Breakout

The documentary Breakout detailing the September 1983 escape from the H Blocks was broadcast earlier in the week. I found it compulsive viewing. The escape took place against a background of the IRA being harried by supergrasses which the organisation and its allies preferred to describe as paid perjurers. That an operation involving so many people both inside and outside the prison was not compromised in that grass-induced precarious security environment is testimony to the ability of the people involved in managing it, particularly in the prison where keeping secrets was not a finely honed skill. Many worked the graveyard shift to pull this one off.

The 3 senior escapees interviewed for Breakout, Gerry Kelly, Brendan McFarlane and Bobby Storey were knowledgeable and articulate. Their actions on the day 25 years ago were characterised by nerve and courage. The escape came at a point in time where it could genuinely be said that the IRA was courageous and imaginative, words that have since come to be corrupted and devalued into meaningless vacuity by the peace process.

At the time an IRA that could pull off such a feat seemed capable of taking its war to levels where the British state might find its Irish strategy flummoxed, leaving it little choice but to begin a process of disengagement. The catastrophic failure that eventually befell the IRA courtesy of the peace process was not considered a remote likelihood in 1983. Were the food lorry that weaved its way to the prison tally lodge to have displayed, stencilled on its side, the words ‘Paisley will be our leader – criminalise the physical force tradition’ would prison staff seriously have risked their lives to prevent it?

The escape was meticulously planned, its impact instant and lasting. Each of us left behind in the prison on the day will remember exactly where we were and what we were doing at the moment the news came through that our comrades in H7 had achieved the impossible. It seemed amazing that it could have been pulled off. But those who thought big had done it.

The thought and precision that went into both the planning and execution of the operation that took 38 prisoners on a voyage of non-discovery right to the perimeter wall diminishes not at all when it is considered that on the day a major enabling factor was the incompetence of the screws. Many prison staff showed unquestionable bravery but a combination of systemic failure underpinned by bungling lackadaisical individuals was an indispensable ingredient in the escape without which it would most certainly have failed. Clear vindication of the maxim that the best laid of battle plans do not survive contact with the enemy. One viewer described it to me on the day after Breakout aired as having the appearance of one big fiasco. This I would argue was more down to the screws than the prisoners.

By the time it had unfolded its way to the tally lodge the great plan had unravelled. Those at the scene say that only for the on-the-feet thinking and intervention of Bobby Storey the 19 who eventually made it to freedom would have joined their battered, bruised and bleeding comrades in the cell blocks after being forced to run a gauntlet of baton wielding screws and snapping Alsatian dogs.

Storey for his part became a hate figure for prison staff. Seen as having rubbed their noses in it and safely back in their grasp, it was not long before reports started to filter onto the wings from the screws’ mess that inebriated staff were discussing poisoning his food.

Of the three who appeared on Breakout, Kelly was the most interesting. Loquacious and witty, he anecdotally laced his narrative with humorous vignettes which showed that much more goes into human situations than a detached plan hatched only from the sombre and the serious. Many years ago when I had written a review of an earlier documentary I had commented to the effect that Kelly had been strategic in his management and coordination of the getaway. He later said to me that he had been strategically trying to bolt as fast and as far away from the place as possible. This self effacing style of humour easily led to Gerry Kelly being the star of the show in terms of the documentary. From him the blend of the military machine and human personality was probably the most balanced part of proceedings.

Bobby Storey for his part sought to infuse his presentation with martial aura. It failed to fly. While his military prowess is undoubted the performance paled judged against Kelly’s. Use of state terms like ‘under arrest’ in a manufactured monotone tends to run against the grain of the anti-state ethos practiced by radical insurrectionists. The end result is an awkward exposure of the joints. A number of years ago in Edinburgh I was at a dinner table next to a SAS officer who was central to coordinating the 1980 siege bust at the Iranian embassy in London. We spoke for most of the evening and it was clear that military authority fitted him like a glove. Even, clipped, precise, authoritative intonations flowed from his lips as we discussed his regiment’s battle against the IRA. That type of cadence is perhaps best used in conventional armies staffed by Clive Fairweather. Applied to a guerrilla force led by Bobby Storey it carries more like emulation and merely reminds listeners and viewers that imitation is the greatest form of flattery. In the first case it sounds natural in the second, ersatz.

Storey was more authentic in describing his euphoria at the escape having succeeded despite the fact that he had been recaptured yards from the prison. There was a selflessness to it that is easy to reconcile with his character.

While the IRA ultimately lost the war, Breakout demonstrated only too well the commitment, military ability, intelligence and limitless patience of its volunteers. History will come to judge them as having been poorly rewarded by the project they invested so much in trying to sustain.

Damnation with Faint Praise

Cardinal Brady is comprehensively demanding the right to control the way of life of every citizen in every European country, whether Christian or not, much less Roman Catholic - Emer O'Kelly

Recently a letter appeared in the Irish Times poking through the stum in search of the usually raucous Left protesting Russian belligerence in Georgia. The silence of the Left had struck me shortly before the letter, not in relation to Georgia, however, but apropos the European Union. Sinister as the antics of Dick Roche’s Lisbon kite flying undoubtedly was, the first flak to be fired at it would do little to reassure opponents of the Lisbon Treaty that all opposition to it is necessarily a good thing.

The Catholic Primate of Ireland, Cardinal Brady, speaking at the Humber Summer School in Ballina, and later on radio, outlined a major consideration behind the thinking of those ‘committed Christians’ who voted ‘no’ in the recent referendum. The European Union in their view was too secular. ‘The prevailing culture and social agenda within the EU would at least appear to be driven by the secular tradition rather than by the Christian memory and heritage of the vast majority of member states.’ Surely, if there is anything that should want to make us consider embracing the Lisbon Treaty it is that. The Cardinal is also reported to have complained of a ‘fairly widespread culture’ in Europe whereby religious matters are pushed into the private sphere. But this is precisely where they should go of their own volition. Religion as a strictly private matter is one more positive for Europe which might lead those of us with reservations about the Lisbon Treaty to hold our noses against some of those we stand shoulder to shoulder with.

In some matters including combating poverty and the end of serious armed conflict in the North the leader of Irish Catholics sang the praises of Europe. Yet it rang hollow, a tune composed to add a soft lilt to the dirge meant to damn its secularism. He expressed difficulty with EU policy decisions that were often made without any consideration to Christian values:

despite the fact that so many European citizens have religious faith and convictions … successive decisions which have undermined the family based on marriage, the right to life from the moment of conception to natural death, the sacredness of the Sabbath, the right of Christian institutions to maintain and promote their ethos, including schools, these and other decisions have made it more difficult for committed Christians to maintain their instinctive commitment to the European project.

Apart from the blind indifference to the rational perspective that schools should promote science and not superstition, implicit in Sean Brady’s comment is the view that values should have an added status because they are Christian. Brady wants Europe to give more weight to Christian – he really means Catholic – values. The current pope from whom he takes his lead is no respecter of rival religions Christian or otherwise.

What all of the stress on Christian values blocks out of course is the existence of many good values rooted not at all in religion. At times they may be indistinguishable from Christian values, but make no claim to special privilege. Moreover, As Emer O Kelly puts it so well in an issue of the Sunday Independent in which she took the leading Catholic cleric to task:

Secularists, even atheistic secularists, are not the anti-Christ. Most of them live their lives as well or as badly as fervent Christians. They pay their taxes, they don't kill other people, and they don't molest children. They probably don't even spit on the street, much less on each other. They keep the law and behave decently because they believe that humanity is the highest form of life. And they object very strongly to being told that they are slavering monsters of depravity because they don't believe in a supernatural being.

So what if society does not care about God? Humanity has no need for a god to make good laws. And a belief in a god can certainly lead to bad laws. As the physicist Steven Weinberg observes, ‘religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.’

There is no reason for Christians, as the Cardinal may claim is happening, to lose their ‘Christian values and memory in Europe.’ That such values may be undergoing sustained erosion could have more to do with the fact that men walking on water and raising the dead are phenomenon which do not sit comfortably in the modern world where as Richard Dawkins puts it planes fly, witches don’t. Where it is on the decline in Europe Christianity is not being repressed, simply ignored. And the more it is allowed to slip into that sector reserved for fairy tales and make-believe the greater the church hierarchy feels the concomitant loss of its power.

As religion abates and societies grow more secularised, humanity stands to benefit from the success of knowledge over myth. In a secular state every body is free to live their lives with or without regard to any religion they may or may not espouse. Secularism is the freedom from religion for all. Those who wish to practice religion can but it should be their own affair. The freedom to observe exists but Cardinal Brady wants to make it an obligation, denying freedom to those who for good reason want nothing to do with religious observance. Human beings should be subjected to no religious law.

Hopefully, the Left is not once again poised to disgracefully abandon secular principle and team up with the theocrats. I would prefer to live as a citizen of an integrated and secular Europe than as a subject in an independent Christian Ireland. Opposition to a rerun of the Lisbon Treaty is a vital component of a democratic polity. But the more that opposition is championed by the religious right the weaker the content of the democratic case against Lisbon becomes.

If At First You Don’t Succeed ...

In truth, the treaty is so gargantuan and garbled that no sane person would undertake to read it, never mind understand it. Its size and lack of plain English is a fundamental flaw that cannot be overcome unless it is changed – Matt Cooper

It hasn’t gone away, you know. The Lisbon Treaty, just like a bad smell, continues to linger in public discourse prompted by ministerial comment and government sponsored surveys. Earth shattering news it most definitely is not to learn from the media that the EU is expecting the Irish government to buckle and hold another referendum in 2009. In Gramscian terms it looks like the Dublin political class is reconnoitring the commanding heights in a war of position before manoeuvring to shaft the electorate and give the middle finger to democratic sentiment. Matt Cooper in the latest issue of the Sunday Times alerts his readers to a government belief that in order to reverse the defeat it suffered in the referendum, it need only win over one quarter of those who voted ‘no’ on the basis that they did not understand the treaty last time around.

True the government is Tower of Babel-like in its reconstruction of a shattered European strategy, evidenced from the public variance between the positions of Taoiseach Cowen and Foreign Affairs Minister Martin. But there is a sneaking suspicion that the real intent is to be found in the position of European Affairs Minister Dick Roche when three weeks ago he informed the public of his private view that another referendum is the way to go in tackling the thorny issue of the rejected Lisbon Treaty. Kite flying is how Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou MacDonald aptly described it. It is hard to be persuaded that he is doing anything other than simply firing the opening salvo in a government attempt to mercilessly batter democracy into submission.

Had the last referendum provided the ruling clique with the result it wanted any suggestion that there should be a rerun of the contest would have seen the legs kicked from under it to outraged howls of approval from those swinging the boot. Their ire, were anybody to buy into it, provoked by a shameless fresh referendum contrived solely as a cynical assault on the democratic ethos they so strongly espouse. For Dick Roche and his ilk our democratic choices are restricted to voting for the things they, not we, think important. If every Fianna Fail general election triumph was met with a clamour for a new election, until the electorate eventually rejected Fianna Fail, Dick Roche would never be a minister.

Dick Roche, ominously and regrettably does not cut a lonely figure. Pat Cox a former president of the European Parliament decided to throw his shoulder behind the wheel that Roche was seeking to reinvent. That he has a background in the currently imploding right wing Progressive Democrats will serve to remind people that he is a wolf in wolf’s clothing, For Cox, ‘the enemy’ on the European question is not the business interests that would seek to lower wages, the bureaucracy that obfuscates in order to bamboozle voters, or the European Council that wishes to amass its own power while simultaneously disempowering Irish citizenry, but Sinn Fein, Libertas and media elements who had the temerity to highlight concerns that for some reason did not unduly concern Pat Cox. The government too drew his ire; it had forfeited its freedom which of course was the freedom to agree with him.

Back in May Cox had told people that those opposed to Lisbon were pedalling ‘stupid nonsense … unworthy of a serious national debate.’ Cox’s dubious assertion that it was rubbish to contend that people did not understand the case made by the ‘yes’ camp was left cruelly exposed by the recent report by Millward Brown IMS which purported to find that 42% of those who voted 'no' said they did so because of a lack of knowledge; that particular dearth being ‘the deciding issue of the campaign.’ Worse still for Cox, the government is now conceding the point made by many of it critics that there was a serious problem with the information disseminated about the Lisbon Treaty.

In the Irish Times of June 4 readers had the opportunity to weigh up the ‘stupid nonsense’ of Sinn Fein’s Pádraig Mac Lochlainn juxtaposed to the intellectual brilliance of Cox. The people were invited to decide after a ‘national debate’ which was of course ‘unworthy’ and not serious. Decide they did. ‘The bastards’, as Brecht so purposefully termed them, chose the ‘nonsense’ of Mac Lochlainn.

Over the next year more ‘nonsense’ will be needed to ensure that Irish people remain vigilant and informed. A treaty that is persistently pushed against the expressed democratic wishes of the people who rejected it cannot be democratic. One less reason to vote ‘yes’ next time it comes up.

When Old Friends Forget

Coming from somebody else the criticism in the Irish News of the SDLP suggestion that enforced power sharing should give way to a voluntary coalition would have sounded fine, for many even persuasive. Brian Feeney for example launched a potent stinging rebuke of Mark Durkan’s proposal announced last week in Oxford at the annual British Irish Association Conference. But coming from Sinn Fein Derry MLA Raymond McCartney it sounds almost tongue in cheek. Raymond is not one to sport Forget-Me-Nots in his lapel.

Raymond’s critique is certainly informative. It succinctly traces a number of previous SDLP positions endorsing power sharing and holds them up against Mark Durkan’s seeming abandonment of a principle which has been an integral component of SDLP identity since its first leader Gerry Fitt, and the cornerstone of its policy for three and a half decades. But Raymond’s own party has performed more about turns, abandoned more positions and slaughtered more sacred policy cows than virtually any other party in Irish history. When Sinn Fein somersaults it is invariably courageous and imaginative but anyone else who wants to try an old back flip will be considered fair game to be hunted down and ridiculed.

Probably the greatest sacred cow of modern republicanism to be slaughtered at the Sinn Fein altar of volte face occurred when the party moved to subvert the logic of the hunger strikes which was that republican activity no matter how illegal could not be deemed criminal. Raymond served a life sentence for exactly the type of activity his party now contends is criminal. Moreover, he endured a prolonged hunger strike to proclaim such activity political in nature.

Although later acquitted on appeal decades after initially being found guilty Raymond did not embark upon the 1980 hunger strike to proclaim his own innocence or to highlight the fact that he was subjected to brutal torture by British police officers. While he at no time freely admitted culpability for the offences for which he had been sentenced to life, his hunger strike was a demonstration that the actions for which he was serving life were republican in character regardless of what individual carried them out, and therefore could not be categorised as criminal.

But selective memory permeates Northern Irish political culture. It sends the one-eyed orange tribe into a frenzy against the actress Rose McGowan because she understood the IRA or catapults the one-eyed green tribe along the Falls Road in search of half truths.

Raymond McCartney, if he is of a mind to, might just consider that one solid reason for opposing enforced power sharing from a republican perspective is that it is intrinsically anti-republican. It institutionalises sectarianism. Government by sectarian headcount might appeal to communal Catholics but why republicans might wish to rummage in the sty is much more difficult to explain. Not one IRA volunteer is known to have died on active service in pursuit of it. All those we are aware of lost their lives opposing it. So while Mark Durkan’s suggestion that the ugly scaffolding buttressing enforced coalition should at some point be dismantled may be inconsistent in terms of SDLP history and tradition, the irony for Raymond McCartney is that the SDLP leader is advocating a position that is eminently reconcilable with republicanism in a way that power sharing is not.

Of Micro Ministers and Mimic Men

Eirigi member Colm Duffy’s recent comments on gun and bomb attacks on the North’s British police force, while erroneously interpreted by the Irish News as support for an ongoing armed campaign, have nevertheless served to profile yet another fairly senior figure who has felt compelled to wander away from the Provisional movement in search of republicanism elsewhere.

Since the ceasefire of 1994 there have been many departures but, the formation of the Real IRA apart, they have always occurred in such a way as not to rupture the system Sinn Fein has in place for dealing with defections. In general Sinn Fein has managed its abandonment of all republican credentials sufficiently slowly to ensure that those who in turn have abandoned it did so slowly as well. It was more akin to the shedding of leaves than the breaking of branches. People, who drifted as individuals, would bob about like corks in the sea, but never gel as a serious alternative force. For the most part they were effectively marginalised, Sinn Fein always managing to maintain some republican fig leaf big enough to conceal its emasculation.

There are now many people who, like Duffy, held a high local profile within the Provisionals and who have now left the increasingly right wing establishment body. All who leave offer some republican rationale to justify their action and increasingly join a republican body. With each defection the Provisionals look less republican. If a republican image is gauged by the faces that populate an organisation then the defections amount to death by a thousand cuts for the republican image of the Provisionals.

This does not mean that the Provisionals face political or organisational meltdown. They are too firmly entrenched in the apparatuses and coffers of the British state to make that a serious likelihood. But they can do absolutely nothing to advance the cause of republicanism one iota. And with the departure of so many republicans, leaving the Provisionals to exude the appearance and tone of a right wing Catholic phalange, it is improbable that they will even bamboozle anybody outside their own unthinking ranks into believing that their current and future politics are republican in orientation. For sure there will be the annual Easter parades to cemeteries and the clench fist salutes, but only for the optics. A fist clenched around a wad of bank notes does little to conjure up imagery of revolution and insurrection. When the Provisional project has been steered by the Brits to a point where it can demand that unionists like Ian Paisley be in government and republicans like Michael McKevitt be in jail, even the fig leaf has been wrenched away. There is nothing left but micro ministers and mimic men giving out the same old same old as their predecessors.

Some sense of how the Brits have played the Provisionals can be found in the recollections of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff throughout his ten years as British prime minister. Although Powell affected considerable affinity with the Sinn Fein leadership, it was just that – affectation. He never quite managed to conceal his contempt for Sinn Fein celebrities, in particular Gerry Adams. And there is a sense that when he verbally dictated the British policy statement that he wanted read out by the Sinn Fein president at an ard fheis, he was squeezing Adams’ goolies just for the sheer hell of having the statement delivered in falsetto tones. We may be excused for suspecting that Powell might just have turned to Blair and said, ‘let’s see how many idiots applaud the bollix we are having this gofer read out for us.’ Even he must have been amazed when he found them all applauding. Fools and their politics are easily parted.

Sinn Fein will survive in the North because it abandoned what threatened that survival – republicanism. Those like Colm Duffy who want to resurrect it will readily discover that the grassroots applauders of every U turn were joint, albeit junior, partners with the leadership in the venture that produced the catastrophic failure of the republican side of the Provisional equation. An immutable law of republicanism in the North is that people are quicker to abandon rather than embrace it. The opposition now sprouting will a la Sisyphus labour only to discover the Yeats view that too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart. Sisyphus, forced back by the weight of that stone, is perpetually condemned to push it up the road to nowhere and see it roll back down over the graves of those that mark the Via Dolorosa.


First published in Fourthwrite, Summer 2008