. Anthony & Carrie McIntyre

From Euphoria to Despair

Sometimes a piece gets written and for whatever reason fails to appear on The Blanket. On occasion they are printed elsewhere but more frequently they just settle at the bottom of the ‘for later’ folder and then slip off the radar. The following piece was penned last year and fortunately did appear in the radical journal Fourthwrite. Now is an appropriate time to let it do another lap of the course. The issue it flags up – Sinn Fein’s incessant lurch to the right of the political spectrum – was evidenced once again in Stormont when the party voted for a programme described by one BBC presenter as much further to the right than even Margaret Thatcher would venture. It was left to the SDLP to strike a worthy note of discord by opposing the programme.

From Euphoria to Despair

“We now have an electoral contest and the people in their very great wisdom will cast their votes and they will decide the composition and the balance of forces in the next Dáil.” – Mary Lou McDonald

In the months that have passed since the Republic’s general election the dust thrown up by the frenzy of the contest has now settled on the political landscape there. Without the mist of hype and spin, and as the political class beds down for the next lot of years, the contours shaping the governmental sphere come into sharp focus.

Those with the biggest wounds to lick are Sinn Fein and the Progressive Democrats. The latter were at least anticipating the worst and went prepared for meltdown. Despite senior northern Sinn Fein official Declan Kearney’s post-poll reflection that it was never going to be his party’s day its leadership - replete with all the arrogance and wrong-headedness of Hitler thinking he could conquer the USSR - stepped into an electoral winter wearing summer attire. Led by a cultish figure convinced that his persona would compensate for his lack of knowledge regarding the territory he sought to vanquish, the party found the natives impervious to northern nonsense.

As Sinn Fein predicted, the party was indeed the ‘big story’ of the election, but only because of its abysmal performance. ‘We are not going to go into this blind. We'll be ready for negotiations on the morning after the results are known’ a senior Sinn Fein official said. The problem is that there was nobody to negotiate with. No one was interested in courting the fringe party.

If Sinn Fein did not go into the election blind as it claimed it seems to have come out of it blinkers firmly in place. Party explanations since the calamity emit the sound of desperation whistling while it shuffles past the graveyard. The party can pretend to take solace in the rise in its overall vote. Conspicuously it fails to mention that it ran in 11 more constituencies in order to make the rather inconsequential rise possible.

In spite of the glaring need for accountability no Sinn Fein leader has shown the slightest appetite for stepping up to the blame plate in order to take the large portion each of them, with varying degrees of culpability, duly deserve. The one redeeming factor has been that no suitable Friedrich Paulus has yet been found upon whose shoulders the blame can be exclusively laid as a foil against the leadership being forced to take its oil for the dismal display.

Seemingly the party is intent on glossing over the defeat rather than seriously analysing it. In the long running discussion that took place in the pages of An Phoblacht/Republican News no one apart from Eoin O Broin attempted a serious analysis. Others continued to play Queen’s We are the Champions rather than the more appropriate Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere.

Joanne Spain’s proffering that the televised performances by Gerry Adams were not absolutely brilliant beggar belief. Why the reluctance to state that the performances were absolutely incompetent? It seems that dropping the Adams brand marketing strategy, arguably a producer of diminishing returns, is not up for consideration. No concession there to the more apt journalistic description of Adams as ‘a vacant lot on the political landscape of the Republic.’

Yet unless the Adams Northern bull is taken by the horns Sinn Fein cannot realistically expect to shed its fringe status in Southern politics. Making sure that Adams was more important than the candidates proved to be an electoral game plan bereft of strategic wisdom. The election campaign was more about promoting the leader than the policies.

This fixation with a personality cult can only continue to damage Sinn Fein in the Twenty Six Counties. Can ‘healthy’ be an apt description for any party that is lumped with the same leader for a quarter of a century? Is Sinn Fein really so short of potential that it can only find one person to lead it over such a prolonged period?

Personality politics cannot hope to alleviate the serious structural weakness that afflicts the Sinn Fein base in the Republic. In the North canvassers from the South don’t feature on the Northern doorstep. In the South legions of workers from West and North Belfast were bussed in to make up the deficit. In the Republic Sinn Feinism has a feel of the imported rather than the indigenous to it. Ultimately, success in the Republic will be home grown. Under the dictatorial Adams this will never be allowed to happen.

The Workers Party, which Sinn Fein now resembles more closely than it does its one time self, was in its day more successful than the current Belfast-led party. But whenever it took a hit it wheeled out the working class. Following in its time honoured practice of emulating the Workers Party an editorial in AP/RN tried the same thing. It rang false. With an estimated 46% drop in the party’s Dublin vote, the working class, it seems, is not as gullible as its Northern counterpart. It sees through the waffle.

Community workers in Dublin point to say Sinn Féin having lost some of its appeal in working-class communities. ‘The party is not as active in these areas as people would believe,’ one former Sinn Féin activist is reported to have said.

They are no longer associated with the anti-drugs movement, or even most community groups. Gerry Adams rambles on about the scourge of heroin in the city but on the ground the Shinners are doing nothing about it … They do a lot of talking but nobody believes a word they say round here. Local community groups see Sinn Féin in the same light as the other parties. They show up when they want something.

With this type of sentiment in mind Eoin OBroin called for a return to community-based campaigning and radical republican politics. Of course he was attacked by those eager to mask the move away from such politics.

This type of discourse which prioritises the working class has led to suggestions that a current debate within Sinn Fein centres on whether or not the party is a left wing outfit. If there is a debate it is to be welcomed in a body whose leaders treat unapproved ideas as a contagious disease. The assertion that Sinn Fein is part of the Left in Irish politics, however, is only partly true. A more accurate observation would be that part of Sinn Fein is part of the left in Irish politics. The part that is not belongs to the rightist northern leadership and its acolytes. There is a strong left wing culture in the party in the Republic which has not yet been destroyed by the leadership a la republicanism in the North. Its future is guaranteed only to the extent that it is able to shake off the shackles of the Northern leadership. Eoghan Harris sensing that Sinn Fein in the North is fully embracing the establishment advises the northern lot to ditch their southern colleagues. Sinn Fein in the south should move first and ditch the albatross up north whose record of preserving radical republicanism has hardy been less than catastrophic.

Ditching its leftwing policies Sinn Fein, as it chases the vote, gives little that would mark it out as radically different from other parties. It certainly waxes the most progressive on health policy but how long before that too is abandoned if the southern end of the organisation is unable to thwart the ambitions of its increasingly right wing northern leadership? The same leadership, remember, led the assault on the health service in the North through the introduction of PFI. It has also somehow managed to switch allegiance from Pearse to Paisley, in the process making the right wing sectarian bigot Western Europe’s only theocratic prime minister.

Sinn Fein’s ability to maintain a left façade in the Republic will face a serious impediment with the Greens rather than Labour having become part of a Fianna Fail led coalition government. With Labour still in opposition the Rabbitte body will acquisition the mantle of the Left under a leader with some knowledge of Southern politics. Sinn Fein’s leftist posturing will take the form of screaming at Mary Harney. It will be a poor substitute for hegemonising a left alternative.

This can only lead to increased tension with party members in the Republic seeking to remould Sinn Fein as a radical party, distinct from what it currently is, one prepared to talk left but strangle every leftist impulse in order to tart itself up as a well behaved spouse for Fianna Fail. Failing that Sinn Fein is likely to continue haemorrhaging as its left flows to groups like Eirigi. Either way a scenario in which Sinn Fein becomes a serious force in the politics of the Republic is as fanciful as a united Ireland in 2016.

Pubished in Fourthwrite, Summer/Autumn 2007

Journalism Matters

Speaking to friends recently about the increasingly anodyne probing by the BBC in the North where matters of the peace process were concerned, some reported instances where long standing programmes were not permitting any substantive criticism of the Chuckle brothers. It made me think back to a piece I put together for Index On Censorship last summer.

Journalism Matters

May 2007

For much of its violent conflict Northern Ireland was afflicted by political censorship. The body that howled most about this particular form of suppression was Sinn Féin. North and south the party voice was emasculated to varying degrees. In the Republic, party members were denied access to the airwaves even when they sought nothing more than to discuss gardening. In the north, actors’ voices were used to dub over the verbal pronouncements of party spokespeople. Hand signals and facial expressions were for some reason not given the taboo status. Sinn Féin, like the proverbial naughty child, was to be seen but not heard.

Despite this (or maybe because of it, given that experience is a good teacher), in a strange twist which calls into question the nature of revolutionaries – ‘social climbers with bombs’ according to Orwell - Sinn Féin is now the only Irish party that demands political censorship. Such has been the verve with which Sinn Féin rushed to become everything it formerly opposed, author and broadcaster Malachi O’Doherty suggested that under all their bombast the party’s demagogues and ideologues were ‘just ordinary old fashioned political dealers’.

In a recent article in the north’s nationalist daily, the Irish News, Sinn Féin weekly columnist Jim Gibney lambasted the BBC for asking questions of party leader Gerry Adams that Sinn Féin did not want broached. Gibney’s position is simple:

“The licence-paying public overwhelmingly voted for an administration led by the DUP and Sinn Féin. Yet over the past month BBC journalists have harried Sinn Féin and DUP politicians with questions which are negative, which instil pessimism and could undermine the public’s hopeful mood.”

In other words, as in totalitarian regimes, journalists are required to be mood manipulators rather than conduits of accurate information. Gibney then went on to complain that it was wrong for any journalist to ask his own party leader about the future of the IRA’s army council. ‘On whose behalf are these questions being asked - the journalist or the public?’

In essence Gibney is calling on journalists to be self-censorious in order to accommodate the dominant societal view. There should be little surprise here. Gibney had previously attacked anybody who wanted clarity in the peace process:

“If there is one big lesson coming out of the peace process over the last ten years, it is that words like ‘certainty’ and ‘clarity’ are not part of the creative lexicon that conflict resolution requires if it is to be successful … Words like ‘clarity’ and ‘certainty’ are part of the fundamentalist’s political dictionary … Demanding such words causes crisis and paralysis. They clog the peace process engine up with gung. … Give me the language of ambiguity. It has served the people of this country well over the last ten years.”

It would be of no great significance were Gibney a lone voice venting spleen at anyone asking questions of his beloved leader. The problem, however, is that Gibney is only the cutting edge of a more widespread assault on the freedom of the media to monitor the centres of power and ask questions that society otherwise would rather not hear.

Recently two journalists, Suzanne Breen and Liam Clarke, were forced to publicly raise their concerns that Sinn Féin was seeking to dictate news content by refusing to allow either journalist to interview its spokespeople. The northern editors of the Sunday Tribune and Sunday Times respectively, both Breen and Clarke have reputations for digging deeper than politicians feel comfortable with.

In the run up to agreement between Sinn Féin and the DUP on the formation of a new power splitting administration Gerry Adams told one of the BBC’s most prominent journalists not to ask ‘stupid questions’ concerning the future of the IRA’s army council. But given that the activities of the army council, in the eyes of most observers, brought down the last agreed administration in 2002, it would be negligent of any journalist to avoid the issue.

John O’Dowd, another of the party’s hierarchy, criticised his media interlocutor for highlighting something untoward. O’Dowd’s advice was that the media need to flag up the good news. In other words the media should tell the public how many people do not get killed in road traffic accidents and forget about those that do; tell the public how many children emerge from Belfast’s maternity hospitals safe and well, and not bother informing it about the amount that die as result of mishaps during the delivery procedure. There is a total lack of understanding here of the media’s role in keeping the public informed when things in society don’t work as they should.

Journalists are feeling the pinch. They remember the attempts by one of their own number to have his colleagues designated as JAPPs – Journalists Against the Peace Process. There is a fear that stories will be fed only to those journalists embedded within the peace process.

The task of the media is not to parrot the consensus in society but to ask questions of it. How otherwise are minority concerns and rights to be protected? The democratic function that media performs in society is only safeguarded when the media has autonomy from the society it serves. Its task is to produce clarity over ambiguity. While that may not be to the liking of Sinn Féin, it is essential for democracy to be extended and deepened throughout Northern Irish society.

First published in Index On Censorship, May 2007.

Other articles previously published by Index on Censorship: Censorship Complementing Coverup (also in The Blanket).

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