Interview with Dixie Elliott

Peace Processing the Memory of the Conflict

No Choice But to Take It

Radio Free Éireann Interview with Richard O'Rawe

Take It Down From the Mast

A bit of Stick had at the recent Anti-Internment March in Belfast

Wiki-Dump

All correspondence in relation to Allison Morris' and Ciaran Barnes' complaints and the NUJ's handling of the issue.

True to Their Words

Disproportionate Coverage of NUJ case in the Irish News

What Price Justice?

For Irish News reporter Allison Morris, Celtic v Cliftonville in Glasgow

The Weird World

Journalists and Online Shenanigans: Double Standards Exposed

Dolours Price Archive

"I look forward to the freedom to lay bare my experiences unfettered by codes now redundant."

Irish Republican Movement Collection

Annoucing the Irish Republican Movement Collection online archive at IUPUI

The Belfast Project and Boston College

The Belfast Project and the Boston College Subpoena Case: The following paper was given at the Oral History Network of Ireland (OHNI) Second Annual Conference in Ennis, Co Clare on Saturday the 29th September 2012

Challenge and Change

Former hunger striker Gerard Hodgkins delivered the 2013 annual Brendan Hughes Memorial Lecture

Brendan Hughes: A Life in Themes

There is little to be gained in going from an A to Z chronological tour of the life of Brendan Hughes. The knowledge is out there. Instead a number of themes will covey to those who are interested what was the essence of the man.

55 HOURS

Day-by-day account of events of the 1981 Hunger Strike. A series in four parts:
July 5July 6July 7July 8

The Bell and the Blanket

Journals of Irish Republican Dissent: A study of the Bell and Blanket magazines by writers Niall Carson and Paddy Hoey

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Lisbon & Sinn Fein

Sinn Fein may feel it has some cause to celebrate the outcome of the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty given the party’s pasting in last year’s general election. A belated acknowledgement of how big a blow that electoral defeat was came via a revealing comment from Jim Gibney in his Irish News column: ‘the result will help restore Sinn Fein’s relevance to the electorate.’ That Sinn Fein had become irrelevant to the electorate was a closely guarded secret up until now.

If Sinn Fein is to acquire the sought after relevance referred to by Gibney a more pertinent lesson to be drawn from comparing the electoral debacle of last year to the victory over Lisbon dominance is that Sinn Fein has the potential to reverse it fortunes in the Republic if it bypasses its Northern president. Although it was claimed in today’s Sunday Times that ‘Adams was personally responsible for Sinn Fein's abysmal performance in last year's general election’ there were more contributory factors than his feeble performance. Nevertheless, his ability to impose his presence on the televised debates rather than allow the spotlight to fall on one of the party’s Southern personalities who at least knew something about the economics of the Republic, helped do untold damage to Sinn Fein’s Dail prospects. His eagerness to be a leader on a par with other political leaders in the Republic backfired because the command of the issues that a party leader would reasonably be expected to possess was simply not there. This was exposed with considerable effect in front of television audiences. The great leader was simply not at the races. This time round, on the Lisbon circuit, the party benefited handsomely from his diminished role. Yet the lessons may not be learned.

The Republic has a much more nuanced electorate than exists in the North. Unlike the run of the mill Belfast chawbacons the politics of the Dublin voters are grounded in delivery not promise. The healthy scepticism shown on their part toward Sinn Fein in May last year is unlikely to recede in response to the unhealthy cynicism practiced by the Sinn Fein leadership. Mary Lou McDonald having been the public face of the anti-Lisbon project was shunted aside as Gerry Adams muscled in on the act, hogging prime time TV and radio, claiming credit for what went right on the watch of another. This crude attempt to let the grassroots activists know he is the daddy on the block will come at the expense of the party’s fortunes. And if radical activists at cumann level are to maintain any progressive perspective they will need to do more than they did last year in the immediate aftermath of the poor electoral showing. Then they restricted themselves to mumbling and grumbling about being ordered to appear at count centres to throw plaudits rather than eggs the way of the supreme leader.

Whatever Sinn Fein may think it is entitled to by way of reward for its campaigning against Lisbon there is no simple converter that will smooth the way to electoral success at home. With opinion polls showing no decline in government support despite the humiliation of the Lisbon defeat there are few grounds for Sinn Fein to feel it might turn the success of its Lisbon foray into electoral gains here. Its popularity ratings rose by only 1% despite its role in curbing Lisbon expansionism. In the public mind, Lisbon and Limerick are poles apart.

Sinn Fein was the only Dail party to hold the line against the big beasts of government and their allies. But there seems to be little discomfort within its grassroots at the cruelly exposed partitionist joint that demarcates the line between a radicalism amongst party activists in the Republic which expressed itself against the big powers, and the right wing Northern leadership which invited and made welcome the commander in chief of the forces currently waging war on Iraq. The case that Lisbon ought to have been opposed because it would lead to a European army and the consequent abandonment of Irish neutrality jars awkwardly with this. The party in the Republic needs to seriously ask itself whether it can continue to indulge the ambitions of a conservative northern leadership which has produced the following political arrangement in the North outlined in the Irish News by the columnist, Patrick Murphy:

The executive's political ideology will now hinge on the DUP's long-held belief in unfettered capitalism, creationism and colonialism. Out goes Sinn Fein's socialist republic – especially the socialist bit – and our traditional welfare state model of a mixed public and private economy … The consideration of formal links between Stormont and Washington has already been reflected here in the reduction of investment in social housing, building a big US-style prison, an increase in university fees and payment for public services such as water. Mrs Thatcher would be so proud of us.

Dublin West TD Leo Varadkar with the aid of considerable exaggeration made the point that ‘if there is anything to be learned about this large working-class vote, it’s that it’s a right-wing reaction – anti-immigration, protect my job - and not a left-wing vote as Sinn Fein pretends to believe.’ There is no one-size-fits all interpretation of the body of people Sinn Fein helped to mobilise against the Lisbon Treaty. Because it defies being easily pigeon holed as either fish or foul, once the cheers of victory have subsided, what lies out there ought to be looked at in the cold light of day. And that substantial element of it which sits to the left needs to be prised free from the anti –immigration lobby and the equally obnoxious Catholic Right if any radical momentum is to be maintained.

Can any of this be achieved under the dominance of the rightist Northern leadership? The answer is a No more resounding than anything heard throughout the referendum.


Saturday, June 28, 2008

Lisbon & Democracy

There is no crisis - except in the minds of those who like crises, and in the self-importance of the EU inner elite that does not like being rebuffed – Vincent Brown

I did not vote in the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty for the simple reason that I am not yet on the electoral registrar. Had I been able to cast a vote it would have gone to the No camp. That decision would have been the result of instinct shading ignorance. I was woefully, perhaps blissfully, unaware of the issues and did not follow the debates closely. My abiding interest in European events this year has been focussed on Vienna and Geneva rather than Lisbon. The Euro 2008 soccer tournament while ultimately less important than the political future of Europe is immeasurably more exciting. Football players using their feet to fool opponents seems more palatable than politicians using their tongues for the same end.

One of the very few exchanges I did listen to was between Eoin O Broin of the No campaign and some forgettable character from the Yes camp. It wasn’t because I both know and like O Broin that I felt enamoured to his argument. It was simply that at a surface level his case made more sense. Right or wrong he explained the issues more clearly than his opponent. He gave out better information whereas in response to his position there were vague assurances rather than solid affirmations. All this amounted to at least one good reason to vote no: there was plenty of information but a dearth of decipherable content made available to the public.

The rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by that part of the Irish electorate not ruled by the British was a significant slap in the face for both the big powers of Europe and the Dublin political leadership. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth but as Berthold Brecht once famously said, the people have voted, the bastards. Had the decision been taken by the political class from deep within its Dail lair it would have been totally out of sync with democratic sentiment on the ground. The referendum was the way to go. But as an instrument of democratisation are referenda valued only instrumentally rather than normatively?

Being more direct than representative, were they used to consider things like immigration many of those strongly supportive of the concept would swiftly find fault with referenda as a means to deal with these issues. Already indications are beginning to emerge that many who voted No also favour a tightening up of immigration legislation making it more difficult for people from abroad to come to Ireland and make a better life for themselves and their families. Pat Leahy, the political editor of the Sunday Business Post having reviewed a survey claimed that ‘voters who are more concerned about immigration were more likely to vote against the treaty.’

Nor are the champions of the ability of people to make an intelligent choice in the Lisbon case as vocal in their praise of the democratic decision to reject a woman’s right to choose. And if it is true that many voted against Lisbon on the grounds that they feared an extension of women’s rights over their own bodies the liberationist dimension of the referendum result is called into question. What is being depicted as Ireland asserting its freedom may in fact be a mask to conceal an impulse to chain rather than unshackle. All of it produced by a referendum.

This is one of the problems with referenda or rather with those who champion them the loudest. The people are right when they agree with us but when they don’t, well they can back to being the bastards that they are for having done something as audacious as voting.

I have not changed my mind about the Irish electorate having rejected the Lisbon Treaty nor has my endorsement of the outcome attenuated. But I would be considerably happier had the vote been the strong pulse of a progressive tendency within Irish society rather than the deep vein fibrillation it is coming to resemble.



Monday, June 23, 2008

The Disappointed Idealist


Video - Religion is bullshit.


George Carlin, 1937-2008

So at some point, I drifted away from feeling any allegiance. Abraham Maslow the psychologist once said, "The fully realized man does not identify with the local group." Boy, when I read that, I said, that's me. I don't identify with city, state, government, religion, association, county, organization or species, even. And what I realized was that this feeling of alienation from all that gave me a kind of emotional detachment that was very valuable artistically. To be able to look at things and not give a fuck. To not have a rooting interest in the outcome. I don't really care what happens in this country. I'll be honest with you. I don't give a fuck what happens. I don't give a fuck what happens to this earth, because it's all temporal and it's all bullshit.

You sound like a fallen idealist.

That's it. You've got it exactly. I don't feel cynical -- I feel more like a skeptic and a realist -- but, if cynical I am, they have said that if you scratch a cynic you'll find a disappointed idealist. And that's a fact. I'm sure that flame flickers.
Interview with George Carlin


"I have no hobbies and I have no leisure activities," Mr. Carlin added. "My greatest joy is working at the computer with my ideas."

You're seventy now, right? Are you still ever bit as rebellious, or do you ever feel like you've become the establishment?

No. The point I've made about this is, an entertainer is one thing, and for a long time I thought of myself as an entertainer and that's all I was. But at some point, an artist started living here too. Artists are different from entertainers. Entertainers are kind of static, sort of. They kind of stay in one place, they do one thing. Artists on the other hand are usually involved in a journey of some kind, they don't know where they're going they just know that they're not there yet. There's a kind of restlessness in an artist, a vague kind of dissatisfaction - and it's because you're always reaching further inside yourself and further outside — or farther, I should say, it's physical &mash; you're reaching for more, inside and in the world itself - your observations, the things you understand or don't understand — you're always kind of moving moving moving.

Pablo Casals was a great cellist of the last century — he was a great virtuoso, just considered the absolute master of his instrument. And in his 90s he was still practicing 3 hours a day. And one of his friends asked him, "Senor Casals, you're a master, why do you still practice 3 hours a day?" and he said, "Well, I'm beginning to notice some improvement." And it's a wonderful thing to have inside you somewhere, that feeling - I was so pleased when I read that, that I could put that at work inside myself because it's true - you still see the joy you get from creating things, from sitting down with an empty page, so to speak, going into your files - in my case I work from files - and finding things that go together. Finding things that make sense and go somewhere, and putting them in form - finding them from ideas and little scraps of thoughts and making them into fully-formed essays. It's joy - it's unalloyed joy - and that's not something that I'd ever say, "Well, it's time to stop that." (laughs) It's a wonderful feeling to have found something you're good at, that you love to do, and that other people think you do well. Those are the three elements, I think, that go into being happy: Find something you love, be good at it, and have other people pat you on the back and say "good job."


George Carlin's website

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Mary Queen of Ireland

“I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.” – Isaac Asimov

Last year when my mother knew she was dying and opted not to countenance sympathy notices in papers her logic was simple but unassailable: there are enough people profiting from death without friends of the dead having to add to the booty of the profiteers. Her attitude was the same toward mass cards. Each that is sent would make two pound sterling for the priests. She was determined that not a penny would make it into their coffers.

An intensely private person, her remains had been removed from her home late at night in the presence of her children so as not to draw the attention of the neighbours. Their living should not be disturbed by her dying. She would have been mortified had she known that on the Sunday after her death, and a day before her funeral, the local cleric would announce from his pulpit that she had died. She preferred that the details be withheld until after her cremation. But even with the best of intent some things cannot be managed. A private funeral is not a secret one.

It is clear that she had a strong disregard for both the convention of funeral rituals and those well wishers all too eager to rush to print bidding godspeed to the next world. This caused me some bemusement in recent times upon reading a death insertion which read ‘Mary Queen of Ireland pray for him.’ The deceased in question had no religious belief. That he, an atheist of all people, should be the intended beneficiary of a plea to an imaginary being to pray for a soul that had no existence left my wind wandering in search of reason through a maze without any rational exit.

How people express their regret at the passing of a friend is their own affair. How that expression comes to be interpreted is the affair of others. There is no control over who reads what is placed in a newspaper. The notion that issues with a religious connotation, including sympathy notices, should somehow escape discussion is a no no. To my mind it read as far out as ‘Santa Claus emperor of Toyland pray for him.’ Yet, Santa has as much right to be petitioned as the queen of Ireland. He is an invisible man that many young people believe in. For them the evidence is clear: how else did the toys get here other than by way of the chimney? And if there are toys that are magically made to come down chimneys there must be a magical toy maker. All very simple really. The equality agenda amounts to zilch if invisible men are to be discriminated against in favour of invisible women.

The republican in me, steeped as it is in a history of secularism, recoils at the thought of seeking the prayers of a monarch who was undemocratically installed as queen by unelected clerics. Had the petitioner to the Queen of Ireland made the plea for prayers to Mary President of Ireland, there would at least have been some sense in it. The praying aspect would have seemed quaint but at least the President of Ireland is a tangible living being whose existence can be verified and whose position as president has been ratified by Irish voters. But the Queen of Ireland is invisible and ringfenced from the recall of any electorate. And here she was being entreated to pray for a man who did not even believe she existed.

When the bell tolls for me to pop my clogs perhaps somebody suitably irreverent will step up to the plate and implore Beano the spinning jelly bean monster to intercede on my behalf. The displacement of pious cant with some secular wit might give rise to a few laughs and at the same time not lend itself to a view that either the facetious implorer or I were by any stretch of the imagination believers in jelly bean monsters, spinning or otherwise. It would also serve to blur the arbitrary psychological demarcation between life and death that gives the latter such finality by pruning from it the buds of a humour to be enjoyed by living beings. Seeds of social human joy can be tilled from individual death. Life constantly renews itself.

That aside, there remains at the bottom of all this something of a theological conundrum which a Jesuitical mind is best equipped to deal with. We are dying every year, millions of us. As a Belfast wag says there are even people dying who never died before. And if the queen of Ireland is busy praying for so many of the dear departed, who then walks and feeds the celestial corgis?

Friday, June 20, 2008

Chuckle Ar La

Looking back at the first year of the Paisley government, a post-mortem of sorts on the Republican Movement, or a lament, maybe, written for Irish Review.

The Volunteers
Can kiss my ass
I’m big Paisley’s man
At last

Even writing about the Zzzzzz thing demands powers of endurance rarely called upon at the worst of times, including during the arduous H-Block blanket protest. The lack of interest generated by the Northern Irish political class can be gauged through the prism of journalistic redundancy. One of the most insightful commentators on the conflict, Liam Clarke of the Sunday Times, has recently found his formidable skills surplus to requirement. London yawning.

The long running bore saga may continue to strut its wears but will attract the same attention as a sixty something New York hooker, visited only by those who are puzzled as to why she is still on the streets. In their view, no longer a sexy item, the allure lies solely in her past.

With eminent journalists like Liam Clarke or Ed Moloney effectively off the scene, the peace process now gets the scribes it deserves. Jim Gibney will serve it just fine. His vocal insistence on avoiding clarity will find a suitable home in the misty landscape of peace process climes.

Curiosity about the shenanigans that pass for politics in the North will not become altogether extinct. What role journalism can play - being news driven it is focussed on the here and now - remains to be seen. Academia may assume the leading role. As a history subject the peace process shall retain value. A chair, perhaps, in some European or American university may yet be found, the incumbent duly known as Professor of Boreology.

When the Protestant fundamentalist Ian Paisley and his deputy, Derry Catholic Martin McGuinness, took office on May 8, my thoughts were not of them but of the eight IRA volunteers who on the same date twenty years earlier had given their lives in a British ambush at Loughall in opposition to the British rule that was now being blessed by this unholy alliance. There is a view in some circles that the SAS mounted their wipe out as a means to extirpate those likely to pose a challenge to the emergence of the peace process, plans for which were under way at the time of the state sanctioned killings. Fewer days in the republican calendar are more inappropriate for the ordaining of the Paisley-McGuinness aberration.

As for the two central characters my only interest was the human one - how they would behave towards each other. So much for the internal executive battle a day promised by Gerry Adams and Peter Robinson. More like a chuckle a day. It is their penchant for idiotically grinning at each other that has earned them the somewhat derisory label the ‘Chuckle brothers.’

In the months that have elapsed since the May 8 inauguration my view of proceedings has changed little. It is tempting to see it all as a theocratic freak show with the leading roles going to Frankenstein and Igor. As in the old Hammer production there is never any doubt about who is in charge. Why McGuinness should appear so thrilled to be cast in the role of Frankenstein’s servant is the unfathomable conundrum that many ponder in the diminishing amount of moments they devote to unravelling the mysteries of the peace process.

The first task in any unravelling exercise is unpicking the Sinn Fein sleight of hand which has brought matters to this point. As republicanism was being shunted to the scrapheap the equality agenda was slipped in and fallaciously termed republican. But how shallow even that has proven to be. The deferential demeanour of McGuinness toward Paisley accentuates his deputy status. For all the shouting of no return to second-class citizenship crown minister McGuinness has settled ably into his second-class ministerial portfolio. Paisley jubilantly proclaims how he will not shake his deputy’s hand. McGuinness accepts it as would a slave who exudes no sense of self-consciousness in kneeling down to kiss his chains. Hardly a psychological fillip to nationalist sensibilities.

So undisputed has the Paisley command of the First and Deputy First Minister’s Office been, the term ‘Paisley government’ is an apt one to describe the executive. It is with no intellectual discomfort that Paisley can be referred to as a British government minister. Considerable cerebral contortions have to be performed before Martin McGuinness can be looked upon as an Irish government minister. So far none have come to the vaulting horse to give it a try.

For all the talk of major shifts within nationalism the central themes of two decades ago still prevail. The ideas of the SDLP – power sharing and cross border bodies - constitute the dominant nationalist discourse. Those concepts are just being expressed by different faces. The SDLP argument has won the day, Sinn Fein merely the vessel in which the message is now carried.

When the SDLP and Sinn Fein engaged in exploratory talks early in 1988, what the Hume led party said then is, give or take an inflexion or two, what Sinn Fein is saying today. And what Sinn Fein said then has become the discourse of those dissident republicans so reviled by the current Adams entourage. Small wonder that Sinn Fein’s current resistance to British rule carries with it all the vigour of Hume and Fitt’s opposition.

At best all that has been achieved by the Provisional movement is a return to the early last century Joe Devlin position of accepting partition on a temporary basis. Given that this is as good as it gets there is some indication that within the leadership there is an unspoken acknowledgement that the armed struggle should have ended in 1974. Hence, one of the main leaders pretends to have left the IRA around that period while another is flabbergasted that the taoiseach would suggest he was ever a member of it at any time. Neither can justify having signed off on the travesty they breathed life into through the wholly unnecessary and failed long war strategy.

It would be easy but dishonest to assert that a republican strategic alternative to the long war might have provided a solution. Even had the leadership not become power obsessed republicanism was never the answer to partition. It had neither the force to compel unionists to submit to a united Ireland nor the moral authority to persuade them. Writing in 1954 on the very question of the divided country John V. Kelleher suggested that a political problem is rarely solved by those who ‘tend to see it as it first existed and not as time and society continually refashion it … the history of the problem is nearly irrelevant to its solution.…’

The republican project is now caricature. A quaint Kafkaesque production where those who died to make it stage worthy do not come back to take the encore at the end. That is reserved for those who sent them to their deaths in the full knowledge that the ground they were dying to take had long since been traded in. From tiochaidh ar la to chuckle ar la the republican odyssey has been one of abject failure, marked at every step of the way by the graves of the innocent and republican activists.

For sure republicanism has been defeated before. But never in its long history has it been hollowed out as it is today. How the republican project which began as Brits out and ended as Paisley in will fascinate generations to come.

Former IRA hunger striker Laurence McKeown once posed a very pertinent question to the criminal killers of Robert McCartney. Calling on them to do the honourable thing and admit to their part in the murder of the Short Strand father of two, he asked if being part of the movement was more important for them than the objectives of the movement. This in turn begs the probe of why McKeown’s provocative question was so restricted in terms of whom it was addressed to. It could just as easily have been put to anyone still in the Provisionals. How can any republican remain associated with what is so blatantly the antithesis of republicanism? Does belonging have more currency than achieving?

In the heartlands the failure is at least registering. In Ballymurphy, where Sinn Fein lorded it up while sucking the vote out of those it treated little better than serfs, complaints from people expressed in a recent academic study suggest that the party has delivered very little in return. Constituents in the Adams stomping ground now claim to be worse off than they were during the years of violent conflict. An ominous indictment of the harbingers of the new dispensation.

Ultimately, the denouement of the republican struggle has demonstrated that under the sun there is nothing new. Elements like the current Sinn Fein leadership have always corroded revolutionary initiatives. Eric Hobsbawm in his magisterial history made the following point about the phenomenon. ‘Moreover having gained power by the efforts of the radicals – for who else fought on the barricades? – they immediately betrayed them.’

As the theocratic leader of Northern Ireland might say – Amen.



First published in Irish Review: Special Issue on Belfast Agreement, March 2008.


Monday, June 16, 2008

In Her Time of Dying

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist - Epicurus

This day a year ago my mother was cremated. It was a hot June day so different from my father’s cremation on a cold January morning eight years earlier. Then Tommy McKearney had said to me that a cremation had much more dignity than a burial. People, including the very old and the very young could be brought together in a warm room rather than feel obligated to stand in a damp field called a cemetery. Besides, leaving the land to the living seems a sound idea. The dead have no use for it.

My mother was carried out of the world by the four sons she had carried into it, the same four that had also carried my father from it. Her funeral was in keeping with how she conducted her life, private and totally lacking in ostentation. Despite her illness she planned her funeral with fine tuned precision. Apart from her family she wanted no mourners, priests, masses, flowers, mass cards, religious trappings, or sympathy notices. At the crematorium there was some music of her choice, including a haunting rendition of Danny Boy by the late Eva Cassidy. There was no service. Family members said a few words or read poems, whatever they felt comfortable with. It was a simple secular ceremony, a dignified occasion with no clowns in gowns shaking incense and chanting mumbo jumbo.

My mother was no die hard atheist ‘biblically’ thumping the latest outpouring by Richard Dawkins. But she did, at her own request, have chapters of his God Delusion read to her by her youngest daughter in her closing days. I suspect it fortified her as the end approached. Despite a fervent religious conviction for much of her life, she had progressively abandoned it as her incredulity grew in the face of mounting challenges to its credibility. Much of the erosion lay in the behaviour of clergy. She could dismiss the antics of individual priests as the failings of men but the church’s collective cover-up for those failings she considered an institutional malaise for which there could be no explanation that resembled anything to do with the love of god. But then the church is about power and influence, not love and maybe not even god. I often wonder if any of the cardinals and bishops believe in god. If they do I strongly suspect it is not a belief that extends to the angels and saints nonsense. Even they could not buy into those fairytales. Those, they manufacture themselves as a sideshow to keep the flock happy. One thing is assured: if, in the morning, the red hat gang were to discover conclusively that god did not exist they would withhold their discovery from the rest of us.

There are many people in the world who draw no consolation from religion, going through their lives without it. They are guilty of nothing but declining to negate their own human essence by finding some mythical vacuum which, in Augustinian language, a deity alone can fill. They do not find their existence so devoid of purpose that they are abandoned to a sea of meaninglessness in which they flail around, clutching desperately for the first supernatural float to be cast their way. They achieve fulfilling lives and behave decently towards their fellow human beings. And when their life expires, it does so in their sure knowledge that there is no other to follow. That is a source of reassurance rather than dread. Humanists are quite comfortable with it, effortlessly accepting that life, good or bad, is its own return. They avoid the end described by Sean Kearney: ‘many who choose to believe in some mythical paradise or demonic hell, must experience great apprehension and terror, based on the fear of God’s wrath.’

Mean and vindictive old tyrant. Best just to ignore him.


11 June 2008

Sunday, June 15, 2008

True Believers

Rightly are the simple so called – Christopher Hitchens

At this stage there is really not that much left to be shocked at. Nobody seriously expected Sinn Fein to hold the line against the DUP and pull out of micro government at Stormont if Peter Robinson failed to provide the party with something of a fig leaf. In terms of what holds the interest any more, if forced to choose between the two, the deception practiced by the Sinn Fein leadership has less gravitational pull than the delusion that thrives amongst its base.

The exchanges between secular humanists and religious faithists on the evolution of the eye could be informative here. How it develops so as not to see what is in front of it is a subject in its own right.

For those who claim to be republicans but who remain wedded to the Provisional project and refuse to consider dissolving the bond delusion is a powerful carrier. It transports them from abandoned position to broken promise, comatosely undisturbed by the turbulence that such journeys must occasion. They share many characteristics with end of the world cults. Evidence and reason count for little, faith is everything. The bewilderment that forensics would normally expect to find as a result of the brute force trauma to republican sensibilities leaves no trace of its presence.

There seems no end to the amount of piss that can cascade from leadership heights, spraying the backs of the true believers who in time honoured fashion convince themselves that it is only raining. The true believer stands without equal on the podium, having lapped every other contender on the credulity circuit, when it comes to taking the garland for buying into Martin McGuinness pronouncements. If he is not urging people to become informers for the British police it is because he has been busy lavishing praise on long standing anti-Catholic bigot, Ian Paisley.

The former leader of British Northern Ireland, the public is told by McGuinness, was doing more to bring about an end to division in Ireland than Republican Sinn Fein. Nothing at all about his anti-Catholic bellowing having caused so much division to begin with. Given that the only division mattering to Republican Sinn Fein is the partitionist line that divides the country McGuinness’s jibe only makes sense in that context. As a criticism of the party Ruairi O’Bradaigh leads, allusion to any other division lacks thrust. Certainly that is how the comments appear to be read in the wider media including the Irish News whose political correspondent William Graham interviewed the deputy first minister. It reported that ‘former IRA commander Martin McGuinness says he believes Ian Paisley is doing more for Irish unity than dissident republicans.’

It is probably true that Martin McGuinness believes Ian Paisley is doing as much as him for Irish unity. It is equally true that one is doing as much as the other to bring a united Ireland about. Both support the partition principle called consent, back the British Police Service of Northern Ireland, feel that informing on republicans opposed to it is honourable, endorse the British judicial system, and believe that the Northern Ireland Prison Service is legitimate and that the republicans in its keep are criminals who should be kept there.

The logic of it all is incredibly simple. Paisley, rather than McGuinness always held to this perspective and therefore unbeknown to the rest of us, including his own party, must even then have been striving towards a united Ireland. For his part McGuinness, during all the he years spent opposing Paisley, must have working against Irish unity. But now that both men are at one in endorsing all that Paisley ever believed throughout his political career a united Ireland is almost certainly on the cards. As a belief system it is not without admirers. Nor is the Scientology Movement.

A much more sobering view can be pulled from beneath the scattered intellectual debris of the Provisional project. Most historians of the IRA have McGuinness serving on the Provisional army council for a time alongside Ruairi O’Bradaigh who was also president of Sinn Fein. During that period O’Bradaigh struggled for a united Ireland and to this day has never set his face against it. Ian Paisley, long a nemesis of both McGuinness and O’Bradaigh, has never ceased to struggle against a united Ireland and only went into government with McGuinness because he was firmly convinced that the Derry Catholic had given up the struggle for a united Ireland rather than he having eased up on his own determination to maintain the union with Britain. It is a strange united Ireland being worked for by a man who is as fervently unionist today as he was fifty years ago. The entire game of power splitting government has been played on Paisley’s ground and by Paisley’s rules. The red card has been waved at republicanism not unionism.

Those activists who in the radical republican tradition do not buy into Sinn Fein’s gradualist programme or the treatyite mentality that produced it will hardly mind being pilloried by someone they view as part of the same lineage as Don Concannon and Richard Needham. They understand only too well that the point made by Martin McGuinness about the retired leader of the North’s micro government is not an explanation at all of where Paisley is at all but a justification for where McGuinness himself now is. The circus that the Provisional project has mutated into is left with little other than the fig leaf of rhetoric to hide behind and an approving audience who clap every time one of the clowns craps on them.

8 June 2008

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The Killing of Frankie

This article, written in March, complements the previous piece about the murder of Harry Holland, taking a look at violent crime and the PSNI in West Belfast.

The Killing of Frankie
27 March, 2008

At the funeral of Brendan Hughes Bap McGreevy came up to me and shook hands. We exchanged a few words, nothing more than the usual banter. It was the same any time our paths crossed. We had known each other for a long time, having first met in an Omeath bar in 1972; both of us underage drinkers. Rules were much less stringently observed then. Different times they were, indeed, where the fear of thugs was not as heightened as it is today. I would find myself in his company on many subsequent occasions, most of it in the jails where he had established a reputation for being one of the characters in that banged up world. He pretty much did things his own way. That was how he faced up to his long incarceration. Frank was never conventional, for a time earning himself the affectionate ribbing ‘Frankie Bonkers.’ Everybody has their own funny tale about him. There are not many people either in jail or out who can bring tears of laughter to the faces of others. Frank did it with me. Neither screws nor fellow prisoners found much to complain about in the person of Frank McGreevy. On the day of Brendan’s funeral no one had any inkling that the next tricolour draped coffin to make its way up the Falls followed by thousands would contain the remains of Bap.

There is a particular sadness about the life and death of Frank McGreevy. He was seriously let down by the North’s policing regime on at least two separate occasions. Each resulted in consequences that were horrendous. The first, life imprisonment; the second, life ended. In February 1976 he was arrested by the police, brutalised in Castlereagh detention centre and forced to sign a statement admitting to a killing he was completely innocent of. I was in Castlereagh at the same time as him and along with others tried to raise his spirits by shouting moral support to him from our cells. But ultimately he had to face his tormentors alone in their interrogation chamber where they battered him until he confessed to what he did not do. Three weeks later I was in the same prison van as him, making the depressing journey from Belfast Petty Sessions to Crumlin Road Jail for a lengthy stay on remand. Later that year I shared a cubicle with him and two other Lower Falls men in Long Kesh’s Cage 13 while we were awaiting trial. In jail people quickly learn who are there courtesy of trumped up charges.

Thirty two years on the same police force could again be found failing abysmally to exercise a duty of care towards Bap. Despite repeated reports to the police about thugs on the rampage they were allowed to go on their not so merry way nonchalantly observed by the supposed forces of law and order. Their port of call was Bap’s house where they proceeded to murder him with sadistic viciousness. Little wonder that during Frank’s funeral mass the officiating cleric said that the community ‘must at least have the security of knowing the judicial system is on their side and not on the side of the criminal.’

His death was so brutal that people hardened over the years by exposure to an environment of violence were left aghast. It took place in the same constituency where Harry Holland was butchered by thugs in an earlier orgy of wanton violence. The parallels with the McGreevy killing are startling. In both cases neither life would have been lost had the police responded to distress calls from vulnerable members of the West Belfast public alerting them to the immediate threat posed by weapon wielding thugs. Those believed to be responsible in each killing have a long violent history. Even this failed to rouse the PSNI from its somnolence.

‘The dam is bursting’ is how one Sinn Fein representative described the deluge of anti-social behaviour raging through West Belfast. His party has been lambasted for doing little. Criticising Sinn Fein or the local MP for the rising tide of violent criminality in West Belfast may vent some pent up frustration but in the end produces only temporary relief, a palliative for annoyance rather than a panacea for the scourge. Why would a British police force find a cure for anti social behaviour in Belfast before finding it for the problems in London where youth violence frequently produces murder? Where Sinn Fein stand accused it is on grounds of deceiving people about what acceptance of the PSNI could deliver. It can hardly be deemed guilty of creating the circumstances that led to the murder of Bap McGreevy.

The PSNI were welcomed into West Belfast by some community ‘stalwarts’ on the grounds that people would feel free to walk up and down the Falls Road without fear of rape or worse. What a coming down to earth with a bump that has proved to be. Acceptance of the PSNI has changed nothing on the ground. People walk through their streets in the evenings like blanket men going on a wing shift. Relaxed is not a way to describe journeying through parts of West Belfast on foot in darkness. The liberation struggle produced neither liberty nor safety where it matters most – on the streets where ordinary people go about their daily lives.

That the problem is by no means specific to West Belfast has been demonstrated in the Republic by the leader of the Irish Labour Party Eamonn Gilmore who stated that Ireland, having been liberated from everything else, now needs to be freed from crime. There is no need to drift into infantile starry eyed leftism in order to put this into perspective and make the point that while crime is a scourge that needs tackled, prioritising it over all else is a useful device with which to avoid tackling other shackles that Ireland needs unchained from such as poverty and shabby public services. Nevertheless, Gilmore is tapping into a vein pulsating with the red anger of a resentment grounded in a sense of social impotence. With young thugs burning children in cars in Limerick’s Moyross much of this resentment is directed against current youth culture.

There is some discussion on the alienation of young people and how this might contribute to the violent path of gang affiliation that some of them go down. As a perspective it is not without merit but should be held up against another which sees gangs as a power hierarchy through which ambitious thugs hope to rise to the top through the use of violence against the vulnerable. From this perspective gang members are not victims denied social opportunities but are an enemy within that needs to be met with the same determination that human rights abusers from without receive.

While there should be no rush to push people, regardless of their crime, into the custody of gangs of screws with their penchant for violence, imprisonment per se unlike, say, rape, slavery or torture is not a denial of human rights. The violation of those rights is minimised when those who threaten them have physical space inserted between them and their intended victims.

The quality of life depreciates in proportion to the rise of gang culture. The haul against it will be no short one. Bap McGreevy will not be the last victim to have his life wrenched away through gratuitous violence. In a world of uncertainty one thing remains immutable: the PSNI will deliver real justice to West Belfast on the same evening that a real Santa delivers toys.


Monday, June 9, 2008

The Worst Murder the Best

Reading about the stabbing of an old friend Paul 'Handy' McGoran in the West Belfast street where I used to live caused me to trawl through the files and folders in search of a piece written for The Blanket shortly after the fatal stabbing of Harry Holland. The pressure of preparing to move house meant the article never made it to The Blanket and until today it lay alongside so many other pieces at varying stages of composition but which failed to make it to completion. A further article in the same genre, dealing with the murder of Frank McGreevy, was also 'rescued' from the forgot about folder where it too became the victim of electronic dust. It will be posted mid week.

The Worst Murder the Best
October 2007

Harry Holland who was knifed to death in the middle of last month is a victim of modern society where knife crime and gang culture are flourishing. He is also a casualty of the myth that West Belfast nationalist areas would somehow be much safer to walk through once support for the PSNI was forthcoming. His murder demonstrates that support for the police did much to safeguard political careers but little to safeguard the streets. Why a British police force would operate more effectively against Belfast hoods than against their Liverpool counterparts was a question considered unhelpful to the peace process. People in West Belfast claim – and have yet to be refuted – that they feel more vulnerable now than at any time during the past four decades.

When Harry Holland was reportedly observed at the Sinn Fein ard fheis enthusiastically applauding the party’s decision to support the PSNI he was expecting to be afforded the protection of that force. Like so many others before him he was let down by it.

Harry Holland at his age stood no chance when confronted by the power, speed and aggression of youth. Thrown into a situation where he opted to defend his hard gained property one of the thugs trying to steal it thrust a sharp instrument into his brain. It was gratuitous violence. Harry could have been thwarted by a punch or a push.

It is not as if West Belfast was unaware that lurking in its midst were elements intent on bullying to the point of murder. Harry Holland’s death was not an isolated incident but as his MP points out, something that was waiting to happen. A local woman threatened by the same knife wielding gang a mere hour or so before the attack on Harry rang the police to complain. Nothing was done. Where the thugs have a previous history of knife use the authorities including the PSNI should be hit up the face with it so that they can no longer wash their hands of culpability for the fate of those they have failed.

It could as easily have been someone other than Harry Holland. His killers had threatened repeatedly to stab anyone getting in their way. Time out of number the police were made aware of fears in the community only to ignore them. On one occasion police threatened locals with prosecution on the basis that the locals in question had used reasonable force to restrain one of those who later went on to murder Harry Holland.

It will come as no surprise when the justice system eventually grinds its way to a verdict in this case that those who end up in the dock could be found to have been aided and abetted by atrocious parental standards. One can imagine the type of perverse reasoning likely to emanate from that quarter:

Harry Holland must have been looking trouble if he was on the street at that time of night. My poor son was out playing with his wee friends when Harry Holland viciously head-butted his screwdriver which he only carried for helping elderly people get into their cars because being old they forget their keys.

This is the type of parenting that would openly gloat at the possibility of a couple of Sinn Fein members being jailed for the ‘crime’ of restraining a thug son engaged in terrorising other members of the public going about their daily business. And our judiciary will be only too willing to find mitigation in such excuses. If proper background knowledge on the killers of Harry Holland is not thrust beneath the noses of the judges the judiciary will throw his killers back onto the streets after a couple of years. The judiciary, chauvinistically indifferent to the malaise of crime in West Belfast, will find some reason to promote its own pseudo liberal tolerance and ignore the people who are forced to live under the regime of fear. As Victor Hugo would have phrased it ‘there is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.’

This is to make no claim that jail is the panacea to the problems that afflict our society. All too frequently the inmate population is made up from the uneducated and mentally ill. Violence has for long been a central feature of prison management techniques. Jailing for the sake of jailing is nothing other than revenge. Sweet tasting as it might be it creates an appetite that is never sated and as the prison population increases few stop to ponder that so too do the crime statistics in society.

Yet if adequate geographic and physical space is not inserted between the thugs that killed Harry and the rest of society then the other Harry Hollands out there, the aged, the weak, the helpless face a human rights crisis where theirs are trampled over. In the absence of imprisonment how are people to be protected from those who murdered Harry Holland? Society has not yet evolved to the point where alternatives to prison safeguard potential victims from aggressors.

The demand for the killers to serve no less than thirty years is unlikely to be fulfilled given the likely tender years of those involved. But neither should it be seen as a mere right wing clamour for vengeance and punishment. It is an expression of appreciation for the life of Harry, a statement that his life is no less valuable than someone from a different social class. It is also a protest against that life being taken away. Few people demand that joyriders who kill someone in the course of their selfish pursuit be locked away for 30 years. Here death, while wholly without justification, is considered a by-product. In the case of Harry Holland death was the intent.

Prison should not be for those who fail to pay fines, get into debt, make nuisances of themselves. It should be reserved exclusively for those whose penchant for violence poses a danger to others they might come into contact with. It should not be to punish those who go there but to protect the innocent who do not. The people of West Belfast will need protected from the killers of Harry Holland – for a very long time.


Thursday, June 5, 2008

Dear Koba

The recent report about censorship in West Belfast led to some rummaging around in the forgot about folder. This is what came out.

Dear Koba
17 April 2008

‘Citizen Chief, we love the President of Uzbekistan and the Uzbek people from the bottom of our hearts, we ask forgiveness of the President of Uzbekistan and the Uzbek people. Thank you to the Chief, food is good, health is good, everything is good’ – An obligatory refrain chanted by prisoners 500 times a day in Navoi city prison.

In his ‘Dear Koba’ letters to Stalin, the imprisoned Bukharin plummeted to the depths of ingratiating despair. ‘I am preparing myself mentally to depart from this vale of tears, and there is nothing in me toward all of you, toward the party and the cause, but a great and boundless love.’ Koba of course did not listen to him. Being a megalomaniac unable to brook any opposition to his authority the destruction of Bukharin was what mattered to Koba. The obliteration of the opponent’s self respect - in Bukharin’s case his physical existence as well - would satisfy the dictator’s demonic power lust.

In its own much discussed Dear Koba letter the Andersonstown News seemed determined to emulate the German flagellist movement of the middle ages. Its frenzied whipping of its own credibility earned it the pejorative, ‘grovel sheet’, gleefully fired at it from one of its rivals in the media industry. The correlation between ‘craven’ and ‘Andersonstown News apology’ reaches the high nineties in the word association matrix. All resulting from the paper’s mea culpa to Gerry Adams for having caused him offence courtesy of a political column.

Newspapers worthy of the name are not given to any form of apology, let alone an emblazoned front page one, to a politician for an opinion piece that, even if harsh, mocking or cruel, was not libellous. Newspapers analyse, grovel sheets apologise. If newspaper columnists are not annoying politicians they are hardly doing their job. Imagine the following scenario: the Irish News runs a column written by its editor which lambastes without libelling Mark Durkan. Durkan then throws a hissy fit and the Irish News issues a front page apology. It is not rocket science to predict diminishing credibility levels in response to columnists who express only opinions approved by the SDLP.

As if the public apology from the paper he edits was not considered punishment enough for Robin Livingstone he was unceremoniously trailed back to the stocks so that the baying crowd could throw a few more insults his way in protest at his errant behaviour. The Sinn Fein president by telling the Irish News that the Andersonstown News had no need to apologise in the first place was depicting Robin Livingstone as having indulged in unsolicited snivelling. Robin, it is implied, did not apologise under pressure as most people suspect but because he had nothing but a great and boundless love for Dear Koba; he was overcome with eagerness to apologise. That somebody higher than Robin most likely decided on the apology while he was in Scotland will be missed in the cacophony of allegations about Robin’s supposed supineness.

The entire affair from beginning to end was, like a show trial, conducted in public so that the admonishment and subsequent atonement would be all the more pronounced. Livingstone was convicted of heresy; an apostate who no longer believed in the greatness of the great leader. At a book launch in Belfast last week, the Andersonstown News apology was discussed as avidly on the floor as the book we were there to see launched. Quips were made that an apology for having apologised would be the next thing to appear in the paper.

I have never been a fan of Robin Livingstone’s goonda journalism which always seemed to defend the strong against the weak. The latter will wait a long time for an expression of contrition to come their way. The abiding purpose of goonda journalism is to dragoon contrary to what journalism should be about which is to enlighten. Yet, while it may be the done thing to sneer at his misfortune, Livingstone’s position was not enviable. The isolation he experienced was enormous. Few would have withstood the tidal wave of animosity that was generated against him. He had annoyed the local caudillo and stood to lose a lot had he persisted with his stance. He wasn’t exactly embroiled in a slanging match with one or two of his usual adversaries whom he could forget about after a day or two, but was pitched against a machine with the power to sanction severely. Nor could he call upon years of experience in the stand alone camp, which would have developed his immune system to the point of imperviousness to the inevitable threats and innuendo that come with the dissenting turf.

Despite the criticism of him, Gerry Adams is not such a terrible MP that he could not have mounted a credible defence against the Livingstone allegations. But Sinn Fein’s draconian response to the matter revealed not only the party’s totalitarian instinct but publicly underscored its own reliance on the goonda journalism so long practiced at the Andersonstown News. It was the only type of journalism Sinn Fein could countenance. The party could simply have said ‘you are wrong Squinter and this is the MP’s track record to refute you.’ Instead it went for a ‘how dare you Robin Livingstone’ menacing tone. The democratic note that had been introduced to the column had to be crushed and the paper made revert to type; diktat rather than dialogue the rule of thumb.

The subsequent attempt by the party to backtrack on the matter suggests its antennae grew sensitive to how its position was perceived. But the damage was done. The ‘how dare you gang’ in virtually threatening Livingstone effectively blurred any difference between it and the ‘do you know who I am gang?’ The image of the bully had not gone away.

As for Robin Livingstone, his one time backers now revile him. They will not forgive him for having harboured an independent thought that had been vocalised and caused embarrassment to Dear Koba. But there was no reason whatsoever, other than the sheer love of gooda journalism for him to have resumed his Squinter column. Damaged goods, it will carry little weight. Those abused in the column in future will simply look in his direction and dismiss him as ‘big hat, no cattle.’ His best course of action would have been to stand over his initial polemic, dissociate himself from the subsequent apology and then openly call on Sinn Fein not to put pressure on the Andersonstown News management, which disgracefully failed to stand by its editor, to sack him.

While many of his critics are now gloating because the rebellion lasted only a week, the real story is that it was ever mounted in the first place. It took courage and in that week Robin Livingstone opened a window on a world of censorship and the marshalled policing of independent thinking.

For the week that was in it, seven days of Squintergate shook West Belfast.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Forgetting Over Memory

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting – Milan Kundera

There must be easier tasks than trying to reconcile the new Martin McGuinness with his old self. Having observed him from the that bygone era when he was described as the single biggest threat to the British state (long before Jonathan Powell awarded the accolade to the late Brian Keenan) to the present where he has come to be regarded as a linchpin of the British administration in the North has been a flip flop experience. A comparable event would be watching Ian Paisley celebrate mass for the late John Paul II in Rome’s St Peter’s Basilica.

A member of the British Police Service of Northern Ireland journeying in his car narrowly escapes death, the result of a booby trap bomb attached to his vehicle by republicans who believe, perhaps because somebody in authority told them, that ‘our position is clear and it will never never never change. The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.’ McGuinness now a Stormont micro minister exercising some power devolved by the British rushes to condemn those who carried out the attack. In a less than laudable victory for forgetting over memory he further calls for anyone with information about the attack to inform the British police about it. Names like Franko Hegarty and Paddy Flood spring to mind as I ponder on who might have sent them to their graves for supposedly doing just that - providing information to the British police.

Being critical of the attack is fine. It stood not even a snowball’s chance in hell of gaining anything. Had the bombers succeeded in their intent their sole achievement would have been the inclusion of one more statistic in the excellent Lost Lives tome. Measured on a republican index, not much more than McGuinness and his colleagues achieved despite countless bombs under cars.

The grounds on which McGuinness made the condemnation, rather than being critical per se, are what animated the face pullers and more than a few others. Visiting the injured cop in hospital McGuinness said the bombers were ‘without mandate and represented no one.’ This set him up for a well planted kick in the swingers from Fionnuala O’Connor who commented that ‘when McGuinness led the IRA's bombers most people thought the same of him and the IRA.’

The charade quickly becomes full blown pantomime when it is considered that McGuinness only ever admits to having been a member of the IRA at a time when its political wing had not a solitary vote. This leaves him by his own admission having served as a leader of an organisation which ‘without mandate’ placed bombs beneath the cars of British police officers in the North.

McGuinness’s call for informers to come forward echoes that of the former Official IRA chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding, who in the autumn of 1983 can be found supporting the supergrass system then in use in the North. That too was supposed to advance republicanism. Then McGuinness and his circle blew raspberries at Goulding’s suggestion. Today the Goulding perspective is given a fair wind rather than a foul one because the Provisional movement now resembles the Officials in everything but decommissioning – the Official IRA never having surrendered its weapons.

The one serious difference that armed struggle republicans see in Martin McGuinness is that from being a senior figure in a movement that sentenced many people to death for informing on republicans to a British police service in the North, he has become a strong supporter of those willing to inform on republicans to a British police service in the North.

Regrettably, armed republicanism in its insular world is unlikely to listen to anyone urging it to quit clinging to the wreckage of a failed armed struggle. But the chances of it ever listening to those who once urged republicans to bomb the Brits but who now propose touting to the Brits are as slim as the probability of bombing their way to a united Ireland. A different Sinn Fein leadership - from the current bomb damaged one - making the case would at least shorten the odds.


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