Amis Experience

Experience supposedly comes at a cost. The Martin Amis book of the same title was anything but costly. I paid for it the grand sum of £1 on a visit to Belfast. I was about to catch the bus back and did not want to make the journey without something to read. Little choice but to call into one of the city’s well stocked second hand bookshops. It proved a good buy. It kept me going for the southbound journey and Amis is such a good writer. I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t read him prior to that journey. Davy Adams, the Irish Times columnist, had once recommended him otherwise I almost certainly would not have picked it up even though in our home library there has been for some years an as yet unread copy of Koba The Dread by the same author. I was not even familiar with the title 'Experience' although it had been published for almost a decade before falling into my hands.

Years ago, browsing through libraries and used book shops I would come across books by the father of Martin Amis. That I noticed them was solely down to the fact that for some bizarre reason my grandmother had named my father ‘James Kingsley’. When I made the mistake of disclosing this to Martin Livingstone during the blanket protest both he and his cell mate laughed for what seemed like days. When the mood took him and he wanted my attention for something a shout of ‘Kingsley’ would ring out. That memory would always visit me whenever I came across a Kingsley Amis book. Warm as it was, however, it was never enough to tempt me to leaf through its pages.

In the second hand copy of the son’s work now in my possession it was not difficult to get a feel for the father. Not that what was felt had much endearing to it. Martin Amis would not see it that way and ‘KA’ looms warmly large throughout his Experience. A somewhat flip-flop but entertaining account of the life of the son, at times expressed through boarding school correspondence, the best lines in Experience come from other writers. The pick of the bunch by far came from Kingsley rather than Martin. Citing from his father’s book The Anti-Death League, Amis the younger presents to the reader a poem written to a severely disabled boy where the narrator is God. Good old god mercilessly tormented the limbless boy over his physical state, at one point telling him:

This is just to show you whose boss around here
It’ll keep you on your toes, so to speak
... But just a word in your ear if you’ve got one
Mind you DO take this is in the right spirit
And keep a civil tongue in your head about me
Because if you DON’T ....

Worth reproducing in full at some point, it continues in similar vein capturing the debilitating essence of belief in a caring, benevolent god. Martin thought it was one of KA’s best poems. Not having read others I can only feel that judged on its own standards the poem is a brilliant piece of sceptical prose capturing the absurdity of worshipping a dictatorial monster. Moreover, when Martin Amis writes of the death of his cousin Lucy Partington at the hands of serial killer Fred West, his comment ‘this is where we really go when we die: into the hearts of those who remember us’ was a secular reassertion of his father’s own humanist stance against superstition.

Amis was deeply disturbed by the death of this cousin. Having vanished in December 19732, she had been missing for years before her family discovered her ultimate fate. The sense of loss amplified by the infliction of unnecessary pain through the act of disappearing a murder victim is something a small number of families in Ireland understand only too well. The anguish of Amis comes through when he contrasts the writing of Lucy Partington with a letter penned by West from his prison cell. The killer’s semi-literate status is presented as evidence of the brutal essence of his character whereas his victim’s intelligent and reflective creativity shows her as a gentle spirit. In the specific circumstances of the two characters the contrast is not in dispute but to equate a low level of education with brutalism, and erudition with sensitivity and compassion is hard to sustain in a more general sense. Although it does seem that, rather than mere snobbery being responsible for Amis’s framing, it was more a deep frustration- driven animus toward West for his crimes. This is most pronounced in the conflicting emotions he expresses when contrasting suicide in general and West’s own act of ‘felo de se’.

Suicide is omnicide. But it is not in me to pass any judgement on it. It escapes morality. Throughout history suicide has been arduously detaching itself from human censure; the curses and penalties; the rock-heaped graves in unsanctified ground, the defiled cadavers. Why drive a stake through their hearts when, as Joyce knew, their hearts have been broke already?

Nothing so detached toward West who ‘crept towards, death, he cringed out of existence.’

While by no means a morbid work a recurring theme in Experience is death, the end of existence, whether reached by cringing means or not. It seems to weigh heavily in the author's mind. How his father and Philip Larkin, the poet, approached it, what Socrates and Saul Bellow had to say on it all focussed his mind. And yet there is nothing other than Larkin’s last words to the nurse holding his hand as he left for the final time. ‘I am going to the inevitable.’ What else is left to embrace us but its infinite and endless nothingness?

On a lighter note Martin Amis was plagued by problems with his teeth. He even writes of having toothache on the days his children were born. Eventually he had major dental surgery and quoted a 1943 letter from Vladimir Nabokov in which the letter writer described a return from the dentist: ‘my tongue feels like someone coming home and finding his furniture gone.’ Anybody with the Experience of a dental chair knows the feeling.

Experience by Martin Amis. Jonathan Cape: 2000

Derelict and Delinquent

The men of god have been making the news headlines again. Not for helping the poor, visiting the imprisoned, tending to the sick or anything decent like that. No, for the men of god it is the same old, same old: guided by the holy sperm they are back in the public spotlight for raping the nation’s children.

Reports into clerical molestation of children are all too frequent these days. Ferns, Ryan, now Murphy, the latest to remind us that in our midst lurks a malevolent army of rapists blessed before battle by their leading chaplains and absolved of sin after it. As a society we are forced to endure these reports, our disgust supposed to be assuaged by meaningless apologies from the clerical commanders. Yet the vile leaders like Bishop Magee remain in place, the institution to which they belong still legal.

These never ending reports only tell us that we look at the problem, make recommendations, write about it, wring our hands on television and radio, and end up permitting the institution responsible to carry on, its structure uninfringed, its leadership intact. We know that within the loins of the Catholic Church a beast is stirring, ready to rape again. Yet it remains a legal entity with state approved involvement in our schools.

Child rape and its cover up are endemic within the Catholic Church in Ireland. It should now be banned and membership of it proscribed. At the end of World War 2 the SS was declared a criminal organisation and those who fought in its ranks denied pension rights and other entitlements that Wehrmacht troops could avail of. Not everyone who fought in the Waffen SS behaved disgracefully. But the institution had little in the way of defence against allegations of endemic criminality. By now a powerful case can be made that the church is a criminally perverse institution which contributes nothing to society. It can give no moral guidance. What could it possibly know about moral guiding? Immoral riding is more to its liking. At best its leading figures have time and time again demonstrated that they know not the difference between right and wrong. A less benign but better grounded view would deem them accomplices before and after the fact in the persistent rape of children.

There is plenty of legislation on the books for dealing with the nation’s criminal gangs. Why should the criminal institution that is the Irish Catholic Church be exempt? Why aren’t its leaders hauled before the courts and tried for collusion in the rape of society’s children? There has to be an effective means for dealing with the custodians of child rape. It is not that the bishops need to be interned without trial. There is an abundance of evidence against them that could be used in the Central Criminal Court. They would receive more justice in criminal law than their victims ever benefited from in canon law.

There should be no special privilege for these people because of religion. Religion is nothing but an opinion. That it should have an exalted status over and beyond other opinions which protects it from probing and democratic scrutiny is corrosive of the societal good. When Michael McDowell as Justice Minister told Cardinal Connell in the wake of the Ferns Report that the church’s canon law had all the status in Irish law of the rules governing membership of a golf club he was defending a very important secular tenet. Connell of course was outraged. He wanted canon law to be treated as if it were the law of a separate state.

To the extent that Connell was justified in what he said the Church and its canon law should be treated as a rogue state. It should be pursued like a pariah, its leaders and operatives afforded no cover, given no sustenance.

A priest hunt against all who practice priestcraft should be avoided. Not every cleric is a fiend. There are some, a minority no doubt, who are in the Church because they are motivated by a love of a god who on occasion they believe they see in the person of another in need of succour. They neither participated in nor approved child molestation. They may not have spoken out when they should have but the anonymous pressure of the group can be stifling and it would be punitive to select these clerics out for anything other than mild rebuke.

The vile cabal of bishops and their lewd but lesser lieutenants are what needs to be hauled before an Irish Nuremburg for their crimes against the humanity of our children. Figuratively they should go to the gallows where the drop will bring them to their own moral level. Derilect and delinquent their place in society is apart from it.

Long Way Down From London

There are few things that sum up the failure of the Provisional IRA campaign more definitively than the recent call by one of its former leaders for people to inform on those republicans still wedded to the notion of armed struggle. It is not an isolated action but one that slots in neatly to the current mode in Sinn Fein where its key leaders have been taking up positions unimaginable not so many years ago. In some cases people who ordered others executed for informing have been to the fore in urging informers to come forward. If such people do come forward they run the risk that those they inform upon will follow the example laid down by those now urging them to become informers. The undignified spectacle of hooded bodies, bound and gagged, jumps to mind.

The shift from a call to arms to a call to tout captures in one still frame the totality of the collapse of the Provisional IRA. There is no need to watch the twists and turns to fully grasp the summersault. When someone told me Gerry Kelly had been lending his shoulder to the tout wheel I was not surprised. It is what Sinn Fein leaders do these days, boxed in as they are with nowhere else to go. Still, I wanted to actually listen to what he had to say and not merely rely on an account of someone else who might have embellished Kelly’s words. But there was no embellishment. There are many things Gerry Kelly, like his colleagues, has not been clear on. But that was not the case here. Kelly could not have been more explicit.

I reflected on the ground Gerry Kelly has covered in his political odyssey from Irish republican activist to British state administrator. His current political stance places him in the same line up as those RUC officers currently in the PSNI against whom he fought while in the Provisional IRA. They have not changed their position, continuing in their role of defending the integrity of the Northern Irish state as part of the UK against armed republican assault. It also pitches Kelly against those members of the IRA who he once stood alongside waging armed assault on the Northern Irish state and who continue to do so today. He wants information about those he fought with to be given to those he fought against.

What Gerry Kelly feels about this on a personal level is anybody’s guess. He must know it is a place he never wanted to be in. He realises it is the outcome of a ‘revolution betrayed’, where the revolutionaries become ‘mimic men’ aping those they once waged revolution against. He is aware that he had as many votes when he bombed London as those who just this week bombed the HQ of the Policing Board in Belfast. He intuitively understands the abject moral poverty of a position that demands they must be informed upon and jailed because they lack any mandate while awarding him plaudits for his non-mandated role in the armed struggle. It is hard to imagine he actually derives personal enjoyment from it. Yet, on a political level he is now left on the British side of the Rubicon and very much against those republicans who refuse to cross over. He finds himself in the company of the British police force that in an act of political policing recently harassed and arrested his old London bombing team comrade Marian Price.

As Leonard Cohen once sang:

That's right, it's come to this,
yes it's come to this,
and wasn't it a long way down

Not So Slippery Anymore

When I first heard of David Cook he was grabbing the headlines because he was the first non-unionist Lord Mayor of Belfast since partition. A pretty mundane event these days, but back in 1978 it seemed a radical departure from ‘the way things are done here so know your place.’ It broke the mould even if the mould quickly reset itself for another lot of years.

Decades later I met David Cook at a book launch in Belfast and we discussed, in no serious depth, a range of issues. On the few occasions I have met with him since, they have all been at book launches, always a site where the widest range of ideas intersect either to clash or converge. On our first encounter he was completely at ease in the company of alternative opinions and different perspectives. We even digressed into atheism, evolution and Dawkins. There were no taboos with him. There was nothing about him to suggest he might be the blinkered type eager to seek clerical blessing and then set out upon his trusty steed to lead the charge in favour of creationism being peddled in the science class. I don’t know if, like me, he felt the concept of a divine, pulling strings from the celestial, was bunkum, but it is easy to see how he was the type of person best suited as the public face of mould-breaking back in the 1970s.

In the mouldy old place that is Northern Irish politics people thinking outside the loop come like a breath of fresh air. They sketch. Depending on the width of the brush they use or the dexterity of their strokes, conveying accurately the political terrain that lies in front of them is an art rather than a science. For that reason their output is often easily dismissed. But to have that extra window to peer through as well as letting in some fresh air and enhancing light has a value all of its own.

Some time after I first met him he sent me a copy of a paper he had published some years earlier prior to the Good Friday Agreement. Its title was Blocking The Slippery Slope, something many claim to devote their time to on what they allege is the black ice surface of the Northern Irish political terrain. The paper now published as a booklet was based on a speech he had given to a gathering of the South Belfast Association of the Alliance Party. Only 24 pages in length it is a quick read. Yet Cook managed to pack more vision into this slim line product than many writers manage to come up with after 24 years of voluminous scribbling.

The argument made by Cook was summed up concisely in the subtitle: ‘Why Unionism should go for a North-South Institution with Limited Functions and Executive Powers.’ Reading this 12 years after it was first penned it was amusing to see how well honed the political antennae of the author were. In relation to republicanism as it then was he argued that probably most republicans ‘have come to the view ... that, subject to certain conditions, partition is going to have to be lived with.’ This came at a time when republican leaders were telling their followers that a united Ireland was just around the corner. Cook also drew attention to what ‘not very intelligent republicans’ failed to understand i.e. that Protestants would not be happy in a united Ireland even were there to be every protection imaginable under the sun for their religion. For Cook that was only half the story if even that. The rest was that Protestants saw themselves as British and wanted to remain under British rule.

This type of thought should have a resonance today where in the midst of a phenomenon that Martin Amis once termed ‘stupefied incuriosity’ there can still be found suggestions that once this or that procedure or institution is tweaked the border which is only a line on the map can be buffed out by plenty of discourse about economic cooperation, following which Protestants will be willing to give up on Britain. No one curious enough to ask them?

How even more delusional such suggestions look today than they did when David Cook was writing. Whether we like it or not the IRA campaign failed. The border is here to stay, perhaps longer than it might otherwise have were it not for the armed struggle. You can be as British in Belfast today as you can in Finchley. Cook got to the point when he wrote ‘there is not going to be a 32 county unitary state in anything like the near future, or possibly at all because there are not anything like enough people either in Northern Ireland or in the Republic who want that to happen.’ But even he must have been surprised at how much Sinn Fein expects the nationalist community to put up with so that some party officials can administer British rule as a matter of priority rather than opposing it.

Nevertheless, despite the waste of it all, he is not as irascible as might be expected about republicanism, the rise of which, he contended, was ‘a dreadful monument to two or three generations of an inadequate, mean spirited and sectarian leadership of unionism.’ Cook clearly knew republicanism better than it knew itself. Just get the British to change rather than leave and that would satisfy most of its adherents.

With this in mind Cook while critical of republicans was scathing of unionism to which he protested the ‘habitual sectarian mean-spiritedness of so many unionist spokesmen and representatives’ which although unnecessary and counterproductive nonsense had ‘more serious consequences than nonsense.’ Anti-nationalist often amounted to being anti-Catholic. David Trimble who would eventually arrive at Cook’s position was dismissed by the author as displaying gross inadequacies in his speech at the 1996 Unionist Party conference where he said no compromise between unionism and nationalism was possible: ‘he is wrong and he has clearly not yet entered the real world.’

Cook’s political vision in 1997 was an all Ireland political administration that would not be the united Ireland of republican mythology. Such an administration would give rise to the conditions whereby a thirty two county unitary state ‘was off the agenda either forever or for several generations to come’. While he might prefer the scenes to be played by different actors with more talent, he is unlikely to complain that he got ushered to the wrong screen. The plot is the same and even without an effective all Ireland administration there is nothing on the agenda but the agenda.


Blocking The Slippery Slope by David Cook. Banford Press, 1997.

Manhandled

It is probably something of a truism to say that the French soccer team handled the World Cup play off against Ireland in Paris on Wednesday better than the Swedish referee. Something of a turnip, the key match official remained rooted to his spot and failed to notice the adroitly administered but illegally executed coup de grace that ensured we won’t be bored by Ireland’s contribution to next year’s World Cup finals in South Africa.

Trappatoni’s firm played with heart in Paris but the chances of the team managing to dazzle for any period of time are remote. Kick, rush, hope for the best, not the ingredients for scintillating soccer. You need to be an indefatigable nationalist rather than a soccer aficionado to derive enjoyment from watching them.

The team’s exit has been the topic of conversation all over. On a bus yesterday evening two women were discussing it loudly. ‘Disgraceful’ was the preferred if constantly repeated adjective of one of them as she spat it out in a strong West Indian accent. Then she announced to the laughter of the rest of us that Stevie Wonder would have seen the Thierry Henry handball incident that sealed Ireland’s fate and saved France’s bacon.

World Cups rarely live up to anticipation and fail to deliver the goods that the viewing public and paying fans have a right to expect given the abundance of talent that is often trumpeted to be on display. There is little chance that South Africa will reproduce the flowing play that graced last year’s European Championship hosted by Switzerland and Austria. Despite the best efforts of Donkeyonkis and his ten fellow defenders even pointless Greece failed to diminish the quality of that competition, the best international soccer spectacle since the 1970 Mexico World Cup finals.

I only watched part of the game two nights ago. Despite having little interest one way or the other the enthusiasm of the Irish fans was infectious although not enough to hold me beyond half time. The team did enough to win but not enough to convince the turnip in charge that officiating at such a level requires more judgement than the average vegetable is capable of delivering.

The soccer powers-that-be will prefer France to travel next summer and will not rue Ireland sitting at home. The French, we are told, have an abundance of Gallic flair, although watching Thierry Henry you could be forgiven for thinking it was Gaelic flair. Kerry’s Gooch Cooper could hardly have used his hand to better effect. The problem with French flair however is that it is latent. Nobody sees it anymore. Just as the capital of cuisine is now Tokyo rather than Paris, the epicentre of soccer skill is no longer rooted in the Parisians. That ghost was given up with, even before, the departure of Zinedine Zidane. Beaten finalists in the last World Cup final the French slogged it out, and in some instances slugged it out, with the equally pedestrian Italians. It is one of the paradoxes of our minds that we still remember that forgettable occasion. It is hard to see this current French side go far in South Africa. If they do, stand by for another underwhelming sporting extravaganza minus any extravagance.

Chances are France will play like they did when they set out to defend their crown in Seoul. They scrounged a point but failed to score a single goal and slithered off home like snails sans the customary gourmet value that a French palate might appreciate. They got eaten up anyway.

No point in being too hard on Thierry Henry. When Diego Maradona backhanded English hopes in the face during the 1986 World Cup in Mexico I temporarily considered taking up Catholicism so that I could better argue for his canonisation. And had Robbie Keane got away with his handball early in the first half in Paris, dribbled past two defenders and hit the back of the onion bag it would be hard to find many on these shores screaming for a rematch. Robbie would be a hero, given the freedom of Dublin, and Sarkozy dismissed as a plaintive frog who would be better advised to turn his sour grapes into wine and drown his sorrows.

It was a tough outcome. Teams are sometimes bundled out of competitions. Ireland’s misfortune was to have been handled out of one. And despite the wailing and the gnashing of teeth had the Irish team done what it ought to have last Saturday during the home leg, Henry’s sleight of hand would have been academic. One winner is the Irish manager Giovanni Trapattoni. The conditions under which his team failed to qualify will ensure that the media in its hunt for a new Steve Staunton will be unable to label him Crapattoni for some time to come.

Section 44

A former republican prisoner rang me this morning. He sounded angry and gave out about ‘those bastards’ having followed him into the school grounds where he was leaving his daughter off for her day's lessons. Which set of bastards I asked him given that quite a few sets had hassled him over the years for his views. ‘The cops’, he said in exasperation. He has been the subject of cop attention for decades. When he is not in prison the cops seem to spend their time trying to give him extended B & B courtesy of Her Majesty.

On this particular occasion his ire was raised because he was with his daughter. The cops stopped him in the school grounds and announced that he was subject to Section 44. It is the technical official term given to harassment. In their former guise as the RUC they had something similar which they would rattle out before beginning their search. They don’t suspect the person they approach of having anything in their possession. It is just a chance to demonstrate police power over republicans. It is a statement from the cops to republicans that if they continue with their republicanism they will be hassled and harried at every opportunity; normal life isn’t something republicans will be allowed to get on with.

Earlier in the week the same former prisoner had been visiting the grave of his parents. The PSNI:

bounced over the graves and through the headstones to me and gave me another Section 44. I told them they were messing about. They knew I was merely visiting a grave. They ignored me and went through the same procedure of searching me. Total messing about. Baggott is pushing his weight around.

At the school incident anyone who stopped in their car to look or acknowledge the former prisoner as he was undergoing his ordeal had their vehicle registration number noted by the PSNI. ‘It is just intimidating the public. The public is being told if they show the slightest concern about cop harassment of republicans they are likely to bring the same to their own door.’

There has been a noticeable increase in police targeting of republicans for intensified harassment. A member of the Republican Network for Unity was arrested at Belfast International Airport returning from a Network event in Glasgow. This came some months after the PSNI had falsely briefed journalists that the same man was the leader of the Real IRA in Belfast. IRSP members leaving the the party's Belfast office had their car surrounded by gun toting and screaming PSNI members. Police aggression was so pronounced that one of the IRSP members told me he thought he was going to be shot. A female member of the Irish Republican Prisoners Welfare Association was arrested at her home and detained overnight at a PSNI interrogation centre. Whispers have been making their way to the press that many arrested republicans are being questioned about the Real IRA attack on Massereene Barracks which left two British soldiers dead in March. While some republicans certainly shot up Massereene, they all can’t have done it. The PSNI in trying to tie all forms of republican activity to attacks on Massereene is on a rerun of the old post-August 1998 position where all republicans at odds with the Good Friday Agreement were depicted as Omagh bombers.

Police harassment is still a fact of life on the streets of working class communities. It is as much political in application as it is security driven. That it is no longer as rampant as it once was is simply because of the reduced level of political violence emanating from republican quarters. A reduction in police activity in such circumstances is hardly a reduction in police powers. In some areas the PSNI has more powers against citizens than it ever had while called the RUC. It is clear that the approach of the latest British chief constable is to demonstrate most fervently that for him the police is a force not a service.

Irish Unity Comes to Toronto, or Does It?

Today The Pensive Quill carries an article by guest writer Mike Burke on the topic of the Gerry Adams' recent visit to Toronto

Irish Unity Comes to Toronto, or Does It? by Mike Burke

On 7 November, I attended the public forum in Toronto entitled “A United Ireland – How Do We Get There?” featuring Gerry Adams as the keynote speaker. He was joined by a distinguished panel of Canadian and Québécois guests. This forum was one installment of Sinn Féin’s larger project of holding a series of national conversations in Ireland and across the Irish diaspora about how to achieve Irish reunification. I did not attend the “very successful fund-raising dinner” held the night before the conference.

On entering the hall, I picked up a letter of greeting signed by Jason Kenney, Conservative Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, who is an ardently right-wing member of a right-wing Canadian federal government. I noted how legitimate Sinn Féin had become and how much things had changed. As Canadian supporters of a united Ireland, we used to be hassled by the police, followed by agents of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and mocked in the mainstream Canadian media.

Hundreds of people filled a large hall to spend three and one-half hours discussing the transition to a united Ireland. As one speaker noted, the panel was “preaching to the converted.” Audience members were largely, but not exclusively, fans of Sinn Féin, the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement. The sole critical note of the afternoon was sounded when a questioner asked how Sinn Féin could justify its support for the PSNI in the face of continued sectarian policing.

The Canadian panelists and audience members engaged the issue in good faith. However much I might disagree with their political analysis, their commitment to a united Ireland and their integrity were obvious. The public forum heard numerous recommendations flowing from Canadian and Quebec experience. Many participants spoke in favour of establishing a Canadian-style federal system of government in Ireland, which is a little ironic given that the current leadership of Sinn Féin was central to the party’s decision to abandon the federalism of Éire Nua. Some speakers underlined the need for an entrenched Charter of Rights, achieved in Canada in 1982, to protect the collective rights of the two main communities in the north. One mentioned that Sinn Féin might consider a “distinct society clause” as a constitutional accommodation for unionism, modeled after the series of constitutional (and extra-constitutional) efforts in Canada to address the linguistic and cultural concerns of French speakers in the province of Quebec.

There were two main, and related, assumptions that animated the conference. The first was that forming broad nationalist alliances has proved to be a formula for political victory. The second was that the GFA sets Ireland on a non-violent, democratic path to a 32-county Republic.

I disagree with both these assumptions. The current Sinn Féin mobilization campaign should be seen as an attempt to repeat what the party regards as its earlier unequivocal success in helping to create the nationalist consensus that ushered in the Irish peace process. But the nationalist consensus of the 1980s and 1990s was a failure for republicanism, not a success. Instead of increasing pan-nationalist pressure on the British government to become “persuaders for a united Ireland,” as was Sinn Féin’s stated intention, it served as a vehicle for Sinn Féin’s nationalist partners to press the party to concede one republican principle after another. Similarly, the GFA signifies the defeat of the Provisional republican project. The Agreement frustrates rather than facilitates the social, economic, political and constitutional objectives of republicanism. Sinn Féin has seriously misinterpreted the institutional implications of the GFA, which legitimizes the north as a political entity and encourages political identification with a partitioned state.

After Gerry Adams’s keynote address, I found myself wondering about the purpose of the conference. I couldn’t help but notice the imprecision and superficial nature of his thoughts on the transition to a united Ireland. More than a decade after the signing of the GFA, Sinn Féin’s strategy for getting there from here is riddled with vague generalities.

I think this conference, and the others like it, have two purposes. The first is to respond to the emerging critical opinion in Ireland that the peace process and the GFA represent serious losses for Provisional republicanism and the objective of reunification. Sinn Féin hopes to answer its critics by pointing to its mobilization campaign as evidence that it does remain a republican party working toward unity. But given the party’s lack of any coherent strategy actually to achieve Irish unity, the (never-ending) process of moving toward unity has become more important than the outcome of a united Ireland. The function of the conference appears to be to buttress Sinn Féin’s republican credentials at the very moment those credentials are being questioned because of the absence of any real movement toward the primary republican goal.

The second purpose of the conference concerns the relationship between republicanism and electoralism. Sinn Féin recognizes that republicanism can be an efficient tool for collecting votes in Ireland and funds in North America and elsewhere. Here, republicanism is reduced to a rhetorical element in a party political campaign. Sinn Féin has, in effect, internalized the project of Irish unity, transforming it from a social and political objective to a partisan institutional goal: having Sinn Féin share governmental power in the north and the south is the essence of the endgame now. And even this limited outcome seems increasingly out of reach given the party’s unexpectedly poor electoral showing in the south and recent signs of a stagnating vote in the north. While these conferences might rejuvenate Sinn Féin as an electoral machine, they do little to advance the realization of a united Ireland.

I don’t think Irish unity has yet made it to Toronto.

The Deputy.

When is a deputy not a deputy? It is like one of the old riddles we often posed while kids, believing the puzzle to contain some great mystery. The answer on this occasion has more of the ridicule than the riddle about it: the deputy is not a deputy when he is a deputy first minister.

When Simon Hamilton of the DUP took the floor at Stormont and referred to Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness as ‘the deputy’, the power disparity in the relationship between the two parties was crystallised in graphic fashion. The Derry politician was said to have ‘visibly bristled.’ Feeling baited, he duly bit and gave an answer which merely confirmed the validity of what Hamilton had said to begin with. ‘First of all, I’m not the deputy. I’m the Deputy First Minister in a department where there is equality between the First Minister and myself. And don’t you ever forget it.’ Hamilton is unlikely to given that he received an answer as shallow as it was short.

Had he been a cute hoor, like his party leader, rather than replying that he was the deputy first minister Martin McGuinness would have reiterated the Adams position and insisted that he was Joint First Minister. It might have been nothing more than a rhetorical stratagem devised less for its truth value and more for its ability to successfully counter Hamilton while at the same time subverting the DUP claim to be top dog.

The height of the Deputy First Minister’s success in this exchange was to remind the DUP and anyone else still interested in what the ‘folks on the hill’ blather on about that the second class status evoked by the term ‘deputy’ is an image McGuinness and his colleagues are quite uneasy with.

Snapping at Simon Hamilton in the manner which Martin McGuinness did carries the stamp of the bully. For those who have met Hamilton, he is hardly the most obnoxious of DUP members. Paisley who can be described as little else but obnoxious was quite fond of referring in public to ‘the deputy’ in the presence of McGuinness. Never once was he rebuked with anything angrier than an ear to ear smile which earned McGuinness his ‘chuckle brother’ tag.

Moreover, complain as he might to Hamilton, the fact remains that there has been no greater reaffirmation of British and Unionist dominance and consequently the deputy status of McGuinness than the Sinn Fein man’s decision to stand shoulder to shoulder with the leader of the British police in Ireland plus the leader of British unionism in Ireland and demonise republicans as ‘traitors.’ Surely the equality agenda would have called for Robinson and Orde to say something comparable about the police or unionists; not a word of it. Each knew their station. When first class tickets were being issued for the post-St Andrews political journey that lay ahead McGuinness didn’t get one.

Martin McGuiness has served as Catholic deputy to both Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson. It is the type of CV we might expect to find in the portfolio of a Larne Catholic circa 1972 but hardly a Derry Catholic in the new Millennium. Yet McGuinness persists. He argues that he has been bending over backwards to facilitate Peter Robinson as the parties continue to fake another crisis in a bid to have someone in London or Dublin listen to them. Larne Catholic phenomenon again. His republican critics would take a somewhat different view feeling that the one time leader of the IRA has bent over forwards to accommodate the current DUP boss and has been duly screwed.

A sad state of affairs which is not offset in the slightest by the occasional gruff snap at perceived tormentors on the floor of Stormont. Where Sinn Fein is at today is a destination far removed from the united Ireland rainbow, illusory, but visible while the armed struggle rained down. Its position does not invalidate the party’s decision to abandon armed campaigning but raises serious questions about how it manages its reformist strategy. It is demonstrably not delivering the goods; the Maze Stadium; Irish Language and devolution of policing and justice are all areas where the failure of its reformist strategy is patent. It is difficult to come up with anything persuasive to refute Peter Robinson’s triumphant claim that:

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 … We have literally dismantled the Belfast Agreement ... Every impartial observer of the political scene agrees that the DUP is the driving force in Stormont. Who can seriously deny that the DUP is setting the agenda?

Faced with such brazen in-your-face crowing Sinn Fein is left dangerously exposed as it swoons and swans around the Stormont corridors of powerlessness looking very much like British parliamentarians with no resemblance to their former revolutionary selves who might just have been expected to do something more radical than listen to reminders that their place is at the back of the bus.

So the dispute over the term ‘deputy’ is not one of semantics. The endless designation of runner up to the nationalist project is reinforced by the use of terms like ‘Deputy First Minister’ and ‘First Minister.’ Martin McGuinness might be right in stating that in terms of equality there is no real difference in the office shared by him and Peter Robinson. But outside it, in the wider world including the international arena, first means first. As in cup finals those who make it there but do not win are rarely remembered. To deputise is not to equalise. The deputy is not the sheriff.

This article featured in Fourthwrite Magazine Winter 2009: Issue 37

"We got nothing"

Today The Pensive Quill carries an article by guest writer, blanketman Thomas 'Dixie' Elliott on the topic of the 1981 hunger strike

"We got nothing" by Thomas 'Dixie' Elliott
This is an unedited version of what was carried in the Irish News

I often look back to the time I spent on the blanket protest and feel privileged that I had the honour of spending some of those dark and more often than not, cold and brutal days sharing a cell in the company of Tom McElwee and Bobby Sands. These patriots, like the other brave hunger strikers, dreamt that they would live to bear witness to the unity of the Irish people within the political framework of a thirty-two county socialist republic, and it was for that reason alone that they had been imprisoned. Having spoken to Tom and Bobby and other hunger strikers, I know that they also looked forward to getting out of Long Kesh after completing their sentences and returning to their families. Tragically, it was not to be.

The darkest of those days were the periods of the two hunger strikes and I clearly remember the night of 18 December 1980, when the first hunger strike ended, after Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes called it off in order to save Seán McKenna’s life. I was in the leadership wing with Bobby, Bik McFarlane and Richard O’Rawe at that time. Bobby had been to the prison hospital and I looked out the window of my cell and saw him alight from the prison van with shoulders hunched and I knew immediately that something wasn’t right. This was confirmed when he walked down the wing and told us: ‘Ní fhuaireomar faic,’ [we got nothing]. In fact the only thing coming from the British, and it was handed to Gerry Adams by Father Meagher in Belfast, was a document that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on and which would never had ended the hunger strike even had The Dark chosen to let Seán die and continue with the fast.

In regards to clothing and work, the most important of our five demands, the document stated: ’As soon as possible all prisoners will be issued with civilian-type clothing for wear during the working day’. We Blanketmen realised instantly that civilian-type clothing was nothing more than a modernised prison uniform and that Bobby had been spot-on when he told us ‘Ní fhuaireomar faic,’ out of the 1980 hunger strike. That being the case, why do Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and others persist with the claim that the Brits reneged on a deal during the first hunger strike when that is demonstrably untrue? Even more perplexing was the fact that former hunger striker, Bernard Fox, recently supported this claim in an interview with the Irish News.

While I have the greatest respect for Bernard as a former comrade and republican, he nonetheless said something in his interview with profound implications:

I wasn’t in the hospital at that time [when Danny Morrison met the hunger strikers on 5 July 1981] and I don’t know what the men were told or not told but I do know there was no deal.

He is right, of course; there was no deal between the prisoners and the Brits in early July; had there been a deal, Bernard would not have had to go on hunger strike. But what is astonishing is that he had been on hunger strike for thirty-two days, yet Bernard says that no one had informed him about the Mountain Climber offer which Danny Morrison allegedly relayed to the hunger strikers on 5 July 1981. It goes without saying then that Bernard never set eyes on the Secretary of State, Humphrey Atkins’s statement that incorporated the offer, and which was to be released upon the hunger strike ending. That begs the question: how can Bernard reconcile being deliberately kept in ignorance about the potentially life-saving Mountain Climber offer, and still lend his unqualified support for those who took a decision to keep that knowledge from him?

Bernard said he was deeply distressed by allegations that a deal which could have ended the hunger strike was vetoed in order to maximise electoral support for Sinn Féin. I too am deeply distressed, but the more I looked into these claims the more I see that there was a lot more being discussed at the time than a resolution to the hunger strike. In a comm to Gerry Adams, dated 26.7.’81, reproduced on page 334 of Ten Men Dead, Bik talks about ‘examining the possibility of contesting elections and actually making full use of seats gained i.e. participating in the Dáil’. He continues: ‘Such an idea presents problems within the Movement. How great would the opposition be and what would be the consequences of pursuing a course which did not enjoy a sizeable degree of support?'

Then on August 20th the same day that Micky Devine died, Owen Carron retained Bobby’s Fermanagh/South Tyrone seat. Just three days later on August 23rd, Sinn Féin announced that in future it would contest all Northern Ireland elections. The Hunger Strikes ended on October the 3rd and on October 6th Prior implemented exactly what was on offer from July 5th.

On October 31st at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis Danny Morrison gave his famous ballot box/armalite speech in which he addressed the issue of the party taking part in future elections.

This time-line can be viewed at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/abstentionism/chron.htm

It shockingly appears that while men were dying and even when the Hunger Strike was still on-going that they were discussing and even pushing through electoralism.

The Lions Historian?

D-Day: the Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor. Penguin Viking.

Book Review

Having, in Spain some years ago, read Antony Beevor’s brilliant account of the battle for Stalingrad, I had no misgivings packing his latest proffering, this time on the Normandy landings by Allied forces in June 1944, for a return journey to the Iberian Peninsula. For the British, taking the beaches of Omaha, Sword, Gold, Juno and Utah, it was Dunkirk reversed; for the Americans it was the beginning of a serious penetration of Europe that would help shape the political landscape of the continent for decades to come. For the myriad of others from different nations determined to crush the Nazi menace, it was do and die. The remains of many who fell there stay put so far from home. For significant numbers, being buried in French dry land was their first and final contact with it, having earlier being cut down before they could emerge from the sea where they had just disembarked from their landing crafts.

The film Saving Private Ryan leaves an impression of a horrendous casualty rate. However, while Operation Overlord, as the beachhead landings were designated by Allied command, met fierce resistance, the casualties on D-Day were fewer than expected. Yet there was almost a full year left in the war before the Nazi capacity to resist could be leeched. That period would deliver the real casualties when the fanaticism of the Waffen SS, fuelled by a conviction that many more than merely Arthur Harris at Bomber Command were determined to see Germany annihilated, felt compelled to kill unrelentingly before they marched off into a Nazi Valhalla in defence of the ‘Fatherland.’

In his account Beevor, by way of vignette, contrasts the attitude of SS and ordinary troops of the Wermacht. In hospital seeking to recover from their wounds the troops were friendly to British medical officers, accepting all the treatment they were offered. An SS soldier arrived on the ward. A blood transfusion was needed to prevent his death. On discovering that the life saving blood being put into his body was from an English donor he disabled the transfusion equipment, shouting ‘I die for Hitler.’ Which is just what he did, as Beevor so tersely put it.

Such unalloyed devotion to one of the great military idiots of all time is frightening. Beevor draws attention to the military-strategic ineptitude of Adolf Hitler. The Nazi supremo read maps and then shaped battlefields as if the two could somehow be correlated. First battle contact with the enemy and battle plans are not renowned for having a compatible relationship. The early German success in the war was built on flexibility, yet from Stalingrad Hitler had been intent on holding ground where his troops would be pinned down, freeing up the enemy to strategically outmanoeuvre the German military command. So incompetent was Hitler considered by the Allies that they came to the conclusion that it was better he was not toppled as German leader. With his unsteady hands at the helm the choppy sea of catastrophe at all times beckoned the Nazi fleet. No shock value is registered by knowing that by the middle of 1944 many German Army officers including Rommel were of the view that Hitler had to go.

In one passage Beevor captures the gullibility of front line troops who mortgaged their critical faculties and absorbed nonsense from their leaders.

Every time an assurance of the propaganda ministry proved false, another one quickly took its place. The Atlantic Wall was impregnable. The Allies would not dare to invade. The Luftwaffe and U boats would smash the invasion fleet. A massive counter attack would hurl the Allies back into the sea. The secret vengeance weapons would bring Britain to her knees, begging for peace. New jet fighters would sweep the Allied aircraft from the sky. The more desperate the situation became, the more shameless the lie.

Yet for SS troops in particular ‘belief became nothing short of an addiction.’ Unthinking soldiery melded with the mindset of the true believer deliver better than any tank factory the most valuable weapon a dictator can have in his armoury.

In the popular mind there is a propensity to view the Eastern Front as the source of the war’s most vicious fighting. Yet divisions on both sides in Normandy lost more men on a daily basis than ever died on Soviet soil over a comparable time period. Nor were the citizens of France spared the violence from the skies which rained down on their heads and homes from the forces supposedly sent to liberate them. Churchill, worried about French civilian casualties failed to persuade the Americans that a bombing strategy would be counterproductive. With the French under their military commander Leclerc playing a crucial role in the drive toward Paris, the opposition to aerial bombardment of their own citizens that might have been expected from the French military, failed to materialise. ‘The idea of bombarding their own country was deeply disturbing but they did not shrink from the task.’ The French on the ground would die for the greater glory of France whether they willed it or not.

Charles De Gaulle, hyper sensitive to criticism of France, read history though such a glory prism. Author of a history of the French Army which failed to mention Waterloo, he stood accused of having singularly batted for French glory to the detriment of all else to a point where Churchill raged he should be arrested for treason in battle.

Elsewhere in the book Beevor makes little attempt to conceal his disdain for the capabilities of the British commander Montgomery. He is depicted in terms which are anything but flattering. Said to have been an inveterate spoofer more eager to capture kudos than German strongholds, Montgomery emerges as a shallow character, over cautious, crippled by vanity and incapable of delegating.

The prevalence of war crimes is a sub-theme that makes its presence felt throughout D-Day. While certainly not part of the central narrative, the author leaves little room for doubt that the Germans were not alone in wearing the shameful badge of war criminality. Frequently, captured German troops were gratuitously forced to surrender their lease on life. Combined with the Allied carpet bombing of German cities such as Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden - the latter in particular having no strategic value by February 1945 when it fell prey to a fire storm of horrendous proportions – the one sided nature of war crime tribunals makes itself abundantly clear. That German generals Jodl and Keitel could be hanged at Nuremberg while Bomber Harris was eulogised in the public eye brings to mind the African proverb that ‘until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.’

Beevor in this work tends not to glorify. He shrouds war in the gory not the glory.

D-Day: the Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor. Penguin Viking. Price £23. ISBN 978-0670-88703-3

This review originally appeared in Fortnight October 2009