Charlie, it looks like you were right

It’s fashionable these days to denounce Charlie Haughey as a hypocrite, a forerunner of the greed that brought the south of Ireland to its knees, probably into a bit of gun-running as well. But whatever you think of Haughey, one phrase of his has stood the test of time. “A failed state” was how he described Northern Ireland, and it looks as though Lisburn City Council, as well as a few others, are intent on proving him right.

Lisburn’s latest brainwave is to grant the freedom of the city to the Orange Order. That’s the fine body of men among whose numbers are counted those who paraded in a circle outside St Patrick’s Church on the Twelfth while playing the Famine Song. And in case we missed the point,  Loyal Order bands recently paraded again in direct defiance of the Parades’ Commission’s ruling that they must not. But then Lisburn has previous, as they say. Didn’t they construct a nice big memorial in the city to the men and women of the UDR who did so much to develop community relations in our divided society?

Add to this the stance of the DUP,  in the person of Jonathan Craig this morning on Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh,  where he refused to criticize these brave law-breakers but instead criticized the PSNI’s representative, who’d said he thought the Parades’ Commission rulings should be observed, at least until something better was in place.

Charlie, thou should'st be living at this hour. Here we are, fourteen years on from the Good Friday Agreement, and the desire among some sections of unionism to stick it to the Croppies burns as brightly as it ever burned in the bosoms of their bigoted forefathers. 

The UUP: Ken leaves and the lift continues to plummet

Been away.  And what do I find when I come back?  The UUP, not content with allowing the DUP to disembowel it at the polls, is now doing what it can to take any of its bowels left and send them through the shredder.

If this had been a movie, there’d have been a darkening shadow and the music would at this point have gone all screechy and ominous. I mean, it’s not every day Ken Magennis resigns. He wasn’t pleased with the leadership qualities that Mike Nesbit has been showing, so he sent him an email calling on him to resign his role as party leader. Nesbit backed a few paces, said he’d restore the whip to the naughty lord, but it was too late. With a contemptuous  grunt, the Fermanagh veteran stomped off into the gathering darkness.

There’s a kind of mass irrationality comes over parties that once were powerful. I suppose the same kind of thing happens when  a lift-cable snaps on the sixty-seventh floor. People who until the plunge started were balanced, dynamic, thoughtful individuals suddenly go totally ape-shit and start clawing the air and each other in a hopeless bid to stop the unstoppable.  It’s as if the UUP is trying to mimic the SDLP’s leadership transition: first Alastair is the heir-presumptive, then Maggie’s men seize top spot for their woman, then their woman turns into a walking disaster area,  then Alastair comes back from the wilderness… Likewise the UUP – under Reg the party ratings plummet, under Big Tom the rate of descent beomes a blur, then Mike looms from nowhere and seizes the ontrols, then Ken indicates he’s a waste of space – Mike, that is, not Ken – then Mike says Ken is a fine UUP man after all, then Ken takes his ball, leaves the lift and goes home. With each move designed to improve things, each party’s pace of descent is increased.

If there’s a purgatory, it’ll contain few UUPers or SDLPers.  They’ve done their suffering here on earth. 

Questions big and small

You learn a lot about a country or state  (yes, Virginia, there is a difference – come to Ireland some time) by checking out their media. The media partly reflect what people want, partly shape what they think people need.

In the UK or Ireland,  you got  TV  interviewers who pride themselves on their terrier-like qualities.  Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight or Vincent Browne on TV3  are examples of this in action.  They’ll tear into a guest,  attempting to nail them on one specific issue or force them to answer a specific question.  What you don’t get is any questioning of the political system behind that issue or question. Prince Harry is caught in flagrante in some far-flung flesh-pot place. The whole fuss is whether  photographs of him and his naked royality are an invasion of privacy. No focus, though, on whether it makes sense for hard-pressed British tax-payers to be forking out so flunkeys and bodyguards be paid  so they can follow this royal prat of dubious heritage while he flies off to indulge his royal lust.

In  the US,  the media bit different.  On the car radio driving from Boston to Lenox, Massachusetts yesterday, I heard a current affairs programme interview  an academic who noted that the average CEO  makes 300 times as much money as the average worker.  That’s what I call getting down to the nitty gritty. Will Obama’s re-election change that? No. Will Romney’s election change that? Yes. By the time he’s through his term of office, it’ll be 600:1. That's the difference.

Last night I switched back and forth between two TV channels. One, C-Span, had Terry O’Neill the President of the Organization for Women Foundation.  She was taking calls from viewers and every single one of them was supportive of her views and of the Obama campaign. Meanwhile, over on Fox News,  somebody was interviewing some former big wheel in the Republican Party and was not so much asking questions as teeing up shots for him so he could send the ball crashing through Obama’s greenhouse. It wasn’t that he was giving the big wheel an easy ride: he was joining him in lambasting all the works and deeds of all Democrats, particularly in Massachusetts.

Is this a good way to interview people?  Most definitely no. There are few things more tedious than to hear two people agreeing with each other on a political issue. It’s cringe-makingly dull and it leaves the issue unexamined. That’s why I like when people disagree with me – it’s more interesting as welll as forcing me to think further, providing the differing view is one of substance and not just a cheap shot.

On the other hand, that CEO earning 300 times what the average worker earns – you don’t get much of that from the British or Irish media.  It’s more Vincent Browne entertaining us by gnawing the ankle of some distressed politician on some within-the-system point.  Maybe we should call a moratorium on all political interviews, if they don’t confront the politician with at least one awkward fact that questions the whole system within which he/she works.

Mind you, I don’t think they’ll ever, in Britain or Ireland, produce a b and b that serves them kind of pancake breakfast I’ve just pigged out on. Never, never, never, never.

Hooray for Todd Akin!

I’m in Boston and I’m itching to write about the different feeling you get from this society. Once, that is, you’ve got through US immigration, which isn’t necessarily easy. But I won’t, or not yet at least. I’d rather talk about  Todd Akin. He’s the  Republican who has put a banana skin under Mitt Romney by suggesting that a raped woman’s body  ‘shuts down’ and (I think this is what he said, it’s not clear) stops the raped woman become pregnant.

Nice one. Anything that keeps Mitt Romney out of the White House is OK with me. But on the broader topic of party and personal attitudes to abortion, there are two points that could use more thought.

One, when you vote for a party or a candidate, you vote for a range of issues – let’s call them A-Z. The chances that you’ll agree with the party or the candidate on every single letter in the alphabet are near to nil. So what most people do is – if they bother to check A-Z in the first place and don’t vote because they like the way the candidate combs  his/her hair –  they put their tick beside the name of the candidate or party that comes nearest to their thinking on the issues that they believe matter most. The problem with anti-abortion/pro-abortion debate in the US (and elsewhere) is that it masks all the other letters in the alphabet.

Two,  I don’t understand the anti-abortion-except-in-cases-of-rape argument. If you believe that the foetus is a human being, then it’s still a human being when it’s the result of a rape. So it’s a bit illogical as well as savagely cruel to respond to the crime of the rapist by killing an innocent, defenceless human being.

Three ( yes I know I said two things but I changed my mind – OK?), I don’t understand the the-foetus-is-not-a-human-being-but-having-an-abortion-is-a-deeply-serious-decision argument. If the foetus is not a human being, having an abortion  isn’t any more serious than cutting your nails or blowing your nose. It's just a cluster of unwanted tissue that you want rid of.  

Answers, please. Keep them  crisp and free of abuse.

Paul Ryan - one of our own, eh?

Paul Ryan.  You don’t get a name much more Irish than that. And by all accounts Ryan could be the kind of guy you’d have a pint with, go to Croke Park with – he’s a young guy proud of his Irish roots. His great-great-grandfather emigrated to America, with hundreds of thousands of others, to avoid the Irish Famine.

Or the Irish Great Hunger, to be more exact. Because it wasn’t just the failure of the potato crop that led to mass starvation.  It was deliberate policy. Charles Trevelyan, the British official in charge of famine relief, decided that “the cankerworm of government dependency” was a bad thing, and so starving people were required to pay for their food rather than be given it. The consequences were drastic – people died in their tens of thousands,  fled abroad on the coffin ships.

So a guy whose ancestors survived all that has to be given respect, right? And we Irish can have a sense of vicarious pride that one of our own, so to say, may be a heart-beat away from the presidency. I mean, he’s one of us, right?

Well he may be one of you but I want no part of him. Remember Trevelyan’s “cankerworm of government dependency”?  Well, it fits right in to Ryan’s thinking.  He’s completely opposed to Obama’s Medicare bill, which would  see to it that Americans were covered if they fell sick.  For Ryan,  it’s a question of "not lulling able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency, which drains them of their very will and incentive to make the most of their lives”.  In other words, no government hand-outs to a lot of able-bodied beggars.

Of course, Americans have been encouraged to think that way, and lots of them do. Ryan is very fond of Ayn Rand, whose novels laud market forces and the strong leader rather than compassion and democracy.  Likewise Sir Randoph Routh, who was in charge of the Irish Relief Commission in the nineteenth century, greeted representatives from Mayo, where people were dying in their thousands, by passing them a copy of Edmund Burke’s ‘Details of Society’  pamphlet.  It explained why it was better to allow the market to distribute food rather than governments.

It is always good to see an Irish person succeed, at home or abroad. And getting so close to the US presidency is no mean feat. But we’d be very stupid if we allowed our nationalist pride to blind us to the kind of man Paul Ryan is.  He would have fitted into British government policy for nineteenth-century Ireland with consummate ease.

Those Games: Britain's pride or Britain's shame?

Now that the fever of the London Olympic Games has passed, maybe we can draw breath and a few reasonable conclusions about the event.

1.    Britain did superbly well – both in terms of organizing the Games and collecting medals.  The sheer scale of the venture makes me weak at the knees but it was carried off with aplomb. And the BBC gave superb coverage.

2.    Ireland did well – better than we’ve ever done. At the same time, the defeat of John Joe Nevin in the final was a let-down with which to end the Games.  Mind you, a silver medal is hardly bad. But It’s a bit like that spin-the-wheel programme on RTÉ on a Saturday night: it’s great winning a bronze or silver, but the goodness gets at least partly sucked out of it when you think how close you came to getting the Big One.

3.    China are a sporting force to be reckoned with. When Chinese athletes emerged a couple of Olympics ago, they were dismissed as cheats who used drugs to gain success. Not quite so much talk of that this time: at one point it looked as though they’d beat the US into second place on the medals count.

4.    The Games’ organizers got very, very lucky with the weather. Remember the month before the Games?  Downpour after downpour, until we forgot what the sun was, never mind what it looked like. Come the games, the TV cameras kept drinking in  days and evenings of sun-kissed endeavour.

5.    The British team is truly multi-ethnic – Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis, their sprinters – a striking number seemed to come from a non-white background.

People like Robert McCrum in today’s Guardian  see the games as giving people a pride in being British and part of a multi-ethnic, tolerant society. I expect many unionists would go with that:  to be part of a society which integrates people from various backgrounds is indeed something to be proud of.

There is, though, an alternative perspective.  This was kind of discussed on BBC TV with the great Michael Johnson, a former Olympic champion.  He was asked if  track events weren’t becoming the exclusive preserve of non-white athletes. Was it a gene thing?  Johnston disagreed, argued it had more to do with training and motivation.  If he's right, there's no case for arguing  that the high number of non-white athletes on  Team GB  has to do with non-whites being naturally better athletes.  It's more similar to the case of   professional boxing:  Afro-Americans and non-whites generally predominate because  it’s one of the few avenues  where they can compete on a level playing field, as it were.  In fact,  far from being a  tribute to British society’s tolerance, the high number of non-white athletes on Team GB testifies to how tough it is for a non-white to succeed or even be accepted in other fields. One obvious example: while Britain was drooling over Jamaican Usain Bolt’s talents,  those with Jamaican background in British society were still firmly stuck in the back of the bus.

I tend to think the alternative perspective is correct.  British society from top to bottom is to a greater or lesser degree racist, not happily multi-ethnic. Bad as it is, though, it’s not as bad as Ireland. Here, we do A* racism.

Pussy Riot - worth protesting about?

 Those Pussy Riot women -  what do you think? Two years in jail, all for  singing a two-minute song.  Admittedly it was performed with some leg-kicking in front of the altar of a Moscow church and it was  denouncing the still-hugely-popular  Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. But hey -  what ever happened to free speech?

Mind you, if a group of women named  after female genitalia were to march into my local church and begin a punk-style denunciation of Peter Robinson  or  even Enda Kenny, I  suspect the congregation would be offended too.  Not  because they are necessarily Robinson (or even Kenny)fans, but more because they'd feel a church wasn't  the place to do a political denunciation (yes, yes, I know it's been done before,  more  usually from the pulpit), especially if  it was  delivered  by a band with a very rude name.

But one thing is sure: if I went into my local church and stood in front of the altar and began to sing a song  denouncing  David Osborne, the people in the church would be offended. Not necessarily because they were Osborne supporters but because they'd feel a church wasn't the place to do a denunciation of that kind, especially if I was part of a trio named after  female  genitalia. 

You see what  I did there? I blurred the distinction between  the name of the group and what they did.  So let's go back to the name. Is it offensive?  Well, they're a punk band, so you may be fairly confident that like most punk bands they wanted to shock, maybe be offensive. And when they got kitted out and did the lepping about in front of the altar, telling everyone how much they disliked Vladimir Putin, you may be sure they wanted to shock and probably offend.  If they hadn't , the event wouldn't have been worth reporting. Were the congregation/ cathedral clergy right to be offended?  I should think so.  Now we're getting somewhere:we know that for a lot of people, the band's name  AND  the band's actions were offensive.  And you'd be pretty perverse  (or maybe a member of the Orange  Order) if you thought that offending people was a good thing to do.

Which lead us to the question: was the penalty they paid for their offensiveness fair and just? The prosecution  wanted to give them three years  but the judge - a woman, as it happens- gave them two years in prison. Which sparked the world-wide protests we've all  heard  about.  Too much, I think. But then, why aren’t Sinead O’Connor and Madonna and Paul McCartney speaking up for Marian Price?