Peter: King Of Salem

There is a name for this dangerous obsession – it’s called McCarthyism. He has only proved what a bigoted moron he has become, and nothing else. Simply said, the hearing was an abuse of his public office - Habib Siddiqui

In the 1970s the Irish in Britain faced a harrowing time. They were victimised and demonised because of the IRA campaign. The Irish became the victims of discrimination and ostracism, while officially sanctioned coercive discrimination saw innocent men and women sent down for lengthy stretches in prison. Peter King would have been aware of this given his close relationship with both the IRA and Sinn Fein. His current witch hunt against US Muslims has led long time friend Niall O Dowd to say:

Alas, he finds himself on the bully pulpit espousing a very different take on Muslim Americans. It is a very strange situation for a great advocate of democracy in Ireland … He has now become the biggest hardliner in Congress against Muslim Americans.

King seems obsessed with Islam, seeing Muslims under every bed where Reds supposedly used to hide out. One of those he relies on to give testimony accuses Islam of being an insidiously supremacist religion. Although as Seema Jilani has rightly retorted ‘as if every other faith does not.’ Islam is hardly different from other religions in that regard. Religion by its nature can’t keep its nose out of other people’s business and forever wants to control the lives of those around it and dictate moral standards which clerics are all too wont to ignore themselves. Look no further than the child rapists of Catholicism as a salutary reminder of that.

There are indeed people of the Islamic faith who are advocates of theocracy. They long to secure widespread acquiescence in their theology of domination. Their goal is to subjugate women, gay people and those who have no religious belief. They also want to impose a regime of censorship on artists and writers. But there are Christians and Jews of like mind. They never seem to get the same degree of manufactured opprobrium that is thrown the way of Islam.

There is no justification for Peter King to pursue the stance against Muslims that we are currently witnessing. A New York Times Editorial made a compelling case against him which highlighted the bluster, bigotry and prejudice that guides his actions.

he is focusing on one group that appears to have obsessed him since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, resulting in slanders and misstatements that might have earned him a rebuke from his colleagues had they been about any other group. More than 80 percent of the mosques in America are run by extremists, he has said, never citing real evidence. Too many American Muslims are sympathetic to radical Islam, he said. Most pernicious, he has claimed that American Muslims have generally refused to cooperate with law enforcement agencies on terrorism cases. He has cited no evidence for this, either, but a study issued last month by Duke University and the University of North Carolina found just the opposite. The American Muslim community has been the single largest source of tips that have brought terror suspects to the attention of authorities, the study found. (It also found that the number of American Muslims found or suspected to be part of terror operations dropped substantially in 2010.)

These hearings are not about rooting out Islamic fascism. They are designed to feed into the amplification spiral of anti-Muslim discourse and drown out in the cacophony other discourses that challenge. The first of his hearings produced nothing. As Joe Conason pointed out, ‘this particular show turned out to be almost fact-free and laden with emotion.’ The type of things that could see a Muslim lynched by the Christians of the Ku Klux Klan.

Witnesses called were those who would tell King what he wanted to hear while those such as New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly whose attitudes and actions in the view of Conason ‘contrast starkly with King's’ were conveniently ignored.

It is not Salem in 1692 but Washington of 2011. Perhaps the religious right in America could justifiably point to this as evidence that there has been no evolution. Certainly nothing has moved on in terms of finding witches to hunt down and persecute.

The Irish Government must be in possession of a full database of incidents of the Irish in Britain being targeted for no reason other than their nationality. It must be uniquely placed to bring pressure to bear in opposition to prejudice. So far the tune has been The Sound of Silence.

On the One Road

Cartoon by Brian Mór
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Free Ps and the Rise of Sinn Fein

As the days tick down to the Stormont poll on 5 May, guest writer Radical Unionist commentator Dr John Coulter analyses for the Pensive Quill how the Free Presbyterians’ 60th anniversary this year could boost Sinn Fein’s chances of being the largest Assembly party.

Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness could succeed the DUP’s Peter Robinson as First Minister after the 5 May poll – and he would have the Protestant fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church to thank!

The hardline denomination celebrated its 60th birthday on St Patrick’s Day as it was founded on 17 March, 1951 by former DUP boss and ex-First Minister Ian Paisley senior, now Lord Bannside, although the commemorations to mark that 60th birthday will continue throughout 2011.

The staunchly fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church was a breakaway from the mainstream, more liberal leaning Irish Presbyterian Church, which in the 1950s was the North’s largest Protestant denomination.

Although the Free Presbyterian Church, commonly called the Free Ps, has only about 16,000 worshippers on a Sunday out of a Northern Protestant population of around one million, for many years it was regarded as ‘the DUP at prayer’.

A decade ago, when the Free Ps celebrated their half-century in 2001, the commemorations became the launching pad for the DUP to overtake the rival Ulster Unionists as the largest Unionist party in the 2003 Assembly poll.

As the secular society becomes more open the deeper we progress into the third millennium, it would be easy to dismiss the Free P Church as a bunch of irrelevant Tub Thumpers. That would be both a huge inaccuracy politically and religiously.

In 1970, by the time Paisley senior became both a Stormont MP and Westminster MP, his Free P Church had existed for almost two decades. Free Presbyterianism gave a voice to two politically muted voices in liberal Unionist-controlled Ulster – evangelical Protestants and working class loyalists.

The Free P Church’s real power was its tremendous ability to mobilise Unionist voters of whatever denomination or class on polling days. This was the secret behind Paisley senior’s 230,251 first preference, poll-topping performance in the 1984 European election; the overtaking of the UUP in 2003 at Stormont, and again two years later in the Westminster General Election.

During the Paisley era, to progress up the ranks of the DUP, many figures also needed to be ‘born again’ Christian fundamentalists in Free Presbyterianism. As well as Paisley senior, another high profile DUP cleric is the Gospel-singing South Antrim MP, Rev William McCrea.

While Sinn Fein spin doctor Danny Morrison masterminded the republican movement’s concept of the ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, Paisley’s Free P’s equally developed the rival Unionist concept of the Bible in one hand and the ballot paper in the other.

Small in quantity the Free P Church may be, even in relation to other fundamentalist Protestant denominations, but its political quality was its ability to send its tentacles of influence right through every Protestant denomination and social class.

Although the Free Presbyterian Church was central to mobilising the DUP core vote, rifts began to emerge after Paisley senior signed the St Andrews Agreement in 2006.

The unease turned into open rebellion the following year after Paisley senior entered a power-sharing Stormont Executive with Sinn Fein, leading to jibes that he and deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness were ‘the Chuckle Brothers’.

Coming myself from a mainstream Irish Presbyterian background where my dad was an Ulster Unionist politician and Presbyterian minister, I was naturally regarded with tremendous suspicion as a journalism by Free Presbyterianism.

But in the weeks and months after the signing of the St Andrews Agreement and the DUP’s 2007 Stormont election victory, I was amazed by the significant number of Free Presbyterians who confidentially opened their hearts to me at the unease with which they viewed the developing peace process.

While I still got ‘the odd earful’ from the hardened Paisley loyalist, even senior and influential Free P’s privately voiced their concerns about ‘The Doc’ being Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church and sitting in a power-sharing Executive with Sinn Fein.

Several months later, Paisley senior was initially forced to quit as Moderator – or leader – of the Free Presbyterian Church; a post he had held for more than 50 years. Weeks later came the news he was stepping aside as both First Minister and DUP leader, the latter post he had held since the DUP was launched in 1971.

Many of those who followed MEP Jim Allister out of the DUP to form the hardline, anti-power sharing Traditional Unionist Voice party were Free Presbyterians.

Under the St Andrews Agreement, the party with the largest number of MLAs has the right to select the coveted First Minister’s post.

Sinn Fein could follow its best ever Dail showing sunder Gerry Adams since the formation of the Republic by becoming the largest Assembly party if the Free Presbyterian Church does not rally Unionist voters behind the Robinson-led DUP.

Protestant voter apathy – especially among Church-going Christians – has been increasing in recent elections. Some political sources estimate around 150,000 Christians – many of whom would be sympathetic to the DUP – did not vote in last year’s Westminster General Election.

The Free Ps’ 60th commemorations also coincide with celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, the translation most favoured by many Protestant fundamentalist churches.

If Free Presbyterians do not play their leading role in mobilising Protestant voters behind the DUP, but instead either plump for the TUV or ignore the ballot box, this could give Sinn Fein a narrow advantage in the battle to become the top Assembly party.

Already there has been open criticism from some in the Free Presbyterian Church of First Minister Robinson suggesting he would be prepared to attend a Roman Catholic funeral – an act severely frowned upon during the Paisleyite era in the DUP.

Paisley senior still retains a leading role in the Free Ps, particularly through its monthly journal, The Revivalist, in which he and his wife – fellow peer Baroness Eileen Paisley - have regular columns.

Free Presbyterians have also been highly active in other fringe fundamentalist groups such as the Evangelical Protestant Society, the Caleb Foundation, and the Independent Orange Order.

It is expected the Free Church will be one of the leading protest groups during any planned visit of the Pope to the North next year.

Republicans and nationalists should not dismiss the tensions within the Free Presbyterian Church as yet another internal Protestant religious squabble.
These same republicans would do well to see Free Presbyterianism as a vital pulse within political Unionism. Nationalists ignore developments in the Free P’s at their peril.

JOHN COULTER’S TOP TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL FREE P’S:
Rev Ian Paisley senior – founded the church in 1951. Now in his mid 80s, he still has a strong behind the scenes influence.

Rev Kyle Paisley – Paisley senior’s son and the leading cleric to succeed his dad as minister of the most famous Free P church, the Martyrs Memorial in Belfast. Has spent much of his ministry in Britain. Brother of Ian Junior, who succeeded Paisley senior as North Antrim MP.

Rev Ivan Foster – Ran one of the church’s Christian schools. Former leading light in the Fermanagh Third Force loyalist vigilante group. Thought to be one of the main opponents of Paisley senior entering the Executive with Sinn Fein.

Rev Willie McCrea – Has been one of Paisley senior’s right hand men for many years. Leading Gospel singer who has made numerous albums. Currently MP for South Antrim.

Rev Jim Beggs – Paisley senior’s brother in law. Former minister of Ballymena Free P Church and was Paisley’s election agent in North Antrim for many years.
Rev Ron Johnstone – former missionary and current successor to Paisley senior as Moderator of Free P Church. Thought to favour the Free P Church distancing itself from Unionist politics.

Rev David McIlveen – minister of Sandown Free P Church in east Belfast and the main media spokesman for the denomination.

Rev John Douglas – senior minister at Lisburn Free P Church and one of the denominations top theologians.

Rev William Beattie – long time political colleague of Paisley senior who was based in South Antrim and Lagan Valley. In 1970, he won Stormont seat for Protestant Unionist Party, the forerunner of the DUP.

George Dawson – died from cancer a few months after retaining his Assembly seat, but as Grand Master of Independent Orange Order, founding Chairman of Caleb and East Antrim MLA, was highly instrumental in rallying other evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants behind the DUP.

Cu? Caw!

Cartoon by Brian Mór
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Betrayal Of Trust

Father Brendan Smyth was evil. He raped and buggered children, boys and girls, who came into his life. He often chose the children of families who regarded him as a trusted friend first and foremost. And then secondly as a priest – Chris Moore

We might have seen it all before, known it all before, heard it all before, read it all before, but when it was laid bare before us the behaviour of a criminal class of objectively disordered people in the Irish Catholic hierarchy had lost none of its jolting potency. It can still send tremors to the human foundations.

Brendan Smyth because of intense media coverage was a household name in the 1990s, albeit one that no one would want near their house. He was a notorious child rapist who used his position as a Catholic priest to sexually abuse numerous children. When he was uncovered the Church quickly moved him on, allowing him access to fresh children, and pushing aside with a prayer book and the sign of the cross both the information it had on him and the concerns of those convinced he would rape again.

Betrayal of Trust tells the story of a West Belfast family’s struggle for justice against a cynical Church hierarchy. Smyth, who the parents revered as a trusted friend, had repeatedly abused the three children in the family. What was paraded in front of viewers was a gang of Catholic clerics who could rest easy with the rape of children so long as the good name of the Church was not besmirched. At every step of the way the family was frustrated. Prevarication and procrastination were the standard responses, plus of course, ‘we will remember you in our prayers.’ What a loathsome nest of snakes.

There is one scene which is a classic on how powerful bodies respond to those who refuse to acquiesce in their demands for submission. Anybody who has ever made a challenge to authority or probed further than authority was comfortable with has experienced the standard put down. The journalist Chris Moore was told by a senior cleric whom he needed to interview that he had no interest in protecting children but only in making a name for himself. Chris Moore the self- promoting journo was now the problem not the Church’s rape victims.

How the criminal clerics who covered up, withheld information, browbeat families and victims into silence and tried to keep Brendan Smyth away from court, did not appear in the dock should beggar belief but it doesn’t. The Catholic Church was a powerful institution and even the RUC, an agency with no reputed love for Catholics, walked on eggshells when dealing with Church related controversies. The smarmy pond life that would tell people ‘god bless and get on with it’ must have felt they had got away with it.

The makers of this two part showing framed the culpability of Cardinal Cahal Daly. If their depiction of his role is accurate, here was a man quite at ease lecturing all and sundry on morality, yet prepared to do absolutely nothing to move against a child rapist, preferring instead to shelter behind canon law. Daly allowed the brute to remain in the Church. And with the Church more than willing to protect him from children making accusations, Smyth continued to abuse kids in their schools, their own bedrooms, anywhere he chose to. One girl who complained to a nun in a Belfast orphanage where Smyth assaulted her was battered over the head with a bunch of keys by the female thug who ordered the terrified child to keep quiet. If that tramp was ever publicly identified I do not recall it.

Courtesy of paedophile trafficking by Church authorities, Smyth was even provided with a safe haven in America where he pillaged his way through children there.

At one point a total sense of surrealism emerged when an idiot priest was deeply concerned that Chris Moore’s car should not go unblessed. It was otherworldly. How could a guy like this seriously interact with humanity or tell people how to live their lives? Yet fools of this ilk are foisted upon us as moral guardians.

The Church in Ireland emerged from this dramatisation as a repugnant band of men many of who were guided by criminal intent. The current cardinal Sean Brady failed lamentably when he imposed a vow of silence on two of Smyth’s victims in 1975. It took almost two decades for action to be initiated in the courts against Smyth. Brady must bear major responsibility for this. Yet, like Smyth, he was allowed to remain in the Irish Church and eventually become its leader. Last year Chris Moore acerbicly wrote of Brady:

He heard the heart-rending story of pain suffered by two children. They described to Cardinal Brady just what happened to them … He got them to sign away their freedom of speech. Excommunication if they didn't? And this he says with a straight face is not a cover-up. Silence the witnesses. Isn't that what Hitler did? Preserve the good name of the Catholic Church. Evil wins when good men stand by and do nothing. Perhaps something will prick Cardinal Brady's conscience, but judging by his performance up to now we should not hold our breath … How he can really expect us to accept his assertion that by making the witnesses of abuse by Smyth sign an oath of silence that he is not perverting the course of justice and creating a cover up? His position is untenable.

The defenders of the criminal class within the Church hierarchy will seek to rubbish this dramatisation on the grounds of input by the Hole in the Wall Gang. Tim McGarry of Gang fame was one of the writers. At the heel of the hunt it is so much easier to take the gang of comics seriously than it is the gang of clerics who plied their trade to cover for a rapist in their midst.

Totally Bummed

Cartoon by Brian Mór
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From Tennessee To Pennsylvania, Some Good Old Christian Mania

Laws to criminalize a minority religion, formal government investigations into disloyalty from a minority group, violent attacks on their place of worship, and the intensity of the hate-mongering … Glenn Greenwald

Just prior to Peter King beginning his official witch hunt against US Muslims the state of Tennessee saw a bill proposed that would make it a felony to follow Sharia Law. Without equivocation Sharia Law, like Canon law, Rabinnic Law, Masonic Law, Demonic Law or any other religious law should have no more status in any society than the rules of the average golf club. Yet the idea that people should not be allowed to adhere to it in their own personal lives while refraining from inflicting it on those who do not want it, is anathema to democratic culture. Tersely put, those in a golf club should be allowed to follow the rules of the golf club insofar as they do not conflict with the rules of society. If they clash with the dominant societal culture so be it. That is a standard feature of democracy which functions by means of, rather than in spite of, a plurality of cultures.

Tennessee, if we need reminding, was home to the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 where the state proved itself very sympathetic to religious intolerance. Tennessee of course became the laughing stock of the world because of its idiocy, a crown it almost ceded to Pennsylvania in 2005 when in a Dover courtroom Christian crackpots took to the stand in a bid to have religion regarded as science. Pennsylvania’s saving grace was that science won the day and the right wing creationist Intelligent Design Movement was humiliated. At the end of last month Lauri Lebo, who covered the Dover Trial – and later went on to write a much acclaimed book about the matter, The Devil In Dover - wrote:

Now, more than 80 years after the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee, creationism proponents are pushing for state legislation there that could make it easier for teachers to bring unscientific ideas back into the science classroom in public schools.

Christian intolerance is okay in Tennessee, but only Christian. It would not be so bad if the problem was constrained to a few Tennessee Hillbillies. But Ed Moloney, who now resides in the States, has drawn attention to a worrying phenomenon: the US is ‘a deeply and at times frighteningly racist country and in Muslims, white racists are able to indulge both their hatred for non-whites and for non-Christians.’

This makes the argument by the the blogger Atheist Ethicist all the more worrying because of the scenario he outlined: ‘Republicans in general have shown themselves to have a strong aversion to anything that even hints at a rational, scientific investigation of a problem.’

With that setting the tone Why wouldn’t Muslims have cause to be concerned about the Peter King witch hunt? When Alejandro Beutel of the Muslim Public Affairs Council protests that ‘what we're talking about is the demonization and criminalization of an entire American faith community here in our nation’ it is hard to find something to pull him up over.

A former member of the Bush administration, Suhail Khan, said:

We've seen this movie before -- whether it was the attacks on Jewish Americans during the Red Scare, on Catholics, on Japanese-Americans during World War II, on African-Americans and so many others who went through horrendous experiences.

A read through Michelle Goldberg’s book, Kingdom Coming, should suffice to show that Americans have enough to contend with from Christian Reconstructionists and their allies in the Intelligent Design Movement who really would drive the democratic, pluralist and scientific dimensions of American cultural and political life out of being and in its place the rule of the irrational and theocratic.

If Peter King really wants to root out theocratic fascists intent on subverting American democracy he could cast his eye in the direction of the Christians. Even then he would have no justification to persecute the entire Christian community because of the behaviour of a minority in its midst. Why should it be any different for Muslims?

Yet we know it is different. Take the case of the murderous Christian John Thomas who told police he used a rock in a sock to batter to death a 70 year old Pennsylvanian man, Murray Seidman, because the bible referred to stoning homosexuals. As Joshua Holland reports:

If the perpetrator were following the uglier dictates of another book of myths - say the Koran - then this would obviously reflect poorly on all his fellow adherents. As it stands ... well, just a lone nutter.

Mon Colonel Adieu

Cartoon by Brian Mór
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Old Peter Hubbard

if your test for whether or not terrorist violence is acceptable is whether or not you agree with the cause that it furthers, you will never have the moral authority to condemn such acts when they are carried out by others. The use of violence against innocents must be wrong in whatever form it takes. Take any other position and you are open, as Congressman King undoubtedly is, to charges of hypocrisy – Tom Parker.

If there is one lesson Peter King has learned from his experience of Ireland it is to reinvent the past. He may even have been tutored in it by his long time ally and grand master of the denial game, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. The type of absurd denial sitting at the heart of the peace process works a bit like the Holy Trinity. Don’t try understanding it, just believe it.

has not been having it all his own way – in fact he’s been having a terrible time of it … His problem is that the US media has finally caught up with his past as a cheerleader for the Provisional IRA back in the 1980’s and 1990’s when he and Noraid were inseparable and when he was on first name terms with and a house guest of many in the IRA’s national and Belfast leaderships.

Because these things have a tendency to be recalled by those who suffered their effects rather than those who caused them, King’s forgetfulness has found a critic in Tom Parker, the policy director for terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights at Amnesty International USA. Parker, who was injured with 20 others in an IRA bomb attack in London in 1990, displayed scorn toward King’s newly acquired disdain for what many define as terrorism:

I have no problem with his support for a unified Ireland. What really bothers me is the hypocrisy of the man … This is a guy who is happy to bully other people when he has a whole crowd of skeletons in his closet on this issue.

King does not want these skeletons flaunted so has picked a different cupboard for the audience to look into, Old Mother Hubbard-like, and discover it bare of content apart from some words scrawled where the skeleton might be expected to hang: ‘Lis¬ten, I think I'm one of the people who brought about peace in Ire¬land’ as he told the Washington Times. Move along folks nothing to see here. Although King has emulated the Sinn Fein leader in creating a fictional past in which his role was only to bring peace to Ireland, his problem has been concisely laid out by Tom Dierner:

From his days as the elected Nassau County comptroller in the early 1980s, King has spoken out for the IRA, a nationalist group that waged a bloody bomb-and-bullet campaign for three decades in an effort to drive the British out of Northern Ireland. To King and other supporters, the IRA volunteers were freedom fighters. But to others, including many Irish Americans, the Provisionals (as the main IRA group was known) were terrorists.

Moreover Ed Moloney, a long time observer of the IRA, contends that history does little to support King’s account.

By the time the process got seriously underway in secret, circa 1987/1988, King had been supporting the IRA for seven or eight years … King’s closest contacts in the IRA in these years were the military men, people who had never been nor would ever want be in Sinn Fein, activists who would have little truck either with the peace process. King told me himself that he didn’t meet Gerry Adams, the architect of the peace process, until 1984, four years after his love affair with the Provos began

In a riveting account in the online journal Counterpunch, Moloney adds to our understanding of King’s immersion in the twilight world of the IRA.

Peter King … had friends and contacts at the very highest levels of the IRA at a time when both the British and American governments had vowed to achieve the organisation’s destruction … Peter King owes all that he is to his own support for a foreign terrorist group. He accuses Wikileaks of enabling Al Qaeda to kill Americans but he was cheerleader, confidant and friend to the leaders of one of Europe’s bloodiest and most violent terrorist groups.

In seeking to establish anti-terrorist bona fides King has been critical of bodies like Wikileaks and demanding that it be placed on the list of foreign terrorist organizations on the grounds that ‘Their activity is enabling terrorists to kill Americans?’

Even for those of us who do not view the IRA per se as a terrorist organisation we can hardly deny that there were many occasions when it did employ terrorism. And despite his professed stance in defence of US citizens from the ‘terrorism’ of Wikileaks the historical record would appear to show King was in a dalliance with the IRA at the time the organisation bombed Harrods in London in 1983 on one of the busiest shopping days of the year making it most unlikely to avoid civilian casualties. As a result of that attack Kenneth Salvesan, a Chicago businessman died and an Irish American, Michigan man Mark McDonald was seriously injured. As Niall O’Dowd wrote ‘it was as bad as anything Al Qaeda could have pulled off.’ He added on King "I think he's gone off the rails."

Like the man who made him respectable, Gerry Adams, King was even banned from the airways by the BBC because he refused to condemn an IRA mortar attack in 1985 that killed 9 British police men and women. Not many US politicians have that on their CV.

Peter the Good may be trying to reinvent himself as the new American hero stepping forward to save US society from the ravages of evil Islam. But hero to zero can often be a quick non-stop journey. As a character in the film Somebody’s Hero said there is only one thing US society loves more than the rise of a hero – the fall of one. Let’s see where this one goes.

Dear Saint of Our Isle

Cartoon by Brian Mór
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King Witch Hunter

I wonder, will you also call Jalat Hamdani, whose son Mohammad Salman Hamdani was an emergency medical technician (EMT) who died in the World Trade Centre on 9/11? Will the thousands of Muslims that serve in our military also testify? Will you ask them to defend their loyalty to this country? When would you like to schedule their testimonies: before, or after, the leg amputations resulting from IEDs that have injured many of them during their tours of duty? - Seema Jilani

The US has done little over the decades to diminish its reputation as home to reactionary ideas. Beyond dispute, many outstanding progressive thinkers exist in America, but a culture that allowed its president to openly endorse torture, in the process reversing one of the key tenets of modern civilisation, reveals the predominance of a mindset that is heavily tipped against the progressive. Conservative ideas no matter how deranged - as in Philip Johnson and Intelligent Design or Lawrence Mead and Workfare - have a purchase in US society like few other countries in the West. Beaming out from deep within American society there is a projection of conservative religious Neanderthals coupled to conservative political troglodytes. Between them they hate all and sundry not as revanchist, reactionary or retarded as themselves. Fertile ground for persecutionist zeal.

Against such a backdrop there is nothing startling that an anti-Muslim witch hunt which parallels the right wing McCarthy terror of the 1950s should be officially sanctioned under the title of ‘Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response’. What might be a surprise to some is that Peter King is in its avant garde.

King, a Long Island Republican Party Congressman, as we recall, is a long time associate of the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. Despite a history - which he unsuccessfully tries to cloud in secrecy - steeped in the type of political violence King professes to abhor and promises to eradicate, Adams these days works at recasting himself in a radically different role. He has revised his past so as to portray himself as a human rights activist. Yet as Brian Rowan wrote recently ‘for all Adams' denials of IRA membership, he was part of the war before he was part of the peace.’ Now the commitment of Adams to human rights might be subject to the same ridicule as his disavowal of an IRA past if, on the international stage, he fails to move against King’s persecution of US Muslims which echoes the treatment meted out to the Irish community in Britain during the dark days of the 1970s. The guiding legal ethic then was innocent until proven Irish.

Ironically, for all his pontificating against violence, the case has been made that without the IRA wind in his sails King’s political career might never have left the port of obscurity. King told Ed Moloney in 2005 that ‘Gerry Adams made me respectable’. In a sense Adams, albeit unintentionally, created the bigot than now stalks US Muslims.

The kingdom of good King Peter is the House Homeland Security Committee of which he is the chairperson. Last week this committee set in motion congressional hearings on US Muslims in a professed bid to root out home-grown terrorism.

At the heart of the Committee’s case is that US Muslims are ‘uncooperative with authorities.’ Although as Seema Jilani points out in her Guardian piece:

the new study by the Triangle Centre on Terrorism and Homeland Security… found that tips from Muslim Americans provided information that helped authorities thwart terrorist plots in 48 of 120 cases.

Quoting from the same report Jilani said ‘Muslim Americans have been so concerned about extremists in their midst that they have turned in people who turned out to be undercover informants.’ In this she finds support from C. Dixon Osburn of The Law and Security Program of Human Rights First who refutes the non-cooperation with the police line. It also challenges a further charge by King that 80% of religious leaders in mosques are radicalized. Osburn points out that the police and FBI disagree. Likewise the Los Angeles Times reported that ‘research by two North Carolina universities shows Muslims have been the top source of tips that have thwarted terrorism plots in the U.S.’

Facts, pesky things, they just can’t be allowed to impede a good old witch hunt where the loons are set loose to hunt whomever is labelled the outsider.

King has for a long time ranted against Muslims in the US. He was therefore a hostile witness long before he took his seat at the congressional hearings. He believes there are too many Mosques in the US. There probably are but then atheists like myself are prone to think that way. But at least we also think there are too many churches, chapels, synagogues, and whatever other type of temple people of faith worship in. King targets the Mosque alone. He won’t dare tell us there are too many synagogues. The Jewish Lobby has the power to roast him over the Holocaust spit were he to venture down that road.

Seema Jilani who delivered a blistering critique of King in the Guardian is a US Muslim. She is far removed from any image we may have of a theocrat intent on pressing home domination theology, hanging gays, stoning adulteses or threatening to behead cartoonists.

Radical Islam is, indeed, a threat – mostly to us Muslims, but it will not be conquered by your humiliating McCarthy-esque public defamations … The biggest threat to this nation is not radical Islam; it is you, hurling the malignancy of prejudice even deeper into the recesses of the American psyche, for your own gratuitous political gain … Let us call this what it is: bigotry draped in the American flag – nothing more than a fear-mongering attempt, drenched in political theatrics, laced with reactionary hatred, and deceptively packaged in an incredulous label of national security. Same as it ever was.

Bigotry draped in the English flag is a phenomenon the Irish have experience of. This morning Martin McGuinness was scheduled to breakfast with King. Let’s see if memory will prevail over forgetting and those who were the making of Peter King will seek to be his breaking.

McGeough Guilty Verdict A Farce

Today The Pensive Quill carries a piece from guest writer Helen McClafferty in her capacity as Chairperson, Freegerry.com Campaign. It was written towards the end of February

On February 18, 2011, after almost 4 years of a politically motivated arrest and trial, Gerry McGeough’s case ended with a "guilty" verdict handed down by a British diplock court. McGeough is the first Irish republican to be sentenced under the GFA on troubles related charges dating back over 30 years. He is now in Maghaberry prison awaiting sentencing.

For several years, prior to McGeough’s arrest, he was living a peaceful existence with his wife and children in Tyrone until he decided to run in the Assembly Elections as an Independent candidate on an anti-PSNI platform in March of 2007. That is when Gerry’s life took a change for the worse and it has been a living nightmare for him and his family ever since. Gerry was arrested at the count center, following the poll, and he has been vindictively persecuted by the British crown ever since.

In contrast, the British government has operated a secret scheme granting royal pardons or immunity from prosecution to hand-picked ex-IRA members and Loyalists wanted for killings, bombings and other paramilitary activities. No members of the British forces are being charged or tried for their part in the 1969-98 North of Ireland conflict (the soldiers responsible for "Bloody Sunday" including those British/Orange forces behind the Dublin-Monaghan bombings).

In their obsessive need to prosecute and imprison Gerry, the British turned international political asylum refugee laws on their head by using as their chief “evidence” alleged political asylum application papers from Sweden (which are normally subjected to a 50-year confidentiality protection clause under Swedish law). The move was the first time such documents were used against a republican and now has widespread implications for the entire concept of political asylum.

To pretend that McGeough’s arrest, his almost 4 year on-going legal saga, and now his ‘guilty’ verdict, has anything to do with “justice,” is pathetic. He is being discriminated against for purely political reasons and there was a determined effort to railroad him into prison at the highest political level.

McGeough’s attorneys have filed a request with the NIO seeking a “pardon” for McGeough. People are being asked to contact their local politicians to ask them to ensure that the NIO treat McGeough equally, the same as others have been treated since the GFA, and grant him a pardon. For further details, updates and history on the case, please go to the ‘freegerry.com’ web site.

Voting Labour

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least - Robert Byrne

Labour have with all due expectation struck the deal with Fine Gael. The party’s chronic ideological promiscuity denies it the anchor that would root it firmly to a left programme and the perspective of the poor. It is fatally attracted to consorting with the right and the rich. The sheer look of ecstasy on the faces of the Labour Party luminaries as they stepped out of the shadow of opposition and into the neon lights of ministerial office said more than an avalanche of political critique. Condemned by their own beaming smiles, their message was undoubtedly that the election was about the furthering of their careers and not about the economic woes plaguing the country. With them in government rather than on opposition the proletariat will quickly become the doletariat hopelessly dependent on social welfare with no chance of social change.

I knew this was a certain outcome when I opted to cast my vote for them. It was never going to go any other way. Unsurprisingly a friend took me to task for this in asking:

A vote for Labour to form a government with the blue shirts. What possessed you? When the axe falls on the poorest and most disadvantaged in our society how will you reconcile this? Better to have spoiled your vote on the basis there was nothing on offer worth voting for.

He could have added that it is a partitionist party and has served in governments that were unremittingly hostile to republicans both in prison and on the streets.

It’s fair comment but not one that blind sided me. I knew all this at the time I cast my vote, or wasted it, depending on your perspective. So why not just stop at the pub on the way to the polling station and stay there until the booths closed rather than dropping in for a drink on the way back from voting? I could always have abstained, spoiled my vote rather than wasting it.

People have the right to desist from voting even though there are some who demand that voting be made compulsory or alternatively heap abuse on those who would rather stay at home on polling day. Democracy supposed to be rooted in consent can hardly coerce citizens into voting. People cannot be denied the right to vent a view that the candidates on offer do not merit a vote. As Jay Leno comments, ‘If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.’ Given that we had plenty of candidates and no god it hardly answers the point but we know what he means.

At the same time to refrain from voting is inescapably to endorse the status quo. You may not vote for things to remain the same but not to cast a vote is an act of inertia which equates with no movement. That when boiled down amounts to nothing other than ‘as you were.’ For that reason there is surely something to be learned from the proclamation by George Jean Nathan that ‘bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.’

When my turn came, faced with the dilemma of either endorsing the status quo or voting for something that would make no difference to the status quo - Hobson’s choice - I looked down the list of candidates on offer. Having already decided that spoiling my vote or not casting it were not options that I favoured, I picked what looked closest to a general Left position. Labour was the only party that fitted the bill, when the bill could be fleetingly glimpsed from behind the haze and penumbra.

There were no United Left Alliance candidates in this constituency, nor a republican one that I could see. The parties I was determined to give no preference to were Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein. In some areas like Dublin Mid West certain Sinn Fein candidates would have got some preference but not in Louth. There was neither a moral or political reason to cast a vote for Sinn Fein there given the record of its candidate. The other parties would not get a preference regardless of where they stood or who stood for them.

In casting my vote I was fully aware that Labour would join Coalition with Fine Gael. The internal composition of the party allowed for nothing else, even if I voted for Labour to go into opposition not government. It was the mere expression of political desire rather than the endorsement of the certain outcome. That however has the ring of an excuse to it rather a reason.

The fallback position, always one where consolation rather than conviction reigns, was that when the party did go into government its more radical elements might be able to eke out some protection for the more vulnerable on issues like child benefit.

There is some small comfort but only just, in that now having voted them I can claim to have been let down by them and muster a louder shout when calling on them to do something worthwhile without arming them with the retort that I never voted.

Nevertheless when all is said and done more will be said than done by Labour. Voting for what we would like rather than what we expect is ultimately more psychologically satisfying than politically so.

Best option – be abroad or seriously hung over on polling day.

Just when you thought it was safe...

Cartoon by Brian Mór
Click to enlarge

Return to Crossmacglynn

Tonight the Pensive Quill carries the next two chapters of Thomas "Dixie" Elliott's satirical story, Crossmacglynn.

Ballycrossmacglynn
Thomas "Dixie" Elliott

Chapter 5


Did we forget about poor old Godfrey Templeton whilst we wasted the last while listening to the dogmatic shit that poured from the mouth of the Reverend Reginald? Well if truth be told, we did indeed. Surely Godfrey has bled to death by now, you may well ask? Well, not exactly. If you remember he was wearing a bullet proof vest which took the full force of Granny MacGlynn’s shotgun blast. Thanks to the sharp shooting of Tomas MacGlynn, aged 7 and a bit, he had lost half his ear and if you can bleed to death from a severed ear then Godfrey was in bloody trouble so to speak.

Anyway he had managed to get to his feet and stagger away up the road hoping a passing army foot patrol would come across him before the IRA did. Three miles he went before he remembered that the army didn’t patrol these roads on foot. They flew in by helicopter, landed in a field, jumped out, hid in the bushes for a hour then fucked off again by helicopter. These were dangerous parts given that even the children and grannies were in the IRA, the dogs in the street knew that and they too were given to attacking and tearing the arses off Her Majesty’s armed forces. So Godfrey took to the fields in search of a helicopter. He kept close to the hedgerows just in case one happened to come, because he knew they’d open fire if they saw anyone looking like a terrorist or an Irish farmer in a field. His plan was to let the copter land and when the troops got out he’d shout in his finest Eton accent, “I say chaps over here!”

The blood was pouring from Godfrey’s ear, making him weaker. He stumbled and then fell through a hedge ending up in a ditch on the other side. He crawled to a old gnarled hawthorn bush and dragged himself under it to rest up a while.

Although he wasn’t yet dead, Godfrey’s body was the subject of the meeting in the Bomb Inn. Big Dan Mor was telling those in attendance that dead bodies just don’t get up and walk away. Some idiot made a comment about zombies and Big Dan Mor had to be held back from killing him.

“Danny Boy!” This was Granny MacGlynn’s pet name for her son Big Dan Mor. “I hear you lot went and lost the Brit I kilt!”

She was shouting from the back room where she did her mangling. In case you don’t know, a mangle’s a machine for squeezing water out of wet clothes.

“You get that body back here afore some one else takes the credit for killin’ him.”

“Right, Ma, I will, don’t you worry yourself about it!”

Big Dan Mor was just about to continue when he heard the voice of his ole Da, Gypo McGlynn speaking very loudly on the phone in the lounge.

“Is that Inspector Simpson of the RUC? I’ve some information for him.”

“Jeeze, Da, are you toutin’ again?”

“I’m no tout, you inconsiderate wee shit, I’m phoning a man about a sheep dog!”

“We haven’t got feckin’ sheep Da! We own a feckin’ bar!”

“Hello Inspector, I’ll have tay whisper, the feckers might hear me!” Old Gypo shouted down the phone. “Do you have that sheep dog?”

There was a pause then he continued shouting. “What do you mean, what am I talking about? That’s the feckin’ new password!”

Now before we go any further, I must tell you that Old Gypo, who was in his eighties, was not only an informer, he was an informer who was hard of hearing and didn’t realise he was shouting all the time. Of course his handler usually had to shout back down the phone at him, therefore everyone knew he was touting anyway.

Old Gypo first met Granny, who was called Nora Lynch, when he was young Daithi, his real name, in the 30s. She was a big ugly brute of a woman even in those days. Big Dan Mor obviously took his looks and personality from her.

Gypo Daithi MacGlynn, the only informer in his family, which had a Republican history going back to the days of the United Irishmen, first started informing on his classmates to the teacher at school. And manys a time he told the local landlord that his father was poaching on his land and more often than not he informed on his brother, a cattle and sheep smuggler, to the custom’s men. He took his nickname Gypo from a famous Irish informer in the movies, Gypo Nolan. It’s said that he gave himself the nickname.

His own wife Nora, now Granny, MacGlynn spent over ten years in jail because he informed on her various times over the years. And Big Dan Mor’s wife Bridget was serving eighteen years in jail because Gypo had informed on her as she was transporting a landmine in a pram near the border.

I bet you’re saying to yourself, why hasn’t anyone shot the touting old fart before now? Two women kept that from happening. His own mother, who wouldn’t let any of her IRA sons harm a hair on his head being as he was the youngest, and his wife Nora, now Granny. She spent over ten years in jail because of him but because she was such an ugly brute of a woman, no one else would marry her. As you might have guessed, Old Gypo also had very bad eyesight as well.

“My wife shot an undercover boyo dead right here in the bar!” Continued Old Gypo. “She blew him right out through the windy!”

Big Dan Mor was in a right panic. “Get all that stuff out of here feckin’ sharpish!”

Everyone started taking rifles and rocket launchers and bomb making equipment from every nook and cranny in the bar. They were running here and there like headless chickens while Old Gypo touted on them over the phone.

Big Dan Mor ordered Red Sean MacGlynn and a few other men to take a couple of weapons and go and look for the body before someone else claimed it. He told them to get it back even if it meant starting a feud.




Godfrey Templeton was still under the hawthorn bush. He had torn a strip from the bottom of his shirt and was using it to stem the flow of blood from his ear.

“That’s a terrible cut to the head you have there,” said a voice behind him.

Templeton’s hand shot to his leg and he pulled an knife which he had concealed down his boot. In one swift movement he spun round to face the speaker. And he nearly shit himself.

“A fakin’ leprechaun!” He gasped as he gaped at the little man sitting cross-legged beside him under the hawthorn bush. “You are taking the fakin’ piss, aren’t you?”

The little man had a shoe wedged between his legs and was tapping away on the sole with a tiny hammer. He had several nails in his teeth which he removed and hammered expertly into the sole as he spoke.

“Is that an upper class English accent I hear?” He asked still tapping.

“Why of course it is!” Godfrey Templeton seemed outraged to be even asked such a question. Even more outraged he was, in that a bloody leprechaun was asking it.

“Eton educated and Sandhurst trained, my family has a history going back to the Charge of the Light Brigade.”

The leprechaun looked over the rim of his wire-rimmed spectacles at Godfrey, much in the way a teacher would at an errant pupil.

“Fook but you’re a terrible liar,” said the leprechaun.

“I jolly well resent that!”

“Resent all you want, you were hardly educated at all, never mind at Eton and they wouldn’t let you into Sandhurst to clean out the bogs! As for the Charge of the fooking Light Brigade, I doubt you even seen the bloody film.”

Godfrey opened his mouth to reply but the leprechaun merely pointed his hammer at him and continued.

“Godfrey Templeton. Now where the fook did you get a name like that out off? You fooking fantasist!”

“Wha-what do you mean?”

“Aha! The old upper class accent has certainly changed hasn’t it, Harry, me boyo?”

Godfrey turned away from the leprechaun and put his hands over his ears. “I’m not fakin’ hearing this! I’m not talking to a fakin’ leprechaun!”

“You fooking bloody well are, Harry Jones from Toxteth in Liverpool. Private fooking Harry Jones!”

“How the fake do you know that you little faker?”

“Because my good man, I happen to be a fooking leprechaun. And leprechauns know everything.”

“Godfrey Templeton, the lying bastard. This means I’ll have to change the name of the main character half way through the story. As long as you remember that
Godfrey Templeton is now Harry Jones you’ll not go far wrong.”

Harry Jones thought about what he’d say next as the leprechaun went back to tapping nails into the sole of the shoe. Tap, tap, tap….

“You don’t do three wishes do you?” He blurted out.

“Fook off!” Tap, tap, tap…

“Eh what?”

Tap, tap, tap…

“I said fook off you British bastard!” Tap, tap, tap…. “Three wishes indeed, this is not Darby O’ fooking Gill and the Little People, you know!”

Tap, tap, tap….



Chapter 6


Right Reverend Reg McClure was sitting on the toilet talking to the camera.

“I came under attack from about fifty IRA Fenian scum,” he stated. “Me and my cameraman Greg, managed to escape by the skin of our teeth.”

Greg’s face was screwed up in disgust. “Could we not film this after you’ve had a bowel movement Reg?”

“I have to get this out while it’s still fresh in my head,” said Reg.

“I take it you’re not referring to bowel movements,” replied Greg, his face a sight to behold.

Reg moved from the toilet to his desk and started over again. He had told Greg to wipe the bowel movement part from the tape. It wouldn’t do to be filmed with one’s arse on the toilet. Talking shit would be one form of abuse thrown at him.

He sat on the edge of the desk and began again. HM the Queen was hanging on the wall behind him looking over his right shoulder. The Reverend Ian looked over his right shoulder.

“I came under attack from about a hundred IRA Fenian scum….”

And so he continued, emphasising his own incredible bravery in the face of overwhelming odds. Blah-de-blah.

“Would ye listen to him waffling away, sure he’s doin’ me head in so he is.”

“Eh?…………..Is that you Cross MacGlynn?”

“Sure don’t you know it’s me, aren’t you narrating the story?”

“I am indeed but I wish you wouldn’t keep creeping up on me like that!”

“I’m a ghost that’s what we do!”

“Why aren’t you haunting the old ruined castle or something?”

“Because if I was you’d have just mentioned me at the start of the story and then forgotten about me. So I’ll just haunt the whole fecking story if you don’t mind.”

Reg looked at Greg. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The whisporin‘.”

“Whispering? I heard nothing Reg.”

“Are you sure? I heared it clear as day.”

“Do you think it’s the IRA eavesdropping?”

“The IRA indeed, I’ve a good mind to appear and scare the shit out of them!”

“Do you mind? You’re ruining a good story here.”

“There I heard it again!”

“When?”

“Just now. Didn’t you hear it?”

“I can’t hear anything Reg.”

“Don’t call me a liar Greg. I most definitely heard whisporin‘.”

“I’m not calling you a liar, it’s just that I don’t hear whispering.”

“This is not the first time this has been done you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“The narrator conversing with a character in a story.”

“It isn’t?”

“Nope! Sure didn’t Spike Milligan do it in Puckoon?”

“I didn’t know that!”

“I heard it this time Reg. It could be the IRA out to kill us!”

“The moor-doorin’ scum will not moor-door may. A loyal son of Ulster will not give in to the threat of IRA violence.”

Suddenly there was a noise at the front door. Reg pushed Greg to the floor, leapt over him and ran out the back door. Screaming in terror Greg got to his feet as swiftly as a cat who had just sat on a hot poker and followed Reg who was screaming “Moor-door! Moor-door!” as he fled down the road.

“Hi Dad!” It was Reginald Junior and not IRA moor-doorers. “I’ve something to tell you.”

Reginald Junior looked round him puzzled, the camera was sitting on the table where Greg had left it. He noticed that the back door was open and went out to look in the back garden.

“Where’s Dad and Greg got to?” he wondered out loud. “it’s not like them to leave the camera behind.”

He went back in and closed the door behind him. “I suppose it was a stupid idea anyway. I could just see the look on Dad’s face when I told him I was gay.”

“That wee bigot Reg is a right eejit, isn’t he?”

“Would you fuck off and let me narrate this story?”

“Jeeze! There’s no need to be uppity!”

“I hear whispering. Is that you Dad?”



Chapter 7



The Right Reverent Reg’s opposite number on the Catholic side of the fence was the Parish Priest Father Dermot O’Toole. A big brute of a man reared in the country by a God-fearing mother and a father who feared his wife more than God. All in all a fearful family. Father O’Toole tried to put the fear of God into his congregation, if indeed his congregation actually turned up at Mass to have God’s fear instilled in them. The problem with this parish priest was that he often took to condemning the violent ways of his flock which was a bit like condemning all dogs for being barking mad. Which indeed dogs are. Isn’t that how they make their living by barking madly at things?

I’m not saying that the people of Ballycrossmacglynn are mad dogs. Most are indeed mad and yes more than most are violent, but like dogs barking, violence against the British Empire comes naturally to them.

The little parish church and graveyard stands just outside the town on a hill with a forest behind it which shelters the church from the winds which usually blow down from the mountain to shake the barley and other Republican crops. Generations of Ballycrossmacglynn folk rest in peace in that graveyard and I’m sure that before the year was out that others would be joining them one way or the other.

People make a good living out of graveyards, undertakers, gravediggers and priests and Father O’Toole usually had a good attendance at the funerals, whereas they tended to avoid mass. Being as he was a man to condemn violence, especially when anyone turned up to listen to him, he often used the fact that people had no choice but to turn up at funerals, weddings and baptisms to condemn their violent ways.

He once condemned IRA violence at the funeral of a saintly old nun called Sister Aloysius. He said that while she had gone to her eternal reward in Heaven that the IRA would burn in hell and be tortured by the devil himself for their evil violent ways which had resulted in the sudden death of Sister Aloysius after a long illness at the age of 94. The wedding mass often included an attack on the IRA and a child couldn’t come into this world without Father O’Toole pouring scorn on the IRA as he poured the holy water on the child’s head.

Besides being Parish Priest, Father O’Toole was a regular at the Bomb Inn mainly because the only other bar in the area had been blown up so many times nothing remained but the cellar. Big Dan Mor’s ole Da Gypo had informed the RUC that his son had blown up the bar because it had served the Brits, but in fact the only Brits had been two tourists from Australia which has a Union Jack on its flag so, according to Big Dan Mor, that made them Brits. Competition had nothing to do with it, he claimed. Anyway nothing could be proved.

Father O’Toole sat at the end of the bar most days minding his own business and supping the Black Stuff with a few halves of Big Dan Mor’s poteen. He had been told by the bar owning OC that if he mentioned violence and condemned it in his bar he would be barred for life then shot dead.

“I wouldn’t go into your chapel with an armalite singing rebel songs so I don’t want you coming in here being a priest and preaching,” he had said.

Father O’Toole was the only hurling man in the bar, the rest were football supporters, mostly Man United or Liverpool. Big Dan Mor, being a true Gael, supported Celtic. The Parish Priest’s love of hurling had more to do with the hurley stick he usually carried about with him than actually knowing anything about the sport. In fact he never played the game in his life and knew fuck all about it, but he did train the Ballycrossmacglynn under eight hurling team for a season during which they lost every match they played. The young players were so traumatised they took up cricket instead. Father O’Toole kept one of their hurley sticks as a memento of his time in management and often used it to fend off the barking mad dogs of the town, as well as his former players who often gave him verbal abuse that included the words 'useless ole cunt'.

“Where is all this going?

“Is that you again?”

“Aye, it’s me Cross MacGlynn. Where is all this going?”

“Well if you had waited I was about to say that Father O’Toole hid a dark secret.”

“He knew feck all about Hurling? You already said that!”

“I know I did, but if you shut to fuck up I’ll tell you!”

“Oh and what’ll you do if I don’t shut to feck up?”

“I’ll write you out of the story.”

“You can’t write me out of anything I’m a ghost, you fecking clampet! I have to be exorcised or something!”

“Then I’ll get a Priest to exorcise you out of the story.”

“Who. Father O’Toole? He couldn’t do ten press ups!!”

“Mmm. Right!”

Father O’Toole hid a dark secret; his mother the God fearing woman that she was, abandoned him outside a church with a note attached to his body. He was 28 at the time and the note read,

’Please take my son for the priesthood as I’ve had him from childhood through to adulthood and he’s always been a useless son to me and his useless father. He’s eaten me out of house and home and the fridge as well. The useless cretin can’t find employment because there’s no work testing beds or sofas and that’s all he’s good for.
Yours Faithfully Mrs O’Toole.’

So Dermot O’Toole was sent off to Maynooth for his Catholic indoctrination believing it meant he was training to be a doctor who treated only Catholics.

Imagine his surprise when he left the seminary still not knowing the difference between an angina attack and the need to fart. He did wonder why he had to wear black clothes and a dog collar but it only dawned on him that he was a priest when he had to give the last rites to an old lady who had died waiting outside the confession box for three days. The then parish priest, Father McGinty, gave him a right bollocking for not attending to his priestly duties even though he himself hadn’t thought to ask the old lady why she was sitting outside a confession box for three days. He thought because she was sitting outside Father O’Toole’s confession box that it was his job to hear her confession and paid her no heed.
Father O’Toole grew really pissed off with religion at this point and became an atheist. That was after he strangled Father McGinty to death and buried his body in the crypt of the church. He had finally taken enough bollocking from pious Catholics like his mother and Father McGinty and snapped. He buried the old lady with the priest and spread a rumour that they were lovers and had run away together. Being a priest no one doubted his word and no further questions were asked.

Even though he had become an atheist, Father O’Toole realised that the prospects of getting a job in other lines of work were unlikely being as he was useless at anything else so he remained a priest. It mattered not that he was also useless at saying mass because the people of Ballycrossmacglynn rarely attended mass anyway and knew no different.

“Well feck me that’s one hell of a dark secret. A murdering atheist of a priest who condemns violence every chance he gets.”

“It’s all a front to cover up his evil deeds.”

“Mmm, I do suppose that hypocrisy is part and parcel of religion.”

“You’ll never get into Heaven with an attitude like that.”

“Why the feck do you think I’m wandering round here as a lost fecking soul?”

“Because you’re an angry bastard who swears a lot?”

“You fecking swear too, you gobshite!”

“You have me fucking swearing. Sticking your fucking nose into every other paragraph I write!”

“Feck Off!”

“No, you fuck off!”

“Humph!”

“Hello.”

“Who’s this then?”

“How the feck do I know?”

“It’s me.”

“Who?”

“Spike.”

“Spike fecking who?”

“Spike fucking Milligan that’s who.”

“You’re dead.”

“I know.”

“And I’m fecking dead too.”

“Who are you?”

“Cross MacGlynn that’s who,”

“Spike Milligan what the fuck are you doing in my narrative?”

“I’m here to tell you that you are a copy-cating bastard. Why? Because you stole my talking to the author thing straight from under my nose….You bastard!”

“Holy fuck I’ve now got two ghosts trying to wreck my book…..Right that’s it!….No more talking to the author thing….Now fuck off!”

“Cross MacGlynn.”

“Yes, Spike?”

“We know when we’re not wanted.”

“You two can fuck off!”

“We’re fucking off!”




To be continued...

Two Issues

Today The Pensive Quill features a piece by guest writer Helen McClafferty in her capacity as Chairperson of the Gerry McGeough Family Fund and Freegerry.com. It was written shortly after the conviction of Gerry McGeough.

I spoke with Peter Corrigan, Gerry's attorney this morning, and two issues arose:

1) PUT PRESSURE ON THE NIO:

It is imperative that EVERYONE contact their local politicians through phone calls or letters demanding they put pressure on the NOI to treat Gerry McGeough equally the same as others have been since the GFA and grant him a pardon. Gerry's arrest during the elections of 2007 was an attack on democracy.

2) Fundraiser:

I know how difficult it is for everyone financially, especially with the economy the way it is, but we have a mother and four children who are in desperate need of financial assistance. Gerry's wife Maria, and their four children, do not even have a reliable car to take them back and forth to visit Gerry in prison. In the past 4 years, due to serious court ordered restrictions, Gerry has not been able to work at anything that would have given him a sustainable income, not to mention the two heart-attacks he suffered under all the stress he has endured since his arrest in 2007. This fiasco and sham of a case/trial, and now incarceration, has financially drained him and his family almost totally.

As chair of the "freegerry.com" campaign, I am personally asking that everyone donate 'something' to the Gerry McGeough Family Fund so that we can at least keep Gerry's wife and four children fed, clothed and warm until Gerry is free. You can make your donation by going to the 'freegerry.com" web site and click on the 'donate' button on the left. You can contribute through paypal, credit card, or by check. If you wish to donate privately, please send me a private email @ mcclafferty32@aol.com.

Every penny will be accounted for, as the money will be wire transferred directly into Gerry's bank account where Maria and the children will be able to withdraw the money as they need it for their basic survival. Your kindness and generosity is so greatly appreciated.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at the email address above or through the "freegerry.com" web site or Helen McClafferty on facebook.

WE ALL HAVE A PART TO PLAY HERE AND WE ALL NEED EACH OTHER TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN, SO PLEASE GET STARTED RIGHT AWAY ON BOTH OF THE ABOVE ISSUES - WE HAVE NO TIME TO WASTE!

Thank you so very much,

The Tribulations of Brendan Lillis

Brendan Lillis is a former republican political prisoner who served a life sentence as a result of his involvement in the North’s violent political conflict. He served around 16 years for possession of explosives and firearms. In 1992 BL, as he was known to his friends and comrades, was released on license. While in prison he took part in the many protests against the British government’s criminalisation policy.

Today he is being held in Maghaberry Prison as a result of a completely unrelated charge which we now know is no longer to be proceeded with. Nevertheless the life sentence that he received in 1977 has been reactivated which means he is once again a lifer serving time only for actions carried out in the 1970s and for nothing else.

In 2009 he appeared in court on a robbery related charge. Shortly after his arrest the British Secretary of State withdrew his licence which meant that in spite of no new convictions Brendan Lillis since his arrest has once again been serving a life sentence.

There have been concerns raised about the state of his health. It seems that he is being detained within a regime which can easily be described as one of medical neglect. It was reported in the Andersonstown News that he is suffering ‘from the debilitating arthritic illness ankylosing spondylitis, which leads to a curvature in the spine and causes the body to produce excess bone mass.’

His condition is considered so serious that he has been deemed unfit to stand trial. His partner Roisin described the difficulty his illness posed for communication between the two.

For the first 10 weeks he had no visits because he couldn't get into a wheelchair and they wouldn't let me into the jail … He couldn’t make phone calls as his condition was so bad he could not physically lift the phone. During that time I could not get a hold of a prison doctor to find out how Brendan was – one day I rang 37 times and no-one was available to talk to me … After a lot of debates with the jail I was eventually allowed to visit him in his cell which I have done since …. He was finally moved to the hospital wing … Brendan is now in a precarious situation and if he doesn't get released from jail I am in no doubts he will die soon.

By the time Roisin eventually did get to see her partner she was shocked at his condition. ‘He just looked like he was dying and he still does.’ She later said ‘he’s been on the hospital wing for the past 14 months and he’s supposed to have physiotherapy every day to stop inflammation, but he’s lucky if he gets one session a week.’

There are reports that he lay on the cell floor for a number of days before prison staff would move him to the prison hospital. During his arraignment Brendan Lillis was unable to leave his bed.

The recently appointed West Belfast Sinn Fein MLA, Pat Sheehan, has called for the immediate release of his former blanket comrade. Sheehan, a former IRA hunger striker, said ‘given the urgency of Brendan Lillis’ medical condition he should not be in prison.’ Sheehan also hit out at the British government’s policy whereby former political prisoners can be held in prison by the revoking of their license. He added, ‘now that the charges against Brendan Lillis are not being brought forward he should be released immediately.’ He called on the Owen Patterson, the British Secretary of State, and the Life Sentence Review Commission ‘to deal with this case without delay.’

Another Sinn Fein MLA and former blanket man Paul Butler added his voice to the calls for British authorities to release Brendan Lillis: ‘I have tabled a question to the Minister for Justice about Brendan and I will do my best to see that he gets released as soon as possible.’

Sinn Fein has been joined in its opposition to the ongoing detention of Lillis by the IRSP and the RNU, both of whom have members who were prison comrades of the imprisoned man.

Also backing the bed ridden man is The Friends of Brendan Lillis, a support group which has campaigned on his behalf on the internet and other outlets. Its primary aim:

is to have Brendy immediately released to ensure he receives the proper medical attention he deserves. His continued imprisonment is wrong and we call for his release on humanitarian grounds.

In typical time honoured fashion those tasked with managing the North’s jails seem intent on prolonging the misery. In a piece of blather the Life Sentence Unit on behalf of the North’s British Micro Minister for Justice, David Ford, said, ‘the Minister of Justice does not consider that exceptional grounds exist which would justify the release of Mr Lillis on compassionate grounds.’ Too ill to stand trial, not ill enough to go home. Any excuse to continue with his detention.

The Life Sentence Review Board is said to consider the case of Brendan Lillis on the 22nd of March. If it fails to act humanely and release him the West Belfast man may well end his days in prison. We have experience of this punitive and vindictive trait in the British state character. In 1994 they allowed Derry republican Pol Kinsella to die in prison rather than release him into the care of his family. His father later pointed out that his son ‘died after suffering an illness, barbaric treatment and neglect in Long Kesh.’

That callous practice should have no place in any prison regime that claims to be modern and enlightened. Brendan Lillis should not be in Maghaberry but at home where he can be tended to in a humane and loving environment where medics are health professionals and not screws in white coats.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

Cartoon by Brian Mór
Click to enlarge

Off The Radar

Tonight The Pensive Quill features guest writer and Ex-Blanket columnist Dr John Coulter who provides a piece written before the budget in the North. Describing himself as a Radical Unionist John Coulter maintains that the credit crunch has pushed the plight of Loyalism off the political radar.

Stuff the Stormont Budget cuts, what are we going to do about the Loyalists? This key question seems to have slipped under the political radar in Northern Ireland as the various parties draw up strategies to ensure they are not blamed for the billions of pounds of cuts about to rock the Province.

Privately, parties across the religious divide, but especially those in the Assembly, are more interested in spinning the 'Don't blame us for the cuts!' game with both Assembly and local council polls taking place on 5 May.

The overwhelming majority of the steadily increasing amounts of terrorist attacks across Northern Ireland have been carried out by the various factions which comprise the so-called dissident republican movement, especially the Oglaigh na hEireann (ONH) group.

In an exclusive interview with me in August, a spokesman for the terror group said it would continue its campaign of violence until it smashed the Stormont power-sharing Executive.

During that chilling interview, the source said the group was set to fight a violent “three to four year campaign” to topple the Assembly.

“By fair means or foul means, we will bring down Stormont. There are people who would push politics, but we are not political.”

Despite the severe budget cuts, the North's policing chief constable Matt Baggott wants to ensure he has all the cash to combat the dissident threat. There have also been a series of rumours the London and Dublin Governments have been holding secret, back-channel talks with dissidents in a bid to end the terror campaign.

Perhaps one sign of the urgency of this process has been the decision of the Northern Ireland Office to rebrand dissident republicans as Residual Terror Groups – RTGs. This is because dissident terror gangs, like ONH, do not see themselves as dissidenting, but view their campaign as descending from 1916 Martyrs executed by British firing squads after the failed Dublin Easter Rising.

Throughout the United Kingdom, even MI5 regards the threat from dissident republicans as higher than that posed by Islamic radicals.

But with so much focus on the republican camp, the real danger looms that disillusionment within the hardline Loyalist community could see groups previously on formal ceasefire since 1994 “go back to war”.

A series of bloody, internal American gangster-style 'turf wars' among loyalist paramilities in recent years has witnessed the threat posed to Stormont's stability from loyalist terror gangs opposed to the peace process all but evapourate.

Dissident loyalist activity has been largely contained to grafitti and arson attacks on Catholic Church property and buildings belonging to the predominantly nationalist Gaelic Athletic Association.

However, last year, a top loyalist was shot dead in the working class Belfast Unionist heartland of the Shankill Road. The broad daylight murder was blamed on the banned Ulster Volunteer Force – the most bloody of the loyalist death squads during the Troubles.

The killing prompted Stormont Assembly member Dawn Purvis of the Progressive Unionists (PUP) to resign as PUP boss. The PUP gave political advice to the UVF and its 'wee brother' terror organisation, the Red Hand Commando.

The move has effectively left the hardline loyalist community without an Assembly voice. Northern Ireland's largest terror group was the Ulster Defence Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters (UDA/UFF). It was represented politically by the Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG). The UPRG has been unable to secure a Stormont seat since the Assembly was created in 1998.

Without elected representatives at the centre of devolved power in Northern Ireland, the loyalist community is effectively rudderless – and dissident republicans know this, too.

Stormont Budget cuts drawn up by the Assembly will bite very hard throughout 2011 and the blame game for the economic pain will decide the make-up of the new Assembly Chamber in May.

On their own, dissident republicans can only maintain a short-term 'terror tap on/terror tap off'-style campaign – what the British Government during the Thatcher era once referred to as “an acceptable level of violence”.
But the equally bitter medicine which the Assembly must face is that there is an element within the UVF which the terror group's leadership cannot control. That faction is already believed to be targeting people it perceives to be dissident republicans.

Financially, a tit-for-tat sectarian conflict would push Northern Ireland to the verge of bankruptcy. There is much speculation in security circles of a re-introduction of the notorious supergrass system to combat the renegade loyalist gangs before they can unleash their brutality.

The Unionist political family is already deeply divided going into May's crucial election showdowns.

The internecine warfare which claimed many lives in loyalism during the first decade of this new millennium was partly caused because the UDA/UFF and rival Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) lacked its own political representatives and mainstream Unionist parties wanted nothing to do with loyalist terror gangs.

There can be no doubting that budget cuts – as with the rest of the UK and the Republic – will leave Northern Ireland severely limping along economically for much of the next decade.

However, if urgent action is not taken to bring hardline loyalism in from the cold politically at Stormont, elements within the UVF, UDA/UFF and smaller Orange Volunteers could slowly tip Northern Ireland back onto a slippery slope which could see the Province descending into the Troubles Mark 2.

An Appeal to People to join the Campaign to Abstain from Voting Sinn Fein

Today The Pensive Quill carries a statement from the Justice For Gerry McGeough Campaign released a few days after McGeough’s conviction in a Diplock Court.

20 February 2011

It was blatantly noticeable that there was no Sinn Fein elected representatives in the Diplock court on Friday, 18th February to support Gerry McGeough. However, ordinary people filled the public gallery to capacity in support of Gerry and his family.

At the same time, Arlene Foster, Roger Burton and Maurice Morrow, from the DUP, cheered and smiled as a father of four was jailed. After attending their crown court in support of Sammy Brush, they walked out of court and past a mother and four crying children left on the side of the street. Now after four years, and Gerry out of the way, Sinn Fein decides to pay lip service to helping him? However, it is very apparent to those following this politically motivated trial and incarceration all these years, that this is only an attempt to salvage votes come election time.

The Justice For Gerry McGeough Committee are now launching a campaign, north and south, asking people to abstain from voting Sinn Fein in all areas, most importantly Fermanagh and south Tyrone, until Gerry McGeough is PERMANENTLY released from jail and back with his family where he belongs. "LONG LIVE THE IRISH NATION".

For further updates on this campaign and other campaigns to release McGeough, please go to the 'Justice for Gerry McGeough' facebook site and the "freegerry.com" web site.

Hallelujah Hazel & Hallelujah Howell

Since ancient times, the philosophers' secret has always been this: we know that God does not exist, or, at least, if he does, he's utterly indifferent to our individual affairs - but we can't let the rabble know that; it's the fear of God, the threat of divine punishment and the promise of divine reward, that keeps in line those too unsophisticated to work out questions of morality on their own - Robert J Sawyer

The case of Hazel Stewart and Colin Howell convicted recently of the double murder of their marriage partners in 1991 gives rise to questions of how morality relates to religion. There was nothing very moral and a damned lot immoral about the murder of two unsuspecting people by a brace of bible thumpers. The killers were both Baptists and one was a former Sunday School teacher.

The deaths of Trevor Buchanan and Lesley Howell may have been peaceful exits for the victims who were poisoned by carbon monoxide as they lay sleeping in their separate homes, but the killings were executed as mercilessly as they were meticulous. The planning and logistical organisation involved underscore a level of premeditation that would deny any defence based on the crime of passion. But for a confession by one of the killers almost two decades after the act the double murder would have constituted the perfect crime. Not easy to achieve in a technological world. An indolent RUC seemed not to ‘think dirty’ when it came to the obvious – lovers not their partners enter into suicide pacts – and so the killers prowled the streets for a further two decades before being apprehended.

‘Gin and tonic set’ killings involving sex and murder are always likely to stir tabloid interest like little else. Nothing like a bit of White Mischief to set the pulses racing. There is a tendency to home in on the mini-skirt, the low cut blouse, the perfume, the seduction. The imagery is massaged and manipulated to titillate the readers. Throw in a bit of puritan religion and the mix is set to explode from the front page of your average red top accompanied by the promise of saucy, sordid secrets on the inside pages.

We have seen it all before with the religious crowd. If they are not raping children and then threatening their victims with hellfire for eternity if they divulge the rapes to anybody, they can often be found fondling each other at the back of the evangelical bible class. Yet they behave as if they are morally superior to the rest of us and insist that we should somehow be required to live our lives in accordance with the moral diktats of their scripture. Iris Robinson is a case in point.

Regardless of the slant pursued by tabloids, behind the Stewart –Howell murder trial lies a human story of loss more enduring than the vagaries of lust; where children from two families are left without a parent each because the other parent had a sociopathic capacity for ruthlessness. Both murderous bible thumpers in this case seem equally culpable. Hazel Stewart’s callousness is perhaps more amplified because of the contrasting demure characterisation of herself that she postulated as a foil against the demonic persona the prosecution sought to present. Colin Howell threw the hands up and confessed to standing apart from most of humanity by his actions. It makes him look bad but straight whereas Stewart just looks bad and bent.

Religious types often like to tell us that their moral values come from god; a bit like me claiming my own come from the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Our morality has evolved like everything else about us. I see no evidence of a morality in religious believers that is absent from somebody without any religious belief. Quite often I see loathsome standards exercised by those with god and honourable stands taken by those without. Not much wrong with Mencken when he said ‘conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.’ Which means don’t stop because it is wrong, only stop because somebody is watching.

Religion did not cause Stewart and Howell to kill their partners. It simply failed to dissuade them from murder. Religion offers no guarantee of moral behaviour, or at least it provides the religious types with a moral outlook no better than that possessed by the atheists.

In fact it might be argued that the religious fixation with policing sexuality brings into being dangerous liaisons which in turn unleash deadly passions. Religious guilt seems to have figured greatly in the interplay between Stewart and Howell. Yet the guilt was as a result of engaging in extra marital sex. Howell would drug Stewart with her consent prior to sex so that her guilt could be assuaged. She did not require to be drugged in order to commit murder. Maybe she found something in the bible that justified murder but not sex.

Judging this sordid episode there is much to be said for the view of Francis Bacon:

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

A moral monarch that whispers in the ear of the devout 'it’s alright to kill both of them.'

Eloquent Proof

Today The Pensive Quill features a letter from guest writer Martin Galvin which was carried in this week's Irish News. It addresses issues in the political court trial of the republican Gerry McGeough

A chara

An “unjustifiable killing” is murder or manslaughter. Untruths stated under oath to cover-up crimes constitute perjury and perverting justice. Cameron shows no inclination to charge anyone of any rank with committing or commanding “unjustified and unjustifiable” Bloody Sunday murders, or for perjury before Widgery or Saville.

Shortly after Gerry McGeough is said to have joined the IRA, twelve year Majella O’Hare was shot as she walked to confession. British troopers swore the child was killed while they returned IRA fire. A Royal Marine was acquitted and sent back to patrol. Now the British admit that tales of an IRA sniper were made up. No one was charged with perjury or perverting justice.

Nora McCabe’s family, backed by Relatives for Justice, fought a heroic legal battle seeking charges against RUC members for her murder and for perjury during the cover-up which followed. RUC members swore they fired the fatal plastic bullet in response to rioting, burning vehicles and petrol bombers. Film taken by a television crew showed none of it was true.

A crown judge said too much time had passed and any charges would be a clear abuse of process. The same judge applied different rules to Gerry McGeough, for an incident four weeks earlier.

Gerry McGeough, over fifty, married, with four young children, was jailed for joining the IRA at seventeen, and in his early twenties, taking part in an IRA ambush. Senior IRA members, who vetted him or the operation, may now be part of the Stormont Administration.

He was not charged by extradition warrant during his years in a notorious German bunker prison, or later imprisonment in America, or when he returned to Tyrone. He was arrested in March 2007, outside the polling centre where his votes were tallied in a case which brought new meaning to ‘political policing’.

Gerry McGeough campaigned as an Independent Republican, contending that the name of the crown constabulary had changed, but its role in enforcing British rule and injustice had not. Now, four years later, despite a new compromised justice ministry, constabulary boards and partnerships, two heart attacks, abuse of process applications, and evidentiary weaknesses, that Diplock court prosecution ended in a verdict which seems to have proven McGeough’s point more eloquently than his words.

Sincerely,

MARTIN GALVIN

Back to Crossmacglynn

Tonight the Pensive Quill carries the next two chapters of Thomas "Dixie" Elliott's satirical story, Crossmacglynn.

Ballycrossmacglynn
Thomas "Dixie" Elliott

Chapter 3


MacGlynn’s ancestors, the MacGlynns, owned almost everything in Ballycrossmacglynn and made up most of the local IRA, from OC to lookout. They even owned all the safe-houses in the local area. Big Dan Mor MacGlynn, the thick bearded OC and bar owner, was also the local school teacher who taught his pupils in Irish. The problem was that none of the pupils actually spoke Irish therefore they learned very little or nothing.

“Sure it is better to learn nothing in Irish than it is to learn anything English,” he was often heard saying.

Big Dan Mor was proud of his grandson Tomas. This was the first time he had fired a shot at a member of the British Crown Forces since he had finished weapons training over the border just three months before.

“Someday lad you’ll grow up to be OC but you’ll have tay grow a beard first,” he said as he produced a pipe from his inner pocket.

Tomas stood to attention and saluted his grandfather. “And kin I get to smoke a pipe as well Granda?” he replied with all the innocence of a boy his age.

Big Dan Mor held a match to his pipe and sucked until it lit. “It’s not a bit good for your health lad, but neither is firing an armalite at the Queens occupying forces.”

In Ballycrossmacglynn there is a tradition that comes between being baptised and making the First Holy Communion and that is the swearing in. All children must be sworn into the junior IRA between the ages of being born and seven. After swearing in they are allowed to carry weapons in their school bags in case they happen upon a passing foot patrol. Thus when Godfrey Templeton was in the middle of changing mags Tommy‘s hand was reaching into his school bag for his Walther PPK.

“You were good lad, but me ole Ma, your great granny MacGlynn fair finished him off with that double barrelled shotgun of hers.”

Without warning the door of the bar crashed open and in came Big Dan Mor’s cousin, Red Sean MacGlynn, so called because of his mop of unruly red hair and drinker’s nose. He was panting for breath as he tried to speak.

“For feck’s sake would you spit out that fag and say what ye have tay say!” Ordered Big Dan Mor.

Red Sean took the cigarette from his mouth and managed to splutter out, “The dead body’s gone!”

“Gone where?”

“Gone away!”

“Away where?”

“That’s a good question Big Dan Mor,” said Red Sean. “I can’t rightly say where it‘s gone.”

Big Dan Mor thought to himself for a moment, then a thought hit him.

“That fecker Peadar McAnally and his lot stole the body and took it away to claim for themselves. It’ll be all over the news tonight that they shot a Brit for feck’s sake!”

He rose to his feet, anger written all over his face.

“Meeting!” He ordered “Get those useless feckers in here now!”

“Er, Big Dan Mor,” mumbled Red Sean. “Sure aren’t they here already?”

The OC looked around, the bar was as full as it had been when Godfrey first entered it.

“And would you look at them drinking me out of house and home instead of fighting the fecking Brits!”

A second cousin of Big Dan Mor who had consumed too much drink and not enough sense interrupted. “I’ll have you know we were out from six o’clock this morning firing at the big watch tower over on the hill.” He looked around smugly at those nodding in agreement. “And if I may also inform you, we are hardly drinking you out of house and home if we are paying you for it. Are we?”

He looked around again to see everyone still nodding. However this time they were nodding for him to look out because Big Dan Mor was coming towards him with clenched fists. One broken jaw later the meeting began.


Chapter 4


Small and rotund with a bespectacled face that had a fixed dour expression, the Right Reverend Reginald McClure was a God fearing Christian man who regarded all Catholics as being members of the IRA. He refused to eat potatoes because they had, he claimed, their roots in Ireland.

Commonly known as Reg he was proud to be a bigot, sure bigotry was in his blood, his father before him was a bigot and he could trace his bigotry back to the bigots in bygone days of yore.

“Those mor-dorin’ scum will not be able to brew their divil’s mead as long as I live ’n breathe,” he muttered as he scoured the landscape through binoculars.

Reg was speaking to a camera as he lay hidden in a thicket of gorse overlooking the surrounding fields. The cameraman, Greg, was a member of his congregation who did weddings when he wasn’t traipsing round the countryside after the publicity seeking Reg. That particular day Reg was searching for the IRA’s illegal poteen distillery, he knew it was hereabouts somewhere and was determined to find it .

“You’ll get us killed one of these days,” whispered Greg turning off the camera to say it.

“I know that mor-dorin’ IRA Fenian Big Dan Mor Ma Glynn is making the divil’s mead somewhere in these hills and I’ll get him if it’s the last fing I do!”

“We’ve been coming here for weeks and theres nothing here but sheep, cows and their crap,” said Greg.

This last statement made Reg stop and think.

“That’s it!” He exclaimed.

“What’s what?” Asked a puzzled Greg.

“They’re smuggling sheep and cow crap across the border, right under our very noses.”

“But how can you tell?”

“They’re IRA Fenians aren’t they? And IRA Fenians smuggle everything, even crap.”

“Now think about it,” continued Reg. “Animal crap makes good fertiliser and fertiliser is used in the making of bombs.”

While the camera was turned off and Reg was lecturing Greg on the evil ways of the IRA Fenian scum and bomb making, he didn’t notice the two cars pulling up on the road away below. Nor did he notice that one of the cars belonged to Reginald Junior, his son. More important, he didn’t notice that the other car, hijacked earlier that day some twenty or so miles away in Newry was driven by Cathal MacGlynn, eldest son of Big Dan Mor MacGlynn. He was the local IRA quarter master and the boot was filled with weapons. Even more important, the two were engaged in a clandestine gay love affair.

Reginald Junior was, unfortunately, the spitting image of his father and this has been an afflicting characteristic of the McClure family since those bygone days of yore; they were all ugly wee fat fuckers. However Reginald Junior to his credit was not a wee fat fucking bigot like his father, he was gay and proud of it.

Cathal MacGlynn had his father’s height and broadness of shoulder, he also had the early stages of a beard and a mullet haircut. And he was minimally good-looking.

“I’ll meet you after work,” Cathal told Reginald Junior after they had a loving embrace. “I’ve a load of stuff to deliver then we can meet up in Pedro’s bar in Newry.”

“I wish you would take me on some of your jobs,” said Reginald Junior as they got into their cars.

“Jeeze imagine the furore if our fathers found out we were lovers,” replied Cathal. “You’d get a right bible-bashing from your ole man.”

“Aye he’d beat me to death with it,” bemoaned Reginald Junior.

They blew each other a loving kiss before they drove off in separate directions.

Reg was still conducting his pointless verbiage about the criminality of The IRA and luckily didn’t see that his own son, who he hoped one day would follow in his Fenian hating footsteps, was engaging in what he would call sodomy with an enemy of Ulster.

Reg must however have sensed the sodomy because he got a sudden shuddery feeling which went up his back. The sort of feeling he got when around sinners and Papists.

“I can feel the divil’s work afoot hereabouts,” he exclaimed all of a sudden.

Some crows relaxing in nearby trees took flight, alarmed by his outburst and Greg fell backwards into the prickly gorse. His swearing was an ungodly violation to the ears of a piously outstanding personage such as Reg. However it also caught the attention of Jed MacGlynn and Padraig Duggan who was married to Big Dan Mor’s other daughter Mary Margaret. Jed was Big Dan Mor’s nephew and right and handy with an ole armalite rifle he was too. Padraig Duggan had his favourite AK-47 slung across his shoulder. They were on the look out for something British to shoot at.

“Did you hear that ficking screechin’ comin’ from yon thicket of gorse Padraig?”

“Sure as hell did Jed. Could be the SAS hiding out.”

At that Reg began to rant about profanity and how only the followers of Rome swore so profusely and shame on a good Christian, God fearing man for allowing himself to give in to such sinful acts.

“If it isn’t that wee ficker Reg the Reverent Ranter himself,” said Jed.

“Giving a sermon from the mount by the sounds of it,” replied Padraig.

“Naw, ficking spyin’ as usual, the ficking ficker!” retorted Jed as he cocked his weapon.

There was a rapid staccato of gunfire as both IRA men sent a volley in the direction of the gorse thicket. And more sinful swearing you wouldn’t hear than that which came from the mouths of Reg and Greg as they ran like the hammers of hell down the hill.

A sinful day indeed.