Tim Pat Coogan: the big man speaks out

[Below is a shortened version of my interview with Tim Pat Coogan in my book 'Whose Past Is It Anyway?' - the ideal Christmas present...You've bought it already? Now that's what I call clever.]

Tim Pat Coogan mentioned that he was working on a book about the Famine when I interviewed him. Since then,  the book has come out and he’s received all sorts of hostile responses for the title (The Famine Plot) and the content of his book. He’s even been refused a visa to the US. All of which will help, I hope, to generate even greater publicity and sales.

 He’s a big, warm, fluent man,  whose head is filled with Irish history, political and personal. 

“My father had an excellent, very strongly nationalist library. As quite a small boy I learned about figures in Irish history that you wouldn’t learn about in school, like Cahir O’Doherty and Galloping O’Hogan, and obviously the great O’Neill, Sarsfield, and figures like  Parnell. So I had a strong grasp of Irish history , from a nationalist perspective, I suppose, but I broadened that out. I was always interested in history and in writing; and living here on the east coast, you got BBC broadcasts and television when nobody else did. That was a kind of window on the world, seeing ministers being put on the spot in current affairs programmes and so on.”

He attended Blackrock Collge and his mentor there was the history teacher, Fr Carroll. The priest rang up Vivian de Valera of the Irish Press and said that he “had a boy who would either turn out a genius or break his heart. I regretfully never managed either”. But the phone-call did get him a toe-hold in journalism, in which he worked for nearly thirty-five years. 

He sees the Covenant and the Larne gun-running as all “part of a seamless garment” with Easter 1916.  “ But I don’t know whether I would use the word ‘celebrate’ for any of the three centenaries; I would use the word ‘commemorate’.”  He laments the absence of such distinctions in Irish life.

“People take a very simplistic, today’s-headline-or-soundbite view of history. When Martin McGuinness decided to go into southern politics at the time of the presidential election, the seagulls rose up in the media and there was tremendous denunciation, as if this were something extraordinarily foreign to Irish politics. Every single party  on the island entered the democratic arena or the parliament with a gun in its pocket or else at home in the store. And that included the unionists, the Labour party, and of course the various strands of the Irish Party. Both Fine Gael and de Valera and his people came into the Dail with guns”.

On the subject of the signing of the Ulster Covenant, he speaks of Lloyd George’s surprise after meeting Sir James Craig, that what he’d thought of as a nine-county Ulster was going to be, for Craig, a six-county Ulster. 

“So they made it a state where they would be safe by using the laws to discriminate and gerrymander constituencies against the Catholics. It was intended that they would have an upper chamber, which would give the Papishes some sort of say in the north, and they would have PR, but they knocked both those things out because they had this siege mentality, a citadel mentality”.

Things have changed, he believes. 

“I mean, the admission by Trimble that the six counties had been a cold house for nationalists seems to indicate that the next logical step over the coming years would be to make the house warm, to have some sort of a welcome sign somewhere in the house - a fáilte.  I imagine it would only be neighbourly and dignified modern political behaviour for the unionist organisers of the Covenant commemoration to invite southern visitors, certainly to invite the MLAs of the Sinn Féin party to it, and that all parties would comport themselves with dignity. “

And he thinks those organising the Easter Rising commemorations have a similar obligation. 

“I most definitely think unionists should be invited to the Easter 1916 commemorations. I very often find it difficult to invade the mind of a nationalist politician, or those of the Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil stripe, so to take over the interior working of Mr Poots’s ..I suppose I can call it intellectual activity - I find that rather unfathomable. But the political situation is evolving so fast. We’re in Europe now. And the six counties may think they’re extraneous to all the crises in the euro and southern Ireland; they’re not. They can go down the tubes even further and faster than the south can.”

As to the commemoration of the Battle of the Somme, he looks to young people.

“They don’t see an abrogation of unity in acknowledging that so many  Irishmen fell in that battle. I think there is a valid intellectual argument that they were misled and that they fell in an imperial war while they thought they were defending plucky little Belgium or that in some way it was going to help the Irish Home Rule movement. I think you should recognise there were brave people on both sides and that according to their lights, they were doing the right thing”.

He’s very struck by the changes in northern nationalism during his lifetime.

“In my younger days going up to the north, there wouldn’t be the slightest possibility of seeing young nationalists, Catholics, on the road with hurling stick or going to a football match with obvious GAA gear. They’d be rousted by the RUC; they’d be lucky to escape a kicking. And now what do you find? You find that the PSNI have joined in football matches with them.”

He believes the Ulster Covenant signing came out of a state of fear among unionist people. 

“Now that fear has demonstrably lessened. The recognition by the south of the north, everything that’s enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement, tells you that there shouldn’t be problems with centenaries. As to the 1916 commemorations, I can’t see modern Sinn Féin being triumphalist. I certainly can’t see the Dublin Government being allowed to by the electorate. But the manifestation of your own identity is not to deny somebody else their identity. And there is a Green tide. The fact is that there are hundreds and thousands of people between Croke Park and Casement Park, and six counties teams have been winning All-Irelands. I mean look at Tyrone, Derry, Armagh - all those places. There is a message in it. And the message is, as Parnell said many, many years ago: no man can set a barrier to the onward march of a nation”. 

Five questions after Connecticut shootings

1. President Obama's speech in the aftermath of the Connecticut killings was indeed impressive, particularly when he spoke of the children whose lives had been brutally snuffed out. Twenty lives ended before they'd properly begun - who wouldn't feel like weeping. Q: Did the president weep also for the 168 children killed in Pakistan since 2004 by drone bombs? Not to mention the civilians killed - somewhere between two and three thousand?

2. Every day in the US,  thirty-four more people die in shooting incidents. If all human lives are equally valuable - and they are - then the president should have been weeping on a daily basis, especially as he has done nothing in the past four years to curb the gun lobby in the US. Is 26 people killed on the one spot by one person worse than 34 people killed by different people in a variety of areas?

3. At the last poll on the subject, only 25% of respondents in the US favoured a tightening of gun laws.  This despite Columbine,  Virginia Tech, Aurora and other appalling events.  How and why is it that Americans appear not to get it? And are they likely to get it, now 20 small children have been slaughtered?

4.  Shootings and killings are a central part of thousands of Hollywood movies. I was reared myself on a diet of Audie Murphy, Gary Cooper and Gene Autry. And how we all love just love Clint Eastwood when he says "I know what you're thinking. 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun inthe world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"  My question: is this cinema diet really good for us?

5. There are  153,450 legally-held weapons in Northern Ireland. The youngest owner is 17, the oldest 103. Eight people own between 150 and 175 weapons each.  Nearly 3,000 are held as 'personal protection weapons' by, among others,  ex-PSNI and prison officers. So you've got to ask yourself one question: does a divided society need all those weapons in private hands? OK - make it two questions: are these weapons evenly distributed among unionists and nationalists. Because an imbalance would surely be alarming for the side without killing instruments.

Change comes dropping slow.Oh so slow.

One minute you’re up, next you’re down. Peter Robinson was just hitting that expansive unionism-is-safe-with-us-and-Catholics-are-lining-up-at-our-door note when boom!  Mein gott, donner und blitzen!  What kind of democracy is this, that votes to not have a 365-day flag at City Hall?  This is a crisis, a political tsunami!…Except. Don’t the Chinese have the same word for crisis as for opportunity?  So let’s send out 40,000 flyers and blame the whole thing on Naomi Long!  Perfect. We impress on the Shinners and their fellow-travellers that we’re not going to have Our Flag tampered with and  we fatally undermine your woman Long's Westminster seat! Great stuff. Get cracking, lads.

So the lads got cracking,  the back of City Hall became a bear-pit of sectarianism and mob rule, and a wee woman stuck her face up to a broken window and made  herself part of a hilarious video that has gone round the world. There will be a cost, of course, and not just for a damaged gate and a broken window.  Foreign firms will turn decidedly frosty at the notion they might want to invest in a place with such obvious nutters in it 

Oh dear. How can someone as shrewd as Robinson hatch a plan with  such self-destruct potential? If he’d thought the thing through he’d have known that as soon as you say ‘Demo - back gate of City Hall,’ the rest of the script is already written. Remember when they came baying for Niall O Donnaighle’s blood? Remember the protests against the Anglo-Irish Agreement, with the late George Seawright trying to scramble up the side of the back gate and the air thick with curses and missiles? Peter has lived through all that and yet he didn’t see this coming. Or maybe he thought there'd be a wee bit of violence, which'd put the frighteners on the Shinners and the Stoops and that bloody woman Long's party.

Certainly limited vision seems to afflict a lot of our unionist fellow-countrymen. Like, hasn’t even one of them noticed how irrevocably, totally and absolutely drenched in Britishness the Belfast City Hall is?  And yet it’s loyalists ( a  loyalist, Virginia, is a unionist with a Rangers scarf round his mouth) who spent the past week burning cars and pelting the police because their identity wasn’t being given clear enough expression.. Maybe go to Specsavers, lads? You get to hoist your flag over City Hall 15 or is it 17 times a year. Nationalists, who are probably now a majority in Belfast, get to hoist their flag over City Hall...um... no times. Never. Never never never. Inside City Hall there are stained glass windows to King William III,  Queen Victoria, the UDR, the RUC,  a bust of Carson, your woman Victoria out front again, all 11 feet of her. And in the city itself - clocks, hospitals, bridges, buildings, hospitals,  all bear the royal name. Belfast is knee-deep in royal and imperial memorials. So remind me again: whose identity is getting a hard time here?

Most shameful of all is that disorder arose because  nationalists and republicans engaged in a democratic act of decision-making.  Remember when unionists used to lecture republicans about following the democratic political path?  Last week they did just that, as they voted in Belfast City Hall. Their reward? See above re burning cars, missiles at cops, demented screeches of ‘No surrender!'  A police officer in her car has a petrol bomb thrown inside it. Peter says ‘suspend’ rather than ‘stop’, because ‘stop’ would make him a tyrant.  And the census figures now suggest that in ten years' time, taigs will be in a majority in the state. That is, if they don't join the DUP, which Peter is confident a lot will want to do. Or should that be 'was confident'? 

Are you Northern Irish?

Are you Northern Irish? Well if you come from the north of Ireland, it seems a reasonable claim to make. But the way the demographists have been going on since the latest release of census figures, you’d be pardoned for assuming it meant someone who votes unionist. 

Why all the excitement over what people call themselves? Because it might be the log onto which unionism can attach itself, as the waters whirl and tumble around it, threatening drowning. 

The demographic trend is unmistakeable: the gap between Protestant and Catholic numbers in our little statelet is shrinking at pace. If what happened over the past ten years were to happen again in the next ten years, Catholics here would constitute 46% of the population, Protestants 43%. And were a border poll then called, as it almost certainly would be, the state of Northern Ireland would cease to exist - assuming Catholics voted for a re-united Ireland. Yes, Virginia, I said “assuming”.

The argument that says they would is that they consistently vote for the SDLP and Sinn Féin - both united-Ireland parties. And that’s where the Northern Irish thing comes in. Demographists, Peter Robinson and others claim that Catholics in the north no longer want a united Ireland - that with their fellow-countrymen in the north, they’re forging a new identity which is neither British nor Irish. So growth in Catholic numbers represents no threat.

On the other hand, why call yourself ‘Northern Irish’  if you don’t think you’re Irish as well? Search me. People say funny things when they’re questioned on nationality. I remember in my former life scrutinising applications for a diploma course at the University of Ulster and being struck by the consistency with which some applicants from Catholic schools described themselves as ‘British’. At first I was quite excited, assuming this would mark a surge in the number of Catholics voting unionist. But the years past and the opposite happened - the number of Catholics voting republican increased. I would guess that the applicants assumed the person scrutinising their application would be unionist-inclined, and by declaring yourself British you gave yourself a slight edge, or at least no handicap. In short, they used a British label because in these circumstances they thought it might be to their advantage. In the privacy and anonymity of the polling booth, things were different. 

There’s also the fact that people often define themselves in terms of what they’re not as much as what they are. It may be that the Northern Irish in the census returns were declaring their difference from the brown-envelope culture of the south of Ireland. Which again would be different from voting pro-union, either in elections or in referendums. 

The truth is, we’ll never know - except, that is, a border poll is called. Then we could all give our views and get on with things, the constitutional question either answered or set aside for another seven years. Odd that there isn’t more clamour for that. But that’s Northern Irish/Irish from the north for you. 

A tale of two men under threat

I’ve just listened to two men talking on the radio. One was on BBC Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh - Jeffrey Donaldson-  and he was talking about the death-threat that he and his family, he says, have received, probably from dissident republicans. If they don’t leave the north of Ireland, the threat says, they will be killed. He says he’s upset about it because naturally he’s concerned for his family.

The other man, interviewed on BBC Radio 4 -  was one of Pat Finucane’s sons - John I think. He was talking about the report to be released today, not about a death-threat to his father but about his father’s murder in front of his wife and children. As you almost certainly know, Pat Finucane was a young lawyer here who was killed by the UDA with acknowledged collusion by British forces. The Finucanes say they will read the report but have little hope for it, since it didn’t involve them and gave no opportunity to interrogate witnesses. As for the British prime minister’s apology, they say he’s got it back to front. First you make clear what events you’re apologizing for, then you apologize. They want a public enquiry.

One obvious difference between the two interviewed men is that while one has received a death threat, the other has been the victim of an executed death-threat ( Pat Finucane was told by prisoners he represented that RUC men had threatened to kill the lawyer). Another difference is that one - Jeffrey Donaldson - is under death-threat from an illegal paramilitary organisation.  Pat Finucane was killed with the willing assistance of state forces - the people whose duty it is to protect citizens. The third difference is that Jeffrey Donaldson appears to be at best ambiguous and at worst rejectionist of a democratic decision arrived at by Belfast City Council. Pat Finucane worked within the law, argued the law on behalf of his clients, accepted the British legal and judicial system here. For that he lost his life. And that’s a big difference. 

Let's count some sectarian heads, shall we?

Well, it’s nice to have something to smile at for a change. All the people who go ‘Tut-tut!’, shake their heads and mutter about the neanderthal thinking of those who go in for sectarian head-counts are now...um, well, busy licking their little pencils and doing a sectarian head-count of the freshly-released census figures. 

OK.  What’s the core point that jumps out? Right - Protestant population down by 5% to 48%, Catholic population up by 1%  to 45%. Replicate that trend next census in 2021 and you’ll have a 43% Protestant population and a 46% Catholic population. Eeeeeeek.

But hold. While 45% of population here are Catholics, only 25% describe themselves as Irish only. Double eeeeek. So Peter Robinson was right all along. Loads and loads of Catholics are really happy as they are and only need a friendly invitation to join the DUP.

Right. That’s the Democratic Unionist Party, which was the Protestant Unionist Party until 1971, when its leader Ian Paisley figured that ‘Democratic’ sounded nicer than ‘Protestant’ in the title. That’s the same Ian Paisley, of course, who believes that Catholics are on the high road to eternal damnation and are being led there by the Pope who is of course the Anti-Christ. 

Mmm. Maybe better not to assume that all those union-loving Catholics will put their tick beside the DUP name in an election. You say they’ll vote for the UUP instead? Pu-lease. The UUP is busy fracturing itself at a rate of knots without tossing the taig-issue into their particular mess. Anyone giving me good odds on Basil McCrea and John McAllister being in the UUP in a year’s time? So that leaves Alliance. Mmm. No, I’m afraid the union-loving Catholics will all have to get together and invent their own union-loving party. ULP has a nice sound for a new party. Like swallowing something you can’t digest.

But of course not joining a unionist party doesn’t mean you wouldn’t vote to stay in the union with Britain, come a referendum.  I imagine quite a few Catholics who see the southern economy sinking even faster than the one north of the border are not going to take any political step that might mean the drowning southern economy pulls them down with it. And then there are those northern Catholics who plain don’t like southerners. So yes, there are a fair number of Catholics who would probably vote to stay in the union with Britain. 

The question is, how many? As the Catholic population continues to grow, and the Protestant population continues to sink, who knows? The south’s economy may revive. The north’s economy may accelerate its descent. Iris Robinson may re-run for Westminster. Events, dear boy, events. There’s no telling. Like, even as I write, I see William Hill has shortened its odds on Britain losing its triple-A rating by next June - was 5/4, now is 4/7.  Talk about eeeeek.

In all this wild swirl of events and figures, one thing is clear: this is Peter Robinson’s moment. He must join with Gerry Adams and call a border referendum quickly, while the Catholic population, or a sizeable part of it, is committed to the Union. 

And if he doesn’t? Well, then he’ll clearly believe a census form is one thing but a polling booth is another.  And on that, if nothing else, I agree with Peter.

From spoof call to utter futility

There’s futility and then there’s utter futility. When I first heard of that spoof call from Australia, impersonating Her Majesty (God bless her) and enquiring after her daughter-in-law, I said “I wouldn’t like to be the nurse that fell for that one!”.  What I had in mind, of course, was that the unfortunate nurse or whoever had let the call through, which had made a laughing-stock of things royal, would get such a blast from her superiors, it’d singe her hair. Alas, it ended with something far, far worse: the death of the unfortunate nurse.

So now - who’s to blame?  Is it the pair in Australia, who carried out the prank?  I would reply with a very firm No. Anyone I spoke to in the immediate aftermath said it was a right laugh, down to the sound of barking Corgis in the background. Now, however, lots of people are getting very moral about the spoof-makers. They’ve been taken off-air, there’s talk of banning all prank calls, they’re the villains. 

I don’t believe that for a moment. I don’t know, of course, but I don’t think it’s wildly inaccurate to speculate   that those higher up the food chain from that poor, poor nurse gave her the mother and father of all bawlings-out, and that this directly related to the terrible and terminal step she took afterwards. The alternative is to believe that the nurse felt so badly about in some way having failed to shield the royal personage, the bearer within her of the next-but-one-or-is-it-two destined to sit on the royal throne, that she felt suicide was the only way out. 

Dear God, I hope not. That would indeed have been an utterly wasteful and futile gesture - to give your life because in some vague way you’d embarrassed a pampered woman getting ready to produce another leech on the public purse.