Why 12 December won't mean much to the Finucanes

I used to think that the killing of Pat Finucane touched people here, at least in part, because he was middle-class.  A successful lawyer, living in a nice house, sitting down to a  family dinner as so many people like him have done. And then the door opens and Death comes in. 

I still think that the ease with which the middle-class could identify with him and his family played a part in his death standing out from so many others. But I’ve changed my mind that class was the central issue in terms of people’s response. I now believe it was because he was a lawyer. 

The fact that he came from a republican family, the fact that he defended those charged with IRA activities should not have entered into his right to conduct his work with all the energy and talent he had. The fact is that Pat Finucane played by the rules - he worked literally within the law. And for that he was cut down mercilessly in front of his wife and children. 

The family have for years been campaigning for a public inquiry into his death. The British PM David Cameron has accepted that collusion took place and apologised to the family - but he refused to set up a public enquiry. Instead he set up a review of the evidence under the London lawyer Desmond de Silva.  

So what will the family get when the review reports on 12 December? Not what they asked for, that’s for sure. Cameron has appointed de Silva in the hope that people will be unwilling to criticise the report because it might be seen as criticism of de Silva. It won’t. The criticism of the report is and will be that it’s not a public inquiry. And it’s not a public inquiry because the British government is concerned that some very old skeletons might tumble out of the cupboard. 

I do hope the Finucanes refuse to be fobbed off with the de Silva report. I don’t think they will. 

Tim Pat Coogan and the visa that wasn't

Maybe it was the title that did it. Tim Pat Coogan,  historian and former editor of The Irish Press, has had his application for a visa to the United States turned down. He was due to do a book tour of the eastern states, including a lecture to the American Irish Historical Society, but that’s off now. The title of his book? The Famine Plot.

The Irish Famine, or more accurately the Great Hunger, is an event of enormous significance in Ireland’s history. And not just Ireland’s. Among the million or so who made their way to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century were the ancestors of John F Kennedy, and the Irish have left and continue to leave a deep imprint on American society (yes, Virginia, for good and bad). Even more important is the imprint that time left on the Irish psyche. There’s a kind of race memory that still carries the scars of what happened to the Irish people more than a century and a half ago. 

But like all history, the history of what happened in Ireland in the 1840s was written by the winners, at least as far as the general understanding of most people is concerned. What caused a million Irish people to die and another million to emigrate in coffin ships? “Because of over-reliance by the Irish on the potato crop. It failed, and the Famine happened”.  That’s true but it’s only half-true. Less well-implanted in public consciousness is the fact that food of all kinds went on being shipped out  of Ireland even as the people died on the roads and ditches of the country. Tony Blair apologised for Britain’s part in the Famine but he didn’t make clear what that part was. I haven’t read Coogan’s book but the title suggests that he’s pointing a finger at the action and inaction of the time which meant death for so many.. Maybe he  should have called it The Famine:  How the Irish Starved Themselves. 

Suffering - at home and abroad

We can’t feel sympathy for all the suffering in the world. There’s just too much of it and too little room in our heads and hearts. Despite that we do feel the pain of some, which is good.  Others we choose to ignore, which is less good. 

Take last week. A young Indian woman called Savita Halappanavar died in a Galway hospital. She was 17 weeks pregnant and she died, her husband said, because the doctors refused to perform an abortion to save her life. The grief of her husband, faced with the double tragedy of the loss of a spouse and child, is deep and dark. You can see why people took to the streets carrying placards saying ‘Ireland’s shame’.  You can see why Joe Duffy’s Liveline programme dealt with the question four days in a row. 

Five other women died on Sunday last.  Not in a hospital, where doctors and nurses, even in Galway,  strive to keep patients alive and restore them to health.  These five women died without doctor or nurse. They didn’t die alone - eight children died with them. And their deaths didn’t happen because someone in a hospital didn’t do the right thing. They died because bombs had been dropped on them by the Israeli air force. In recent days over a hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fighter-bombers. 

No four-day Joe Duffy discussions for these people.  Newly-elected American president Barack Obama spoke about the Middle East deaths but he did it in a way similar to the way the Troubles here were once reported: from behind police or British army lines.  So Obama chose to speak of the conflict in the Middle East but it was suffering of Israel, subject to rocket attacks from the Gaza strip, that he drew attention to. He didn’t mention the names of the Palestinian women who died. He probably didn’t know them. Neither do I.

There’s a reason for this selective sympathy. Savita Halappanavar was an individual about whom we learnt a lot. We saw her picture, we heard from her husband, we watched a spokesman for the Indian government speak critically of what had happened. All around the world, newspapers carried headlines painting Ireland as the country  which let a helpless woman die. She was an individual.

The Palestinians - they’re just an amorphous mass. Uneducated, excitable, far away. And so Barack Obama presents the situation as one where Israel, surrounded by enemies, must strike out in self-defence, and most of us accept that. We think of what the Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis and, squashing a sense of uneasiness, we sympathise with Israel.

The United States sympathises with Israel too. In fact it goes beyond sympathy. Between 1996 and 2006, Israel was given $24 billion in financial military aid by the US. In August 2007, a new Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the two countries, guaranteeing Israel $30 billion in military aid over the next ten years. Americans, you might say, have put and are putting their money where their mouth is. Just as the Jews were incarcerated in concentration camps, so the Palestinians are virtual prisoners on the Gaza strip: a piece of land 25 miles long and some 5 miles wide is home to 1.7 million people.  It’s on these cooped-up people that the Israelis drop bomb after bomb. 

Several decades ago, Christy Moore sang a song about the American role in the assassination of Chile’s president,  Dr Salvador Allende.

“It’s a long way from the heartlands

To Santiago Bay

Where the good doctor lies 

With blood in his eyes

And the bullets read ‘US of A’ “

In Gaza today, you don’t have to alter too many words to hear the same old song. 

Ann Travers, whataboutery and unique pain

David Dunseith was a man I had not just respect but affection for. He somehow caught all the political bits of mud that people slung at him and each other, and made out of them a forum in which people could maybe think again about things, could set aside or at least put on hold the fierce loyalties or prejudices or pain that they brought to his Talkback programme. However, there was one term David used which I think was misleading and sometimes diminished the  case a caller was presenting. The term was whataboutery.  You’re claiming A, but what about B. Or C or D or Z? David had no time for whataboutery.  

I think whataboutery is important, or certainly can be. For example, when the media and everyone else was weighing into the Catholic Church for the sexual horrors some of its clergy were guilty of, and the cover-up that followed those crimes, no one said “What about other sections of society? What about the BBC, and care homes, and even within families?” As a result, the horrors of society were piled on one back and all other backs apparently didn’t exist. How stupid and short-sighted that was is now becoming slowly and painfully evident. 

Which brings us - yet again - to the death of Mary Travers. Yes, call it murder by all means, if that’s how you see it and if it helps us focus on the point. Mary Travers’s sister Ann was on TV during the week and it would have taken a heart of flint not to feel for her.  Trying to cope with cancer, trying to cope with the loss of her sister in horrific circumstances, trying to get what she believes is justice in an unjust world: it seems like too much to heap on one frail back. 

But then, on Good Morning Ulster I think it was,  Jude Whyte rang in. His mother was killed - yes, call it that if you wish, or murdered - in the same year, in the same time-period as Mary Travers died.  Mrs Whyte was killed at her own front door by UVF people, probably with state collusion. Whyte still feels the loss of his mother - who wouldn’t? But his point on Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh was that there are hundreds of cases like his and Ann Travers - hundreds of people grieving for a face and a hand and a voice that will never come back. But that the way we’ve stopped these losses is by coming to an Agreement that, while it’s more than difficult for victims - all victims - to accept, it’s what we’ve agreed on and that’s the price we pay for a fragile peace.  

I’m reading a booklet at the moment called The Pitchfork Murders. It’s about two young men - more boys, really - who were killed by a loyalist gang, again most likely with state collusion. It’s called The Pitchfork Murders because, initially, it was thought the two young men had been killed with a pitchfork. In fact both died by repeated stabbing with a 6” Bowie knife. There were no signs of resistance from either of the two, which suggests they were held by others while the killer stabbed again and again. One of the pair had wounds on his back and front, suggesting the killer stabbed him first in the front and then had him turned over, like an animal on a spit, so he could be stabbed on the other side. The killers have never been brought to justice; the state has never conceded involvement. 

There are hundreds of people out there bearing the kind of grief that came to eat into the relatives of those killed in the Pitchfork Murders,  the relatives of Mrs  Whyte, the relatives of Ann Travers. It’s not to take away from Ann Travers’s pain to say that she hasn’t the right to seek personal, unique terms of punishment for the woman who was involved in her sister’s death - yes, her sister’s murder, if you want to call it that. The woman involved in the death of her sister served time in prison, like hundreds of others, for what she’d done. And she was released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. And the GFA said nothing about released prisoners not being allowed to be advisers to politicians in Stormont. If anything, the situation of released prisoners deserves thoughtful and sympathetic consideration, to help re-integrate them into society, rather than place further restrictions on their lives. And that’s all prisoners. 

So what am I saying in a long-winded way? That Jude Whyte is right. The only way forward is for all who have suffered to move on, accept the terms under which agreement was reached, and stop claiming that his or her grief is unique. What about all the other victims and their grief? Each and every one is equally unique.  

Education and Israel

It sounds a bit like something from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, but Queen’s University’s Tony Gallagher has been in Israel to discuss shared education. The idea is that as shared (not to be confused with integrated?) education helps bring people together here, it could equally work in the Middle East. 

I’ve got mixed feelings on this one, but the pros and the cons aren’t mixed in equal proportions. A small pro part of me says that when you get to know people, you’re more sympathetic to them even if you still reject their politics. To that extent, people who make up their minds about the worth of political thinking on the basis of how much they like someone as an individual - they’d probably be helped by shared/integrated education.

On the other hand a large con part of me says that if shared/integrated education made a difference, we’d have a changed society by now. We don’t. In fact, divisions and hatreds are deeper than ever. 

When I was part of the working world of education, I watched as some people built successful careers out of a search for peace within the educational process. Cynically or naively, they argued that education had a major part to play in resolving the conflict.  It’s true that it didn’t make it worse - visiting Catholic and Protestant schools on a regular basis and sitting in on classes, I never once heard a teacher so much as hint at sectarianism. The reverse, if anything. So I suppose education at least didn’t add to the flames. And of course no less a person than Padraig Pearse believed passionately in the worth of education: his book The Murder Machine  is well worth reading still for its criticisms of what we accept as ‘good’ education.

But clearly Pearse didn’t believe education would change the Ireland in which he lived, otherwise he wouldn’t have gone out in Easter Week to meet his death.  Education is a vital part of any society, but it’s impotent in terms of who governs and who controls. Good teachers, by and large, are seen as those who follow the rules. And part of the rules over the past forty years has been that education could change things here, because the problem is really a sectarian one and not a political one. Change the way we regard each other and political structures become irrelevant.

Gallagher on his Tel Aviv visit says he can’t understand why Hamas keeps firing missiles, since this only shows their impotence compared to the Israeli army and brings destruction on the people of Gaza. Maybe they do it, Tony, because they believe that the imprisoned people of the Gaza Strip, treated with contempt for decades, want to make some gesture of defiance, as the bully that is Israel beats them to the ground and starts kicking. 

The G8 in Fermanagh - isn't it GR8?

God isn’t it great, though? I can hardly believe it - it’s like getting all your birthdays and Christmases bunched together on a couple of June days. Sure we’ll be like a house that’s been nominated for the stations - there’ll be no let-up in white-washing and scrubbing and cleaning and painting and putting up ‘Cead mile failte’ signs on every lamp-post and tree.

And to think that where was that remote village Obama visited a while back, what was it, right, Moneygall. To think that  the Moneygall people thought they were the tops. Hah!  Forget it, Co Louth. We’ll be getting Obama plus every other important person you could think of - the political creme de la creme of Britain, France, Germany, Russia - we really have been selected for an honour so top-heavy, it’s a wonder it doesn't topple and fall into one of those loughs around the hotel.

What’s that? The hotel is in receivership? Oh. That does put a slight dampener on things. But hey, think of it this way: having the G8 summit there shows that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, that there’s resurrection after receivership, that phoenix-like, we’re set to come swooping clear of the ashes. I knew there was a positive aspect to it, if you thought hard enough. 

Will I be going myself? Well, no. And no, none of my friends either. Though there is a neighbour’s lad that’s got a job taking out the garbage at the back of the hotel - he’s going to be there. No, he won’t be able to take pictures with his camera-phone, but still: he’ll be able to tell his grandchildren he was there, won’t he? And then there’s the tourist boost this will give the area. Just think of it! People will see how lovely Fermanagh is and they’ll only be lining up to get visiting us, thus doing wonders for the local economy. What’s that?  They said the same thing about the visit by the Windsor woman, and tourism numbers actually fell in the year after? God, I hadn’t heard that. Maybe that was because there are a lot of anti-royalists about. This is different. This is the elected heads of so many states - people will be certain to follow their lead and visit. And spend their money, of course.  How much money will the G8 itself generate? I don’t know...Yes, of course they’ll bring their own chefs and food and stuff - you don’t want to risk somebody poisoning them, do you? ...That’s a shameful thing to say, shameful.  OK, I can’t see Cameron or Merkel going down to the village to buy a pint of milk or some Cornflakes or a packet of fags, but at the same time somebody  local must be benefiting. And think what it’ll do for the hotel - what an ad! It’ll flash round the world. 

Yes, to every nook and cranny. To remote spots in Asia, in Africa, in South America - places where people barely scrape out an existence. Sure it’ll be only inspirational for them...Well yes, you could  put it differently. You could say the rest of the world will be pressing its nose to the shop window to watch how our leaders live life. How soft their beds are, how sumptuous their banquets, how elegant their surroundings. You could if you were that nasty negative sort of person...EH?  Oh well, now you’re preaching the politics of envy. Just because you  can’t have that sort of lavish life-style, just because there are millions of people in Africa and South America living in appalling conditions, doesn’t mean the G8 people shouldn’t be given a proper lfeather-bedded time when they visit us. How else would their brains work so they could continue running the financial and political world in the clever, wealth-developing way they’ve been doing for the last ten years? 

It’s humbling, that’s what it is. To have these immensely powerful men and women, who could have gone anywhere in the world, deciding to come to Fermanagh and put the Province on the map...OK, who was it? Who shouted that remark about dreary spires?  Get him out of here  this instant. We all know that a massive honour has been bestowed on humble little Fermanagh and the Province. Thank you,  Mr Cameron sir. Never let it be said that Britain  forgets us. We are eternally  in your debt. And no, I don’t mean the £7 billion each year.  Oh, I feel quite dizzy with delight. Give me your arm, Marjorie...

Jim seizes the high ground

There are few things more enjoyable than a man or woman in full moral-outrage flow.  Jim Wells was flowing very well in the Stormont debating chamber the other day and I must say it was a tour de force.

Jim was making it clear that non, il ne regrette rien.  If any muddle-headed nationalists or republicans were waiting for him to apologise for his remarks, they’d be waiting a long, long, LONG time. The remarks Jim was referring to were when he, behaving in what Minister Carál Ní Chuilín described as an aggressive, venomous and threatening manner, and referring to the Minister’s   adviser Mary McArdle, said to her “You needn’t think you are going to bring that murderer to South Down”. In another incident, Jim passed Mary McArdle in a corridor in Stormont and said to her “There’s the murderer herself”.  In the light of the incidents, the committee on standards and privileges proposed to bar Jim from Stormont for  a week. But the motion was defeated. Jim stays.

Why was I cheered up by these matters? Several reasons. It brings into the open what people are thinking - in this case, what unionist politicians, particularly Jim, think of people like Mary McArdle who were formerly IRA members. It brings into the open what people think of themselves: in denouncing the actions of Ms McArdle, Jim clearly was claiming higher moral ground for himself. Finally, it brings into the open the attempts of unionist politicians to instate their version of the history of the past forty years as the official history. I’m cheered by that because it’s always comforting to see what people are really up to.

Unfortunately there’s a down side as well, and that is that what people are up to may prevail as accepted wisdom and fact. Let’s consider the three I’ve listed.

Even if we were to accept Jim’s judgement of Ms McArdle as a murderer, why just her? Why doesn’t Jim stop Gerry Kelly, Martin McGuinness and any number of other former IRA people and tell them they’re murderers as well? He might even stop former members of the UDR or the British Army or the RUC and upbraid them. But he doesn’t. Jim’s wrath is confined to one woman.

Clearly, in denouncing her, Jim believes himself to be morally superior. I’m assuming (perhaps I’m wrong) that if he were asked his religious affiliation, Jim would reply without hesitation “Christian”. But doesn’t the founder of Christianity say somewhere “Judge not that you may not be judged”? And didn’t he forgive sinners again and again? And urge his followers to do likewise?

But maybe Jim’s history-writing is the most important part of his display of wrath. If Jim and those who think like him can promote as official the view that the IRA were a murderous gang and the cause of all the deaths of the Troubles, then that will mean...Well, that Jim’ s side was right. That they had God on their side. With the devil, presumably, on the side of those who opposed him.  Not that Jim’s the only one to take this tack. Quite a number of those who would describe themselves as nationalists take the same tack, only without Jim‘s thundering anger.

Post-script. It could be that Jim chose his moral-wrath target because he knew he’d have a fair number of nationalists lining up beside him as well as unionists. When I was sufficiently reckless to suggest that Mary Travers, in whose death  Mary McArdle  has been implicated, was killed by the IRA but not murdered,  I received more, well yes, venomous responses from people than for pretty well anything I’ve blogged in the past few years. No doubt Jim had that kind of venomous back-up in mind when he targeted Mary McArdle.  I've also noticed that, since that blog, my appearances on Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh's Thought for the Day, once regular, have petered into non-existence. Coincidence? Mmm. Let me think about that one.

Still, you have to admit: the Stormont outburst was as fine a display of off-the-leash moral indignation as we’re likely to get this side of Christmas.  Go raibh cead maith agat, Jim - thanks loads.