Jimmy Harpo Murray

On the last day of the year I find myself thinking back to an old friend from childhood for whom this year was the last of his mortal coil. Jimmy Harpo Murray was a character from the earliest days. As kids on the scent of adventure and devilment there was so much we did together. Life was carefree, cushioned somewhat by the illusion that if we messed up this one there would always be another one in some imaginary place called Heaven. Although then, Jimmy’s idea of what Paradise really was seemed to be Parkhead in Glasgow where the angels wore green and white hoops and the devils in blue were not all that welcome.

Jimmy hailed from a large family in Belfast’s Markets area. We didn’t know him as Harpo then, although why we never tagged the name to him given the remarkable resemblance to the most silent of Marx brothers with his mop of curly reddish hair, escapes me. The family later moved to McClure Street in the Lower Ormeau Road but were fortunate to move out before the area became a killing ground for loyalists on the prowl for an easy innocent target. It was while he lived in McClure Street that we became firm friends.

One of our shared passions was soccer. I had been to see my first Liverpool game, played against Linfield in Windsor Park, while his loyalties lay further North than the Scousers. He was a Glasgow Celtic supporter and I have this distinct memory of watching the 1970 European Cup final with him in the living room of his home on a rain swept Belfast night. The game was played in Italy and Celtic were beaten by an Ove Kindvall goal for Feyenoord after Tommy Gemmell put the Glasgow side ahead. Jimmy’s disappointment was greater than mine.

Shortly after that game we avidly followed the 1970 World Cup which was won by a brilliant Brazilian team never to be equalled since. From their first game against Czechoslovakia they dazzled their way to Jules Rimet glory. Around the same time we were running our own soccer team, Santos, named after Pele’s club team in Brazil. There were probably dozens of Santos teams formed that year but for us our own was the real Santos, the rest ersatz. Our full eleven played throughout Belfast in the Chelsea rig of the day, and went unbeaten. Myself and Jimmy would argue like mad on the pitch, I too bossy and he too much of a free spirit to be told how to play by a self-appointed captain. He eventually led a rebellion and the team fell apart.

Together we made up a formidable team of inveterate orchard robbers, often making what seemed like suicidal leaps from trees to escape being caught by irate apple growers. Memories come flooding back which also cast us as line walkers doing the railway tracks for hours on end, sustained by a packet of cigarettes and what buns we managed to steal from the Scammels belonging to Inglis Bakery which were parked close to the tracks at the Markets.

The bond of friendship, when forged at such a tender age, seems filled with the potential to be undying. It is rarely so. Life’s events intervene and new friendships are formed that are much more complex and less forgiving than those formed when so young. Inevitably we parted ways. As the conflict deepened he moved off to the West of the city and I ended up going to jail. After release I would bump into him on a few occasions in Ballymurphy as he sauntered his way through the streets. He would always stop and gave me his craic and then move on to whatever destination he was heading to. Although we played no part in each other’s lives after those heady teenage years, his death in September left a void in a heart that was once young and as wild as the flowing hair of Jimmy Murray. There was no way that his infectious sense of mischief would not stir something in me when I learned that he had died.

No Sundays

Gerry Adams only last evening blogged, ‘I stopped buying the Sunday papers about ten years ago. A waste of a Sunday morning. Pages of half truths, opinions, bias, lies. Better buying a decent novel’. Before The Dawn perhaps. He also told the Independent some years back that he had stopped reading Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA after 25 pages because it was filled with lies. Moloney apparently stated that Adams had been in the IRA. Gerry Adams does not like lies, he would have us believe. Indeed he was scathing about his brother Liam for having lied about his abuse of his daughter Aine Tyrell.

So two days ago, when Gerry Adams purchased the very last copy of the Sunday Tribune from the Glenmac Newsagents on the Gen Road, situated next door to the grocers once owned by the late murdered Harry Holland, it must have been with a fair measure of trepidation. A benign view of his purchasing this paper being totally at odds with his claim not to have bought any Sundays for ten years might just be that he does not recollect buying the paper only the day before and may just have slipped unwittingly into the mode of believing he was carrying on with a ten year tradition. He sometimes, to use his own words, has no recollection of certain things.

A less sympathetic reading would be that he broke a ten year tradition because the paper contained revelations that were damning to him but pretended not to have broken it in order to convey the impression that he was laid back and nonchalant about the whole affair. So damning, in fact, were the paper’s contents, that it assertively and confidently labelled him a liar. While it may be something most people say about him in private conversation or in Sunday Independent opinion pieces, for a national newspaper to make the allegation as part of a major news story is serious stuff.

Highly troublesome for the Sinn Fein president is that the allegation of dishonesty is so easily made to stick. By denying that his brother Liam Adams, whom Gerry Adams believes to be a paedophile, was ever in the running to secure the nomination as party candidate for the Dail in 1997 only to be confronted with witness evidence that he was very much in the running, as well as photographic evidence that he was actively canvassing alongside the Sinn Fein boss in the same election campaign, despite Gerry Adams having supposedly thrown him out of the party as soon as he was discovered to have been in it, the Sinn Fein boss’s narrative has come unstuck.

Adding even more damage to the Adams story is Sinn Fein’s response to the Sunday Tribune charges which was nothing short of woeful. It has served to reinforce the chronic weakness that afflicts the version of the sad sordid saga put forward by Gerry Adams. He must feel he has been hit by friendly fire. A spokesperson was quoted in the Irish Times as saying that the Tribune findings did ‘not in any way punch a hole’ in Gerry Adams’s claim to have acted to halt his brother being selected as the party’s Louth candidate for the Dail; that the Sinn Fein leader could not prevent his brother joining the electoral canvassing team: ‘What was he to do: stand up and say on a loudspeaker that there are allegations of abuse against my brother?.’ Well, yes if need be. A loudspeaker in those circumstances is much more beneficial to society and its children than the muffler employed by Gerry Adams on the campaign trail.

So cynical are people about his account that when Gerry Adams made the allegation that his late father was guilty of child abuse a former republican prisoner genuinely believed that he had manufactured the story just to draw attention away from his role in handling the Aine Tyrell affair. I thought he was off the wall in suggesting it to me but since then I wish I had a euro coin for every occasion I have been asked if I think it is true about the father. I believe he is telling the truth about his father although why he is telling it is another matter. The challenge facing him in getting his message across is one outlined by the journalist Liam Clarke who said his word is hard to accept without corroboration.

Even were we to try, out of a spirit of generosity and compassion, to understand his personal predicament in all of this, allow him his lack of recollection, inconsistencies and foibles, we are still confronted with the awful fact that Gerry Adams allowed a man he firmly believed to be a child rapist to be promoted in circumstances that fell far short of alerting parents to the dangers their children might be in. Mull over it as we might, the evidence lends itself to no other conclusion. And if you do what bishops do then you should go where bishops go – the Ex Club.

Marie Moore

Another old stalwart of the conflict to leave us this year was the veteran Sinn Fein activist Marie Moore who died in hospital after a long illness. I don’t really think she, like a lot of her colleagues, was ever comfortable in the company of a dissenting opinion but she was approachable. The last time I spoke with her was in Belfast City Hall back in 2003. An anti-war rally had been taking place and a couple of Sinn Fein members on it had been manhandled by the PSNI and arrested. I left the protest to enter City Hall and asked at the desk for somebody from Sinn Fein. Marie Moore emerged. I told her what had happened and she promised to get onto it immediately. That conversation with her were the last words ever spoken between us. Our paths were not to cross again.

She always struck me more as the grandmotherly type rather than the grassroots political activist. Often arm in arm with her friend Elsie she could be seen making her way to the cinema or some other social occasion. But that concealed a political energy that bubbled within. In terms of Provisional resistance to the British state Marie had been there from the start. She joined the Civil Rights Movement prior to her marriage in 1969, later going on to organise Sinn Fein in Belfast after British armed invasions on nationalist communities. At one point her 13 year old son was arrested for possession of a M1 carbine yet she carried on. She was of that generation of street battling women who confronted the British Army head to head. They formed the Women’s Action Committee who would take to the streets any time day or night to face British military wreck and raid parties and also to alert the local IRA of the imminent danger. The British in 1971, determined to teach the women a lesson, riddled the sisters Dorothy Maguire and Maura Meehan in a clinical and cold blooded killing in West Belfast. In a separate incident Marie was shot by the British Army, leaving her with a slight limp which she carried throughout her life. She limped into Armagh Prison on a treason charge in the late 1970s and limped out again but not once did she break her stride.

From the earliest days of the conflict Marie Moore featured in the public record. P Michael O’Sullivan’s 1972 Patriot Graves contains photographic and interview material detailing her contribution to republican resistance. Her own introduction to republicanism was traumatic, described by her as a ‘shocking experience’:

It was Easter 1942. I was four years of age and was with my Granny and Granda, Mary and Frank O’Brien. We were in the living room of their Cawnpore Street home in the Clonard area of Belfast when suddenly a group of men ran into the kitchen ...There was a lot of shouting and commotion. Then suddenly there were these loud bangs, more screams and shouting. Shots were being fired all around us and I was terrified. My Granda grabbed me in his arms. Then there was more shooting, more shouting. Men ran past us and ran up my granny’s stairs. They were carrying someone who had been shot. He was covered in blood. Another man was lying on the ground in my granny’s kitchen. He had also been shot ... Other men wearing black uniforms and carrying guns – RUC men - were all around us. The two men who were shot in my granny’s house were Tom Williams and an RUC Constable Patrick Murphy. Tom was badly injured but survived only to be hanged later for the killing of the RUC man.

In the minds of former blanket men, whatever their later political inclination, she remained a revered figure. A key player, known as the An Bean Uasal, she took charge of the H-Block Information Centre, becoming the human channel through which communication between the IRA leadership on the outside and the protesting prisoners was sustained for two years, a period which included both hungers strikes. Then the running of the ‘comms’ became the vital pivot of communication. Marie Moore was responsible for that. At the head of a tight group of women visiting the prison on a daily basis she ensured the communication network was serviced whatever else failed. Of her smuggling colleagues she said:

They were the best smugglers I ever came across. For almost two years they brought messages in and out on a daily basis. Sometimes several times a day. It was gruelling for them. They were rigorously searched before meeting the prisoner. They were under constant scrutiny from warders while on the visit and very often they were searched after the visit. On top of that they had to deal with the emotion of the actual visit itself. I don’t recall them losing one ‘comm’ ... We needed information out of the prison and the prisoners needed information from the leadership of the Republican Movement on the outside. It was all done through ‘comms’, tiny messages written usually on cigarette paper and water-proofed by being wrapped in clingfilm.

In the overall engine of the protest her position was as vital to its functioning as that of the IRA prison leaders themselves. We now know because of the efforts of Richard O’Rawe that the comms were not as revealing as they should have been, used as they were by leadership figures on the outside to manipulate perceptions and withhold rather than impart information. But that was no fault of Marie Moore. She was devoted to ending the misery of the prisoners and worked tirelessly to alleviate the deprivation they endured.

On the other side receiving many of the comms that came in was a Strabane IRA volunteer, Gary McNally. Marie was said to be heavy chested and Bobby Sands had humorously named her ‘Bainne Mor’ which translated into English as ‘Big Milk.’ When Gary first went out to meet her on the visit and receive the comms he greeted her as ‘Mrs Mor.’.Thinking he was addressing her as Mrs Moore she asked him to call her by her first name and he said ‘ok Bainne.’ Bobby’s reaction when told this by Gary on his return from the visit was the source of much mirth. In the midst of the horrors of the place it was not without its lighter moments.

By the time Marie Moore had become Deputy Mayor of Belfast in 1999 the leech of constitutionalism was well clamped to the neck of Sinn Fein and was sucking all republicanism out of the party’s project. Nevertheless, I heard few if any criticisms of Marie Moore as she applied herself to representing the nationalists of Belfast within the chambers of City Hall. In all she served four terms as a Sinn Fein councillor there.

When people like Marie Moore close their lives a part of living history is sealed off and put beyond reach. There is always something, often unintentionally, taken to the grave with them that would have been of value to a researcher and the public record, but which will now inevitably remain beyond the access of posterity. They were witnesses to events that many of us only learn of long after they happen; or, when they are happening, are marginalised from the centres of decision making by those with more power. In the case of Marie Moore it would have been illuminating to have spoken to her about the August 1969 burnings, the 1970 Falls curfew, the formative days of Provisional Sinn Fein in Belfast, a party described by her as the political wing of the IRA, internment of 1971 and the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. On all of these things she could have enhanced our understanding. Now it’s too late to ask.

A couple of years before she died she wrote an essay for a book of collected works on the hunger strikes edited by Danny Morrison. In it she said, ‘I am proud to have been close to the blanket men, the women in Armagh, the hunger strikers.’ We are proud to have been close to her.

John Duice McMullan

He had great presence and was renowned for laughing in the face of adversity, with the tendency to see the funny side of things, even in the most tense or dangerous scenarios with many comrades on the receiving end – Sean Spike Murray

Around Christmas it is customary to think of old friends and comrades who have died during the year. One in particular was John ‘Duice’ McMullan. He was one of the stalwarts of the Dogs, Cage 11 and the H Blocks. Tall and tough Duice was a defender in many of the soccer games played on the pitches of Long Kesh. A difficult opponent to get around, being thrust into the role of centre forward against him was not a coveted position.

How he came to be called Duice I don’t know but he was also known as John the Joiner because joinery was where he found his feet in the world of employment, working on the construction of Divis Flats in the late 1960s.

He was the H-Blocks camp intelligence officer in the early 1980s and went about his business displaying nether fear or favour. We were on the same block and I was his subordinate in charge of intelligence in H Block 1. It was then that I really got to know and like him. Earlier I had met him in Cage 11 of Long Kesh where we were never particularly close. Then Duice was a great believer in left wing politics and revolution. An avid watcher of documentaries, like others in his hut, he was into revolution and strategists like the Vietnamese military leader, General Giap. An inveterate slagger he spared no one with the speed and punch of his wit and I was often on the receiving end of it, but he was funny and never malicious.

In Cage 11 along with those he knocked about out with he was in the avant-garde of a musical thrust. Other cages seemed to value Top of the Pops, but not the middle hut in Cage 11. Their big thing was the Old Grey Whistle Test presented by Bob Harris. Old Whispering Bob was their man and as rapidly as an act appeared on the Whistle Test an album quickly appeared in Duice’s hut. It was through them that I first became familiar with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes, Wild Willy Barrett and John Otway, and Billy Joel. They were most certainly not into Abba or the Bay City Rollers.

Duice was a committed IRA volunteer. Arrested in 1972 and sentenced to seven years the time behind bars accumulated as he was additionally sentenced to other terms for trying to escape. Once, if memory stands by me, he tried escaping from the cages of Long Kesh in the company of other volunteers dressed as armed British soldiers. For this he found himself in Newry Courthouse in 1975 where along with others he again made the bid for illicit freedom only to be recaptured in the company of the late Terence Cleeky Clarke. Larry Marley, also deceased, was one of those who successfully made it across the border after the Newry escape. Duice was finally released in 1978. Even with the benefit of 50% remission he spent much longer in the jail that he ought to.

To those who knew him it was no surprise when just over a year later he found himself captured with two other volunteers near Belfast city centre after a high speed RUC chase. He continued his journey from there to the blanket protest via the remand jail on the Crumlin Road in Belfast.

When I spoke to him at a funeral a few years ago we had a bantering match and the conversation eventually made its way around to the state of republicanism. I had known Duice was far from persuaded of the strategy. At the worst of times he would not pull back from talking with critics of the Sinn Fein strategy when the done thing was to ostracise them. At the funeral he told me I was wasting my time publicly commenting on the way things had gone. ‘It’s all about money now’ was his summation of things. He also raised the Stakeknife issue. It was not the first time we had been in touch about it. A number of years earlier when Freddie Scappaticci had been publicly identified as Stakeknife and Sinn Fein was busy shielding him from the accusation, Duice sent word to me through a mutual friend. Hs advice was terse; I should not stick my neck out on it; he had known the truth behind Scappaticci for many years. At the funeral he asked me when I had first discovered that Scap was the man. I explained to him that it was shortly before the actual outing in the Sunday papers. He told me he had known it for about a decade. Whether he actually knew or had narrowed it down to one suspect I never got to ask him. But I did press him on why the knowledge was never made more widespread. He shrugged. I was later to find out – again at another funeral – that Scappaticci was indeed identified by IRA colleagues as the most likely candidate for being an informer long before he was actually outed. It all caused me to reflect on the song and dance Sinn Fein created at the time in its insistence that Scappaticci was the victim of a securocrat plot. Only idiots believed that.

Duice McMullan was no idiot. An intelligent and resourceful IRA volunteer it was an honour to have worked with him and to spend time in the company of his memory on this most special of days.

Crisis of a New Order

For decades it was an awful truth that dared not speak its name. The unspeakable acts perpetrated against children in the family home which Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams shared with his siblings and parents were horrendous. The child victims of what happened in that home are not to blame for what was visited upon them, the extent of which we do not yet know. I did time with many of the Adams clan, both those who lived in the home and cousins. I also worked with others in the Provisional Movement post-release. Despite whatever huge political differences I later grew to have with them, as people, with one or two exceptions, I always found them amiable and a lot less hostile and unpleasant than many others who share their political views.

I did not know Liam Adams and was not aware of any allegations of rape against him up until the Insight documentary. About the only thing I knew on him was that he had been kneecapped in the 1970s. I knew the father, ‘auld Gerry’ as they called him, but only to say hello to on the street. I witnessed him getting nasty at the funeral of Liam Burke in 1995 because he objected to the way the tricolour was being folded prior to the handover of the national flag to the family of the deceased. But ‘grumpy old men’ are what they are so I had no personal reason to take umbrage against him on account of that. Although in the light of Gerry Adams’ comments that his father had besmirched the National flag through his depravity, his objections to how others folded it seemed trite by comparison.

Shortly after ‘auld Gerry’ died I was told that staff in the nursing home where he was had complained that Gerry Adams and other family members did not visit him much. The person telling me added that the reason there was little contact was because ‘auld Gerry’ had abused some of his children. Until this week I never repeated it or passed it on to friends or journalists even in casual conversation. I had not the slightest evidence it was true. Stories like that apart from being a dime a dozen grow legs all too easily and are off on the gallop sustaining themselves when there is nothing else to keep them going. Whatever critiques I mounted against the political strategy of Gerry Adams feeding nastiness of that nature was not part of it. There was little of appeal in the view of some that republican opponents of the party should copy the Sinn Fein tactic of focussing in on people’s personal problems and then smearing their target on the strength of it. What other than poison does that inject into political discourse?

I doubt if any real objection was raised by Gerry Adams to the decision to drape his father’s coffin with the tricolour. He could simply have said the father had confided in him some time before he died that he wanted a ‘civilian’ funeral and not been overruled. Who would have insisted otherwise? A more plausible explanation for the traditional republican send off was that it was part of the cover-up that was put in place to shield Liam Adams. ‘Auld Gerry’ buried without honours would have raised too many questions. Much easier to dupe the thousands who made up the cortege.

That Gerry Adams should only now out his father as a child molester was likely due to the fact that the story was going to break anyway. Fed or not by pre-broadcast leakage from the Insight documentary, it was being predicted in some Belfast circles for almost two weeks prior to Gerry Adams’ announcing it that a sex abuse scandal implicating ‘auld Gerry’ was imminent. Pat Kenny this morning hinted most strongly during his lengthy exchange with Irish News editor, Noel Doran, that Gerry Adams moved before the posse caught up with him. Whatever the intention of Gerry Adams in exposing his father’s wrongdoing the effect has been to cast himself in a soft sympathetic light; he and his wider family now take on the mantle of the victims thus denying Aine Tyrell some of the vital oxygen of publicity. This was followed by Sinn Fein calls for the family to be afforded privacy. Like the recent debate surrounding the Adams handling of the 1981 hunger strike, the intention is to smother any further probing.

In the media there is growing scepticism of Gerry Adams’ explanations. There is a cursory nod made to his personal predicament followed by strong suggestions that he is pursuing a self serving agenda aimed at protecting his political career. Addicted to wielding power, a life without it can only be contemplated as a desolate existence. He has survived every crisis thus far but this is a crisis of a new order. Covering for bank robbers, society can swallow, but as the bishops controversy has shown, covering for child rapists forces society to vomit.

The Adams Family

The UTV Insight report by Chris Moore on the sexual abuse inflicted by a West Belfast paedophile on Aine Tyrell had barely ended before a journalist friend rang and asked me if I wished to make a comment on what I had just viewed. The rapist was the father of the victim, Liam Adams, brother of the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. The journalist in question has always been judicious and fair and has asked for my view on a range of Adams related matters over the years, but on this occasion, while grateful for the offer, I declined. I explained that I had not watched the broadcast wearing my critical republican glasses and other than being revolted by what Aine Tyrell suffered from the tender age of four, my thoughts had not settled sufficiently to allow me to form an opinion on the wider ramifications.

For many of his critics it is normally easy to gloat when Adams squirms during televised interviews. But what was there to smirk about here when each little voodoo pin thrust into Adams was fashioned from the horrendous experience of a raped child? For some the sun is shining and the temptation to make hay is irresistible. For others the sun is setting on the long political career of the Sinn Fein boss of bosses, hastened no doubt by the latest controversy. Given the dark backdrop it is something to be observed rather than celebrated.

While the president of Sinn Fein cannot be held responsible for the actions of his brother his knowledge of child sex allegations against the same brother – allegations which Gerry Adams claims to have believed from ‘the very beginning’ - for over twenty years without having brought them to the attention of any authority North or South ensures he will be faced with enormous pressure to explain the stance he took. No different from the bishop whose behaviour was described as inexcusable in the Murphy Report. Moreover, that he should promote a man who he firmly believed to be a child rapist as a possible contender for a Dail seat in 1997 is nothing short of scandalous.

Fanning the flames beneath the Adams feet is the imagery of the priest Aidan Troy visiting the rape survivor at the request of her abuser. It lends itself to a damning fusion which joins the dots between the Catholic Church and the Catholic Provos. Suddenly collusion takes on a new inflection which flags up what should have been a straightforward police matter being steered away from PSNI intervention, for no seeming purpose other than protecting the reputation of Gerry Adams. While many continue not to support the PSNI because of the political policing dimension which overwrites its civic function, there is no cause not to acknowledge the crucial role it has to, and must, play in dealing with cases such as this one.

It is instructive to note that Sinn Fein were much quicker out of the traps calling for their own IRA volunteers to make themselves accountable to the PSNI when they went AWOL during their trial for the kidnapping of Bobby Tohill. Almost immediately the party was screaming for them to give themselves up. Yet an arrest warrant was issued for Liam Adams a year ago and it is only now, when confronted by Chris Moore, that the party leader is calling for this wanted man to make himself amenable.

A subdued and visibly shaken Adams, in no position to resort to the usual bullying and hectoring, laboured unconvincingly to push back the suggestion that he was at best tardy in dealing with the matter and that his real motivation might have been governed by a perceived need to protect the institution of which he is the cardinal figure rather than securing justice for the abused woman. Perhaps he might plead mitigation on the grounds of being embroiled in a complex family trauma where emotions can be strained and tensions simmer. Unlike bishops who cover up for the priests they are not blood related to, Gerry Adams will have undergone some degree of emotional conflict: ‘this is a hugely difficult personal matter.’ Yet none of it absolves him of his responsibilities. He had a duty to become an advocate on behalf of the woman who was child raped rather than promote the rapist. The one appropriate option left to him is to resign from the leadership of Sinn Fein and step down from his role as an elected representative. The Bishop of Limerick can hardly walk off, albeit reluctant and grudging, into the sunset while the bishop of West Belfast clings on forever and a day.

When Tom Hartley told the Spanish academic Rogelio Alonso that Adams ‘acted like an archbishop’ the comparison might prove to be more accurate than Hartley ever envisaged.

Step Low

Pretty much as low as we are likely to find this side of Christmas. A lender repossessed the home of a Waterford couple which they shared with their special needs child. The pair had previously worked for Waterford Crystal but had since lost their jobs when the company folded. In debt and arrears they desperately tried to save their home. The lender, Stepstone Mortgage Funding Ltd, usuriously refused to renegotiate the terms. Phone calls met with no compassion. The couple had earlier written to the company requesting negotiation but were ignored. The excuse later given by the company was a ‘regrettable’ administrative oversight. Waffle.

The monthly payment amounted to the not inconsiderable sum of €2,422. In most households two jobs would need to be held down to sustain that level of repayment. Unable to obtain mortgage interest relief because they were in arrears the couple, in a bid to retain their home, offered the lender a monthly payment of €800. No mean feat for a family on benefits. Stepstone demanded €1000 knowing this to be beyond the family’s means. ‘I offered all my carer’s allowance, they said no’ the tear filled mother explained. Even the judge asked legal counsel representing the lenders to accept the €800, but not an inch were the heartless swine of Stepstone willing to budge. Then the company had the chutzpah to issue the following statement: ‘we do all that we can to assist borrowers when they find themselves in financial difficulty ... repossession will always be a last resort.’ Bollix.

The judge hearing the case offered words of sympathy, protesting that he was powerless to do anything other than help the powerful pursue their quarry. That he did not adjourn and in the interim call for a moratorium on all home repossessions was because he did not want to. Rather he rebuked those who took out loans on the grounds that if they borrowed money they were under obligation to repay. Of course, but under what conditions? Here the judge was confirming his role – to uphold the strong against the weak. Just to rub it in Stepstone asked for their legal costs to be paid for by the family. The ‘sympathetic’ judge awarded that as well.

Green Party senator Dan Boyle promised that the case would be raised at cabinet level and accused the lender of having behaved "appallingly". His party colleague TD Paul Gogarty might shout ‘fuck you too Senator Boyle’ in exasperation at Boyle having spoken out on behalf of the disadvantaged but it is good that he raised it nonetheless. Labour’s Ciarán Lynch told the Dáil, that subprime lenders like Stepstone were ‘screwing people to the wall.’

The victim of Stepstone, a young mother, exclaimed, ‘I’m sorry I ever went to them, they brought me to hell and back and they can have the house.’ But they should not have it. It would be a crime were that to happen. The recently proposed Home Defence law should not be instituted to afford protection only against the John 'Frog' Wards of the world. But we would be justified in suspecting if Padraig Nally had confronted and dealt with Stepstone in the same fashion as he did with Ward, he would still be in prison struggling through a life sentence. Nally was right when he told RTE that 'the criminal is more active now than ever in this country'; active in their pursuit of the homes of people who don't have the economic power to either pay up or resist.

Any Home Defence law that would seek to defend homes against gangsters would not restrict itself to warding off small fry. It could do much worse than acknowledge that when the aggressor forces a weaker opponent into a retreat, scorched earth is a time honoured tactic designed to render worthless the ground taken.

If some Christmas spirit animated by an anathema for Scrooge was to bulldoze the house to the ground before the greedy lenders got their hands on it few would really care, viewing it as the type of Christmas present Stepstone should get every year and throughout the year to boot.

Thank you for the Music

Yesterday along with my wife and son I headed off to the RDS in Dublin. It was 14 years ago when I last set foot in the place, then for a Sinn Fein conference on the direction of the peace process. Yesterday was an event attended by people with more common sense, thousands of them; children dressed in Xmas attire representing their respective schools in putting on a musical extravaganza for the benefit of their parents and friends.

For weeks we had to endure our eight year old sing every ABBA song that was ever recorded. She enticed her four year old brother to sing along just to prove that two heads are worse than one. The din would normally be enough to send me off to the pub but I resisted. Her persistence paid off on the big day. Collectively the kids put on a great show and brought memories flooding to me from the days when I was a great fan of Abba music.

The first time I had heard the group was in Dundalk’s Imperial Hotel in 1974. Their winning entry in the Eurovision song contest, Waterloo, was played to the audience just after their victory was announced. What a catalyst that proved to be for the Swedish band. It catapulted them to international celebrity status. Weeks later I was in prison for the first time; a sixteen year old in Crumlin Road Jail on remand never quite sure whether to be proud or pissed off. Waterloo soon made it to number one in the British charts and every time I heard it in my cell or on the wing I lapsed into self pity, remembering the much better surrounds where I had first encountered it.

I was so pleased to hear my daughter and her little friends belt out all the old numbers that used to give me such joy. And the fact that she had not made it back from Belfast with me and her brother the day before until the stroke of midnight did not deter her in the slightest. There is something deeply beautiful about the collective singing of children or the crescendo that gathers each time I pass a school and they are on their break. Listening to them is an ear on the future. There is always the hope, even a belief fuelled by their boundless energy, that they will make a better job of things than we ever did.

During one of the concert breaks I bantered with my wife, asking if she had seen the armed garda on the roof on our way into the concert arena. Puzzled, she looked at me with a quizzical expression suggesting she hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. I told her there were armed men all over the building and on the roof in case priests should attempt to storm the venue. I got one of those ‘give it a rest’ looks. I think she has had enough of god’s monsters being whacked with the right end of the stick that is frequently brandished in her company. Even the four year old has developed the habit, through imitation, of shouting ‘bastards’ every time the religious channels are flicked on. He is without doubt right but it isn’t something to be encouraged. I just think they are bastards now to myself and don’t shout it in front of him. Censored in the house of free speech! Won’t the SWP just be delighted if they have got over their split sufficiently to resume their passion for trivia.

Concert over, we made our way home on a packed evening train to a house mercifully freed from the ABBA duet in the playroom. A silent night not even accompanied by the song. Bliss.

Brutal Budget

This week’s budget here in Rip Off Ireland was a state strategy of displacement where the worst effects of a government initiative were displaced onto those least able to do anything about it. It was nothing short of a state economic assault on the poor. All the ministers who are taking a pay cut including the Taoiseach can more easily carry the loss than the families on social welfare who will see their benefits cut by a few percentage points. 20% of a whole lot is easy to put up with. It cuts back on the trimmings. Take 5% away from a little and the necessities are being chopped.

Conor O’Clery put the ‘leading by example’ narrative into some perspective in a way that helped rubbish the myth of the nation pulling together in an act of collective fiscal sacrifice:

Pity the Irish prime minister. Brian Cowen has just taken a 20 percent pay cut, leaving him the equivalent of $300,000 a year. Two years ago the Taoiseach, as he is known, was the highest paid leader of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the group of rich nations which includes the United States, Germany and France. His cash remuneration for leading a country of 4.5 million people brings him down to the level of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, population 61.5 million ... If anything it draws attention to how overpaid the leaders of this small nation still are. Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, draws a mere $137,000 a year.

Although it was certainly ‘jobless and joyless’ as described by Richard Bruton of Fine Gael, it was a fiendishly clever budget by the state. Not because government cutting back on public spending is either innovative or ingenious. The strategic wisdom of the strategy lay in the manner in which the government has shifted culpability for the Republic’s economic woes from the bankers to the public service workers. Working class people are now the enemy at the gate while the bankers have been shifted off to the safety of their vaults.

The best the bunglers can offer the people whose futures they consign to penury is a statement that next year the economy will shrink by 1.25% compared with the current year’s decline of 7.5%. The chances of that prediction coming to pass have to be slim. One of the reasons the current crisis is hard to take is that the bunglers got the rest of their predictions wrong and maligned as Jeremiahs anyone who got it right. Why should it be any different this time round?

The ferocity of the budget was matched only by the contempt within the move to lower the price of alcohol. It was like Marie Antoinette’s ‘let them eat cake’. Urge the poor to get blocked and become inured to their misery as they stew in their squalor. Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party referred to the booze factor when he hit out at the brutal budget. What a disaster it would have been had some candidate other than Higgins been elected to the European parliament last year. His is a voice of principled opposition. Other strident voices raised against the budget and which were accompanied by a copy of the 1916 Proclamation would jump into government with the Fine Gael and the blue shirts given half a chance. Then watch the shedding of the radical rhetoric and stand by for the poorest to get screwed six ways to Sunday.

The die is cast, the gauntlet has been thrown down. If Joe Higgins can overcome the legacy bequeathed to radical politics by the irrelevant and laughed at Left – no easy task given the damage done by the prophet before people circus - the challenge may just be thrown back in the sneering faces of government ministers.

Piece by Sordid Piece

The Irish bishops conference has issued a ‘humble’ apology to all those their foot soldiers raped under the full protection of the bishops who attended the conference. Murray, the Limerick bishop has still not resigned. That resignation, if and when it does come, because of the delay in both making and announcing it, will be viewed as something dragged out of the charlatan; a move grudgingly made on the basis of an awareness that his fellow crozier cronies were unable to give him the same sort of cover it provided for the rapists. There is nothing humble about the bishops. Arrogant men, infuriated by being trapped in the spotlight aiding and abetting those caught with their trousers down.

Having a go at the hierarchy is not to be misconstrued as an attack on the body of the worshipping faithful. There are many lay people of integrity who believe in god and who make up the congregation that the rogue reverends preach to. As William Scholes argued in the Irish News, ‘it is important to draw a distinction between the Church as an institution and the Church as the faithful people of God…’ In terms of arguing for a ban it is only the former that should ever be outlawed. Religion, as an opinion, should have the same status as other opinions and must not be subject to persecution or censorship. True, the mass going congregation could do more to curb the malignant power of the Church as an institution but the efficacy of self-denial is not something to be dismissed lightly.

Unfortunately, as much as some of us might wish it to happen, the Catholic Church in Ireland is not about to be declared an unlawful body of men. Not the remotest chance of it. It is not because the Church serves a useful purpose. Clearly, as a rape institution, it does not. It will survive because it still retains a degree of social power and influence. Any other non-essential body that engaged in widespread child rape and systemic cover-up would be banned outright.

The Church may well be chronically incapable of reforming itself and nothing legislative will come into being that will force it to. That does not mean that it can have its way and evade all democratic and secular scrutiny. What will certainly curb its room for manoeuvre is its declining moral and social authority which unfortunately for it is ultimately conferred on it by civil society.

Yesterday, my four year old managed to get himself lost in town while out shopping with my wife. Unable to locate him quickly his mother approached two garda on patrol. They detected him within a matter of minutes. Had two priests been on the scene she might well have accused them of kidnapping him. The point is, if the Garda were to be disbanded, there would be widespread public panic. If the Church were to face a similar fate it would hardly register on the radar of public concern. The recent suggestion that the Garda might strike has sent alarm bells sounding. Were every bishop and priest to go on strike in the morning the public would most likely welcome the move. What would it be detrimental to?

While disbandment would certainly deprive the rape monster of its lair, the ever growing lack of public confidence in the Church considerably drains it of its power and strengthens the societal mechanisms that hold it to account.

There are other hopeful signs. The decline in the number of people applying to join the priesthood in Ireland is encouraging. The reason for that is hardly that there are fewer good people in the country but rather that the rape pool is shrinking because the bishops are no longer able to provide the necessary cover for marauding bands of priests that infest society.

Where it cannot be smashed the Church can be dismantled from without, piece by sordid piece.

Challenging the Balkans

The Balkans despite frequently capturing world headlines have long seemed a place apart. ‘In Europe but not of it’, the Balkans have, like a horror movie, both fascinated and repelled. The politics, rivalries, wars and disputes there seem endless and incomprehensible, almost as if it is part of the DNA of the people who inhabit the territory, goaded on by their religious and political affiliations.

Not being relaxed with the ‘fight like cats and dogs’ explanation for the disputatious nature of the region and lacking any real familiarity with its politics, I set myself the task many years ago of developing a better understanding. The moment to take the plunge eventually arrived last year when I decided to take a book about it to Majorca. It had been on the shelf quite a while along with a range of others professing to offer contextualisation and understanding of that long troubled part of the world. The bulk of them are likely to go to the crematorium with me unread, once I pop my clogs. Fuel for the fire. Mark Mazower’s The Balkans was spared that trip. That I picked it up was fortuitous. Like a slot machine I put my hand in the Balkans section and took what came out. Brief as it was, once into it I half regretted bringing it along. Hardly a holiday read, where being slightly or not so slightly inebriated doesn’t really matter, the book was a challenge to get through in the heat of a Mediterranean sun. It required disciplined concentration.

Up until the 1880s the ‘Balkan peoples’ had little currency in the discursive vogue of the times. The area where the Balkans later acquired an integrated sense of identity was referred to by many as ‘European Turkey.’ By the outbreak of World War 1 ‘the Balkans’ had become the common sense of political and geographic discourse. But it was a term that has laboured to escape the image of ‘violence, savagery, primitivism’ that is etched on the mind alongside the emblazoned names of war criminals like Slobodan Milosevic and Arkan.

This negative image of ‘the Balkans’ prompted Mazower to look at the region in a fresh way without gazing through the prism of ‘the Balkans.’ His book, first published nine years ago, rose to the challenge with intellectual rigour. It comes like Dr Who’s Tardis where more information and detail is packed in than 135 pages of narrative would seem to allow.

In the very first page Mazower opts to confront a myth of nationalism head-on. ‘At the end of the twentieth century, people spoke as if the Balkans had existed forever. Two hundred years earlier they had not yet come into being.’ It was not until the twentieth century that nation building took off in earnest throughout the Balkans; and then for most of it. It did little for many people there who became subject to the domination of an imperial power. The newly created Balkan states were treated as puppets by the Great Powers that created them. The rest is history and there have been problems ever since. Although, it is always more comfortable to blame it on the people living there.

When hatred and violence are on the move religion is never too far from the scene of the crime. Early into the opening pages the old scourge raises its ugly head when the reader finds that ‘the Ottoman dynasty might have seen itself as the successor to the universal monarchies of Rome and Byzantium, "the shadow of God on earth".’ By way of some intellectual solace, there was the view of Eric Christiansen that the ‘Holy Wars of the Mediterranean’ were ultimately ‘a sad waste of time, money and life.’ They proved beneficial no doubt to some who waged them but not because they made anyone holier or more favoured in the eyes of their make believe god than their neighbours, who were dutifully trying to kill as many enemies of their own imaginary god as was possible to put to the sword or burn. When I first read this book the apartment where I stayed overlooked the Med Sea. While it was simply imagination there was tranquillity to the view so in contrast to the maelstrom conjured up in my mind of religious maniacs hacking each other to death in a bid to prove that the god of the hackers was a more loving god than the god of the hacked. Peaceful sorts, both gods and those who worship them.

Much Western writing on religious violence in the region arbitrarily selected only the cruelty inflicted by one side. Mazower records an American diplomat writing in 1842:

No war, ancient or modern, was ever carried out with such unrelenting fury and such cruelty as the war against the Greeks by the Turks. It is a matter of astonishment that the Christian nations of Europe could have so long remained silent spectators of its atrocities.

This is in spite of the evidence that ‘for many centuries religious coexistence was undoubtedly more accepted under the Ottomans than almost anywhere in Christendom...’ By citing a contrary view, that of Edith Durham, Mazower, struck at the heart of Western bias, cutting through the cant:

When a Moslem kills a Moslem it does not count ... when a Christian kills a Moslem, it is a righteous act; when a Christian kills a Christian it is an error of judgement better not talked about; it is only when a Moslem kills a Christian that we arrive at a full blown atrocity.

Think of the Christian cranks Bush and Blair, acting on the advice of god to invade Iraq, and Durham’s wisdom all too readily appears timeless. In the process of de-Islamicisation many acts of savagery were inflicted on the area once dominated by the Ottomans.

And as ever the story would not be complete if the molesting men of god failed to make an appearance and of how easily religious allegiance could turn on boy lust.

We read for example of a sixteenth century Istanbul man who vowed in the midst oif a dangerous fever that if he recovered he would give up his taste in young boys. Cured, he thought better of it, but hesitated to break his vow. Having been advised by the ulema of Istanbul that he could not wriggle out of an oath once made, he sought the advice of the rabbis of Salonica to see if they could find a loophole. (They suggested he try women.)

It would read funny were it not for the very real misery and despair that such people bring as has been made only too clear again in Ireland.

Mazower makes a useful point about how nationalism comes to hegemonise political discourse. He states that because the history of the Balkans was written for the most part by the descendants of the nationalist patriots the voices of the peasantry those patriots were trying to recruit have ‘rarely made it into the archives.’ The introduction of the oral history technique and more so the world of the internet has given tomorrow’s historians an advantage over todays.

Yet, nationalism like religion, is merely an opinion about what type of political unit people should organise themselves within. Nationalists resent this and, as with their counterparts in the world of religion, often claim some sacred status based on the opinion they subscribe to having been elevated to an ahistorical and eternal truth: roughly translated this status expresses itself as ‘our way or no way.’

Mazower strives in the book to reject the view of people like the former British prime minister John Major that ‘the conflict in Bosnia was the product of impersonal and inevitable forces beyond anyone’s control.’ The logic and language of Major has roots in the past. It is also strikingly similar to what has come out about Africa. A certain ‘unalterable otherness’ is ascribed to the peoples of these regions and the West washes its hands of them. Mazower favours the much less ahistorical interpretation which recognises the role of Milosevic.

On the lookout for evidence of Balkan bloodthirstiness, however, western observers have often mistaken the myths spun by nineteenth century romantic nationalists for eternal truths. Ethnic cleansing whether in the Balkans in 1912-13, in Anatolia in 1921-2, or in erstwhile Yugoslavia in 1991-9, was not then the spontaneous eruption of primeval hatreds but the deliberate use of organised violence against civilians by paramilitary squads and army units; it represented the extreme force required by nationalists to break apart a society which was otherwise capable of ignoring the mundane fractures of class and ethnicity.

A harrowing novel on the region’s wars read back in 1996 was the sole item on my list of ‘books read’ on its conflict. Mazower’s account now makes two but it has more than doubled the knowledge.

The Balkans, by Mark Mazower. Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2000.

God's Poem

It is something of a truism that more people write poetry than read it. I once tried it. I had a notebook in jail and a Derry man using calligraphy sketched a title on its cover for me: ‘The Cynic’s Book of Alternative Poetry and Prose.’ It was meant to be an outlet for poetry and verse that was not simply an act of worship towards the great and the good in the republican prison hierarchy. I found it relaxing, others found it wittily subversive. There is a similarity between composing poetry and penning polemic. Both have a therapeutic character, cathartic even.

For a while inside I also took to reading some of the heavy hitters of the world of poetry, although I did find some of the verse of Gino McCormack and Lawrence McKeown, fellow prisoners, much more authentic than the literary greats. My first foray into the world of poetry was through the poems of Mao Tse Tung, written on his Long March. My long time neighbour from the blanket protest, Martin Livingstone, had a liking for poetry. He pushed me toward it without even trying, catching my interest as he recited snatched verses out the window of a barren H-Block cell. One of his favourites was a poem by Robert Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

There was a certain haunting quality to it which has never diminished with time. Often he would discuss the meaning of poems. There was no great depth to our conversation. We were 21 years of age, banged up in a cell 24/7/365, and ever on the lookout for ways to put our day in. If discussing poetry filled the miles until we slept then it was a welcome break from the daily grind of endless protest.

Years later I would read and derive enjoyment from Philip Larkin and Berthold Brecht. There was also a Liverpudlian who wrote working class prose whose name, despite his brilliance, escapes me. I came across Larkin again in the Martin Amis memoir, Experience. In that book there is a brilliant poem composed by Kingsley Amis, the father of Martin. It is not anything a wordsmith would get excited over but its meaning is sharp, its blade deftly thrust into the heart of pious cant. I loved it because it scathingly sliced through the Christian myth of a loving god and in its place gave us a god of callousness who delighted in the pain of his subjects; the only type of god there could be if one were to exist. The poem sneeringly rubbishes the silliness of a religion that somehow finds immense suffering compatible with a benign creator.

In the book where the poem is drawn from, Kingsley Amis creates god as the poetic narrator who mercilessly taunts a boy without arms or legs, the type of god that would be at ease in the minds of the clergy of Ireland. The poem, sent anonymously to an army chaplain, more or less to subvert his addiction to rubbish, is a fillip for those appalled by the loving god of misery and suffering. My eight year old daughter dictated it to me as I typed. She has a great reading voice, and with emphases, pitch and cadence throughout blended an alluring character into the poem.

To A Baby Born Without Limbs

This is just to show you who's boss around here
It’ll keep you on your toes, so to speak
Make you put your best foot forward so to speak
And give you something to turn your hand to, so to speak
You can face up to it like a man
Or snivel and blubber like a baby
That’s up to you. Nothing to do with Me
If you take it in the right spirit
You can have a bloody marvellous life
With the great rewards courage brings
And the beauty of accepting your LOT
And think how much good it’ll do your mum and dad
And your Grans and Gramps and the rest of the shower
To be stopped being complacent
Make sure they baptise you, though
In case some murdering bastard
Decides to put you away quick
Which would send you straight to LIMB-O, ha ha ha
But just a word in your ear, if you’ve got one
Mind you DO take this in the right spirit
And keep a civil tongue in your head about Me.
Because if you DON’T
I’ve got plenty of other stuff up My sleeve
Such as Leukaemia and polio
(Which incidentally your welcome to any time,
Whatever spirit you take this in.)
I’ve given you one love-pat, right?
You don’t want another
So watch it, Jack

The Beasthood

Do I want to be associated with an organisation that is now proven beyond all doubt to be rotten with arrogance, pride, wealth? Senior clerics who, let’s face it, the nation lived in awe of, have been proved to be cowardly devious liars. What these men presided over was, and is, horror, yet they still refuse to resign - Declan Burke.

Irish society is not all that convincing in its moral outrage. It is currently engaged in yet another deflective time wasting charade or a time buying exercise. The howls of horror emitting from its collective larynx serve no purpose other than to displace with noise the battle that should be waged against the country’s bishops and the brotherhood of child rapists they allowed to ravish society’s children. The perpetual succour associated with ‘Our Lady’ was handed out in abundance by the bishops to the brothers in rape.

The bishops get shouted at, they recoil into their lair replete with a hefty mixture of arrogance and self pity, they grudgingly apologise, make lame excuses and prepare to regroup rather than resign. Society takes its foot off the pedal, allows the structure that supports the bishops and their malignant mob to carry on, drops its guard, and the rape machine cranks up again because everything that made it possible to begin with is still in place. The beast may be monitored to a greater degree than ever before, called to unprecedented account and its culture of secrecy penetrated. But all that is being dealt with are the symptoms. The Irish Catholic Church remains in place and its Act of Contrition is muttered merely for the optics.

Outlawing the Catholic Church in Ireland might seem a controversial proposal but it is not made for the purpose of stirring controversy. Nothing else will work. The Catholic Church poses a serious threat to children throughout Ireland. There is no time to piddle about with attempts at reform. It is not as if society needs the Church. It is not the Garda or the health service where dissolution would be catastrophic. It has been given aeons of time and numerous chances to zip its fly but has chosen to ignore all yellow cards termed reports. Time for a red one.

Look at how the bishops are responding to the Murphy Report; pretending that they took their eye of the ball, misread the risk, claiming that the cover-up was not deliberate, protesting that despite being deemed by Murphy as guilty of inexcusable behaviour, they did not mishandle complaints, and closing ranks to prevent other dioceses being investigated. Andrew Madden, a survivor of clerical abuse, was surely right in arguing that by its actions the hierarchy are ‘belittling the findings’ of the Murphy Report.

There is one firm conclusion to be drawn from this. The Catholic hierarchy is mounting a damage limitation exercise. In such circumstances society has but one choice. It must hold the pass against the Bishops and refuse to allow damage limitation through. On the contrary it should seek to inflict maximum damage on the Church. The Beasthood must have its lair destroyed. Anything less and the malevolent men of god will march and rape again.