A Black Mark

Everywhere they were; in streets, shops, serving behind counters, even the bus driver was one. Catholics, the lot of them. All sporting the black ash that had been daubed on their heads by some priest during the course of the day. They were getting off buses with it while I was climbing on, and getting on them as I was disembarking, the black eyes in the middle of their foreheads glaring at me. The first one I took little notice of, thinking he might just not have washed, or had been working with his car and took a spot of oil to the head. It was only after the second passed me, before they started coming out from everywhere, that I realised what was happening. Ash Wednesday, the start of the Lent season, the six week period of self denial was upon us. And I couldn’t even say ‘heaven forbid.’ If they were getting ready for some sort of Passover whereupon the boss of heaven would strike down everybody with a clean brow for not believing in his existence then I had no chance. What, with my views on religion and priestcraft, and me walking through town without the protection of the ash, I was done for. I stood out like a sore thumb. No forgiveness or salvation for me.

And there was me believing Malachi O Doherty when he told us religion was on the decline and the pulpits were emptying. He should have been down here today. That would have tested his faith in the decline of faith. He would have felt he was reliving our experience of two years ago on the Glasgow boat to Belfast when we both got on the one taking Rangers fans home, every Ibrox devotee in Ireland it seemed. Neither of us Catholics yet we could have been thrown overboard for being Catholics. A curious irony would have descended upon us as we bobbed about in the Irish Sea had that fate befallen us, followed by horror that we might be canonised as martyrs for the faith.

Looking around for a few Muslims I could take cover amongst under the mistaken belief that there would be safety in numbers, that the all-powerful might just not find me if I stuck my butt in the air, poked my nose east and pressed my forehead to the ground to hide the fact that my head was clear, I was quickly disabused. I wouldn’t even get away with the Rowan Atkinson excuse that I was only looking for a lost contact lens. They might peacefully kill me before a divinely guided thunderbolt from up there somewhere hit me square where the black mark ought to have been. I am no more into Koranic claptrap than I am into biblical balderdash. So, no room for unbelievers there. Death at the hand of Allah, or death at the hand of Yahweh. Not much of a choice. And I shudder to think what would have happened had they found the Hans Kung book I was carrying in my bag. A Christian theologian who had long rubbished the notion of religious infallibility and there was me sauntering nonchalantly along with his book in my possession. A Catholic atheist the most likely conclusion they would have come to. Any virgins awaiting me on the other side could only be big greasy men with blue chinned stubble. My lot would have been that of an altar boy in a monastery.

And the Protestants, well they were nowhere to be seen. Never are down here where they have kept their heads low since the 1937 Constitution which effectively declared the place a Catholic state for a Catholic people. Doubtless, they would have no more time for me than the other religious types. I’m not enamoured to that god of theirs either. Too punitive and unforgiving for me to want to buddy up to.

So tonight it’s the green out the back for me. Just in case the black mark tribe come looking me, torches in hand, crucifixes to the fore, buckets of ash – no garlic, I like that - ready to force my head into each of them, so that I too may be kept in the dark just like themselves. I don’t want a religious black mark against me. Let there be light!

A Special Day

It is my daughter’s birthday. 8 years ago today around 7 in the morning she was born. I had been at the hospital all night. It was a long labour. The night before I had just returned home after a day waiting at my wife’s side. The razor had hardly started its downward strokes on my face when the phone rang. My wife had just been moved to the delivery suite. I could hardly believe it. Frantically I rang a taxi but those depots that were open said it would be an hour or more. No use to me, I ran to the hospital dreading that I might not be present for my daughter’s entry into the world of West Belfast.

Four months earlier she had experienced something of that intolerant world from her mother’s womb when a noisy crowd had assembled at our home to shout in her mother’s face that they did not approve of some writing I had done. We wondered about the type of environment our daughter was to be born into. We did not expect our local MP to stand up for her rights. It was his party that had brought the crowd to her as she gestated deep within her mother.

The evening previous, awaiting my daughter’s arrival, I sat beside her mother as she lay in her hospital bed, both of us reading an attack made on her in the local party paper. Her poetry had upset its management much more than its attack annoyed us. That was how it was then. The atmosphere was invariably stressful and intimidating. When our daughter was born it all seemed to dissipate. In reality it didn’t; we were just oblivious to it. When she first emerged I have a memory of looking into her eyes and she into mine. I like to think that I was the first person she saw and also the first person to see her. I don’t like to remind myself that at that age she probably could not see further than the end of her nose.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. When I look at her today, so grown up, speaking, reading and writing in Irish, composing stories, reading bedtime tales to her younger brother, talkative, engaging, inquisitive, creative, I marvel at the complexity of the human condition, the highest form of life. What makes it all the more wondrous is that it didn’t require the assistance of a supernatural being to make it all happen.

She is brought up to think for herself. She asks all manner of probing questions many of which I have no answers for. She talks to me about the universe and how it came about. She is not subject to any religious influence but is free to opt for a religious persuasion if she should ever choose to. When she asks me my view I tell her it. Likewise with politics, she can develop whatever perspective she wants. I always tell her what I believe and explain to her that she is under no reason to share it. A voracious reader like her mother, she devours books at an incredible pace, and currently loves Nancy Drew, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Horrid Henry. At five she had her first writing published as part of an edited collection in a book. We hope it is the first of many.

I had intended taking her to her first Liverpool game as a present. As an alternative my wife suggested a computer for her as an aid to her education. Liverpool drew 1-1 with Manchester City. I am relieved we went for the computer. A draw in a bland game is hardy the first memory of the Kop a father wants his daughter to have.

Tonight when my wife reads some of her establishment-rattling poetry to me we will both reflect on that morning eight years ago when our lives changed forever. Children are irreplaceable.

God's Anointed One

I now believe that his only consideration was to get to the top of the heap and that he used religion and politics as a route to power. He has become and maybe always was the consummate post-modern politician - Clifford Smyth.

Ian Paisley is one of the most malign people to have enjoyed an extended run on the Northern Ireland political stage. Only someone totally consumed by power lust would want to stay leader of a political party for so long. Had Agatha Christie wrote the script for his performance, Mouth Trap might have been the title she chose for it. A belligerent bigot throughout his life his raucous voice bellowed abuse at everyone who sleighted him or who were considered impediments along the route to fulfilling his ambitions. Even those who did nothing untoward to him were viciously lashed by his rasping cow’s tongue if he found it somehow advantageous. And the advantage invariably had to be his own not society’s. At the hub of everything poisonous he has been a source of rich pickings for anyone inclined to look over his career.

One observer long familiar with the Paisley dynasty is the journalist Ed Moloney. In the public mind the former northern editor of the Dublin based Sunday Tribune is perhaps better known for his deftness at probing deep into the clandestine world of the Provisionals. With an unsurpassed work on the role of Gerry Adams at the head of the Provisional IRA, he generated widespread interest at home and abroad thus enhancing his already redoubtable journalistic reputation as an authority on the Provisional movement. Two decades before his Adams foray, however, Moloney had co-authored with Andy Pollak what was then most authoritative study to date on the career of Ian Paisley. This secured him poll position when he set out on his quest to replicate his Adams success in his updated treatment of the former DUP leader, Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat? Just as Moloney traced the odyssey of the Provisionals from being die hard killers of British police officers to die hard backers of British police officers he has efficiently sketched the broadening of the DUP from a Billy and the bigots mindset to one of Peter and the pragmatists.

This time Moloney went on a solo run in his updating of the Paisley biography. Andy Pollak may have felt too embedded in the peace process to risk probing its less salubrious side. Whatever the reason the outcome has been that the now New York domiciled writer has the unique distinction of having crafted biographies of the foremost two totalitarian leaders in Northern Irish politics. No mean feat given the uncompromising unwillingness of either man to collaborate with anyone unwilling to pen a slavish hagiography to them. Published almost a year now the book remains a talking point in the intellectual and cultural milieu of the North.

Not being from the school of lavishly drooling praise on politicians Moloney stays true to what a journalist should be. He knows instinctively that authorised accounts are as a rule worthless for anything other than promoting their subject. Dean Godson’s Trimble biography is a notable exception. But then Trimble had a courageous streak not available to Paisley. Moloney knows that if you want a more accurate insight into the psyche of a leader it is essential to approach his internal critics, listen to what they say and then search for means to substantiate it. This approach worked in the Adams construction and has proved reliable again.

The book about Paisley is unlikely however to poke the hornet’s nest to the same extent that the Adams centred A Secret History of the IRA did. There is simply no record of Paisley having denied membership of the DUP. Adams by contrast has been denying IRA membership for decades. Even as late as this evening he was at it again on BBC Hearts & Minds. Thoroughly rubbishing such denials and reducing them to farce has a drawing power all of its own.

Much as Godson did with the Trimble biography Moloney tells the story of the peace process through the political character of Paisley. Such accounts of the process are the best way of overcoming the tedium associated with it. Picking up a book dealing exclusively with the peace process would be much like reading through a telephone directory, the brain dead alone having the intellectual stamina to get to the end.

In this work Moloney treats his reader to an absorbing account of the life of Ian Kyle Paisley. As interesting as the political trajectory is the religious dimension of Paisley’s life. Not that spirituality figured to any great extent. Religion was more about the happenings in this world. As with the Methodist John Wesley’s use of an ‘appalling system of religious terrorism’, frightening the wits out of people through the devil figured more prominently in Paisley’s Weltanschung than the love of god. And with the omnipresent hate contorted faces of disciples Willie McCrea, Ivan Foster and William Beattie accompanying him for much of his career Hades readily sprang to mind in a way that Heaven most certainly did not.

Paisley from his early days in the world of the church promoted division at every strategic opportunity to give him advantage over his rivals. It was a device he would employ throughout his long political life causing Moloney to conclude that Paisley used both religious and political intransigence as a means to further his own career. Moloney in the opening pages asks the most wounding question of all: ‘was Ian Paisley possibly the only member of his flock who never really or fully believed his own gospel?’

Moloney’s timing was fortuitous as well as fortunate. The publication of the book coincided with the handover of power within the DUP and the stepping down by Paisley from the long coveted First Minister’s position. And it is in describing the strategies used by Paisley’s critics to undermine him that Moloney excels. I put the book down thinking Paisley’s last words as party leader must have been ‘et tu Brutus.’ Peter Robinson was always Cassius in this one and Paisley’s curiosity would have led his nose to sniffing out who else was along with Peter as the knife was thrust into his ambitious heart. From the religious flank Ivan Foster was the man who shielded the blade within a bible. One time leader of the ‘turd force’, Foster first lacerated then rubbed salt into the wounds of the old brute by explaining to Paisley that it was he himself who taught the commander in chief of the turds the art of fighting dirty and rooting out heresy within the ranks. After years of slashing at the unclean thing the big beast proved not too biblically sound in the area of theological hygiene. What bitter irony it is to fall on one’s own sword.

Moloney with typical bluntness does not pull his punches in describing Ulster Resistance as the paramilitary wing of the DUP. This sets the scene for a conclusion that both the DUP and Sinn Fein were two heads of the same coin and that one’s need for the other was always reciprocal. ‘The truth about Paisley and the Provos is that they were yoked together from the very beginning.’ This adds a new layer of understanding to the conceptual means by which we come to understand the Provisionals as being the product of events rather than the continuation of a long unbroken tradition. And it was the absence of any substantive traditional influences on the Provisionals that made them susceptible to the lure of reformism and by extension an internal solution, both of which have come to characterise their defeat.

Despite the similarities between the two parties, best distilled down to the personality cults surrounding totalitarian leaders, there was much more of a challenging grassroots at play inside the DUP than there was within Sinn Fein. The type of barracking described by Moloney at DUP meetings in Lurgan was unimaginable within Sinn Fein where no matter what the U-turns, gatherings attended by the brass were always leadership adulation fests.

Although this is a book about Paisley the reader can only hope that at some point Moloney may turn his attention to Peter Robinson, worthy of a book own his own. Arguably were it not for Robinson keeping a close eye on the talks with Downing Street and refusing to allow his then leader to conclude any deal without his own imprimatur, Unionism’s current position of dominance might not have been so strong. Ian Paisley junior triumphantly referred to it last week in Hearts & Minds in terms of what the party could get away with because Sinn Fein in his view were such a pushover in government. Robinson proved the foil to Paisley’s susceptibility to Tony Blair’s flattery at crucial points in negotiations. Robinson rather than Paisley was the formidable bulwark that Sinn Fein could not budge. The Catholic party had no one in its ranks capable of matching Robinson’s strategic, devious, calculating, ruthless and formidable mind.

Robinson’s role in building the Paisley machine is well documented in this book. Moloney leaves no doubts that Robinson was the power behind the Paisley throne. From the moment Robinson saved Paisley’s bacon after the latter’s disastrous handling of the 1977 loyalist strike this astute strategist and party organisational maven’s grip on strategic power in the party was assured. Robinson was entrenched inside the greasy power pole and would never become dislodged, even riding out his Peter Punt moment in 1986 to make a resounding comeback.

Strategising and outmanoeuvring the UUP to Paisley’s delight, but simultaneously coming up on the big bigot’s inside track, Peter Robinson was perfectly placed to pick up the baton Paisley’s son, Ian Junior, felt was his own courtesy of hereditary succession. When Paisley was left dangerously exposed by being unable to protect his son against a cacophony of calls for his venal head, everyone knew the game was up. It was finishing Paisley senior off by proxy. The longest running ‘pa and his boy’ soap since Steptoe and Son had come to an end.

Evidently, Paisley was trapped on the horns of a dilemma over Robinson. Every other deputy whose head seemed to be growing bigger than Paisley’s own quickly found it guillotined. That Paisley kept Robinson signalled the bind he was in. There was no way that Paisley would ever have become leader of a British Northern Ireland without standing on the shoulders of Robinson. But the very act that hoisted him to such lofty heights was also the one that ensured his feet were no longer on the ground. Robinson first hoisted him then heisted him, stealing the crown that despite its largeness could fit more heads than one. Although not before Paisley had worn it for a year.

The men who pulled him into power sharing ultimately pushed him out of his share of it. He was seduced by Robinson’s logic that the best place to screw Sinn Fein was in bed beside them. Once he succumbed to the lure of being a chuckle brother, grinning at the jokes of a man he had long called a mass murderer, Robinson left him in no doubt that the DUP’s greatest asset had become its greatest liability.

To reach the zenith Paisley had to abandon a lot of what he proclaimed to stand for over the decades of strife making. He began his serious coup d’etat career as a serial saboteur of Northern Irish political leaders with the removal of Terence O’Neill as Prime minister. He cursed everyone who even smiled benignly at a nationalist. An implacable opponent of power sharing he did not even want the SDLP in office yet ended up sitting in it alongside and chuckling with Sinn Fein. At the close of play he faced the same vitriol he had long cooked up by the bucketful and spat at numerous others. The slayer of all Lundys now faced accusations that he had become the greatest Lundy of all.

Yet for all of that he came to lead a Northern Ireland no less British than it was with O’Neill or Faulkner at the helm. He witnessed the defeat of the Provisional IRA, Sinn Fein’s acceptance of an exclusive six county veto over the future of the country – the partition principle, Sinn Fein’s support for a British police service and its calls for criminalising republican critics. He must have laughed mirthfully at Sinn Fein’s demands for republicans like Harry Fitzsimons and Liam Rainey to be put in jail and for him to be put in government. Paisley did not come to terms with republicanism, the disintegration of which he must have viewed with quite some glee. He came to terms, albeit grudgingly and reluctantly, with the civil rights agenda.

Paisley certainly does not emerge from this book as someone with a mastery of detail. One of the uncomfortable challenges that flows from its pages for Moloney’s critics is that the biographer masters detail much better than his subject. Packed with facts, vignettes, records of meetings, minutes and confidences, none of it dull or insipid, there is little scope for the analysis to be seriously refuted. Moloney’s account of the back channel negotiations between Sinn Fein and the DUP is fascinating and is a foil to the DUP assertions that no such meetings took place.

The St Andrews Agreement which finally formalised the Paisley victory over Sinn Fein hardly amounted to a significant advance of what was agreed more than three decades earlier at Sunningdale. Moloney forces his reader to question the reason that the violence and hate mongering lasted so long when it produced so little tangible improvement.

This is a book that will continue to be read long after its first publication. Students trying to find a quick access point to understanding the Northern Ireland conflict will be well advised by their tutors to have it sitting on their shelves next to A Secret History of the IRA by the same author.

Ed Moloney, Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat? 2008. Poolbeg Press: Dublin

A Year Without The Light of The Dark

Sometimes, I've sat here crying for a week. I think of all my comrades' suffering and I don't even want to go out. You never really leave prison – Brendan Hughes

Time zooms by. The past year seems to have been the quickest since records began; all subjective but for me at any rate the fastest in living memory. On this day in 2008 the left wing IRA leader Brendan Hughes died. The turmoil he had endured for years would no longer plague him. With the spreading of his ashes he would never be contained behind concrete walls again. Beyond all crying and suffering he really did leave the psychological prison that had long confined him.

Although his death had been anticipated, given his illness coupled with progress reports from his family, it was no less a blow when it did occur. I vividly recall spending the evening with my wife and Dolours Price, seeking consolation in each other’s memories; then travelling to Belfast on three consecutive days after his death. The last trip was made with my wife and children for his funeral, accompanying him to the crematorium. Later the same week I made the journey to the Cooley Mountains for the spreading of his ashes and then back to Belfast the following day with my children for a similar procedure at the Falls Road Commemorative garden. On that occasion we arrived minutes too late due to being delayed in town. As we arrived people were just leaving. There was a buzz of excitement in the air. A volley of shots had been fired in Brendan’s honour presumably by members of one of the IRAs still opposed to partition and unwilling to be co-opted into Britain’s establishment in the North.

Some time later again I was back in the same Cooley Mountains for the erection of a monument to him. It was an occasion considerably less sombre than his funeral. Yesterday in Belfast a plaque was erected in his memory at Divis Flat where he had lived up until his death. On this occasion I was too fatigued to make the trip, having put in a busy week with too many late nights and early mornings, without even the benefit of drink as an excuse. By all accounts yesterday’s event was a well attended affair. Brendan, a powerfully charismatic individual always had that pulling power.

As I write his photo is again adorning our mantelpiece as it did this time last year. There are candles in front of it, just as there were then; the establishment of a sort of family tradition. My wife feels it is a poignant way to honour him. I do too but could hardly claim to have come up with the idea myself.

There is little that has happened in the year since he died that would have surprised Brendan. He would have been hurt by some of it but hardly shocked. The calls by the Sinn Fein leadership for people to inform to the British police on republicans still wrapped up in the physical force tradition would have gutted him. He had led too many young men during the black years of blanket protest who were jailed for doing what other young republicans are doing today. As wrong as they are undoubtedly are to persist in their armed activities, ignoring all the lessons learned from futility, they are no different in motivation from those of us who braved the blanket protest in defiance of criminalisation. Nor are they any different from Harry White and Charlie Kerins, IRA leaders when the IRA was a micro group and one that the IRA to which Brendan belonged claimed continuity from.

With senior British government officials openly admitting to writing Sinn Fein leadership statements, there can be no real sense of awe that criminalising republicans now features so prominently in such statements.

A year seems such a short time whereas thirty years ago has the feel of an eternity; when it was Thatcher labelling republicans as criminals. Brendan never succumbed to any of that. To the end, always The Dark, he stayed light years away from her and her legacy of criminalisation.

Up To Their Groins

John Magee, the Catholic bishop of Cloyne, has apologised to victims of clerical sex abuse, but the apology is designed solely to save Magee’s own hypocritical arse. John Magee couldn’t care less about the victims of sexual abuse as long as his pervert priests are protected and he himself stays out of the shit … You see, John Magee, Bishop of Cloyne, is an arrogant, cynical prick who couldn’t give one flying fuck about the victims of clerical sexual abuse – Bock the Robber

It seems perverse that the pope should order an English bishop to recant his views on the Nazi holocaust against the Jews or face demotion from the church hierarchy, yet threaten nothing of any consequence to an Irish bishop guilty of much worse. Holocaust denial, while an incredibly odious position, is ultimately an opinion which people should be entitled to hold. Can the expression of an off the wall opinion by an eccentric reactionary English bishop be as harmful as the cynical actions of his Irish counterpart in the wilful mismanagement of child abuse procedures?

The hopes of many after the Ferns Report in 2005 must have evaporated in sighs of exasperation on learning of the vile practices that have gone on in the diocese of Cloyne, Co Cork under the dictatorship of the local bishop John Magee, former assistant to 3 popes. When the role of this senior clerical miscreant became public knowledge, the Irish Times reported:

The National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church, (NBSC) was highly critical of the way that the Diocese of Cloyne and Bishop John Magee handled a series of complaints of sexual abuse made by five people against two priests in the diocese.

Despite the lessons that the Catholic Church has been invited to learn as a result of the cumulative knowledge acquired from the litany of abuse cases its clerics have literally been up to their groin in, the NBSC report was able to state:

children have been placed at risk of harm within the diocese of Cloyne through the inability of that diocese to respond appropriately to the information that came to it regarding child protection concerns involving the clergy. It failed to act effectively to limit the access to children by individuals against whom a credible complaint of child sex abuse was made . . . put simply, the responses of the diocese could be described as ill-advised and too little, too late.

The NBSC did not investigate if the allegations of child abuse had any substance but whether the church hierarchy dealt with those allegations in an appropriate manner. It produced minutes from a 2006 meeting signed by Magee which stated that the gardai would never be supplied with the identities of alleged child abusers within church ranks. Magee described the practice of withholding such vital information as ‘normal.’

Meetings of the diocesan Child Protection Management Committee, ostensibly in place to safeguard children, were more concerned with protecting the priests. Actions taken by the Bishop John Magee were minimalist and delayed. The protection he afforded to priests meant that children were left exposed to danger of further abuse.

A priest, Matthew Ring, who left the Cloyne diocese in 1999 in ‘utter disillusionment and deep disgust at the cover up of chid sex abuse has called on Magee to resign.

I posed the question to Bishop Magee at the time of my resignation: how can I baptise innocent children into a system when they run the risk of being abused and never see justice? What I got was a stony silence.

In Easter of 2008 when Ring approached Magee on behalf of a family who had complained against the diocese but who were being fobbed off he:

got the same reaction as ever. I pressed upon him that victims of abuse require truth, validation, redress and closure. He went silent. What has been allowed to happen is vile in the extreme.

So vile in fact that one outraged blogger made no attempt to moderate his language in demanding, ‘John Magee, Bishop of Cloyne - Resign You Fucking Bastard.’ Couldn’t agree more but boss priest Brady failed to see it this way. Strenuously defending his man and rejecting all calls for Magee to resign, the cardinal insisted that Magee would do all in his power to ensure child abuse in his diocese was a thing of the past. What does the good cardinal in his divine disdain for non-clerical worldly beings take people for?

The 2005 child protection policy, Our Children, Our Church which stipulated that child abuse allegations made against clergy were to be handled by a professionally competent person and not by a cleric has fallen flat on its face in this case, a point underlined by Colm O’Gorman, the former director of the One-in-Four victim support group. He commented that ‘the report shows the person who had ultimate responsibility for child protection in this area has been shown to have failed absolutely in discharging that duty.’ In calling for the state to take full responsibility for child protection he claimed, ‘here we are finding out yet again that bishops don’t take child protection seriously. Child protection has to be the primary responsibility of the state.’

When the pope thinks a bishop with a Nazi fetish who simply professes not to believe a given historical narrative merits discipline in a fashion that a senior cleric totally indifferent to the fate of children at the hands of his priests does not, it is time for society to consider banning the Catholic Church from the lives of its children. Schools, playgrounds, crèches, nurseries and homes should be off limits to the lot of them.

Lament For Lá

A daily newspaper was always a dream of the Irish language movement until we achieved it here, in Béal Feirste. That is, until Nollaig 2008 when Foras na Gaeilge proposed that the meagre grant they gave annually to Lá Nua should be stopped, knowing that this would mean the end of the paper. When the proposal to kill off Lá Nua was put to the meeting, amazingly, the four Sinn Féin representatives on the board of Foras nodded their acquiescence - Gearóid Ó Cairealláin

The Irish language activist Gearóid Ó Cairealláin has taken to urging people not to vote Sinn Fein. He has stated that never again shall he vote the party he has only ever voted for from the time he was legally eligible to deposit his ballot paper. He called on god to forgive and pardon him for such heresy and blasphemy but went on to commit it anyway. Not that he has any call to worry about the wrath of god, well not the celestial type anyway.

What caused a split in the camp was Ó Cairealláin’s umbrage at Sinn Fein not giving the Irish language the support he thought it merited.

We always assumed that Sinn Féin supported Irish so much that they would have banged the table, and shouted and roared their opposition to this act of short sighted cultural homicide. But no, Sinn Féin agreed totally, with the result that Lá Nua, the first and only Irish language daily is no more and ten people in west Belfast's Gaeltacht Quarter were dumped onto the dole and started 2009 out of work.

I speak the language a bit – no where near as fluently as Gearóid Ó Cairealláin – send my daughter to an Irish language school and financially contribute to funds for the school which she attends. Outside of that I have no real passion for the teanga. I am simply not a culture vulture. This extends to the sports and music as much as it does to the language. Those who cherish such things can do as they please so long as they don’t impose it on me.

So it doesn’t rouse any great feeling in me when I learn that Sinn Fein representatives on Foras na Gaelige allowed Lá Nua to be shafted and deprived of its funding. Over the years I have grown accustomed to Sinn Fein pulling the rug from beneath the feet of projects it had previously endorsed as a matter of principle. When Gearóid Ó Cairealláin accuses the Catholic party of turning its back on Belfast's Irish speakers I merely shrug and think why complain about a bear doing what it does in the woods? When he protests ‘I thought that Sinn Féin could be trusted as regard to the Irish language. I was wrong. Now I wonder, can they be trusted with anything?’ I merely think that activists like himself and Conchubar Ó Liatháin are now discovering what others like Tommy Gorman and Brendan Hughes understood more than a decade ago.

Gearóid Ó Cairealláin can battle it out with Sinn Fein for the hearts and minds of those who seek to prioritise the language. Good luck to him. More important than any of it is the fact that he now appears to be on the mend after a serious illness and is writing with the verve of old. Although a Sinn Fein supporter when I first met him, his willingness not only to listen to a different opinion but to allow it to be publicly aired was a characteristic that deeply impressed me. The trait has remained with him as is evidenced by his willingness to air his own concerns against an outfit quite capable, as one republican recently said, of organising disadvantage for its critics.