Victory to Blanketmen

It might have been a long flight for Richard O’Rawe, most of it a climb. It is said that aircraft are most strained during the ascent but once in the sky the cruise is relatively easy. The author of Blanketmen now finds himself cruising at a moral altitude well above that of his critics.

For long we had been regaled with delusional tales of how O’Rawe had been comprehensively demolished and that each new non-discovery by his opponents had finally concluded the debate in their favour. Truly underwhelming stuff where wish was parent to the thought.

Even before this week’s Irish News special on the 1981 hunger strike O’Rawe’s integrity had been both salvaged and enhanced. With Brendan McFarlane feeling compelled to reconfigure his account of the pivotal 1981 prison conversation between himself and O’Rawe in the wake of serious erosion of his original account, the die was cast. After that few believed that O’Rawe had made it all up. They may not have attributed any malign motive to McFarlane but simply acknowledged that O’Rawe’s narrative possessed a consistency that unlike the counter narrative was not chameleon in character. The pendulum of culpability swung decisively away from O’Rawe.

His vindication secured, that the Irish News debate took place at all was further validation of the position of Richard O’Rawe. That the claims made in his book Blanketmen almost five years ago are being given such exposure this week in a newspaper read by more Northern nationalists than any other were beyond his wildest expectations at the time of publication. It was also something Sinn Fein would have viewed as a nightmare had they any inkling. Now all O’Rawe has to do is turn up. His critics, by contrast, have no option but to turn up; a sign of how the balance of power of persuasion has undergone a significant shift. And where they needed to raise the level of their contribution they singularly failed. The issue has now been pushed to a new plateau. Had the original allegation in Blanketmen been about the existence of either the unicorn or the mermaid that would have been the last anyone heard of it. What kept it going to the point where O’Rawe’s narrative is now the dominant one, having successfully challenged and displaced the previous one, was the ring of truth that resonated from it.

There are echoes of the Birmingham Six emanating from this controversy. When convicted it looked as if their goose was cooked. Few gave them a snowball’s chance in hell. When challenged the British judiciary jerked and jumped as if they had had been tapped with a cattle prod. Howls of indignation met the challenges of those seeking to establish accuracy. ‘How dare anyone question us’ was the standard arrogant refrain. All critics were told to shut up and just accept the view of Lord Denning that all they had to offer was an appalling vista. They were smeared as terrorist sympathizers. It got the judiciary nowhere as they were swamped under an avalanche of probing and investigative journalism.

Seems something similar is taking place here. The regime of truth which had little true about it is being dismantled month by month. The old chant from within the bowels of the H-Blocks, ‘Victory to the Blanketmen’, has meaning like never before.

Green Book

A little story came my way lately which suggested that there might be a resurgence of the failed Provisional IRA campaign. It surprised me. The organisation’s leaders seem quite happy with having attained nothing and why they might wish to go about trying to achieve something doesn't figure. However, it is thought in some quarters that the military body, long believed to have been dormant, has been stung by accusations from cynics about its love-in with the PSNI and the surrender of most of its weaponry. Charges that these constitute a humiliating defeat for the not so secret army are being hotly denied. It is now reported to be reorganising and drawing up a new code of conduct for its members. Evidence for this was said not to have been manufactured by usual suspects, the securocrats, but came in the form of a new Green Book which was seized during a PSNI search of premises believed to serve as a money laundering facility for the organisation.

Alongside the new Green Book a magnified £10 note was also discovered which the PSNI are reporting was used during swearing-in ceremonies, having replaced the tricolour which had lost its relevance once the IRA’s mothership, Sinn Fein, had renounced any notion of pursuing such an outmoded political arrangement. According to a well placed source use of the new ‘conch’ prompted a fierce debate inside the Provisional IRA. The pragmatists were quite happy to lay a hand on the larger than life Sterling note and swear an oath of allegiance. The more nationalistic argued that the Northern Bank note represented a British symbol and insisted on something more appropriate being used such as the Euro even though the Euro is not the currency in the North, which is the only area in the country where the Provisionals retain a substantial presence and where few would appreciate the meaning. The traditionalists were having none of it and nailed their green colours to the past with their call for a punt note to be used during swearing-in ceremonies.

Failure to resolve the matter meant that any binding decision would be put off until an extraordinary general army convention could be summoned. In the meantime all three currencies would be represented at swearing-in ceremonies and those coming through could make their own choice.

According to a former member of the organisation agreement had barely been reached on this before another issue popped up to frustrate proceedings. Given that all current members as well as new recruits had to undergo a swearing-in ceremony long time volunteers including leaders had to place their hands on the note and swear allegiance to the prosperity of the nation. Most volunteers and new members were content to place one hand on the note and raise the other in the air while uttering the oath. Leadership figures were said to have placed both hands on the note and on occasion a jemmy bar was used to prise their fingers away from it before proceedings could continue. The leaders concerned claimed it was a sign of their commitment to the country’s prosperity. While their subordinates remained stum, not being permitted to say anything in public that might undermine faith in the infallibility of the leadership, the dissidents were not so kind, singing in bars the ABBA song, ‘Money, Money, Money’. To make matters worse the same refrain rang loudly in leadership ears from the Recruiting Department whose staffers applied for overtime as a result of the length of time it took to get leaders through the process.

I don’t know if any of it is true. Somebody might be having a laugh so I remain highly sceptical that any of this could be on the money. Nevertheless, not content to bury the story I probed around to see if anybody knew about the Green Book. This is what I was presented with.

Weak Defence

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity - Robertson Davies

Holidaying in Palma Nova does not easily lend itself to reading Irish newspapers. A break from things Irish in a political sense is one of the joys of being away although in reality it rarely works out that way. Anytime I have been abroad Irish political events have managed to follow me. Somebody either phones with news or some emblazoned newspaper headline jumps out upon entering a newsagents. Irish politics remain the centre of curiosity’s gravity. It’s part of our ethnocentricity.

Anyway, the one paper I did look at – apart from an English Language Majorcan daily – carried the headline ‘IRA millionaire faces 146 years in prison over fraud.’ The IRA aspect of the case helped capture my attention. In the genes I suppose. Of equal interest was the jail term suggested. It seemed a bit steep. The lowlife that knifed West Belfast shopkeeper Harry Holland to death two years ago will not have to serve even one twelfth of that. Fraud if not on Bernie Madoff proportions hardly registers on the Richter scale of horrible crime. A serial fraudster is rarely remembered in the way that a serial killer is.

Sean O’Neill’s misfortune came when the FBI raided his home in relation to an incident totally unrelated to him. During their search they came across a photo of O’Neill in the presence of the Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. That whet their curiosity and further probing revealed a chequered past. It transpired that away back in 1977 Sean O’Neill had pleaded guilty to a charge of belonging to Na Fianna Eireann, the youth wing of the IRA. In those days with rampant teams of RUC torturers doing pretty much as they pleased many young people had confessions forcibly extracted from them in which they admitted to belonging to Na Fianna Eireann. Earlier this year in separate cases two men from Belfast and Derry had convictions for membership of the youth group quashed. As the Irish News reported, ‘the court heard that in both cases the only evidence against the teenagers was confessions signed without the presence of a solicitor or an appropriate adult.’

Whatever the facts of the O’Neill case, guilty or not, a conviction for membership of Na Fianna Eireann hardly ranks in the serious offence category. Yet Sean O’Neill hardly made matters easy for himself as was illustrated by his ludicrous defence that the state had shown a ‘strong and impermissible Irish-Catholic prejudice’ in that it sought to depict Gerry Adams as an IRA leader rather than as a man who had brought peace. Adams undoubtedly made a major contribution to delivering peace but nobody other than the odd internet groupie or the Sinn Fein cumann in Outer Mongolia believes that he was not an IRA leader. Why would an American court fall for that one? A much better defence for Sean O'Neill would be for him to have argued that Adams was the IRA leader who brought peace and as such it was an honour to follow the example of US presidents and be photographed alongside him. That way he would have had a plausible defence in so far as it sounded truthful.

That sort of spoof that sits well in peace processery where nothing really has to be true - just useful for the purpose of getting by - won’t open doors in places where nonsense has no premium. What people might pretend to believe in Northern Irish political life can have no bearing on what is actually believed in a US law court where the temptation to succumb to Oscar Wilde’s logic that ‘illusion is the first of all pleasures’ has little purchase.

“A silent mouth is sweet to hear”

Today The Pensive Quill carries an article by guest writer, Mark McGregor

“A silent mouth is sweet to hear” by Mark McGregor

Different people seem to find different things to interest them in Johann Hari’s recent interview with Gerry Adams. For me one thing stood out and demonstrated again the absolute transformation SF have undergone. In the interview where Adams responds to claims, from named accusers, linking him with the IRA as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘rubbish’, he proceeds to claim:

‘that several figures in the Real IRA – again, he names them, but for legal reasons I can't – are in the pay of the British.’

The leader of a party that stood beside and point blank denied the clear and widely accepted claims of treachery against their trusted comrades Scappaticci and Donaldson took the opportunity to name people as members of the ‘RIRA’ and state they were agents of the British to a journalist. Johann doesn’t tell us if even a little colour came to his cheeks as he named the ‘touts’.

The journalist interviewing recognised the legal constraints of due process and innocent until proven guilty that operate even, to some extent, under the British judicial system and refused to print the names freely offered up by the Sinn Fein President. However, the fact stands that Adams did attempt to put these people's names in the public domain as both IRA members and touts without proffering a shred of evidence.

In days gone by SF have attacked (in more ways than one) those that name people as members of the IRA. They have refuted claims of people being ‘touts’ within the IRA as 'baseless slurs' and accused those making them of being 'agenda driven'. They have demanded proof for every allegation, dismissing and ridiculing those making allegations.

Now their leader makes the very same baseless claims they raged against in the recent past.

The leader of SF, speaking to the media, names people he claims are involved in armed republican struggle and attaches to them the tag ‘British agents’ as if it is the most natural thing in the world for a republican to be doing.

Of course this should be no surprise given other senior SF figures previously ploughed this furrow of briefing against republicans, including those involved in political groups hostile to their stance, by claiming they are in fact involved in armed struggle and/or also ‘touts’ in off the record chats with journalists.

The old adage of 'whatever you say, say nothing', seems to have mutated into 'whatever you say, say it to a journalist' for Sinn Fein. It remains to be seen when SF will move from their frankness in the company of the press and start speaking as openly with their friends in the RUC/PSNI. That’s assuming they haven’t already headed down that road in secret.

Hari and the Magician

In these less than troubled times I don’t make an effort to read interviews with Gerry Adams. Sinn Fein’s fall from republican grace no longer interests me to the extent that it once did and one Adams interview is pretty much the same as another. That I made a point of reading the one he did with Johann Hari for the Independent was more because of the interviewer rather than the interviewee. Hari has long been a powerful writer who, given to much reflection, often sees things through a prism that pulsates with insight.

From Adams’ perspective it was not a strong interview. It seems to be the way as of late. The eternal president has failed to cut the mustard since the debacle on RTE in the run up to the 2007 general election in the Republic. Not only that but he is persistently dragged beneath the surface of credibility by a self created albatross fashioned by his denials of IRA membership past or present. He comes across as instantly implausible, giving rise to suspicions that this lies behind his not having featured in the contentious hunger strike debate fuelled by the claims of Richard O’Rawe in his challenging book Blanketmen.

That said, he still managed to pull something out from his bag of tricks. Having negotiated such a small return for the great effort expended in the IRA’s armed struggle, Adams, chutzpah personified, made the remarkable comment that ‘this has been the only IRA campaign that has succeeded. Because every other one fought and then another generation had to pick up the fight, and continue fighting.’ A cynic might take the view that is only true to the extent that Sinn Fein will do its utmost to tout on any new generation inclined to take up the fight the Adams leadership abandoned.

The IRA campaign was an unmitigated failure, achieving only an internal solution, something the organisation pledged throughout its existence to thwart. Adams' point would be true if the IRA had fought for an internal solution rather than against it. But no amount of revisionism can alter the historical record which is out there for all and sundry to look at and judge for themselves.

In his interview Hari puts forward the thesis that Adams ‘decided to shift his goal: to aim for full equality for Catholics within a partitioned Ireland, and argue for reunification solely at the ballot box.’ It seems an accurate enough summation of the Adams position, the only problem being that Hari rather than Adams said it. Elsewhere Adams and his permanent leadership cabal have been consistent in claiming that there is something transitional about their acceptance of the Good Friday Agreement rather than the less dynamic stages theory outlined by Hari.

Even if we reject Hari’s static interpretation of the Sinn Fein project in favour of the more dynamic transitional properties ascribed to it by Adams, the whole ensemble in which Sinn Fein is currently enmeshed is undeniably reformist and fails to resemble republicanism as long articulated by the Provisional movement. Whatever its merits as a reformist strategy, as a republican project it falls abysmally short of its own stated goals and can hardly be held up as an outcome untainted by gross failure.

When it came to the matter of what else might be in his bag of tricks Adams looked less like he was pulling a rabbit from a hat and more like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The Sinn Fein leader handled the magician’s trick of making things disappear in a very clumsy fashion. While strenuously denying any involvement in the disappearance of Jean McConville he seemed ill at ease with Hari’s line of questioning.

When, a few years ago, Adams met two of her children, he told them: "Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared." But he wasn't. He was jailed more than six months later. Is she the body in his mental attic, the one he can't forget? … His usually long sentences begin to fracture … And he looks like he has run out of words. There is a long silence … He looks down, then away.

Forced to abandon an earlier claim that he had been in prison at the time of her disappearance, he knows that he could not maintain the falsehood and emerge as unscathed as he had from his recent ridiculous assertion in the face of irrefutable evidence that he had been singing in his jail cell ‘Look on the Bright Side of Life’ a year before the song was even released. Narrating demonstrable fictions around a war crime is a much more risky venture than narrating them around a song.

Culpable or not, his depiction by Hari reinforces the implausibility that has come to characterise his media performances. Undoubtedly heroic in the face of British abuses he remains confronted with the logic of Emerson that every hero becomes a bore at last. Even Harry Houdini would be hard pressed to devise an escape from the consequences of that.

Just Get It Done

Fortnight, July/August 2009

Governor, Inside the Maze by William McKee
Gill & Macmillan Ltd (Feb 2009)

Book Review

The Father’s Day irony of receiving a gift a book on the Maze Prison written by a former prison governor was not lost on me. Buried in the administrative section for much of his career from 1977 when he first joined up, William McKee, with 15 years experience in the service to stand by him was becoming a governor at the time I was being released so I had no opportunity to cross his path.

Having just finished Sam Miller’s brilliant On The Brinks in which Miller detailed that portion of his life spent being maltreated by prison staff I did not feel quite ready to read another book about the Maze, even if on this occasion it was written from an entirely different perspective. As it was a Father’s Day gift I relented and read it on the day. I am glad that I did because there is an infinite range of worse ways to spend a Sunday than a good read.

It is sometimes said by people like me that the prison service is the only job in the world where you start at the bottom and work your way down. Former governor McKee might agree but only in a radically different context. His downward spiral within the service was one caused by severe stress and depression which led him to explore suicide, ended both his career and marriage, and for a long time put him on the psychiatrist’s couch where he was treated for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

It is this willingness to discuss his own mental health issues that helps make Governor a gripping read. It also places McKee in a position where he finds it easy to empathise with prisoners who undergo similar problems and to campaign for better conditions for that type of prisoner. While the death of Colin Bell from suicide in Maghaberry shows the revanchist mentality among prison staff, forever resentful of ground ceded to prisoners’ welfare, things have moved on from the days when a self righteous god crusading governor could tell some unfortunate prisoner to seek in his bible solutions for despair.

It would be wrong to say I expected more from this book. I expected something different. But William McKee, while in the prison service during the most troublesome of years, was not in the front line for some of the events the public would like to hear more on such as the Blanket protest, hunger strikes and the 1983 escape. It was his misfortune, however, to find himself as duty governor in charge of the prison on the day Billy Wright was killed by a three man INLA team, two of whom have since died. Throughout the book the Wright killing overshadows the narrative like a dark cloud waiting to open up and shower the author with a ponderous deluge. Leaping out from the pages is the feel that part of the reason for writing this book was a therapeutic one: William McKee needed to take a long run up to that inevitable confrontation with his demons. Page after page the reader senses him peering into that particular abyss before finally taking the plunge.

At some point during the inquiry into the Wright killing there was a suggestion made by another member of prison staff that McKee was known for telling porkies. There was a moment reached where I felt ready to concur as he began relaying tales that he had picked up at training college. I winced too soon. He as quickly explained that he had no way of authenticating any of the stories that he and his colleagues-to-be had been weaned on. The significance lies less in that and more in the fact that prison myths have developed and seemed to run without any substantiation. One is the tale of prisoners who had disappeared while in custody, never to be seen or heard of again. Can a name be put to any person that this might have happened to? Not a solitary one.

At one point the most puzzling of anecdotes appears in the book which conjures up images of sexual voyeurism. What were his editors doing? McKee was on duty as a prison officer when a couple began to have sex in front of him. The detail he used to describe it seemed better placed in a Jackie Collins novel. A WTF moment stopped me in my tracks as I thought ‘WTF is this?’

William McKee provided insight into the enormous stress that prison staff endured in the job under the direction of a management system that cared little for either those in its charge or custody. ‘Duty of care’ might as well have been Latin. The dominant managerial ethos was one of ‘just get it done.’ McKee paid the price in terms of health and family for his moth to the flame-like dedication or ambition. Throughout his life as a governor he was forced to move home on many occasions, sometimes because loyalists or republicans had been collating information on his whereabouts and movements. On one occasion he rushed from his home having just been warned by security personnel that a loyalist hit squad was en route to kill him.

William McKee has been associated with calls for an overhaul of the prison service. Publicly he has expressed misgivings about the commitment of prison staff to make the changes necessary to create a modern enlightened prison regime. At the same time this book reveals another dimension to his character; one which resented concessions to prisoners. He frequently bemoaned the status of the Maze as being anything but a normal prison. This displayed a lack of understanding of the experience of the prison he helped govern. When prison staff are not held in check by prisoners their tendency towards violence increases proportionally. As the former governor of Peterhead Prison in Scotland – once infamous for its cages – told an audience in Edinburgh three years ago, a prisoner once explained to him the cause of prison violence: ‘Governor, your gang is bigger than my gang.’

William McKee, Governor: Inside the Maze, Gill & Macmillan. ISBN 978–07171–4591-1

Review first published in Fortnight, July/August 2009

Might Sinn Fein Merge With Labour?

Today The Pensive Quill carries an article by guest writer, Tommy McKearney

Might Sinn Fein Merge With Labour, by Tommy McKearney
Fourthwrite, Summer 2009

Denis Bradley’s proposal in his column in the Irish News that Sinn Fein should concentrate exclusively on advocating Irish unity while eschewing socialism is misguided. To do so would leave the party increasingly isolated in the South while confining it to a dangerously narrow brand of nationalism in the North. For republicans, after all, uniting Ireland politically is only a means to the end of establishing a republic across the entire island. What form that republic takes assumes ever greater importance as the global economy tumbles deeper into recession. Indeed, Gerry Adams would be well advised to seek a much closer formal alliance with the Irish Labour Party rather than move away from Left politics.

Following the recent elections South of the border, Mr. Adams’s party finds itself in political ‘no-man’s-land’. At a time when economic hardship has led to widespread disenchantment with government policy and practice, the party failed to capitalise on a tide of resentment that only a few years ago would have resulted in handsome dividends. Prospects of a breakthrough in the Republic are fading and with these plummeting hopes, go a carefully crafted strategy that has been at the core of Sinn Fein efforts for over a decade. Party leaders know that this lost momentum will not easily, if ever, be regained.

The most telling aspect of the setback is not that Sinn Fein failed to gain a significant number of extra seats but that it was unable to stake out any identifiable ground for itself. At local government and European level, Labour increased its quota of elected representatives, as did smaller left-wing parties such as the Socialist Party, People Before Profit and Seamus Healy’s WUAG in Tipperary. Clearly there was a rise in support for the Left. Equally obvious from Sinn Fein’s flat performance is that, in spite of its overwhelmingly working class base, the organisation is not deemed a left-wing party.

Nor did the collapse of Fianna Fail, the ‘republican party’, benefit Sinn Fein. A majority of southern voters are convinced that the northern issue is resolved and see little point in pursing it further. Irish unity is viewed by many in the Republic as a vague aspiration and one they are not currently willing to prioritise. This outlook might well change but only if an all-Ireland state were to offer something much more tangibly attractive than a hazy promise to merge the current departments of transport and health. Reality for Sinn Fein is that it has failed to carve out a distinctive niche for itself in southern Irish political life, making it difficult to avoid the conclusion that at best, the party will stall indefinitely in its current marginal position.

However gloomy prospects may be for Sinn Fein in the South, its plight cannot be a source of comfort for left of centre parties and especially not for Labour. In spite of a heartening result, Eamonn Gilmore and colleagues are aware that in the midst of the most severe economic crisis in half a decade, their party has secured the support of less than 15% of the Republic’s electorate. If a general election were called at the moment, Labour could aspire only to acting as junior partners in a Fine Gael led coalition. Displacing Fianna Fail might cause a degree of satisfaction among party activists but it would not break any mould nor would it lead to significant redistribution of national wealth and income. Longer term, the party would very likely pay a price once again for its cyclical relationship with the strongly free-market Fine Gael.

One option for both organisations would be to end the long standing rift between working class republicans and the Irish Labour movement that emerged post-Treaty. A split that has perpetuated Civil War politics by throwing up on one hand the unlikely pairing of Labour and Fine Gael while simultaneously allowing a right of centre party claim the loyalty of a large section of modestly waged citizens. As a consequence, Irish politics has stagnated for decades as two very similar political philosophies exchanged office but with little change in direction.

A pooling of Labour and republican electoral tallies would, on recent results, produce a total approaching that of Fianna Fail. Allowing that other left leaning parties and independents would, at least, give critical support to such an initiative, the basis for a real challenge to the revolving door of Irish politics would exist. North of the border, Sinn Fein would surely benefit in the long run by clearly identifying itself as socialist and thus affording it an opportunity to avoid a pitfall it now faces of becoming merely the 6-Counties’ ‘Catholic’s Party’.

For these changes to come about there would have to be bold and generous behaviour from key players in the two main parties and a great deal of understanding from their members. Unlike the deal between Democratic Left and the Labour Party, a successful partnership would not see one group submerge its identity into that of the other. In order not to leave significant numbers behind it would be important to combine both constituencies into a republican labour party.

There is no evidence that the leadership of either party is contemplating such a move at present but the underlying logic is compelling. Sinn Fein has put its insurrectionary past behind it and is striving to make as telling an impact on Southern political life as it has in the North. Its socialist credentials are a tad threadbare but its support base is working class and feels more comfortable with social democracy than neo-liberalism. Labour’s socialism, on the other hand, is somewhat jaded but still strikes a note with many of its supporters. In short, there is little to separate the parties ideologically and cavilling from either about skeletons in the cupboard would ring hollow in light of history. More important is the fact that on their own they have limited options, while together; they could provide the catalyst for realignment in Irish politics at a time when the opportunity is greater than ever.

If, as Denis Bradley suggests, the time is appropriate for a debate within Sinn Fein about its policies, then a more productive discussion might take place around the benefits of amalgamating with the Irish Labour Party. And for those who dismiss such a prospect out of hand, it’s only necessary to point out that for parties which brought us the Mullingar Accord and the Chuckle Brothers; a republican and labour partnership sounds a relatively modest and plausible proposal and one that promises more than appears to be currently on offer.