Kick the Pope

When I think of the Vatican's record in Africa, I think of its failure to acknowledge what happened in Rwanda, where priests and nuns not only led the death squads to Tutsi refugees cowering in their churches, but provided the petrol to burn them alive, took part in the shootings and raped survivors. Rwanda was Africa's most devout Catholic nation, and the role the Church played in condoning and fostering the Hutu extremism that climaxed in genocide is as shameful as its collaboration with the Nazis. – Michela Wrong

When I was young a familiar chant from loyalists was ‘kick the pope.’ I used to find it strange that anybody wanted to kick our great holy man. Now I feel that any African who doesn’t want to kick him must be a lower limb double amputee.

Africa is the continent most ravished by the HIV/AIDS virus. At the same time it is estimated that around 17 per cent of people living there are Catholics and that it the fastest growing region in the world for the church. As many other areas descale their eyes of religious goo Africa sees it thriving. In decline elsewhere because of the rise of secularism and the relentless push of science, the church hierarchy is quick to spot the potential in a vast fetid pool of misery where harmful social and political bacteria fuse and mutate, creating the optimum conditions in which the virus of religion might flourish. Pope Joe Ratzinger is in the continent at the moment, celebrating mass in Angola as I write. He wants to maintain the growth rate for Catholicism and is determined to ensure that the Catholic Church is not threatened by competition from ‘the growing influence of superstitious forms of religion.’ His superstition is better than theirs sort of thing.

His advanced priestcraft, against the other more retarded phenomenon of witchcraft which he has warned Angolans to avoid, fosters the illusion that there is a better reward in the afterlife for those who refuse to wear the condom during sex. On the way through the pearly gates the pecker checker will carry out inspections. There should be no shortage of priestly contenders for that job. Those who go bareback will receive tickets to the choir of angels’ eternal performance while the rubber renegades can try somewhere else. Ratzinger lacks the gall to sell this ridiculous position in more explicit terms that would spell out for the victims of his diktat that the afterlife of paradise is likely to come much sooner if condoms are not worn.

Quentin Sattentau, professor of Immunology at Oxford University argued that Ratzinger’s position:

represents a major step backward in terms of global health education, is entirely counter-productive, and is likely to lead to increases in H.I.V. infection in Africa and elsewhere … there is a large body of published evidence demonstrating that condom use reduces the risk of acquiring H.I.V. infection, but does not lead to increased sexual activity.

It seems an outrage that a body as large as the African Catholic community could be asked to accept the view of Ratzinger that ‘the traditional teaching of the Church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids’ and that the use of condoms should be avoided. On a plane taking him to Cameroon, there seemed no more appropriate a place for him to have made the comment - far removed from the ground. The world the pope and his ilk live in has been described by the author Malachi O Doherty as ‘medieval’. He has chosen to follow in the footsteps of the his arch conservative predecessor the Pole, Karol Józef Wojtyła, who in the words of Michela Wrong ‘probably contributed more to the continental spread of the disease than the trucking industry and prostitution combined … John Paul II has the blood of innocents on his hands.’

What, but more misery, suffering, death and disease can Catholicism offer Africa where it insists on tackling the AIDS epidemic through fidelity and abstinence not condoms? A silent genocide with more victims than either Dafur or Rwanda, and where the culpable masquerade as men of a loving god. If Joe Ratzinger does not want to wear a condom that is a matter for himself. By seeking to control the lives of others by ascribing some divine endorsement to such a life saving practice is a con of astronomical proportions. It is as cruel as it is enormous, making it hard to disagree with Rebecca Hodes, of the working Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa who dismissed the former Hitler Youth member’s remarks as alienating, ignorant and pernicious.

The lengths to which the church hierarchy will go to sustain this gigantic con is evidenced from the comments of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo who in late 2003 sought to blame perforations in the condoms through which fluid would seep. What altar boy testified to that I wonder? Perhaps his Most Reverend Eminence the cardinal chose one, purely for experimental purposes of course, from a faulty batch. In any event his ridiculous assertion was rubbished by the World Health Organization: ‘these incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million.’

Nor is it being seriously proposed by critics of Ratzinger that condoms will cure AIDS. Jon O’Brien, President of Catholics for Choice, hit out at the papal stance, saying ‘this is a myopic view of sexuality and a nonsense-based approach to public health. We have never argued that condoms are a panacea for Aids. But they are an absolutely vital health measure to help stem the spread of HIV and Aids.’ O’Brien went on to claim that the Vatican was seeking to pressurize governments and aid agencies across the world to ensure that the provision of condoms did not feature in any aid packages.

Modern science has devised a way to prevent the spread of this disease. As Craig McClure, Executive Director of the International AIDS Society, reflects, ‘to suggest that condom use contributes to the HIV problem is not merely contrary to scientific evidence and global consensus, it contributes to fuelling HIV infection and its consequences - sickness and death…’

The church can pray all it wants and throw holy water over the pecker but it is all rubbish with the one guarantee being that it will not work. Condom use performs more miracles than Lourdes, yet no sainthood for the person who came up with the idea. Ultimately, the pope is helping spread this disease. The power of religious opinion coming from a figure as senior as the Catholic pontiff over people who retain a superstitious belief system cannot be underestimated. It is not just issued as an opinion but as a law, a command, meant to be obeyed even if the power to physically enforce it is no longer an option available to the church. As Craig McClure observes. ‘Catholics throughout Africa rely on the spiritual guidance of the Pope.’

Africans, of course, like others do not have to blindly follow Vatican edicts on condoms or anything else for that matter. They are capable of making informed choices but that depends on the extent to which they are informed. Philip Gourevitch once pointed out that the Rwandan genocide was so successful in its implementation because the government backed radio was the one source of information that the public was getting. When it urged Hutus to go out and kill their neighbour that is what many of them did. Similarly Johann Hari condemned lies about condoms 'proclaimed from pulpits in rural African churches where illiterate villagers often had no other source of information’

There is a mountain of information out there. The challenge is how to get it to those whose lives depend on making the proper choices. Subverting ignorance is crucial to the survival of millions.

Julio Montaner. President of the International AIDS Society has challenged the promotion of ignorance most strongly:

Instead of spreading ignorance, the Pope should use his global position of leadership to encourage young people, who are our future, to protect themselves and others from HIV infection using all the tools we have at our disposal, including condoms … his remarks are insulting to the tireless efforts of committed scientific, public health and human rights leaders around the world to protect the poorest of the poor from HIV infection.

‘Let there be light’ so that Ratzinger may be thwarted in his efforts to lead multitudes of victims into the ‘heart of darkness’.

Written 21 March 2009

Getting Off the Pot

Seems some people from widely varying perspectives, for their own reasons, have managed to get annoyed about my previous piece Against the Odds. Whether giving off about shaking the hands of PSNI members or claiming offence as a result of the rights of a 17-year old being defended against police abuse, the responses shared a common theme, a resentment of democratic sentiment.

I have purposefully chosen to highlight the following comment from someone posting as Mark because of the attitude it provides for furthering discussion. The comment is not selected because it is particularly insightful; it is not. Nor because Mark is a bigot or a fool; he seems neither. It is chosen because it is a concise political opinion situated at the opposite end of the spectrum from where I find myself. Subsequently, there is much in between the two positions that can be cultivated and explored in pursuit of a better comprehension of the issues involved rather than a better understanding by each of the other’s stance.

It is not my intention to home in on Mark but rather to use his suggestion as being representative of arguments out there that cannot be dismissed as being irrelevant or without substantial support. His advice is:

Sh*t or get off the pot Anthony. Either support peaceful democratic methods, which include co-operating with police investigations into murder, or don't. If the youth had fully co-operated with police after his arrest, there would have been no need for an extended period of detention without charge.

This is an authoritarian impulse masquerading as democratic discourse. The first challenge to a democratic tenet contained within it is the bias it shows against the rights of citizens in favour of a police already shown to have behaved illegally in its holding of some members of the public. The only people we can at present be sure have behaved illegally are not those in custody but those holding them in custody – the police. The courts have ruled against no one else – just the police.

In the ‘get off the pot perspective’ peaceful democratic methods are postulated as exclusively meaning an absolute requirement to cooperate with police investigation into murders by answering any questions police ask during interrogation. Nowhere is there the slightest understanding that it is a detained person’s democratic and legal right to remain silent. And these rights exist because the police are not to be trusted to behave legally. And in behaving illegally they undermine the democratic ethos. Yet it seems that this right, from the ‘get off the pot perspective’ is not in fact a right at all, merely something for the optics; there only to be broadcast to the wider world as evidence of British police best practice.

There is also, not very well shielded, within the ‘get off the pot perspective’ a typical presumption of guilt which has echoes of the old British maxim, ‘innocent until proven Irish.’ The only way to shorten the time of detention we are told is to cooperate. But to cooperate by disputing one’s involvement is likely to ensure a longer stay in custody as a means to squeezing out the confession the police seek to obtain. It is a long established view that the police instinctively presume guilty everyone they arrest. Why would they release early those they believe to be guilty? Is there anyone so naïve as to believe that a denial will lead to an ‘ok, on your way, mind how you go’ response? Only someone who has never undergone police interrogation. The democratic duty to cooperate in the ‘get off the pot’ perspective really means the authoritarian right to extract a confession.

Moreover, that perspective’ seems hopelessly blind to the tension that exists within the legislative system whereby a 17 year old youth is on the one hand considered too young to be identified, yet on the other not young enough to avoid being detained for anything up to 28 days, the most stringent application of detention procedures in the democratic world; a practice described by Mike Ritchie of the Committee for the Administration of Justice as outrageous. This must mean that Mr Ritchie too should get off the pot or face being branded a fellow traveller of those against peaceful democratic methods. When it gets to this point it becomes easy to see how ridiculously self-serving the argument in favour of more powers for the police and less for the detainee has become.

The pot we are asked to either foul or move off is one which sits atop the moral sewer of draconian legislation and police abuse. The stench it emits comes from decaying justice. Those able to sit on the pot indifferent to the putrescence it contains will inevitably add to it as they fill it with a pollution all of their own. Sitting on that pot causes a smell that suffocates the porous culture of civil liberties. The ‘get off the pot’ perspective is little more than an authoritarian assault on civil liberties and human rights. I want to ensure as much ethical distance between it and me lest it contaminates my thinking. If the pot fits …

Democracy is about strengthening rights of citizens within society, not usurping them. It includes empowering citizens against the state. It gives citizens rights against the police. Lest it is forgotten David Mamet hardly hit the wrong note when he intoned that: ‘Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.’

Against the Odds

At seventeen I learned the truth – Janice Ian

On Tuesday a 17 year old appeared in court charged with killing PSNI member Stephen Carroll in Craigavon earlier this month. That the killing had political motivation leaves it no more excusable than one stripped of all political context. The main problem associated with violence lies in its use and not in the distinction that is often made between different types of violence. Political motivation is a description not a licence. There is no need to go off on some ethical odyssey to find cause to oppose its application. There are manifold practical reasons that would militate against uncorking its bottle.

Taking a stand against political violence should by no means lead to the injustice of endorsing every move that is claimed to be necessary for ensuring that it does not occur. That would put people opposed to political violence in the same camp as the singing bigot Willie McCrea. His stance is almost as simple as himself: ‘it is for the police to say what resources they need and it is for elected politicians to battle to get those resources for them.’ That brings us right to the precipice of a police state, one step removed from the police demanding that democratic scrutiny of their actions be abolished and politicians having to facilitate it; where the politicians and the political system become instruments in the hands of the police rather than the police deferring to the democratic political system.

There is absolutely no reason why people opposed to political violence cannot also be opposed to political policing. The inverse may well be true. Given the contribution political policing in the North of Ireland has made to political violence, opposition to such violence unavoidably involves taking a stand against political policing.

This is why I found it so uplifting to read of the attitude adopted by the 17 year old referred to above while in the custody of British police officers. He was detained in an interrogation centre for longer than any other single person throughout the entire Northern conflict and not as much as uttered a word. When I read of his epic human resistance, images of Martin Lynch’s The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty and Martin Meehan’s Castlereagh flooded my mind; plays that captured the bad old days but which need updated to address the worse new days. Like so many before him who were hauled into those foreboding places he defied its oppressive culture. He stared at walls and floors, anything but talk to cops intent on using draconian British legislation against him. At a time when others would dismiss him as a suspect ‘traitor’ who deserves to be interrogated by British police officers investigating ‘treason’, and who stand shoulder to shoulder with his interrogators against him, urging others to inform on him, it was impossible for me not to admire his stamina and resolve in the face of overwhelming odds.

For me, what he stands accused of is not the issue. For now it is an accusation, nothing more. What is absolutely certain, not a mere accusation, is the length of time he was detained. That is the issue. Were he to have been a unionist being interrogated by Garda in similar circumstances my attitude would be no different. Through his actions in that interrogation centre this youngster made an ethical stand against draconian police powers. Whatever his motives or intent, it is indisputable that through his defiance of his British police interrogators he has made a powerful statement in defence of civil liberties.

Having been through numerous interrogations at the hands of the British – although for nothing remotely approaching the length of time endured by this kid - I instinctively, emotionally and intellectually stood shoulder to shoulder with him not his interrogators. What was he doing in the midst of his loneliness, deprivation and isolation but offering passive and ethical resistance? Or is that also to be scorned and denigrated as the activity of traitors? Even if he is misguided, even if he does believe – and I do not even know his name or anything about him – that physical force republicanism is the only way to go, what republican or human rights activist could possibly turn their back on him in his act of passive resistance against draconian powers?

I would have no problem in saying hello to a member of the PSNI or shaking their hand. I think John O’Dowd of Sinn Fein set a better example in shaking the hand of a senior PSNI officer at the funeral of Stephen Carroll than the members of the Continuity IRA who ended the life of Stephen Carroll. But in a detention centre I would behave exactly as the 17 year old; my silence, a declaration of dissent from the most abusive powers of police detention in any of the world’s democracies. The table separating interrogator and interrogated, an unbridgeable chasm over which no hand should reach nor voice be heard. On one side the police assault on civil liberties, on the other an assertion of those liberties.

The withdrawal of consent from the abusive 28 day procedure is an absolutely justifiable measure. It is a necessary safeguard against the abuse inherent in the detention process developing into an even worse abuse – a serious miscarriage of justice of which there have been many. Sad that the resistance to it had to be led by one of such tender years.

28 Days

It is the longest anyone has been in custody without charge since internment - BBC

It was heralded as the end of political policing but what Sinn Fein endorsed at its 2007 special Ard Fheis was anything but. With MI5 using at least 15 per cent of its resources to combat republican physical force in the North and people being held in police custody without charge for an inordinate amount of time, the hurrah for a new era is somewhat muted. Even in non-political terms the gap between promise and delivery was yawning. The pledge that ordinary people could now begin to walk up and down the Falls Road free from the fear of hoods has proven to be the myth critics of the move foresaw at the time.

The policing structure now legitimised by the party most hostile to previous British policing structures was simply a reconfiguration of the management of policing on the part of the British state. Sinn Fein has been left cruelly exposed on this matter. At no time over the past forty years have policing powers in relation to the detention of suspects been so draconian. Under 2006 legislation detainees can be held for a period of up to 28 days. After so many years of struggle it takes some amount of explaining to justify how a British police force ended up with more stringent powers of abuse than before.

Although sold as such Sinn Fein’s strategy on policing has been anything but revolutionary. Attributing revolutionary boldness to the decision to suck the truncheon made no sense other than to allow the faithful to carry on deluding themselves. The strategy only ever made sense if viewed through a reformist prism where at least there was something to recommend it. Now the reformist strategy is looking decidedly weak even by its own terms of reference.

Since it voiced its support for the PSNI Sinn Fein has made no progress on the policing question whatsoever. Rather it has sought to bamboozle the public by inflating the significance of the devolution of policing and justice powers. Will the British Police Service of Northern Ireland be any less British because it is operated from a regional branch of the British government rather than the central branch? Not in the slightest. Will its abusive powers be curbed? Not a hope.

Sinn Fein finds itself in the position of supporting the right of the British police to detain Irish republicans for a period of seven days before they must either release or charge them. When the IRA campaign was in full swing against the wishes of the Irish people and presenting a much more potent threat to the security of the British state than the physical force republicans of today, seven day detention was viewed by Sinn Fein as a violation of human rights. Why support it now in circumstances which from a British security perspective need it less?

In criticising the move to hold people in detention for longer than seven days Sinn Fein’s opposition is hardly strident and has a vacuous ring to it. How else could it be given that the police exercising the abusive powers has been endorsed by the party seemingly without the slightest attempt to curb draconian powers. It cannot claim to have been blindsided. The legislation permitting the practice existed prior to the decision to support the PSNI.

However it is looked at, holding political detainees for a 28 day period constitutes a serious assault on civil liberties and is a substantial encroachment on human rights. On top of this the North’s chief Human Rights Commissioner, Monica McWilliams, criticised the conditions under which people are being held. ‘To hold individuals in such confinement for extended periods of time raises human rights concerns …’

What we are now witnessing is the creation of a new breed of political detainees underscored by the fact that detained republicans are on hunger strike in British state detention centres. While not yet comparable to water boarding, isolating detainees for prolonged periods increases the likelihood of depression and loneliness setting it. That will almost certainly have an attenuating effect on the human character. It will create a powerful stimulus to confess and will lead to admissions of guilt by the innocent who are most vulnerable. Any statements from detainees procured in such circumstances should be treated as the product of coercion and duress and thoroughly inadmissible as evidence.

In the end, it all comes down to the simple question once posed by Ramsey Clarke: ‘who will protect the public when the police violate the law?’

The Blelloch Interview

A couple of days ago I received an e mail from a friend with a link which took me to the well designed website of the Bobby Sands Trust. Once there I found myself looking at what appeared to be a valuable historical document and one that any researcher of the period in time referred to would want archived. It was an interview recorded by the US academic and author Padraig O’Malley with John Blelloch, a key British official central to events pertaining to the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. The interview took place in 1986 and O’Malley was interested in bringing more light to bear on the era of five to six years past. He later went on to write a book about the hunger strike Biting At The Grave, which while dubious in terms of the analytical method used to explore and explain motivation was nevertheless packed with useful insight and information.

Why the interview has just appeared is not explained. Nor are we told who supplied it to the Trust or when it came into its possession. If Blelloch’s side passed it on we are not aware of it. Nor are we sure that it came from O’Malley. It might well have been stumbled upon as so often happens. The Trust has a responsibility to find these things and would be foolish not to seize upon them whenever the opportunity arises and from whatever the source. While knowledge of the pathway from donor to recipient is useful for allowing a more finely tuned appreciation of where the debate is at, for now the matter of origins is a secondary issue. More than a quarter century after the hunger strikes it is inevitable that people will be more forthcoming and the presumption of an underhand agenda on their part may be misplaced. What is important is that the widest possible range of information be brought into the public sphere so that people can arrive at their own judgements. The Bobby Sands Trust is to be commended for placing this important transcript in the public domain.

According to the Trust:

What is important about the interview is that it represents an insight into the psyche of the British at crucial periods in the hunger strikes, particularly at the time of mediation attempts by others, including the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace [ICJP] … O’Malley twice interviewed Blelloch: in September 1986 and again on 23rd November 1988. Below is an unedited extract from the September 1986 interview dealing with the death of IRA Volunteer Joe McDonnell, and is followed by Blelloch’s analysis of the first hunger strike. It is illuminating in that the interview was conducted long before the publication of Ten Men Dead, which reveals the republican analysis, and it shows the intransigence of the British government throughout both hunger strikes.

Having finished reading the interview this morning, like the Trust I concluded that Blelloch - whom the Trust claims was a member of MI5, a view I have no reason to dissent from - sought to present a very unyielding position. What puzzled me is why he chose to conceal the initiative by his sister spook agency MI6 which seems to have been involved in a more conciliatory approach just prior to the death of IRA volunteer Joe McDonnell. Blelloch had to have known of that initiative but restricted his comments to the efforts by the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, an intervention already well documented. What was not in the pubic domain Blelloch was clearly not going to place there. O’Malley clearly did not know of the MI6 mission otherwise he would have tested the Blelloch perspective against it. Blelloch chose not to enlighten him.

It was not until the following year that David Beresford brought the MI6 role to the attention of the public with his fine book Ten Men Dead. He only discovered it because, according to Richard O’Rawe, a comm from the period referring to the MI6 operative Mountain Climber that was not supposed to make its way to Beresford evaded the Sinn Fein filter. Sinn Fein knew of MI6’s involvement but for its own reasons decided not to make the matter public. We can only speculate that this was because the party felt there was no point in allowing the British to don the mantle of compassion and flexibility when it seemed clear to everyone that they were unbending throughout the period. Indeed Sinn Fein’s most consistent theme has been that the British Prime Minister of the time, Margaret Thatcher, was totally hostile to any bridging of the gap between her government’s position and the demands of the dying prisoners. Sinn Fein, or people close to it, also relied heavily on this inflexible trait of Thatcher in their effort to refute the charge by Richard O’Rawe that the British through MI6 made a substantial offer to the prisoners which the prison leadership accepted but was overruled on by elements within the outside leadership responsible for day to day management of the hunger strike.

In 1986 both Sinn Fein and the British, then on opposite sides of a bitter armed conflict, had their own reasons for wanting to portray the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher as being resolute and determined not to bend in the face of pressure. The British for ideological and then current strategic reasons wanted to maintain an image of a prime minister not for turning as she and the Conservatives set about rolling back the social democratic state. Any suggestion that Thatcher might have wilted in the face of determined republican opposition at the centre of which was the IRA for whom she had a visceral hatred, would have undermined that position. Sinn Fein, for it part, always found it easier to get its message across if its opponent was effectively maligned. In Thatcher it found an easy albeit willing target.

Whether Thatcher was as unbending as has been suggested by Blelloch is called into question by his unwillingness to disclose information that would permit the development of an alternative narrative of the hunger strikes. That narrative has since been developed by Richard O’Rawe in his book Blanketmen and has maintained an elongated stage life despite attempts to force it into the wings. Blelloch’s account does nothing to reinforce O’Rawe’s perspective but at the same time fails to undermine him largely because it declined to trespass on an area then marked ‘prohibited’. By withholding vital information Blelloch has undermined his own ostensible commitment to be forthcoming. Why the Bobby Sands Trust failed to draw attention to this is something best explained by itself.

Blelloch’s account is so flat and delivered in typical British mandarin style, that if it were to be integrated into any assault aimed at exploding the O’Rawe thesis it will produce the blast of a damp squib. It will hardy even make the 7 day wonder category. 7 days is a long time in politics, long enough to see perspectives turned completely on their head.

No Missing Link

Within the past fortnight political violence in the North of Ireland has raised its all too ugly head with a lethal ferocity many thought had petered out. In a venture that constituted a failure of explanation, the Belfast writer Mairtin O'Muilleoir (10 March) made a contribution to the Guardian’s 'Comment is Free', which did little to clarify for his readership the background to the ‘resurgence.’ His core contention was simple; those who killed two British soldiers at Massereene Barrack are as close to republicanism as he is to molecular physics.

The problem here is that in fact the opposite is demonstrably true. Their actions have everything to do with republicanism. Can Mairtin O'Muilleoir or anyone else with a background in the republican tradition point to a single incident since the killing of Gunner Robert Curtis in February 1971 – the first soldier to die at the hands of the Provisional IRA – where criminals armed with automatic rifles confronted and killed British troops at military installations? All such attacks were carried out by republicans.

The columnist Brian Feeney had a much more credible take when, without conceding the slightest justification, he stated in today’s Irish News:

Last week people thrashed around trying to find reasons for the killings of members of the security forces. The emphasis was on the political motivation of the republican splinter groups, their loathing for Sinn Fein and their attempts to wreck the arrangements of the Good Friday Agreement. While those objectives guided the people who planned the attacks …

I know a significant number of people who unfortunately still identify with the physical force republicanism that carried out the attack at Massereene. Some of them were on hunger strikes or the H-Block blanket protest. They were republicans in 1981 during the most intense republican ideological moment of the past 40 years. They retain today the very same belief system they held then. If on the other hand Sinn Fein’s position is examined it has slaughtered every sacred cow it grazed during the 1981 hunger strikes and now uses the old Tory blue language of Margaret Thatcher to label as ‘criminal’ those republicans who have refused to budge. Sinn Fein, not those it fulminates against, resembles republicanism as much as Mr O'Muilleoir does a molecular physicist. If the men who killed the soldiers were not republicans the reaction would be nowhere near as molten.

Because those who have drawn the ire of Mairtin O'Muilleoir are republicans they follow the republican, not criminal, logic that they were long fed by the current Sinn Fein leadership. Gerry Adams told them that if Sinn Fein were to ever disown the armed struggle it would not have him as a member, and that the presence of British soldiers in Ireland was the mandate for armed republican activity. Martin McGuinness reinforced the position when he insisted to them that ‘our position is clear and it will never never never change. The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.’ For those who wanted to stop the war he had only the words ‘shame, shame, shame.’

Perhaps Messrs Adams and McGuinness did not really believe what they were saying. But others did. And the armed struggle both men heavily endorsed involved killing British soldiers. Due to the way they framed their positions it was hardly unreasonable to interpret their pronouncements as kill, kill, kill, even should all others choose to abandon it. Consequently, it is time to drop the pretence that there is a ‘missing link’ between the discourse of Adams-McGuinness and the killings at Massereene.

There is nothing intrinsic to political violence that necessarily makes it more justified than violence that is criminal. People in Northern Irish society have as much right to be free from political violence as they have to be free from criminal violence. Yet to argue that a new phenomenon has simply and suddenly sprang into existence - criminals with automatic rifles attacking British soldiers - is a myth of creationist proportion. The recent killings are the detritus from republicanism, not a separate and distinct phenomenon, and the DNA of Sinn Fein can be found at the scene. No understanding of the problem ensures no grasp of the solution.

Who is McGuinness to talk of treachery?

Published in the Independent on Sunday, 15 March, 2009.

Many years ago I looked up to Martin McGuinness. Most within the ranks of the Provisional IRA did likewise. When we were just moving into our teens, he was the republican Adonis strutting the streets of Derry with martial airs, putting it up to the military might of the British with whatever armed prowess he could muster. When he travelled to London in 1972 along with five other IRA commanders for talks with the British government’s William Whitelaw, it seemed proof positive that the armed struggle which had whisked the IRA delegation across the Irish Sea would soon keep the British on their own side of it.

Later, when I went to prison to serve a life sentence for a killing carried out on behalf of the IRA and ended up on the blanket protest which led to the hunger strike deaths of ten republican volunteers including Bobby Sands, we held Martin McGuinness in no less esteem. We regarded him as our chief of staff directing a campaign that was at the time knocking over British soldiers and police officers like pins in a bowling alley.

Watching him earlier this week stand with a British chief constable and British First Minister for a British-run North of Ireland, himself now a British micro minister, I ruminated on the crossover he had made. Standing alongside these implacable opponents of everything he had at one time fought for, he was now denouncing as ‘traitors’ those who had believed him when for years he had proclaimed the IRA the cutting edge of republican resistance. Like a chastened moral dwarf in the land of the giants, there he was screaming ‘midget’ at everybody else.

My respect for him had already dwarfed in the intervening years commensurate to his diminishing republican status. I cannot claim surprise, having predicted it both publicly and privately for the last 15 years. The leadership’s ambivalent attitude to the non-republican document, the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993, was the writing on the wall. And it spelled ‘capitulation.’

Since then, beginning with an article in Fortnight, the North’s main political journal, I sought to question the direction in which the struggle was moving. For the first year things were okay. Wearing an academic hat for cover I could write and comment pretty much as I wanted. By November 1994 the squeeze was on. At an academic conference I had predicted the type of outcome we have today. Summoned to the Sinn Fein headquarters in Belfast by a friend and colleague, I was asked how it was possible for me to have arrived at such a damning indictment of the leadership’s strategy. Despite the obvious logic of the trajectory about to be embarked upon, I was rapidly becoming a ‘thought criminal’.

Not to be deterred from thinking, the following year I received the most sustained applause of the day at a packed conference in Dublin when I alerted the audience of around 1000 party members that there was only one terminus on the road we had taken - defeat. Although Martin McGuinness was at that conference, it was when Gerry Adams also clapped for me I knew the Judas kiss had been planted on my cheek.

For the next three years I found myself visited by leadership figures and ‘invited’ to be silent. They were wasting their time as much as I was wasting my own in trying to convince my fellow activists of what was afoot.

On the evening of the Good Friday Agreement, Jeremy Paxman asked me in a Belfast television studio what was my problem with the agreement. My response was as terse as it was accurate: it constituted a British declaration of intent to stay in Ireland when the IRA’s objective had been to secure a declaration of intent to withdraw. The party leadership was infuriated. That fury percolated down and soon enough nearly everybody else in the party waxed furious. I parted ways with the organisation I had been a member of for twenty five years.

The Real IRA had formed some months before the agreement. I never felt the slightest inclination to join up. It appeared inappropriately named. The Make Believe IRA seemed a more accurate way to characterise it. Not because its volunteers lacked commitment or experience, but if the Provisional IRA campaign had failed so completely there seemed nothing to suggest to me that any other IRA would reverse that situation.

Despite the killings of two British soldiers and one police officer in the past week by the combined gun power of the Real and Continuity IRAs, there is absolutely no reason for me to change my mind. Political in motivation and republican in ideology, the IRAs who picked up the baton dropped by the IRA which Martin McGuinness once led have no serious degree of republican political support. They constitute a much less robust militarily efficient organisation than the Provisional IRA.

Their sense of having been sold out by people like Martin McGuinness goes some way towards explaining why they behave as they do. But they are also sustained by the republican tradition of physical force. And within that tradition there is an unshakable belief that so long as there is a British presence in any part of Ireland republicans will always be justified in bearing arms to strike at Britain and its forces.

Those of us who have ‘been there and done that’ and who can bear testimony to the utter futility of militarism look on events with a mixture of angst and guilt. Angst because of the lives being destroyed; guilt because the logic we preached in the Provisional IRA is their logic. Treading in our footsteps they will secure the same defeat, but for Martin McGuinness to denounce them as traitors for following the example he set for decades is to commit an act of treachery against truth.

No Easy Answers

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things - Russell Baker

Yesterday in Banbridge a member of the PSNI, Stephen Carroll, was laid to rest. During those times when I regarded members of the force, then called the RUC, as enemies, my attitude toward their deaths was philosophical. ‘Its war, they know the score and, like other combatants, take their chances.’ When they attacked IRA funerals, the IRA bombed the route of theirs. Watching the battle of the funerals from the confinement of jail surrounds our thinking was no less boxed in than our bodies. Flame throwers liberally applied to their massed ranks seemed an effective dispersal agent. They could experience the fires of hell before getting there. It now looks like a vortex of irrationality from which we have been plucked back onto the terra firma of reason.

Today, I may be no fan of the force, remain opposed to its political character, but at worst regard its members as political opponents rather than enemies. And with a republican mindset which has over the years become increasingly tempered by a democratic sentiment reinforced by a deep suspicion of revolutionaries, I harbour no notion that opponents should be killed. Passions and emotions from the politically violent past float around for sure, but they are invariably filtered out before they enter my cognitive processes.

Nor am I any longer in the grip of that one-dimensional thinking which reduces policing to a political essence and nothing else. The PSNI is a political police force but it is also a body that deals with a wide range of non-political issues. It is hard to imagine that Stephen Carroll, when travelling to Craigavon in response to a call for assistance, had only one thing in his mind: to make it clear to the woman who had summoned him that neither she nor the Irish people had the right to national self determination. He was doing what cops in every country in the world do if worth their salt; answering a distress call. If we complain from a democratic point of view that the PSNI are often tardy in their response time when those most vulnerable call for their help, then it seems incomprehensible that we can condone killing them when they do come out, even if their status as a British police force does rile our republican sentiment.

Coming from a Provisional republican background where the normal societal moral constraints on killing members of the police become dissipated by a combination of ideology and numbing palliatives liberally massaged into the conscience by the leadership, not to forget police repression, I am immediately confronted by an uncomfortable awareness that if police were fair game then why should it be any different today? The reason the Provisionals killed police was because they were police operating in the service of the British state. That aspect of policing remains as pronounced today as it was then. So how can the legitimacy we conferred on our attacks on police be withheld from those attacking police today?

There are no easy answers that avoid inconsistencies and strained logic. The current Sinn Fein rationale is as disingenuous as it is self serving. Stephen Carroll had Sinn Fein representation at his funeral. But for much of his career the same party thought it necessary and morally correct to kill him. Whatever the difference between the Stephen Carroll of 1989 and the Stephen Carroll of 2009, it hardly justifies the massive differential in the means used to address his wearing of a police uniform. If it was alright for ‘patriots’ to kill him twenty years ago then killing him last week was also the work of patriots, not ‘traitors.’ If it was wrong to kill him last week then it was wrong to kill him 20 years ago. And for people like me who do see it as wrong to kill him last week only one logical conclusion flows from that.

While I refuse to disown it or dismiss it, I no longer seek to justify the Provisional IRA campaign. Too many of its leaders, as we have seen this week, were absolutely unscrupulous. Too many of its members were willing to kill for no other reason than the leadership told them to. Both leadership and led at the drop of a hat all too easily abandoned positions which when held had terrible consequences for people on the receiving end of them. We are entitled to expect that if killing people was not some frivolous exercise, then the steady abandonment of the goals their deaths were meant help achieve would at the very least be questioned rigorously. But rarely were they.

Writing in the Irish News a couple of years ago about a different conflict I argued that mitigation rather than justification is a more helpful concept to be employed when defending armed actions. There were many mitigating circumstances pertaining to the use of force by the Provisional IRA that no longer apply today, none of which related to the privileged position the republican physical force tradition assumes for itself. But as the conflict progressed from long war to wrong war the greatest mitigating factor appears to have been locked-in syndrome. Republicans today can hardly cite that by way of mitigation.

Locked-in syndrome increases the likelihood that a conflict can be become self-contained yet self perpetuating. The players lose sight of external factors such as the rights of others and seek to foreclose ideas that increase the potential for a respite in which the necessary space might emerge that will permit a step outside the box. There was certainly no need for ‘the peace process’ to unlock matters but a ceasefire was an essential requirement.

Without the mitigating factor of locked-in syndrome what is there left that can be said in defence of the killing of Stephen Carroll? Certainly the threadbare cloaks of legitimacy from the ramshackle wardrobe of the republican physical force tradition are so tattered and torn that they offer no cover whatsoever. White stick republicanism alone can find guidance in that. For me the considerations of the physical force tradition will never be permitted to form part of my deliberations. As the left activist and former republican prisoner Tommy McKearney argued many years ago republicanism must be uncompromisingly democratic or not at all.

If protecting a version of the past lends itself to violating the future then it is better to lay it to rest altogether and walk away reverentially but firmly. Like a dead comrade it should undergo neither desecration nor resurrection. However it is dealt with, preserving life in the future seems ultimately a more worthwhile republican objective than preserving the right to have taken it in the past.

Christine Beattie

The sky is starless tonight
Or so it seems from my cell window
One little patch of sky is better than none
So I suppose I should be grateful
Or should I?
Should be grateful for little things
That have been pressed upon me
By the oppressors of our land
The little things that grow and grow
Until nothing is left
But the freedom of my soul
But a flame burns within me
So Strong
Not even my enemies will quench it
Never ending
Until the day my country is free
- Christine Beattie

The common view of Spartans is that they were male warriors who would traditionally come home to their women borne on shields having fallen in battle. They did the fighting while the women tended to other things. When Richard O’Rawe in his fine book Blanketmen talks of the 300 Spartans who took on the might of the British government, ten of whom were carried out of the prison hospital on their shields, we invariably think of men. Overlooked at times is that a matter of miles down the road from the H-Blocks was Armagh Prison where republican women prisoners were every bit as engaged in the daily struggle against the Brits as the men closer to Lisburn.

Christine Beattie was a Spartan fighter of the highest calibre. Imprisoned as a young woman for her role in the ranks of the IRA, she would spend almost her full twenties as a republican prisoner. Like her colleagues, under the leadership of the late Mairead Farrell, ‘Bap’, as we knew her, endured the years of protest which evolved in 1980 into a full blown no-wash protest. Given the particular challenges posed to women by a lack of hygiene, the republican activists in Armagh Prison initially opted for a form of protest which did not involve refusing both to wash or use the toilets. The catalyst for that more drastic course of action came as a result of prison staff brutality. Women were attacked and beaten by male screws during a prison search. The die was cast.

In his book Hard Time: Armagh Jail 1971-1986 the prison chaplain Raymond Murray lambasted the regime:

… on February the 7th 1980, now to go down in history as Black February, stories of the beating of the girls by male officers, the subsequent denial of access to the toilets, 7-12 February denial of laundry and visits from concerned persons, and the 23 hour lock up have been broadcast around the world. The girls some 30 in number have now been locked 23 hours a day for almost a year. Who in the wide world would inflict such a dreadful punishment on women? Do makeshift prison rules condone it? Does following the tradition of the founding of the concentration camps in South Africa condone it?

One of Bap’s tasks in the jail was to keep up morale through organising quizzes, sing songs, anything that would offer respite from monotony or deadening routine. Margaretta D’Arcy described her efforts in her memoir of Armagh Jail, Tell Them Everything.

Released in 1986 she married and gave birth to her two children. She worked in Sinn Fein and stood for the party as an electoral candidate. Christine was always open to opinions. A keen community worker with a strong political bent she knew that a block on radical ideas was hardly advantageous to the community on whose behalf she was struggling to improve the quality of life. An area facing poverty and deprivation needed an infusion of left rather than conservative ideas. On one occasion she organised a discussion in a pub in the Bone on socialism. Not to be put off by the official frown she asked Tommy Gorman to speak at it. The University of Ulster academic Pete Shirlow was the other speaker. I accompanied Tommy to the event which proved to be a lively affair. North Belfast republicans were usually more tolerant of alternative ideas than their colleagues in the West and hosted a number of events where republicans critical of the Sinn Fein leadership strategy were prominent speakers. On one occasion, much to their chagrin, a senior Sinn Fein speaker from West Belfast pulled out of a New Lodge Road discussion at the last minute rather than share a platform with those critical of the party. That was the thinking and porous environment Christine Beattie was trying hard to create when I last spoke with her.

According to an obituary for her in An Phoblacht/Republican News, one of the community initiatives Bap was involved in was the annual Seany Bateson Memorial Cup. Seany was one of her fellow Spartans who fell prey to a fatal heart attack walking along a wing of H7 weeks before he was due his first parole in 1990. The development of community cohesion and the material enhancement of the conditions in which working people lived and brought up their families was what Bap was about.

The starless sky she wrote about in prison may at last have closed in on her. But the flame that burned within her has left enough brightness for others to avoid cursing the darkness.

Massereene

While travelling home from Belfast last night along with my eight year old daughter news started to filter through of an armed attack on British soldiers in Antrim. Before we reached our destination confirmation of two British military fatalities came through from a journalist friend who had been monitoring information as it came to light. My first thought was personal and laden with no political overtones. I looked at my daughter and felt a weary sense of relief that she did not have to grow up in the North where political violence seems to sleep with one eye open waiting on any opportunity or circumstance that may come along. Years ago this type of news would rally the spirit. Now it just dampens the mood and feeds into despair, the strategic futility of it all every bit as debilitating as the political failure it constitutes.

Last night’s operation looked efficient from a strictly military point of view. Claimed today by the South Antrim brigade of the Real IRA that efficiency was probably its most salient feature. Like most others familiar to some degree with republican developments in the North I had felt that if wiser heads failed to make their influence felt within the decision making centres that shape the republican physical force tradition then it was only a matter of time before republicans killed a member of the British security apparatuses in the North in a futile act of militarism. As the Provisional IRA statement released immediately after the Brighton bomb in 1984 made clear the British have to be lucky all the time, republicans need only be lucky once. However, there seemed a greater probability that the easier option would have found its way to the top of the target selection list. An off duty, guard-dropped member of the PSNI always seemed the likely candidate for armed republican interest.

All of that has to be revised now. To hit the British military at one of its own installations puts more meaning into the terms ‘courageous and imaginative’ than we are familiar with from years of listening to other pronouncements containing that brace of words. This suggests a definite efficiency and a steely determination on the part of the attackers that most people thought they were incapable of. It is the type of activity that increases the power of what the Soviet Marxist Lenin once termed ‘excitative terror.’ There are young people with republican sentiment who are likely to feel such actions should be emulated rather than rejected. It is the type of activity the 1981 IRA hunger striker Frank Hughes was renowned for and for which the British secretary of state at the time labelled him a criminal.

This focuses attention on virtually every aspect of the assault on Massereene being indistinguishable from many similar attacks carried out by the Provisional IRA during its own armed struggle. Ruthless and clinical as it was, in human terms it was hardly as horrendous as the operation by the Derry City IRA on a British Army checkpoint at Coshquin in October 1990 in which it forced the civilian Patsy Gillespie to become a human bomb. In military terms it was more successful than the October 1996 IRA bomb attack on Thiepval Barracks which claimed the life of one British soldier. Those civilians who, like the pizza delivery men at Massereene, contracted their services out to British security personnel were frequently targeted; on one occasion at Teebane in 1992 eight of them were blown apart as they drove home in their work van. There is a thread of continuity weaving its way through attacks of this type. Those who shout ‘our killing of British soldiers is more legitimate than yours’ merely confirm that legitimacy, like Talleyrand’s treason, is a matter of dates.

Be that as it may, the attack will produce no more than the loss of two lives if last night’s injured parties do not lose their fight for life. It will not kick start any campaign on the scale of the failed Provisional IRA armed venture. And if that failed in circumstances that were arguably more propitious for success than those of today, then there is no chance of current armed republican actions succeeding. If those driving this type of activity are so politically short sighted that they fail to see the outcome then they will most assuredly prove susceptible to the type of overtures that have so compromised Sinn Fein. The Catholic party now stands despised in their eyes for having being lured into Britain’s administration in Ireland from where they stand shoulder to shoulder with the current British secretary of state, screaming ‘criminal’ at all who follow Sinn Fein’s now abandoned position of giving unambiguous support to armed struggle.

It has sometimes been stated that ‘if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got’. Dead on all sides, graves, funeral processions, widows, children growing up a parent short, jails, human rights abuses and no united Ireland at the end of it all. Why this addiction to failure? Surely republicanism has to be more imaginative than that.

In Denial

The party president, once suspected of sitting on the ruling army council, draws gasps of astonishment by insisting he was never in the Provisionals. Even his closest associates look on in bewilderment – UTV 4th October 2002

It wasn’t too long ago that republican critics of Gerry Adams would be infuriated at his persistent denials of Provisional IRA membership. They felt betrayed that the person many of them regarded as their former military commander would abandon them in such public fashion. In their minds he had, by putting distance between himself and the IRA, absolved himself of responsibility for the actions they had carried out and which he had directed; the implication being that membership of the IRA was something to be ashamed of.

These days they rarely wax furious, preferring to just laugh and do the round robin on the phone, urging those who missed the latest televised disavowal to grab themselves a recording. It has become a bit of a thing with them, more comedy than current affairs. They reckon that the denials have become so ludicrous that the Sinn Fein chief should draw only their scorn, not their fury. It cannot be said that they enjoy his discomfort as he rarely seems discomfited by his denials. What they do relish, it seems, is having a ringside seat for interviewers performing as mock jocks. It is the one issue on which the otherwise astute Sinn Fein leader is made to look injudicious. For good measure his republican detractors enjoy poking a bit of fun at the ciphers who feel duty bound to trot out the line that fiction is fact.

Recently I witnessed, heard to be more exact, all the unmitigated derision hard on the heels of an Adams interview with Noel Thompson on BBC’s Hearts & Minds. I can’t say I was brimming with enthusiasm for the exchange, having seen them so often, but was enticed into viewing a recording with the promise that ‘you’ll scream laughing.’ I didn’t manage that response but then, like an old joke, how often can it be laughed at? Nor was it the worst Sinn Fein performance against the wry Thompson. Martin McGuinness has bagged exclusive rights on that. At the same time Adams has had better outings. He played square balls and seemed to break no new ground; platitudes aplenty but little in the way of policy substance. All of which served to confirm the view of Irish Times columnist Davy Adams that the Sinn Fein president is armed only with a ‘portfolio of policies which constitute little more than clichés and soundbites’. Moreover, he exuded jadedness, someone moving pedestrian-like through the motions and who has the benefit of neither a spur nor a leadership competitor pounding at his internal flank. None of which augurs well for his party as it faces another electoral challenge in the difficult terrain of the Republic.

Back in June 1983 when Adams had his solicitors write to the Irish Times to vehemently protest that it had erroneously described him as Vice President of the IRA rather than of Sinn Fein he was already plotting a course, began some time earlier, that he has followed to this day. Then few would have expected him to concede IRA membership and face jail for it. He had already beaten an IRA membership rap in September 1978 when Lord Chief Justice Robert Lowry acquitted him on grounds of insufficient evidence. Not that in terms of what constitutes public knowledge are we are obliged to follow the legal declarations of Bob Lowry. I too was acquitted of the same charge by ‘Sir Robert’ so know not to take such things too seriously, having been an IRA member of ten years standing as I stood listening to him legally find that I was not in the organisation. But for Adams the verdict was a useful foil against media suggestions of IRA involvement.

Subject to the unquantifiable laws of memory erosion I have what I hope is a fairly clear recollection of a prison conversation with Brendan Hughes who expressed the view that Adams might have stepped down from the army to take up a party role given his very public discourse on the issue. The Dark felt his old comrade was too straight a guy to mislead people. It was a position Brendan later parted company with. I expressed the view that Adams was hardly going to hand the Brits a stick to beat him over the head with. The Dark’s response as I recall it was simple: a ‘no comment’ was all that was required to evade legal sanction. Not much to argue with there.

Maybe denials work with people of a much younger age than me although I have no evidence of it. People of my generation grew up understanding Gerry Adams to be in the Provisional IRA as comfortably as we grew up believing Paul McCartney to be in the Beatles. It was just a matter of fact, nothing controversial to it. I suspect however that the younger generation are not taken in. The denials are not being reinforced from anywhere else in society. Apart from the odd groupie or two on the internet few profess to take them seriously. It is well nigh impossible to find a journalist, academic or historian willing to go on the record and endorse the long standing claims by Adams. Reputation in their respective fields obviously still counts for something.

What seemed novel about what Noel Thompson did in his interview was to leave the albatross question to the end. This ensures that the interview is remembered for the note it ended on rather than anything else that was said during it. Had it been the opener on the night Gerry Adams would have had time to sideline the ridicule-inviting denial and allow his later points to stay on centre. The Thompson tactic was to entice the Adams head onto the block, allow the denial to be uttered and then guillotine any further discussion. There was no follow-up cross examination from Thompson or heated debate. The point had been simply made and efficiently executed. It was a lesson in mockery without even seeming to try.

At some point journalists might start asking all Sinn Fein members being interviewed if they believe Gerry Adams when he claims never to have been a member of the IRA. In responding they can only avoid appearing foolish by making a fool out of their leader. Hieronymus Bosch would have recognised the dilemma; a ship of fools or a foolish captain, the vessel’s seaworthiness dubious either way.

Sean McKenna

He had suffered 53 days without food and his health had been damaged irreparably. He had difficulties with his sight, hearing, balance and general health. He had to take medication for the rest of his days … when finally he was released he was to carry for the remainder of his life the scars of years on the Blanket Protest and his 53 days on Hunger Strike – Seanna Walsh

Sean McKenna was the second Provisional IRA volunteer from the 1980 hunger strike to die. Strike leader Brendan Hughes had predeceased him by 10 months. Both men had carried deep scars - psychological, physical or both - from the experience. Like their five surviving colleagues from the strike their bodies had undergone enormous deprivation while their minds were assaulted by intense trauma. Each day of their fast, as they grew lighter, their burden grew heavier. Those of us who came through that era with them but were fortunate to escape the physical and psychological ravishing they endured carry forever a debt of gratitude to them.

Sean McKenna came into Crumlin Road Prison in March 1976. Although on the wing with him I do not recall his presence, only getting to know him when the remand prisoners housed in the Crum were shifted to Cage 3 of Long Kesh in the midst of the IRA’s ‘long hot summer’ against the RUC. There Sean was adjutant to Albert Allen from the Kashmir area of West Belfast. The two of them were efficient administrators but laboured under the burden of carrying an infantile rump of young prisoners unwilling to settle down in their environment and forever in pursuit of mayhem for the sheer hell of it. On one occasion when the food lorry pulled up at the cage gates the contents could not be pulled in because the Ballymurphy men had put the trolley on top of the water tower. How they managed to haul it up so high and balance it seemed an engineering feat all in itself. To a man, when asked, we all swore it must have got up there on its own.

This errant behaviour brought many of us into conflict with Sean and Albert. Their task was to maintain a sense of IRA discipline and an environment where the majority were not subject to the unruliness of the few. While it may have amounted to nothing more than the wayward boisterousness of youth, both men felt obliged to lay down the law.

Jim Scullion, a senior republican figure in the jail about to take over the reins of control, visited the cage. The screws had complained that we had wrecked the place during a small hours food fight. Holes had also been punched or kicked in every studded wall after we had watched a Kung Fu film and decided to practice our newly acquired martial arts skills on our surroundings. The offenders, about a dozen in all, were lined up and brought to attention in the study hut. Jim Scullion told us we were not to buck the IRA or the IRA would buck us. We stared ahead feigning indifference. As soon as he left we joked that the IRA up the camp had been in jail too long if they wanted to buck us. Comments about Vaseline did the rounds. We calmed down after that but largely due to our numbers depleting. Men, having received their deposition papers and now officially ‘Awaiting Trial’, were being moved up to Cage 10.

After that, for a while in Cage 3, our attitude to Sean and Albert was one of morose aloofness. For a time we would speak if spoken to but little else. Although they were right and we were nuisances in the wrong, recalcitrance figured in our psyche at the time and ‘mea culpa’ was indeed Latin to us, well outside our insouciant vocabulary. Albert and Sean were ultimately more flexible and forgiving than we were. They were in their twenties, had been around the block and knew the score, so bore no grudges. We were teenagers confined behind wire fences when others our age were having the life of it. Our energy rushed the outlets provided by whatever limited opportunities existed in our world. And we were sullen and sulky when thwarted.

In any event Sean and I ended up on the Blanket protest. The time for opposite sides in a battle over frivolity had passed and now we were engaged in a prolonged and arduous struggle for survival. The IRA was not about to be bucked by the British on this one.

Sean had been interned at 17. After his release he was kidnapped by British soldiers on the Southern side of the partition line and outside British jurisdiction. Jailed unethically without trial at 17 now he was jailed illegally for 25 years. He became O/C of H5 during the protest, probably the block with the least harsh of all regimes at the time. That still did not make it easy. A humane Principal Officer in charge of the block made the difference between a protest being accompanied by persistent screw violence and a protest more marked by intense deprivation. Sean McKenna, as he had done in much more favourable circumstances in Cage 3, guided the men he commanded through the daily challenges of prison life. The particular abnormality of that life on the blanket afforded him no previous experience that he could call upon, yet he did not balk from making the calls that had to be made.

After the 1980 hunger strike there was a view in the prison that six men came though alive if not exactly well. A large part of the life of Sean McKenna had died during those 53 days. He was never the same person after it. It was sometime in the mid 1980s that I met him again, the first since 1976. He embraced me and laughed. Although I was aware of the stories about his condition I was shocked to experience it first hand. Shuffling, heavy on medication, and obviously physically limited, he had to stare towards the ground in order to see the person he was talking to. I was so angry that the British, having forced him to push his body to the absolute limits of endurance – clinically dying for four seconds in the prison hospital before being brought round – were continuing to hold him when he should have been in a home environment receiving the loving care and medical attention his condition was so clearly crying out for. There was a malign and vindictive streak running through the heart of British penal policy. The wing screws did what they could to facilitate him but their hands were tied.

At some point in the near future when we visit his final resting place in Ravensdale we will reflect on a man part of whom was buried elsewhere many years ago.

The Park

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either - Dick Cavett

This afternoon I took my two children over to the local park. What I like about this one compared to the previous park we used not to visit where we lived in West Belfast is that kids can actually use it. No broken glass, beer bottles or discarded condoms, kids can get the use out of it that a park was intended for rather than thinking it is a post-modern museum showing how delinquents and thugs spent their time. The best efforts of local community activists and politicians were often insufficient to thwart those indifferent to the happiness and wellbeing of children in West Belfast.

When I was growing up the park was not the first venue of choice for parents making decisions for their kids. Chapel was. They were only inflicting on us what had in their own childhood been inflicted on them. We had to tramp off to Alfred Street to be bored stupid; the price of saving our mortal souls from the devil and his lot. I felt sorry for my Protestant friends. They had to go to Sunday School as well. Sunday, despite the obligatory rigours of mass-going, was a day off and that anybody should have to tramp off to school on it seemed pretty unfair.

Once mass was either suffered or mitched – an hour spent rummaging on a disused railway line – the day was our own. Yet even if we made it to the park, the swings were chained up because religious bigots successfully made their opinion carry the day in the spheres where decisions were made about parks and such things. That religious opinions were often the daftest of all opinions doing the rounds seemed not to matter. Why let reason and intelligence get in the way of a determined bigot?

My children don’t go to chapel. Religion is a virus they have been inoculated against from an early age. A park is a better place for them on a Sunday. They see other children with different skin colours and yet manage to remain colour blind. It is the only thing I want them to remain blind to as they grow up. I don’t want them to be subject to the racism of religion where it is commonplace to think that women are not fully paid up members of the human race and therefore should not have the same opportunities as other human beings. I could never contemplate telling my daughter that it would be acceptable within the Catholic Church for her brother to celebrate mass but not her; that she can be pauper and he can be pope. Even worse, that in the Islamic world she might have to wear a veil and know her place at home, behind the sink. For some reason in the house of god her status is as a child of a lesser god. Not in our house it isn't.

The outdoor park with children is very much a hands-on experience. It is not like going to an indoor fun park where the two of them can be sent off into the softball jungle and I can sit nose buried in a book; oblivious until I hear them scream or run up to me in a bid to be first in accusing each other of having done something terrible to them. In the park they want pushed on swings, lifted onto one apparatus after another or a path steered through bigger kids. And then in the middle of it all a blight for them and a bounty for me - a burst of rain - sent us scampering for the cover provided by a nearby bridge.

From the bridge Micky Donalds is visible which sent my three year old off in a flurry of demands to be taken there. It is his way of describing McDonald’s. He went to Subway instead. Not for any ideological reasons, it just does healthier food and is closer to the shops we wanted to call into.

Now they have been bathed and are getting ready to bed down for the night. They will end their day with a bedtime story rather than a prayer. I suppose we could tell them a story that the world was made 7,000 years ago and that it all happened in seven days, the type of thing Mervyn Storey might tell his children. No. We’ll opt for Nancy Drew; good fiction rather than bad.