Cut out Gilligan’s Tongue

The only thing that is obscene is censorship - Craig Bruce

John Gilligan has caused something of a furore by having an interview published in an Irish magazine, Hot Press. Perhaps it is more accurate to claim that the magazine caused the furore by allowing the words of Gilligan to become known to the public. Already the Minister of Justice Dermot Ahern, under pressure from Fine Gael justice spokesman Charlie Flanagan, is preparing to squeeze an explanation if not an apology out of prison management for this supposedly wanton intrusion on the public intellect by the views of Gilligan. We the public, it seems, need protected from some views and are expected to approve the good minister using his hands as ear mufflers.

Flanagan claimed that ‘John Gilligan is currently serving a prison term and I would consider a platform in the media inappropriate in that context.’ In other words censor prisoners. The Fine Gael justice spokesperson sought to justify his call for censorship on grounds that ‘it is entirely inappropriate for John Gilligan to become a celebrity criminal through magazine interviews while serving a term behind bars … John Gilligan's interview with Hot Press is a further example of certain prisoners making a mockery of the criminal justice system.’

Flanagan’s inept attempt to discursively position Gilligan, and by extension all prisoners, outside the realm of public understanding is nonsense and was underlined as such by Hot Press which responded to the alarmism gripping the upper political echelons of the criminal justice system: ‘Is it now the case that no one in prison has the right to ever say anything in their defence? You cannot understand crime without talking to criminals.’

But this is it, is it not? The people urging censorship do not want us to understand crime. They wish to lock us into their view of crime which is that it is all down to a few villains like John Gilligan whose take on the matter is so contagious that quarantine through censorship is required to inoculate others from criminal infection.

At a conference on alternatives to imprisonment in Edinburgh two years ago I was struck by how the former governor of Peterhead prison anecdotally acknowledged the criminal violence that permeates prison life. A Glaswegian inmate once told him that the key to understanding the balance of power within prison lay in recognising that ‘your gang is bigger than mine.’ Now, if the Gilligans of this world are not free to inform us of that strain of uniformed criminality who shall? It will not be Charlie Flanagan.

Flanagan does not hail from a party with a robust tradition of respecting the rights of prisoners. When Paddy Cooney was justice minister in the 1970s he informed the public that prisoners don’t have rights. Seems little has changed. But why does Dermot Ahern jig to an old Blue Shirt tune by insisting that ‘the Prison Service will have to look at their modus operandi to ensure that it doesn't happen again.’ Yet, it is crucially important that it continues to happen again and again for a very simple reason.

Irish prisons do not have a wholesome reputation. Last weekend’s recent riot in Mountjoy, Monday’s critical report from the Irish Council of Civil Liberties, Free Legal Advice Centre and Irish Penal Reform Trust against a backdrop of the damning yearly reports from prison inspector Dermot Kinlen indicting the prison system up until his death last year, all tell us that something festers within the walls. As to what goes on behind them, or who exists on the wrong side of them, society should not have to rely on official sources. Prison is a closed institution where closure is not merely physical but intellectual. While ostensibly to lock prisoners in, our penal institutions also function to lock the public out. Our gaze must be averted by high walls. A public that ignores what goes on behind prison walls ends up being shuffled towards that carceral archipelago warned of by Michel Foucault.

John Gilligan might not be expected to rouse sympathy within the columns of a magazine given that guilty or not journalists would appear to hold him culpable for the 1996 killing of their colleague, Veronica Guerin. But good journalism will see this as secondary to the much more fundamental issue of telling the story as a matter of public interest. And the public interest is often served even when the public does not want to hear what it is being told.

Burn the Witch Myers

The populist authoritarianism that is the downside of political correctness means that anyone, sometimes it seems like everyone, can proclaim their grief and have it acknowledged. The victim culture, every sufferer grasping for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship. And censorship, that by-product of fear - stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others - must surely be resisted. - Jonathon Green, Did You Say 'Offensive'?

As is his wont, Kevin Myers has placed another torch beneath the tinder box where many of us seem to store our emotions. The slightest friction is sure to ignite a conflagration which can only be doused with the blood of the pyromaniac.

By midday I had not yet read the article that has caused so much ire. A friend had asked if I liked Kevin Myers. I responded that I did but could never agree with him on much that he wrote. My friend had hoped to lead me into expressing admiration for the content of Myers’ writing and then ambush me with his comment about Africa contributing nothing to the world but AIDS. He would agree with Myers on this matter whereas I would not. His was a humorous attempt to recruit me to his side of the debate. There was nothing in it that would send either of us off in search of wood for the pyre.

A couple of years ago Myers came out with his famous or infamous ‘bastards’ comment in relation to children born out of wedlock. Amongst his critics were people who for decades had labelled other people legitimate targets and who somehow thought it was better to be called that than a bastard. So the sanctimonious fury that Myers provokes in the politically correct is something that I have come to pay little heed to. Such is their disposition to being upset that even the Life of Brian is an affront to their sensibilities. Poor things, cursed to struggle through the only life they will ever have with skins as frail as eggshells.

When I arrived home this evening, having been dropped at the house by my Myers-lauding friend - both of us having forgotten the banter of earlier in the day - I noticed an e mail urging me – and whoever else was on the sender’s mailing list – to write complaints about the offending Myers piece in the ‘Irish Times’. In his eagerness to be first to kick Myers off the scaffold the distributor of the chain e mail failed to notice that the article appeared in the Irish Independent. When did Myers last feature as a columnist in the Irish Times?

The sender asked in particular that we all write to the Office of the Press Ombudsman. He further urged that we refrain from copying and pasting what he sent us so that we could at least pretend our outburst was spontaneous rather than prompted. Well, as the notion to write complaining about Myers never struck me earlier in the day, I have no intention of writing now because somebody else thought it was a good idea. Perhaps what Myers had written was racist but I was certainly not enamoured to the suggestion that it was offensive. I have come to learn that the cry of ‘offensive’ is the great wet blanket of the censor. A couple of nights ago watching a recording of Ali G wind up a group of religious hallions, I found myself shouting ‘debate killer’ at the dog collared cleric each time he told G he found his views on religion ‘offensive’.

In any event I had no intention of doing anything before I had a chance to read the piece by Myers. When I did I found it shocking. But I have always found a piece that shocks, rather than soothes, a much more intellectually stimulating read. It jump starts my faculty for thinking in a way that the bland and the boring never manage.

John O’Shea, who Myers has a pop at in the column when he is not hammering the Africans, is a person whose political views on the African situation are closer to my own that the Myers perspective which is light years away. Yet there is no reason to strangle at birth the Myers view before it gets a chance to filter into the public mind where it can be intellectually dismantled rather than emotionally suffocated.

Myers cruel Malthussian solution to the problems that beset Africa lack the wit and irony of the 1729 Swiftean satire, A Modest Proposal, which urged Irish parents to eat their own children as a solution to the problems of penury. And the extent to which he has warped a complex network into one way traffic leaves him stum on the Rwandan genocide being something given to Africa by the United Nations, France and China.

Yet, this is what we are supposed to be afraid of. Myers is such a threat to intellectual life that its autonomy must now be eroded so that it may lean on the crutch of censorship. I don’t think so. I will not be joining the Myersophobic mob so intent on raising the stakes so that writers may be burned at them.

Death of a Bigot

In South Africa, Argentina, Mozambique, Honduras, and Nicaragua, Helms cooperated with racists and fascists who have nothing in common with the ideals of American democracy - Boston Globe editorial, 2001

Religious bigots are wont to dismiss as ‘abominations’ those their preferred tyrannical ‘good’ book finds fault with. They love to lord it over those they detest, as Anne Lamont observed, by demonstrating that god is on their side because he hates the same people they do. Now, someone who can be fittingly described as the real thing in terms of possessing genuinely abominable characteristics – qualities would be the wrong type of word - passes unmolested by the inquisitionist probing of the sanctimonious brethren. Even worse, they are frequently praised to the mythical high heavens.

Jesse Helms, a deeply religious miscreant, was without doubt an abomination. His death at the age of 86 prompts lots of comments – ‘at last’ not the most uncommon – but only one query: surely if god did exist would he really have granted the number of bountiful years that fell the way of this villain while at the same time inflicting AIDS on a child just out of its mother’s womb or condemn another to death by malnutrition?

A deacon and Sunday School teacher in his local Baptist church prior to taking up a Senate seat, Helms once proclaimed that ‘the only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ His Christian love led him to vote against disability aid proposals, hate the civil rights movement, label Martin Luther King a communist and sex pervert, feel the victims of rape should be compelled to give birth to the offspring of the rapist, eulogise the fascist Pinochet, endorse Raoul Cedras who massacred civilians in Haiti, back the Contras in Nicaragua, and oppose sanctions aimed at ending the regime of apartheid in South Africa.

Helms’ perspective was brutally simple. In 1994 The New York Times reported that:

For Mr. Helms, the devil lived down in Latin America during the 1980's. The Senator and his staff aimed to fight him. They became a crucible of American support for the far right wing: politicians linked to death squads in El Salvador; the Guatemalan military which killed thousands of people suspected of ties to the left; Honduran military intelligence; the Argentine junta; and other violently authoritarian governments of the era.

Anyone with a passing interest in the politics of Latin America will be no stranger to this. Over the decades when any human rights impulse in the region made itself felt Helms could be relied upon to stand atop Capitol Hill and shout encouragement to the death squads as they sought to behead human rights advances off at the pass. Countless numbers of headless human corpses would turn up in the rubbish dumps and beaches of El Salvador courtesy of the friends of Jesse Helms. The leader of the Salvadoran right wing death squads and the man believed to have ordered the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Major Roberto D’Aubisson, was described by Helms as a ‘deeply religious’ man. No doubt he was. Hacking people to bits or burning them is the type of activity numerous religious sorts have been at since man first created god and immediately pretended that it was the other way round. An arch hypocrite who argued against abortion on the grounds that he would ‘never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves’ his entire career was based on enforcing silence for thugs like D’Aubisson and other mass murderers of children.

Helms, a senator from 1973, emerged as a powerful presence in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at one point shoving and bullying his way through to chair it. According to the Sunday Times, during the Clinton Presidency ‘he held up 400 promotions in the State Department, the passage of 12 foreign treaties and the approval of 30 ambassadors.’ In 1993, when Clinton asked for confirmation for a gay assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms exploded, ‘I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that … If you want to call me a bigot, fine.’ A New Orleans blogger, Gentilly Girl, stated that ‘his office once responded to me that all of the Gay boys deserved to die for their sins.’ In the abominable mind of the Christian senator gays were ‘weak morally sick wretches’, abominations, unlike, death squad leaders who were alright sort of guys.

His persistent obstructionism earned him the title Senator No. But unlike his fellow religious bigot Dr No who was allowed to run the North of Ireland for a year – and with whom he, surprise, surprise, shared many similar views - Senator No, despite the onset of vascular dementia and an easing up of his opposition to helping those suffering from AIDS, never stepped back.

Helms was a racist and looked back to the halcyon days when US blacks ‘knew their place.’ In a 1950 election campaign he helped write an ad urging ‘White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories?’ In 1993 the first African-American woman to be elected to the US Senate, Carol Moseley-Braun, during an elevator ride had to endure Helms singing "Dixie". He boasted ‘I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing Dixie until she cries.’ In 1994 he branded the University of North Carolina as ‘the University of Negroes and Communists.’ Later when a caller to the Larry King Live show lauded Helms for ‘everything you've done to help keep down the niggers’ Helms turned to the camera, saluted it and said ‘well, thank you, I think.’

When political and religious leaders from the US president down – or, in terms of ethical qualities and intellectual ability, from the president up – rolled out to eulogise the bigot it was heartening therefore to find amongst the obituaries for the rabid racist titles such as ‘Death of an old Monster’ and ‘Jesse Helms Finally does the right thing’, or no punches pulled commentary like ‘I have hated that bigoted bastard all of my life. He came to power in ‘57 and was always a nasty word in our household.’ And due praise to LF Eason, the head of a Department of Agriculture lab who had to leave the only job he ever had for refusing to lower the US flag as a mark of respect for Helms on the grounds that the flag could not be allowed to salute the ‘doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice’ pursued by the former senator for North Carolina.

Because he died on the 4th of July there are those eager to depict him as a great America first advocate whose patriotism was underscored by the date of his death. In the words of Billy Graham ‘it is fitting that such a patriot who fought for free markets and free people would die on Independence Day.’ A more fitting comment came from Gentilly Girl: ‘some of his champions are happy he died on the Fourth, but I see it as if the concept of Freedom removed him from our midst on this special day.’

Humour and its Haters

It would be impossible to overstate George Carlin's contribution to standup comedy. Along with Richard Pryor and a few others, he essentially created the genre. But he was more than just a comedy pioneer. He was a freethinker who never backed down, and he truly changed the course of American culture. He will be missed - Jay Dixit

George Carlin, one of the greats of US comedy has left us. The world will be a dourer place but only for a while. Carlin’s enterprise would not have proved the success it has undoubtedly been were his influence unable to survive his death. One sure reason that Carlin made the impact he did lies in his having set out his stall on what humour should be. It was a stall where the merchandise on offer never lost its power of attraction. Carlin’s influence will far outlive him. Therein is to be found the evidence of his potency. Death shall not curb it.

Out of all his sketches my favourite is where he narrated the tale of the invisible man. The raving, ranting, religious right must have been red in the face as Carlin hurled them to the outer limits of apoplectic rage with his take on god. Repeated viewing does not fray its edge. Elsewhere, his take on the men of the cloth wasn’t far off the mark ‘what a bad name religion has given God.’

In town today I became self conscious that people might be looking at me strangely as I sauntered along, laughing and snickering as the ear phones extending out from my MP3 player transmitted the voice of George Carlin ribalding away about the US being a mass producer of bullshit. Carlin was careful not to accuse it of being the sole producer of bull. How enriching it would have been had he turned his wry eye and waspish tongue on the North. Bullshitting politicians who think gay people are an abomination on the basis of some biblical bollix, coupled with theocratic grifters stalking the chambers of powerlessness up at Stormont would have been a feast to him. He would probably have been barred from the North on the grounds of not being helpful to the peace process. Seems commanders in chief who, in the words of retired Major General Antonio Taguba - responsible for the initial investigation into abuses at Abu Ghraib - 'authorized a systematic regime of torture’ rather than comedians who mock them, are truly helpful to the peace process.

Carlin in the last interview of his life, given to Jay Dixit, offered an insight into how he regarded humour. Because it was ‘vulgar’, comedy could never quite fit into the category of fine arts. And why should it? Comedy is essentially people’s art, not high brow for the theatre stuff. There are wags in every pub but few if any opera singers. A good comedian gives expression, often in crude form, to the collection of sentiments floating around in the social intellect. That the politically affiliated of all shades seem to harbour in their midst an inordinately high proportion of humour haters is precisely because the crap that passes for politics is often the target of the humorist. They don’t want the floating particles of discord - which in Carlin’s own words ‘are lying around waiting to be discovered and … our job is to just notice them and bring them to life’ - to form into a coherent common sense against them. The current mayor of Belfast, a long standing joke himself, once requested that Sinn Fein members be prohibited from telling jokes about him. The minute it was announced in Connolly House prior to our weekly Monday morning meeting commencing, I told another one about him. Those at the meeting merely laughed including the chair. No more was heard of it. Not everybody in Sinn Fein is an insufferable bore.

I love a joke, the thought that goes into it, the shape of its structure. Carlin referred to its logic and ingenuity, the two elements that converge in an apex when melded by the wholly unforeseen twist. I marvel at the artistry involved. And I don’t particularly care if the PC type thinks the jokes I enjoy are sexist, racist, fatist, ageist or whateverist. Sour faced lemon suckers who think cracking a smile would result in a visit to the hospital should never be allowed to police what the rest of us listen to, view, read or say. They suffer from victim syndrome, an intellectually debilitating ailment that propels them to search endlessly for those offensive sorts who might just … offend them and leave them fuming, much like ‘rage boy’ from the world of Islam.

Paul Krassner commented that Carlin knew 'his audience trusted him not to be afraid of offending them'. An artist’s courage interacting with an intelligent audience – a potent mix that is a triumph for the Enlightenment.

The Road to Perdition

The collapse of the Robert McCartney murder trial is unlikely to have aroused bafflement amongst those familiar with the case. There will be more bewilderment that due process was ever launched along the certain road to perdition in the first place. From the outset there was the feel that the prosecutions had been initiated to take the sting out of a justice campaign that was proving embarrassing to those powerful political forces, confronted on a daily basis with demands to match their ‘rule of law’ rhetoric with deeds. As Catherine McCartney, sister of the murdered man, told the Sunday Tribune, ‘neither London nor Dublin delivered anything concrete in our search for justice. The British government was useless; the Irish government was polite and useless.’

After three years of legal proceedings the prosecution case evaporated in a puff of smoke. Fittingly so, given that the British crown case amounted to little more than shovelling smoke from the day and hour the former republican prisoners Terry Davison and Jim McCormick first appeared in court. That Davison was being depicted as the knife man raised suspicions about the motives of the prosecution. It ran contrary to what many people understood to be the truth. Few would dispute the evidence eventually offered in court that placed him at the scene of the crime but they would contest the nature of his involvement as outlined by the crown.

Truth is, those famous dogs on the streets of Belfast know who plunged the knife into Robert McCartney. The name of the thug responsible - who later told the IRA in the morally vacant language of the sociopath that he had ‘no reason’ for murdering the Short Strand father of two – was on the lips of everyone talking about the killing from the word go. PSNI intelligence left it in no doubt as to what happened on the night of January 30 just over three years ago. It is understood that more than one British state informer either witnessed or participated in the events on the evening of the murder. There is nothing to suggest that any of these informers ever identified Davison as the knife man.

Nevertheless, what we end up with is a decision to charge Terry Davison with murder on the basis of an allegation that he had wielded the murder weapon. The PSNI, like almost everyone else, knew Davison - whatever role he might have played - was most definitely not the knife man. Despite knowing the identity of the individual who plunged the knife into Robert McCartney, the PSNI for reasons known only to itself chose not to charge him with murder.

The PSNI could not have been anything other than aware of the consequences that this would have on the chances of securing a conviction. Long before the trial judge reached his damning conclusion it was clear that the evidence presented against the accused was so at variance with what took place that short of travesty there was no possibility of a conviction. Why the PSNI, with the information available to it, sought to wrongly identify Davison as the knife man and at the same time allow the person who inflicted the fatal blow to evade the serious charge of murder is something that the police ombudsman’s office may consider worthy of further investigation. While chewing over that, the same office might like to delve a little deeper into the paradox that others, against whom there was as much evidence as was put before the court in relation to the accused, never appeared in front of any judge. The ombudsman might enhance public understanding by demonstrating who was being protected and for what reason.

The murder of Robert McCartney led to a wall of silence. The ‘warm up’ to the killing took place in a bar and was witnessed by anything up to 70 people. Nobody outside the incident came forward with any evidence of substance. Not one Sinn Fein member, of whom there were many, in the bar on the evening gave evidence in the court or made statements to police implicating the attackers. Mate culture may explain some of this. People do not want to inform on their friends. But not all those in the bar were friends of the assailants. Fear must go some way towards explaining their reason for not coming forward. But the fulcrum on which this fear swivels would appear to be a Sinn Fein culture of non-cooperation with the PSNI investigation. There is no doubt that had Sinn Fein members come forward with evidence other witnesses would have felt less fearful in doing likewise. That no Sinn Fein member gave evidence in court suggests that the culture of non co-operation permeated the party. Sinn Fein wanted the murder to go away, rather than the murderers to go down. Like the PSNI, Sinn Fein, fully cognisant of the sequence of events that took place in Magennis’s Bar, were prepared to allow Davison to take his chances on a charge of wielding the murder weapon rather than prompt their own members who witnessed the night’s events to go forward and identify the particular party treasurer who had ‘no reason’ for plunging a knife into his defenceless victim.

The upshot of it all is that this case was never initiated with a view to producing anything other than a short term political expedient. The seriousness of the British crown’s intentions to secure a conviction in the case was called into question from the outset of the prosecution. The crown emphasis apparently was on being seen to be doing something rather than actually doing anything. Getting individuals into court was useful only insofar as it allowed politicians off the hook.

This is the backdrop to a verdict that must have hurt the grieving family of Robert McCartney. Emotionally traumatised they have never traded in their dignified composure in exchange for expedients. They maintain that given their own pursuit of justice a verdict that was reached unjustly would have delivered neither the solace nor the closure that the family needed. This shows a robust regard for a culture of human rights in circumstances where a range of emotional pressures must militate against seeking justice in favour of the gratification offered by revenge.

What in terms of justice has this trial produced? Nothing. The killers of Robert McCartney still stalk the streets in a most unedifying validation of the theses that apes evolved from man.