Felon Setting

Tony Catney is a former republican prisoner. He served a life sentence for an action carried out while a republican activist in 1974. I initially met him at the tail end of my first jail term. He arrived in Cage F of Magilligan Prison in the closing months of 1975, shortly after he was sent down and just a matter of days before I was due for release. Like a minority in the IRA our first acquaintance with prison life took place at the tender age of 16. Over the years I got to know him very well. We became and remain firm friends despite as far back as 1986 having serious reservations about each other’s reading of political trends. His friendship broke through the stay away barrier when times were tough, both politically and personally. Despite my long standing political disagreements with him I have always saw him as a keen strategic and political mind. As a real electoral strategist - and not just one the press elevated to the status on the sole basis of the press wanting to elevate someone to that status - he was a powerful asset to Sinn Fein throughout the peace process.

Never one to leap in the air as if jabbed with a cattle prod and then collapse to the ground with a sigh and a shudder when confronted with a different idea, he readily faced up to any criticisms of Sinn Fein strategy or his own role in helping formulate or drive it. In my numerous disagreements with him he was a formidable adversary. I would often leave discussions with him exasperated but niggled by the thought that he had a point.

We worked together in the movement and in the mid 1990s both of us came to suspect that because of our close relationship and refusal to be deferential to leadership ideas that seemed questionable, some people at that level thought it better to keep us apart. We were not organising against leadership, rather providing a platform for people to express a view not officially sanctioned. The Bobby Sands Discussion Group, which we were both central to, was not officially closed. However, those of us who were IRA volunteers, Sinn Fein activists or both were told by the thought police not to express our views in public or organise any events that might cause the leadership discomfort. He underwent his exile in Brussels while I experienced it at home. Maybe we got it wrong and the leadership were just making use of its resources but that is how we saw it at the time. Little has happened since that would cause us to revise that view.

These days Tony Catney is no longer with Sinn Fein, having decided to promote republicanism through a republican body. He is a key driving force behind the Republican Network for Unity (RNU) a campaigning body set up for the purpose of salvaging something from the wreckage of a republicanism torpedoed beneath the waterline by the Sinn Fein leadership. He has been central to many debates and discussions where he has presented the RNU analysis of the state of play. He told the Sunday Life:

It's about sitting down with each other and working out a common way forward. The Good Friday Agreement hasn't achieved anything, it's a sectarian document.When people voted for it they were voting for peace, not the contents of a deeply flawed document.

Despite a busy schedule, he has made time for anyone interested in his political viewpoint and on one recent occasion made last minute rearrangements to facilitate the travel schedule of a visiting academic currently working on a book which looks at the resurgence of republican ideas.

Last week my normal jaundiced view of the peace process hurtled rather than slipped into overdrive on reading a front page news feature in the Sunday Life in which TC, as we know him, was given space to deny allegations against him that he was leader of the Real IRA in Belfast. The story itself did not annoy me. What did were the insights it provided as to the manner in which the allegations were being pushed into the public arena. A line in the article stated that ‘Republican and security sources said they believed Catney was the Real IRA's Belfast boss.’

Having previously dealt with false claims against Catney being pedalled by the Sinn Fein leadership in which it alleged he was plotting against their safety I was immediately suspicious as to who was behind these claims. I contacted TC and asked him to comment:

I was contacted by a journalist who told me he had been briefed by a senior PSNI man, Mark Hamilton, who told him that I was the head of the Real IRA in Belfast. The journalist also told me that Mark Hamilton freely expressed the view that he in turn had been provided with this information by Gerry Kelly of Sinn Fein.

He then went on to repeat a challenge laid down in the Sunday Life:

What I am doing now is making a challenge to the PSNI. I am a former prisoner currently out on licence. If they believe these allegations are true, rather than something put out there just to discredit me, why has my license not been revoked?

Tony Catney has no way of knowing for sure if Gerry Kelly told Mark Hamilton of the PSNI anything. All he has to go on is what the journalist told him. I asked him had he any reason to disbelieve the journalist to which he answered no. The journalist in question had no reason to be hostile to Kelly and relayed the story to Catney during the course of a conversation.

No stranger to whisper weasels, in his interview with the Sunday Life Catney outlined the type of problems a republican is likely to face upon deciding to no longer acquiesce in the party line:

Once I left Sinn Fein I became the victim of a witch-hunt, sniping and Chinese whispers … In the autumn of 2006 a senior Sinn Fein member was briefing IRA members that I was the head of a heavily armed military organisation that wanted to kill Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness or Gerry Kelly. That was total rubbish then and it's total rubbish now. Because I have been the victim of a whispering campaign before it isn't surprising to hear this stuff linking me to the Real IRA now.

Tony Catney believes he is the victim of a smear campaign being orchestrated by his former colleagues in Sinn Fein. It is similar in style to what Rab Jackson of Eirigi so vociferously protested about in the Irish News. Eirigi too has had the evil eye of Sinn Fein cast upon it because, although it has tried to avoid coming into conflict with the party, operates autonomously in pursuit of its own republican agenda.

Catney’s explanation of the logic governing the dissemination campaign against him would equally apply to Eirigi: ‘Sinn Fein see our group as a threat and they see us offering an alternative, that's why I believe they have singled me out and are trying to depict that I am bathed in blood.’

Sinn Fein has every right to compete with the RNU and Eirigi on the field of ideas. But Tony Catney is the victim of an odious felon setting campaign then in the words of one former leading IRA volunteer, ‘it is an act so soaked in malign intent that the people responsible have plummeted to new depths and have slipped off the radar screen of anything that could be vaguely described as republican.’

Catholic Politicians

In recent days a comment appeared on the Pensive Quill in response to the article ‘Wrong Tune’. The poster, ‘Starry Plough’, manages a promising blog, Sinn Fein Keep Left. While constructed from the perspective of someone who feels Sinn Fein can still deliver the goals that initially defined it, the blog has survived the howls of those who protest the washing of dirty linen in public. Soiled linen is anything that does not depict the leadership in halos. Keep Left is a brave attempt to swim against the tide of party orientation which would readily see the leadership lurch gleefully to the right if the Blueshirts of Fine Gael were in a position to extend an invitation to join them in government. The one downside of the blog, which is not a criticism of Starry Plough or any of those who take the time to run it, is that 15 years ago its value would have been greatly magnified. Regrettably, at a time when debate and probing may have salvaged something from the republican project, there was so little of it able to emerge in the face of concerted leadership attempts to discourage it. Few then were thinking of blogs. Most of us were unaware of the existence of the internet.
Part of the comment Starry Plough made to the Pensive Quill had this to say.

One point I am struggling with in your posts though is the term catholic politician. The church is dying, many if not most people who vote SF, or any party for that manner, are no longer church going. So why the use of this phrase? I simply find it grabs my attention and deflects from other things you write.

That it grabs the attention of the poster is an achievement in it itself. It may have done so because it had a certain shock or annoyance property or alternatively because – as it seems to be for Starry Plough – it rings so far off the mark that it distorts the wider argument being made.

There are a number of defensible reasons for describing Sinn Fein elected representatives as Catholic politicians, none of which have anything to do with the religious persuasion of the people involved or the church that they might attend. Primarily, in as far as they stand for something other than their own power, the political project of Sinn Fein politicians, regardless of the discourse, is strategically driven by the impulse to advance the position of the Northern Catholic populace in a communitarian as opposed to a religious sense. Sinn Fein demand better schools not better church run schools. While people like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness openly admit their religious preferences Gerry Kelly seems never to express any religious sentiment whatsoever. So when the term ‘Catholic politician’ is employed it delineates a political community not a religious one. The terms Protestant and Catholic in the North are widely assumed to be interchangeable with Unionist and Nationalist. The concept ‘political Catholic’ is not to be misunderstood as, or confused with a religious Catholic.

Sinn Fein is essentially a Northern Catholic party. This results less from the ideological orientation of the leadership – vote chasers rather than ideology sponsors – than it does from the structural location within the political grid of that insurrectionary energy which brought Provisionalism into being and has played no small part in sustaining it since. Provisionalism is shaped more by constraints than opportunities. Brian Faulkner long ago made the observation that were it not for the Catholics of Belfast there would be no discussion of a united Ireland or a Provisional IRA to push it. Sinn Fein’s only consistent hardcore support base is located in the Catholic North. Elsewhere it tends to be more transient. This goes some way toward explaining its declining relevance in the South. Whether left or right, it is not viewed as a party that has answers to the problems that beset the South, just something up North that endlessly chatters in a strange Northern language called peace processery. Its abysmal failure to be recognised as a left alternative when cities like Dublin clearly moved to the left all militate against positioning it within a socialist framework. Its strategy of expansionism throughout Ireland has come off the rails and it is now being contained within the North where it plays second fiddle in a DUP led and dominated government. As unpalatable as it appears to those of us who saw comrades die and who spent long times in prison in pursuit of something vastly different from what Peter Robinson stands for, his pronouncements leave little room for confidence:

Nobody is boasting about Irish unification by 2016 anymore … on all fronts and at every level we have rolled back the nationalist agenda and are following our unionist agenda. We have re-moulded Government to our vision. Every impartial observer of the political scene agrees that the DUP is the driving force in Stormont.

This points to a Catholic minority and its political representatives accepting the balance of political forces and deferring to their outworking, not a republican constituency and its political representatives following a republican agenda that undermines that balance of forces and destabilises the concomitant political arrangement that it gives rise to.

Be that as it may, it does not follow that seeing Sinn Fein politicians as little other than political Catholics is self-evident. The case for that has to be demonstrated rather than assumed. Personally, there is a measure of discomfort in describing Sinn Fein as republican, socialist, revolutionary – all terms it would prefer over Catholic. The first three terms, once said leave a bad aftertaste in the mouth. There is a certain psychological comfort to be drawn from finding a term that intellectually and emotionally smoothes those jutting and jagged edges that come with employing another term that does not seem to fit quite as well. The term Catholic politician is not made to measure but one that is purchased straight from the rack. As such it is never a perfect fit, is a matter of taste and must at all times coexist alongside the view of others who think it does not fit at all.

For some time I have not felt comfortable in employing the term ‘republican politician.’ It bestows legitimacy on actions which are demonstrably anything other the republican. Apart from all the other republican sacred cows sacrificially offered up to the great god Peace Process, to equate republicanism with a strategy of touting to the British is so anathema to republican sentiment – on a par with terming someone who supports the Ku Klux Klan, a black civil rights activist– that it simply fails to compute. It sticks in the craw to confer the status of republican on anyone who would endorse touting, no matter how useless, self-referential, abhorrent or counterproductive the actions of physical force republicans.

‘Nationalist politicians’ would be a term more appropriate than ‘republican politicians’ but in many senses the SDLP got their first and were always termed nationalists by Sinn Fein. So the term Catholic politician allows for a convenient demarcation line between the two sets of politicians, Sinn Fein and the SDLP. And because Sinn Fein has been more inclined to beat the sectarian drum in terms of appealing to the instincts of its constituency the label political Catholic is more appropriate to it than to the SDLP. Moreover, ‘Catholic’ rather than ‘nationalist’ tugs at Sinn Fein’s sleeve each time it makes a claim to have advanced nationalism as a 32 county phenomenon. In that sense it is subversive of the party’s proclamations. Any sense that Sinn Fein is involved in a struggle for national liberation has long since evaporated. As Fionnuala O Connor, frequently quoted in recent articles on the Pensive Quill, tellingly asked:

Hijackings certainly would not advance the cause of Irish unity, said one youngish Belfast Sinn Féiner indignantly on Tuesday. Behind closed doors, does anyone in her party profess to believe that taking part in Stormont debates is bringing Irish unity a day closer?

The term Sinn Fein politician would be adequate but it is merely descriptive and not critically interpretive. Benign and neutral, it would hardly ‘grab the attention’ of any reader, apart from members of RSF who might demand that the Provisionals relinquish the title deeds to the name Sinn Fein. The term Catholic politician is interpretive in as much as it suggests what Sinn Fein is, by exclusion it also implies what it is not. In that sense the term ‘Catholic politician’ is a subversive term, aimed at challenging and eroding the view that Sinn Fein is a republican party.

Use of the term ‘Catholic’ also draws on the thinking of Peadar O’Donnell, a republican of substantial pedigree and firmly established left wing credentials, who pointedly made the observation of the IRA in Belfast that it was a battalion of armed Catholics. So there is historical precedent within the republican tradition for its usage.

Finally, the internal power-sharing solution that Sinn Fein has accepted is an answer to a problem that could only have its explanatory roots in the model of internal conflict that throughout the Northern political instability constituted the main definition of the conflict and which the Provisional republican narrative sought to challenge at all points before effectively succumbing to it. The internal conflict model allows the British state to stand back, benignly hold the ring in which Catholics and Protestants are instructed to solve their differences, and behave like a convenor or arbiter rather than a malign participant.

Sinn Fein, no longer armed with a serious republican, socialist, revolutionary or all-Ireland nationalist ideology has long since vacated the primal ground of republicanism. There is no ideological centre of gravity which acts to prevent it becoming a catch-all party. But the structural limitations that contain it both to the North and within the Catholic community within the North mean that its catch-all catchment area is the Catholic population of the six counties. Sinn Fein growth in the North is not the consequence of creating more republicans than ever before – that is like saying Tony Blair and New Labour created more socialists than ever before. It is a growth fuelled by greater numbers of Catholics not opposed to the British presence per se but who feel the British can be made to run the Northern state more fairly so that Catholics can improve their chances within a British political system.

Sinn Fein - a Catholic party for a Catholic people.

The 20th of July

Glancing at my watch while travelling this morning, today’s date leapt out at me stirring memories from the days when I could still out sprint a British soldier, well apart from the one that caught me in an alleyway between Cooke Street and Lavinia Street in the Lower Ormeau Road. While a teenager in Magilligan Prison in 1975 I picked up a book by the German writer HH Kirst. Its title was simple: The 20th of July. It was a novelised account of the plot against the life of Adolf Hitler and its eventual unsuccessful execution, carried out by Colonel Count Claus Von Stauffenberg when he placed a bomb concealed in a suitcase close to where the Nazi leader held court in his Wolf’s Lair HQ.

At the time it seemed one of the most profound books I had read to date. Slow but captivating, it never slipped far beneath the memory’s surface. It stands out as one of the literary moments of a then young life. I suppose remembering the author’s name 35 years later is testimony to that. Today the event at the heart of the Kirst novel is recreated through the film Valkyrie which I at some point intend to watch. If it comes close to capturing the suspense and anticipation of the book, the viewing will be well worthwhile.

The book was a slow read, one to take your time over. Other books I had been reading at the time were faster moving and more action packed such as the accounts of his involvement in World War 2 by the penal battalion soldier Sven Hassel. In a sense they were little more than good militarised Westerns but for a 17 year old they marked a further advance into the world of literature which once entered opened up an infinite expanse which could never be colonised in a multitude of lifetimes. Perhaps more importantly the characters in them were given to considerable reflection on the savagery of war.

The very first Hassel book I picked up was Wheels of Terror. No one recommended it. It was lying about the cage and what gave it instant appeal were the words on the front cover, something to the effect that it was a book no German publisher dared print. Curiosity may have killed the odd cat but for the felines that survived the experience, being curious proved an indispensable fortifier to the intellect. Besides, something that required a sense of daring in order for it to be printed dared the reader to unlock its mysteries. I immediately grabbed it and dared my way through it in the small Cage F cubicle I shared with a North Belfast republican. On finishing the last page, while satisfied at a good read, my estimation of German publishers was not that high.

After an exchange of letters with a lifelong friend who was then doing some summer work in Guernsey, he sent me a parcel containing all the books by Sven Hassel published up until that point. There were about 8 in all. It was like a Xmas present in the sun although by the time I had got to about the fourth I had developed a sense that the author was spoofing a bit. From that point on I read them as if they were novels. Good but always with an escape hatch when the gore of battle proved too much. Conversely, Kirst’s book, while a novel, had a greater sense of the real to it.

65 years ago today a dictator’s life was almost brought to an end by courageous people. They failed in their attempt and millions more died as Hitler drove the German nation on to self destruction. In a windswept prison camp at the other end of Europe 31 years after the event that almost toppled the tyrant, HH Kirst brought it to life for me.

Wrong Tune

There is undoubtedly a serious problem in North Belfast around the Billy Boys longing to be ‘up to our neck in Fenian blood, surrender or you die’, which is not going to be resolved by shooting at cops, stoning obnoxious parades, rioting or the myriad of other forceful measures employed against Orange encroachment. For all the commitment of those determined to use them, armed actions have demonstrably failed to prise one British finger away from the North. Nor, in a more localised context, are armed republicans going to find themselves treated by the state as Billy Wright was when he threatened massive violence against police lines in Drumcree, forcing the state to buckle. That has only ever worked to get Orange marches through, not halted.

Nor will a solution be cobbled together from the diatribes against republicans currently being vented by some Catholic politicians. There is no escaping it. Sinn Fein will always struggle with the albatross called the past which hangs tenaciously around its neck. No matter how much Gerry Kelly has set his face against the old tried and failed methodology of physical force republicanism, because he has embraced a position previously described in the most pejorative of terms by his party, any criticism he has to make of republicans choosing to follow the armed example he laid down, at no small cost to himself and others, will be ignored. Their response will be to follow his other example of being impervious to criticism thrown his way by Catholic politicians opposed to his unmandated armed campaigning. Concisely expressed, because he bombed London armed with a mandate of no votes he is in an awkward position any time he ventures out to condemn republicans for using the same violent means sans mandate in pursuit of the ends his generation failed to secure.

Fionnuala O’Connor was succinct on the matter when she wrote earlier in the year:

Sinn Féin has the additional problem of facing its own past in new
confrontational form. Its Stormont representatives say the dissidents have no mandate, no strategy. Every other party North and South, and the bulk of the population, thought the same of the IRA.

When those who have ‘been there, done that’ instruct others ‘not to go there or do that’ it pretty much sounds like ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ It takes little imagination to predict the type of response likely to be provoked by that. Nevertheless, there must be a certain republican satisfaction to be derived from Sinn Fein squirming as it is forced to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Free Presbyterians and British police officers who fire plastic bullets at the community Sinn Fein claims to represent.

It is not the sort of satisfaction that can be drawn down when other politicians sing from the same old hymn sheet which Sinn Fein now render a flawless cover version of. It would be different if all the parties were issuing some new form of condemnation against some new violent phenomenon but they aren’t. The DUP, for example, is saying nothing new about the type of activity we have just witnessed in Ardoyne; just the same as they were saying when Martin Meehan defended the district in the early 1970s. Nor is any other political party saying something 180 degrees removed from what they have always said. Sinn Fein, itself alone, is the party with a different song. And when it is in tune with the malodorous tones of Willie McCrea, what a rasping, grating effect that has on the republican ear canal.

As the late American satirist Ambrose Bierce might have said of Willie the singing bigot: ‘hypocrisy: prejudice with a halo.’ What republican would want to keep tune with him?

Infected

At times there have been journalists brazen enough to claim that they would withhold reporting on anything that might prove damaging to the peace process. This never failed to strike me as having blurred the distinction between journalist and player. Eroding that crucial demarcation through withholding information is probably an infrequent act. A more common method is in the way a story is reported. I have no doubt that this type of activity is done for good reason, but not a good journalistic reason.

The sense that Sinn Fein is undergoing some turbulence is enhanced when people in the media trot out the type of arguments that the party itself makes when trying to avoid accusations that for all its shouting about change there has not been an awful lot of it. The party seemingly has changed more than the circumstances around it and needs the acquiescence of a compliant media to pretend it isn’t so.

Brian Rowan is not beyond making Sinn Fin uncomfortable. He did it last year at the West Belfast Festival with his allusion to the IRA’s key informer still at large and unmasked; a person who makes the notorious Special Branch tout Mark Haddock pale into relative insignificance. In today’s Belfast Telegraph, however, he appeared to be trying to save the party’s blushes as it wilts in the face of cutting republican discourse, by placing a magnifying glass over the word ‘change’ so that it looks like CHANGE; real and plenty of it:

Sinn Fein is in government with the DUP … policing has changed - republicans are on the different boards that are part of the new post-Patten accountability structure … Soon, Sinn Fein will have a voice and a say in appointing the new Chief Constable. That is how much things have changed.

Is Barney for real here? The Jimmy Simple column makes the same sort of claim every Thursday but people just laugh or cringe. But you expect it there. When a journalist indulges it all sounds like a step back to the days when Sinn Fein could not be heard uttering its own words, so an actor would step in and render verbatim what the muted Sinn Feiner was striving to convey to the audience. There may have been an arguable journalistic reason for permitting it then but hardly today when the party has much greater access to the media than those republicans it is at odds with and against whom journalists are defending it.

Undeniably Sinn Fein is in government with the DUP but as Fionnuala O Connor put it in April of this year:

In its own streets Sinn Féin cuts a less impressive figure than is healthy for political progress generally. Being haunted by its past is bad enough. The spectacle that Sinn Féin makes in Stormont must be a constant frustration, made worse by awareness that it will only end if others co-operate. A relentlessly triumphalist DUP seems to see no further than their own backyard and a dread, surely inflated and unrealistic, of their own lone dissident, Jim Allister. The coolest heads must know it is way past time to stop trying to humiliate republicans and start looking for areas of agreement, out of self-interest, if nothing else.

On policing there are more than a few Catholics on the boards but no republicans. In its entire history what republican has ever supported informing on republican activity to the British police? Cathal Goulding the one time chief of staff of the IRA can be found supporting the supergrass system in 1983 but for his sins was viewed as a former republican by Sinn Fein. Moreover, being allowed to have a say in the appointment of a chief constable seems a far cry from the days of ‘disband the RUC.’ Can Sinn Fein members shape the policies of the chief constable they have a say in nominating? The party has done next to nothing on the current policies of 28 day detention or the construction of supergrass. It failed to mention the firing of plastic bullets in Ardoyne until embarrassed into it by Mairtin Og Meehan.

Rowan’s views would have greater purchase if applied to the SDLP. In reformist terms it is easy enough to listen to the SDLP talk of the real changes that have occurred. It never sought anything other than reforms, killed nobody to get them and has been engaged in a peace process from the moment of its formation in 1970. In terms of the type of reforms advocated by the SDLP Northern Irish society has indeed come a long way through the internal settlement that came into being through the Good Friday Agreement.

It makes little sense to attribute the same success to the Sinn Fein project. Measured against the revolutionary goals Sinn Fein proclaimed to be in pursuit of, in the end what it actually settled for in terms of republicanism did not amount to a significant distance travelled. Whereas the SDLP always stood for an internal solution the Sinn Fein project on the other hand could be described as one of pursuing a solution wholly external to the existence of the NI state. Sinn Fein stood for the revolutionary abolition of the state and not its internal reformation.

If support for the peace process becomes more important than reporting it, then we will have no way of knowing its real value. How we come to understand it will not be informed by what it is but by how the agendas of key players need it spun. Suddenly the journalistic defence of protecting sources and the risks taken by journalists such as Suzanne Breen are rendered redundant because the peace process is valued more by journalists than journalism.

It seems that in some areas of journalism there is a view that the peace process should be protected from journalism. Surely, for the journalist it should be the other way round. Journalism should be innoculated so as to avoid infection from the peace process.

If progress on policing is as good as those who support the PSNI claim it to be, then the results will speak for themselves. Truth is they won’t. Republican critics of Sinn Fein, according to Brian Rowan, ‘want to portray policing as old policing.’ Reality check: they don’t need to. The PSNI is managing quite well on its own.

Going To Seed

Shots fired on the police in Belfast, themselves armed with the latest weaponry available from the British government; republicans manhandled and dragged from their homes screaming abuse at their captors and about those former prisoners they alleged were responsible for orchestrating the arrests; serious rioting confronted with the politics of condemnation from the mouths of Catholic politicians, many of whom were one time rioters and worse.

The British sociologist Frank Burton back in the 1970s conducted extensive serious academic research in Ardoyne. Later published in book form, Politics of Legitimacy: Struggles in a Belfast Community, ‘Anro’ was the fictitious name he gave to the district as it is endearingly termed by those who live there. Were Burton to arrive in the elongated streets of Ardoyne in the morning he would be tempted to title his next book The Politics of No Change. Apart from a few different faces now on the state side of the barricades everything looks much as it did three decades ago.

Earlier in the week an irate Gerry Kelly, former republican prisoner and currently a prominent Catholic politician – in his day as close to being universally admired within the ranks of the IRA as one gets – could be heard on BBC Radio Ulster spitting nails at the people he claimed were behind the violent disturbances. They belonged to ‘micro groups’ who had specifically bussed troublemakers into the area from beyond for the sole purpose of mischief making.

Memory may be something that escapes politicians, but for those who don’t want aids to prompt us to obliterate recall, there is a recollection of being ‘bussed’ by the IRA and Sinn Fein into areas in which we did not live for the purpose of obstructing Orange marches. I and the many others standing alongside me on South Belfast’s Lower Ormeau Road in the mid 1990s, face to face with armed British police, lived in the west of the city. Bussing in (it is just a term, not exactly being a day out most tend to make their own way to these occurrences) to add volume to the militant roar was a feature of activist life. Bans on secondary picketing, rather like council tax, seemed a quaint British concept that played no part in our decisions.

Gerry Kelly may have sounded genuinely angry at lives being put at risk by snipers opening fire on the PSNI but like others in his party making similar noises he is hoist on the petard of past example. The republicans in Ardoyne are doing nothing other than following in the footsteps of their Provisional forebearers who organised riots and launched armed attacks on police. It is this which takes much of the sting out of the criticisms of Gerry Kelly.

On this matter in the Irish News the North Belfast MLA offered a revealing perspective:

Judge the calibre of these people, after all the lessons of the long conflict, who would fire shots or throw bombs where many children and others had congregated. I don't think it's an understatement to say we are lucky that no-one has been killed.

This comment would appear to constitute a serious indictment of the IRA campaign. It is the closest thing to branding the IRA’s actions, in the built up areas where they were based, wrong, that we have yet heard from any Sinn Fein politician. For long it was the type of criticism hurled the way of the Provisional IRA when they took up arms on the streets of Ardoyne. Unlike today’s armed republicans those in the Provisional movement did kill members of the Ardoyne community during their armed assaults on British security personnel.

Moreover as a junior micro minister in a British micro government his characterisation of republicans as being members of micro groups will hardly rouse swathes of public sentiment against them. Sounding vacuous, the only people likely to listen are those who always joined ranks to condemn republican activity, not those being corralled into backstreets by the Orange Order.

This logic was swiftly identified by one of Gerry Kelly’s republican critics Mairtin Og Meehan:

Whilst I respect Gerry Kelly's electoral mandate, he needs to acknowledge that the majority of people in Ardoyne are angry that he or his party have not condemned the injuring of 10 people by plastic bullets, the hostile use of water cannons and antagonistic actions by the PSNI.

This seems to have stung the Catholic politician into taking up a position his party appeared to have lost sight of earlier in the week. Kelly’s diatribe against the republicans now had to be balanced by a critique of the Orange Order and the PSNI who fired plastic bullets.

This is a significant achievement for republicans who have wrong footed their Catholic adversaries. To have forced Sinn Fein to become critical of the PSNI on terms articulated by republicans can only be viewed within Sinn Fein as a further erosion of its once indisputable hegemony within Ardoyne. Are we witnessing the party as it goes to seed? As so often in these matters the journalist Ed Moloney might well have a point when he claims that, ‘Sinn Fein is a party which is now in decline. It is in a place where it’s possible to say that its best years are behind it.’

Tramplers

To speak of the Orange Order in the opening decade of the 21st century conjures up all kinds of images in the popular mind. Usually, images of confrontation and violence, as the institution is perceived to want to walk where they are not wanted – Brian Kennaway.

Rioting in Ardoyne. Hardly news, we have heard it too often to be shocked by it. Yet, paradoxically, it is very much newsworthy. That riots should be continuing there long after the supposed emergence of a new dispensation around a very old bone of contention provides substance to those perspectives challenging the myths of the peace process. For the residents of Ardoyne the peace process has in the view of Mairtin Og Meehan delivered the dubious right to be hemmed in to the sound of ‘silence of the elected representatives of the area who care to look the other way and only see and say what their masters up in Stormont tell them to.’

A perennial source of friction, Orange marches which intersect with nationalist communities are often a match to tinder. Ardoyne on the 13th of July showed how combustible the combination of triumphalist marchers and besieged residents actually is. The outcome – conflagration. Disingenuously, those who insist on marching through areas where they are despised claim they are exercising their religious freedom. Persecution and religious freedom have down the centuries been symbiotically fused into ideologies of hatred, of which Orangeism is one we in Ireland are only too familiar with.

Not that religion has anything to recommend it but if these marches have any theological underpinning it is in a theology of domination that it is to be found. As the author of The Orange Order: A Tradition Betrayed, Brian Kennaway asks, ‘Is the Orange Institution a religious organisation with a political element or a political organisation with a religious element?’ There are few takers for the suggestion that Orange marches are religious events based on the principle that all the children of god are equal. That sort of god is of little use to the Orangeman. He wants a god that allows him to lord it over his neighbours. Equality, religious or otherwise, has traditionally held little premium in the North. Men in clerical dog collars may preach at fields but what they preach is politics masked by piety. Look no further than Willie McCrea and you immediately get a sense of the infinite. It is the gap between him and any sort of merciful deity.

This is not to be blind to individuals like Brian Kennaway, a member of the Orange Order from 1964, who genuinely hold religious beliefs that do not seek to express themselves by trampling over their neighbours. Although more or less a believer that the last real Christian was crucified I nevertheless admire Brian Kennaway for the energy he has brought to the task of stripping the Order of its supremacist ethos by stressing ‘ideals of tolerance, religious piety, citizenship and brotherhood’ and for the manner in which he tries to live out a tolerant Christian lifestyle. Unfortunately, despite the efforts of him and others of like mind, the tramplers continue to trample, under the pretence of freedom to assemble. They tend to emulate the intellectual acumen of the imbecile Dawson Bailie and sidestep the cerebral prowess of Kennaway.

Meanwhile, the government in Dublin, in an age of growing secularism, has unpardonably introduced a blasphemy law which allows people like Willie McCrea and Dawson Bailie to claim special privilege for their opinions which when ridiculed by the rest of us may result in a court appearance.

Religious prejudice defended North and South – Ireland is being united. Great.

Forward to the Rear

The irony not to be missed is that 99.99% of the thousands who feel offended and demonstrate had never even SEEN the Danish caricatures - Slavoj Žižek

Yesterday along with my wife, I met up with two long term friends from the British Left. We all went out for a few pints together. The drink flowed. I stuck to the cider, my wife preferred something with a greater blend of flavours – Malibu and Coke – but being visitors to Ireland our two friends made the statutory reach for the dark stuff. Guinness, it hardly needs to be pulled, having a pulling power of its own. Over the years I have been in their company in English cities like Manchester, London, Liverpool and Southampton sampling the booze and attending political events or soccer games. They are political people with a long history of activism and brushes with authority. They emphasise the interpretive over the descriptive. Not being Trots they are given to analysing rather than sloganising. They have long been associated with the progressive Left as distinct from its regressive counterpart.

These pub gatherings, although social, because of their composition can never escape politics for long. Both our friends have doctorates and are accomplished academics and authors. Their breadth of knowledge is impressive and their take on events in Ireland and abroad is always thought provoking. When they are around talk about the chances of getting tickets for a Liverpool game soon makes way for a more heavy duty discussion.

During the course of the afternoon our conversation veered to the state of the British Left. I asked if the Socialist Workers Party had torn itself apart yet. I don’t follow its fortunes any way closely but there had been reports that the body was on the verge of a split, its central committee had been caught lying to and manipulating the membership for the umpteenth time. Malachi O Doherty had recently been writing on the split at Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle and it crossed my mind that it might just be the season for the sects to engage in the time honoured practice of routing out heresy amidst screams of ‘deviationist.’

One of our friends volunteered that while he didn’t know much about the internal goings-on within the SWP he had been at Marxism 2009, a yearly event organised by the party. One of the main attractions was a debate about what it means to be a revolutionary. On the panel was the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. On hearing that, a wry grin must have crossed my face. Three years ago when religious zealots decided to feel offended at12 Danish artists each sketching an anti-theocratic cartoon, the imans and mullahs found themselves backed by the SWP. Žižek had taken an interesting stand that, if the SWP were serious, would have enraged them: "Muslims' only real allies are not those who first published the caricatures for shock value, but those who, in support of the ideal of freedom of expression, reprinted them."

I asked if Žižek was subject to any criticism from the audience because of his stance. Nothing at all. A few sisters had a go because of an allegory he related to convey the irrelevance of the types he was speaking to. Their umbrage – he was belittling rape. Nonsense of course but it was instructive that it alone constituted what the criticism of the philosopher amounted to.

I had long suspected that the SWP had abandoned a secular and humanist position merely to facilitate an alliance with people – a united front of a special type - who the late SWP stalwart Tony Cliff described as clerical fascists. Now that George Galloway has not proven susceptible to SWP manipulation opponents of the theocrats no longer seem to be accused of racism but are rehabilitated and are guest speakers at showcase SWP events.

What next – a burka ban at SWP conferences?

Patron Saint of Eegits

In Dublin today Atheist Ireland held its inaugural AGM. I only found out about it this morning, had other things planned so, regrettably, was unable to attend. I am not a member but the public was invited anyway. There are meetings of humanist associations all the time and although a member of the Rationalist Association it would never occur to me to turn up at one of its meetings. However, in Ireland events this week have led me to believe that bodies like Atheist Ireland which are campaigning groups need solidarity from others of like mind or from those that simply value the freedoms that religion would almost certainly encroach on if not held in check.

Two events caught my attention in this regard. The first, more serious and threatening, was the imposition of a Blasphemy law. The other was downright ridiculous and while it might make Limerick the fool city of Europe, it certainly gives the rest of us a laugh. As the Times journalist David Sharrock put it, ‘it has been 14 years since her last major apparition in Ireland but the Virgin Mary is back and this time in the lowly form of a tree stump in Limerick.’

As the old saw goes, Limerick must be putting in a strong challenge to top the fool’s league of cities that hold to a belief that a man could live with his mother until he was 33 all the time believing she was a virgin, and she convinced he was god. Nothing more than the stump of a tree and yet the fools are flocking to it in their hordes thinking that Joe the Carpenter’s missus has suddenly decided to bestow her heavenly charms on the city’s population. From stable to stump the virgin is certainly not afraid to get her hands dirty in her recruitment drive to increase the ranks of the faithful. Does that expose me to prosecution under the new blasphemy law?

In most other circumstances a more rational explanation would be that the Keane/Collopy gang or their rivals in the McCarthy/Dundon outfit have sold a bad batch of whatever the drug of the day happens to be. This has led to hallucinations and delusions causing the afflicted to flock to trees where they light candles or mumble rosaries. At the last count 2000 of them had signed a petition demanding the preservation of the stump.

Not quite the type of phenomenon that the laughable moving statues of Ballinspittle proved to be in their day but enough to make secularists who pride themselves on being Irish a little self conscious. When abroad they might just feel that their hosts think they hail from the land of goblins, gnomes, Halloween witches and spiritual tree stumps. The undoing of the Ballinspittle moving statue gang was that they didn’t move fast enough. Some other gang of religious miscreants travelled from Dublin, caught the statue gang taking a breather and attacked them with sledge hammers on the grounds that they were idolatrous and blasphemous.

As for the blessed stump, even the local cleric, Willie Russell was sceptical. ‘There’s nothing there, it’s just a tree. You can’t worship a tree. A tree is a tree.’ At least a tree is something that can be seen. Willie’s type would have us worshipping the great invisible one. As sceptical as Willie but totally blind to any sense of irony was the view of his more senior colleague, priest Paul Finnerty, whose objections were based on a ‘wish to avoid anything which might lead to superstition.’ His superstitions alone shall prevail and shall have no false superstitions before them.

Commentators have not been slow to point out that these types of apparition coincide with recessions. Perhaps they do. Economic recession, religious revival, the old seesaw of fiscal failure and fantasy. No relief but religion aplenty. ‘Worshipping a tree stump’ – it’s as good as it gets.

Prison Brutality

Last year I and another former prisoner found ourselves speaking to a British official at a conference in England. We had no particular agenda. He was a strong Sinn Fein supporter, something I am not, and we were exchanging views with the official over drinks, which is what happens at such events. We talked about the history of prison from a republican perspective. We ventured the opinion that the British state should apologise for its behaviour which led to the hunger strike.

In turn the official expressed the view to us that a written history of the Northern Ireland Prison would not go amiss. The absence of it had left a serious gap in the literature on the prison experience. Much had already been penned from the prisoner perspective. We conceded there was some merit in that suggestion. The Chris Ryder account Inside The Maze purported to tell the story but never managed to. Since our conversation in England Governor by William McKee has been published. It was more about his own experience as a jail governor than about the prison service per se. So, without doubt, there is a vacuum that needs filled.

Our reason for agreeing that the story of the prison service should be told was simple although not one shared by the British official. The service had been such a violent prison gang that for it to pass off into history without its violence being narrated seemed such a travesty that any decision to give it the full Monty could only be welcome.

In an as yet unpublished review of Governor I made the following observation: ‘when prison staff are not held in check by prisoners their tendency towards violence increases proportionally.’ Violence and bullying by screws has always been endemic to prison life. Had it not been for the brutality of prison staff during the blanket protest the fatality rate for its off-duty members at the hands of the IRA would have been considerably lower.

Anyone who thinks screws in the North have become susceptible to a greater degree of professionalism over the years need only look at their behaviour in the lead up to the death by suicide of Maghaberry prisoner Colin Bell. Same old same old. Bell, a deeply disturbed and distressed individual, died while those supposed to be observing him for his own safety slept through it all, indifferent to the drama unfolding in front of their shuteye.

So, while shocking it came as no surprise to read a statement put out by an old comrade from prison, Danny McBrearty, highlighting the violence of Maghaberry screws against the Lurgan republican, Colin Duffy. According to the former prisoner who is now the National Chairperson of the Republican Network for Unity, Colin Duffy was assaulted first by two screws during a strip search and then by the ‘heavies’ of the Control and Restraint Unit:

Mr Duffy’s family have confirmed the extensive injuries he sustained as a result of this savage attack, as a result of having received blows to the head, face and upper body he now has severe bruising. The Republican Network for Unity understand that the two prison officers, not used to escort Mr Duffy at any time before, deliberately used the regular video-linked remand hearing to orchestrate the attack upon him. Both were making very insulting, provocative remarks to him beforehand and then used the excuse of the search procedures to carry out an unprovoked assault.

There is nothing that gives me cause to doubt the veracity of Danny McBrearty’s claim. For years we had to listen to the NIO praise the thugs of the Northern Ireland Prison Service and defend them against allegations of brutality which we prisoners either experienced or witnessed on a almost daily basis. Of the literally thousands of assaults carried out by screws during the blanket protest how many were ever acknowledged as having happened by the NIO? My recollection is that one drunken thug was demoted down to basic grade after he launched an unprovoked assault on a teenage blanket man.

Closed institutions are home to a wide range of illegal activities including violence and many forms of abuse. The screws are all too eager to put the boot in when someone of the status of Colin Duffy is served up to them. When the former H-Block IRA sentenced prisoner, Gary Kearney, was badly beaten in Maghaberry Prison while on remand a number of years ago too few people highlighted the case. The screws got away with it and as can be seen in the Duffy case are all to willing to deliver a repeat performance and encore if needed.

The screws rely on their victims being out of sight and out of mind. The prisoner depends on the public being made aware of his plight. No effort should be spared in publicising the asssault on Colin Duffy and bringing the thugs responsible to book. Public scrutiny should ensure that prison is a place, if not exactly comfortably, in which the violence of screws at least is abolished and designated a thing of the past.

Murmurs of Dissent

For the second June in succession we journeyed deep into the Cooley Mountains to assemble at the final resting place of Brendan Hughes. I brought my daughter with me. Along with Tommy McReynolds and myself, Brendan drank the night away on the day she was born in his favourite haunt, the Oasis, in Distillery Street. Friends picked us up a few miles from the mountains and we made our first stop at a pub where I sampled the cider and met others who were there for the same reason – Brendan’s memory, not the cider.

Once everyone arrived we winded our way to the spot where his ashes were scattered a year and a half ago, bringing to an end a tumultuous journey for one of the troubled souls of republicanism. A man who was denied peace of mind during much of his life finally rested at peace in an area he would often escape to for the tranquillity it offered.

It was heartening to immediately note that the crowd in attendance this year was even bigger than it had been when we last stood where Brendan lay. We made our way up a country lane and then over a low stone wall which was not just as easy to navigate as it appeared. Helping hands are always available to assist and guide the less agile – of which there are quite a few – across to the plot of land that held what was left of Brendan’s earthly remains.

Terry Hughes, a brother, opened proceedings. The crowd seemed to keep one eye on him and another on the sky and its clouds, heavily pregnant with the moisture they seemed ready to give birth to. His speech was short, merely pointing out that as time moved on it as becoming clear that his brother’s misgivings about the strategy of the movement that had claimed so much of his life was proving correct. Paddy Joe Rice of the famous IRA ‘Dogs’ and Ivor Bell a former chief of staff of the organisation were equally as brief in their comments, focussing on the integrity of the man we had come to remember and his ability to rapidly discern that things were not always what they were served up as.

When the speakers had finished flowers were laid and old friends pulled together in front of the memorial stone to be photographed together. It was brief event so in keeping with the Dark’s own disdain for formality and standing on ceremony.

Having done what we set out to do we retired to a local hotel where food and refreshments had been laid on and where I continued with the cider sampling practice started earlier in the day. As people relaxed the conversation turned to where the republican struggle had ended up, the disappointment with the outcome, the growing head of steam gathering behind the probe to find out just what did happen during the 1981 hunger strike, and speculation about the possibility and type of alternatives that might emerge as more people were beginning to accept that republicanism had been seriously short changed by the peace process. There was also discussion about another solid republican who had died in the period that had elapsed since our last venture into the Cooleys. John ‘big Duice’ McMullan did not have the public profile of his fellow D Company volunteer, the Dark, but his commitment to the republican cause and his staying power was every bit as formidable.

Later as I travelled home half listening to my daughter chatter about the things in life that interest her - republicanism and its icons do not figure highly there, Horrid Henry books and Nintendo DS games do – I reflected that had the Dark managed to extract a few more years from life he would have experienced a sense of satisfaction long denied him as alternative discourses mushroom and dovetail with the perspective he had for long offered. He would have derived a certain joy from the fact that the strangulation of republican sentiment had not been an unmitigated success for the Sinn Fein leadership; those ‘murmuring lips of dissent’ continued to undulate despite all attempts to hermetically seal them.

From the silence of the Cooley Mountains a little murmuring can still be heard.

On a Train with Yeats

It was not the discussion surrounding William Butler Yeats on the anniversary of his birth a few weeks ago that prompted me to pick up this book about him. Over a year ago I hurriedly pushed it into my bag before setting out for a train journey with my daughter. It was small and light but not too short that I would be left with nothing to read before the train shuffled into its destination. But even the best laid plans are said not to survive first contact with the enemy. The enemy on this occasion was a malfunctioning rail system causing a delay of three to four hours before the train even pulled away from the station. Anticipating arrival in Belfast Central by around 8 or 9 we got there, I recall, shortly after midnight. I was glad it was a power failure of some signalling system up the line rather than a bomb scare. That way I could complain about it. Giving out about delays resulting from bomb scares would sound a bit rich giving the amount of them I had caused in my teenage days. Yet I had to grumble about something, having brought a book too short; just to keep my mind occupied with something else.

The copy of Yeats I had with me was an old one I had picked up in a second hand book shop. It was first written many years ago by professor of literature, Denis Donoghue as part of the Fontana Modern Masters series. Any time I found myself browsing in the dusty shops of Belfast back streets whose shade seems to draw used book sellers - although unlike their counterparts the car dealers they seem not be shady – and one of the series appeared on the shelf, I would quickly bag it if it were not already at home. There were occasions when I reached up to place the new acquisition on one of my own book shelves only to find a copy already there. No great loss. That only occurs when a book is borrowed by someone and not returned. I am one of those types who remember who still have my books from 1993.

Although I prefer biography the Masters series is thematic rather than biographical. Still, there is always something to be learned from any book. So with a little patience, perseverance and probing even the dullest and densest will eventually yield something that make the journey through its pages a little less onerous.

Like many others, I know William Butler Yeats through phrases: a terrible beauty is born; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity; too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. Yet limitations on my own knowledge do not preclude awareness that Yeats’s contribution to literary life has been immense. Said to be perhaps not as great a poet as a playwright his legacy has run for longer than his mortal coil. Jonathan Powell borrowed from him for the title of his peace process memoirs Great Hatred Little Room. Donoghue probable annoyed the nationalistic purist through his claim that Yeats ‘invented a country, calling it Ireland.’ His contribution to founding the Abbey Theatre, which he hoped would promote the flourishing of national life, helped establish his ‘greatness’ in the world of culture.

Described by Donoghue as a ‘Tory nationalist’ – in this sense not all that different from the Tory nationalists who strut the political stage north and south today – this was less grating than the fact that Yeats had a strong liking for the fascisms that were sweeping the Europe of his day. Although Donoghue defends him against the charge of secretly harbouring an ambition to become the ‘Mussolini of Ireland’ there is no disputing his penchant for the generic dictator. Donoghue refers to his ‘cordiality to the Blueshirts.’ His preference for the land over the city, his revering of ‘the people’ in a volkish sense and his detestation of the ‘many headed-foam at Salamis’ – the emergence of modern democracy with its lack of order - all combined with his call to ‘limit the families of the unintelligent classes’ to mould a man of deeply reactionary views.

Donoghue stressed the centrality of Nietzsche to the thinking of Yeats. Being tardy in his responses to the letters of Lady Gregory, in his defence Yeats offered:

The truth is you have a rival in Nietzsche, that strong enchanter. I have read him so much that I have made my eyes bad again … I have not read anything with so much excitement since I got to love Morris’s stories which have the same curious astringent joy.

Yeats identified with the Nietzschean disdain for the herd and the elevation of the superman. Cuchulain became Yeats’s own superman. But Nietzsche is a much maligned character in the history of philosophy, having positions ascribed to him that he in fact never held. Much of this was down to his sister who took charge of his voluminous literary output after his illness and death and invented a Nietzsche the authentic one would not have recognised. She superimposed her own racist and anti-Semitic perspective onto her brother, at one point writing a lie riddled biography. Most damning of all she published the book Will to Power from a scattering of her brother’s unpublished notes and claimed that it represented his final testimony. So extensive had been her repackaging of his image that when Gerard Hodgins first introduced me to Nietzsche in prison my domineering thoughts were, ‘Was he not a fascist?’ He of course predated the emergence of fascism and while German by birth saw the dangers in the rise of Germanic nationalism. It is said to the extent that Nietzsche was racist it was only against the Germans whose nationalism he despised, and whom he castigated for not being ‘good Europeans.’

Curiously for an intellectual, Yeats was not a lover of ideas distrusting them for their philosophical grounding in concepts. ‘Descartes, Locke and Newton took away the world and gave us its excrement instead.’ No concession here that he viewed such as the fertiliser needed to replenish the earth he so worshiped. He loved to quote Goethe by saying that people never learn to know themselves by thought, just by action. As he expressed it, ‘do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.’ This ‘action’ focus would appear to have nourished the fetish for strong men, power and heroes.

I disembarked at Belfast Central not quite thinking I had discovered my own hero.

Denis Donoghue, Yeats. Fontana. Modern Masters Series. 1982.

Costly Speech

In matters of branches of the state launching an assault on the protection of sources providing information which helps enhance public understanding in Northern Ireland much recent media attention has focussed on the case of journalist Suzanne Breen. The Northern editor of the Sunday Tribune two weeks ago won a landmark decision in the courts against a police force determined to gain access to information it had no right to obtain.

Of equal importance to the protection of sources and free inquiry is the case of another figure in public life. This time the person concerned is a politician rather than a journalist, Ian Paisley Jnr of the Democratic Unionist Party, a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

It is more normal for politicians to call for censorship, seeking information buried rather than see it brought to the public fore. Indeed it was Ian Paisley Jnr’s Assembly colleague, Martin McGuinness, who vented spleen against ‘dissident journalists’ in the days preceding the PSNI move against Suzanne Breen.

However, on this occasion we find in the person of Paisley Jnr a politician who has not only brought serious information into the public domain but has defied the threat of prison in order to protect the source of that information, a prison officer who informed him of a file destruction policy implemented by prison staff in the wake of the Billy Wright killing in 1997. Wright was a feared loyalist militia leader shot dead in the Maze Prison by the INLA.

The controversial killing led to an official inquiry being set up. Its chair ordered Paisley Jnr to reveal the identity of the prison officer who had yielded the information about the files to him. The Assembly member refused and in court at the start of this week was fined £5000. As the imprisonment of a high profile politician on such a sensitive matter would be a grave political embarrassment Lord Justice Gillen, rather than hold the threat of jail over Paisley Jnr in the event of his refusal to cough up the money, has ordered the seizure of the equivalent amount in assets at the end of a three month period if there is no compliance.

In his ruling that the senior DUP member had acted in contempt of court Judge Gillen said "it is a recipe for legal anarchy for individuals to pick and choose with impunity those laws they will obey and those they will defy." Here we see the state moving to claw back ground ceded in the Breen case. It is clearly uncomfortable with the concept of source protection.

In this matter Ian Paisley Jnr’s political persuasion is of no consequence. He is guilty of nothing other than performing a valuable public service by ensuring that the public has access to information that many in officialdom would rather be kept hidden. Anti-censorship activists should keep this in mind when people other than journalists are subject to state coercion designed to uncover sources. Journalists themselves should find common cause with politicians who take a stand against the state on this matter.

Ian Paisley Junior should not be left to battle this case on his own. The costs of his legal defence alone work out at around £50,000. The cumulative effect of fine and costs amounts to a state attempt to price the protection of sources out of the information market. As the man in dock put it while vowing to protect his source to the grave: 'I think it's a very rare commodity in the world today that someone in public life is prepared to keep their word.'

Indeed. Not often do we see it. The price of keeping it for Ian Paisley Jnr is tens of thousands of pounds.

The Story Of Ireland

Fergal Keane is one of the great journalists to have worked in the Foreign Affairs section of the British media. His reportage of Africa in particular leaves a searing mark on the memory. His very human story in his powerful memoir All of these People on Valentina, a young girl who survived the Rwandan genocide despite being hacked with a machete by a Hutu Power thug, is a moving testimony to the power of his observation and depth of his empathy. In his book Seasons of Blood a palpable sense of fear is emitted from its pages, confirming that Keane is a writer who can convey like few others in his trade. A natural story teller his style is the essence of simplicity.

So it was with a sense of great expectation that I learned that he had been selected to both write and present a six part history series, jointly commissioned by BBC and RTE to be broadcast in 2011. It is billed as the first major television series about the history of Ireland since the Robert Kee 13 part epic in 1980. In his comment to the Sunday Tribune Keane said:

in documentary terms this is the biggest thing I have ever taken on. I do feel a responsibility to get it right. I see it as a chance to bring two things together, my passion for Irish history and everything I have experienced in conflict over the last twenty five years.

Titled The Story of Ireland refreshingly it shall not be featuring the voices of people like Bertie Ahern, Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley. Keane explained ‘very often what you get with politicians is their version of events. I’ll be reading everything they’ve said but this will be my take on it.’ This augers well for the series surviving the suffocating powers of peace processery. New voices will lift the rank staleness that for long has sat like a fog on our understanding of our own history.

Nephew of the writer John B Keane and son of the actor Eamon Keane, Fergal Keane will not be without his detractors. His family background in Fine Gael will inevitably lead to howls of ‘bias’ and ‘revisionism.’ But Keane is such a brave, competent and professional journalist that his credibility will be much stronger than his critics’ own. The family’s historical roots in Fine Gael have not endeared him to party icons like Garret Fitzgerald whose public image was beguiling in that it belied a sly steeliness Keane had a disdain for. Although he knew Charley Haughey was a rogue he preferred the Fianna Fail Taoiseach to his nemesis and counterpart in Fine Gael.

Keane has plenty of northern experience where the continuous practice of attending funerals of the conflict’s victims wore heavily on him. For a time he lived a few streets from where I grew up in Belfast’s Lower Ormeau Road and through which I often ambled, armed or otherwise, on IRA business He did not have a high opinion of the North’s politicians and there is certainly little chance of him being bamboozled or bullied by them. He has faced down thugs equally as avaricious as them and much more bloodstained.

Historical investigation is so important for giving us a sense of where we are today. In the hands of Fergal Keane that sense should be both honed and challenged. Although there is no chance of Ireland being united in 2016, by 2011 we might have a better understanding why not.