To coin a phrase: glory be to God for dappled things

I've just come from talking with a man who is 100% unionist and whose company, on the few occasions I meet him, I enjoy. And that set me thinking about something: when I was working on my book (yes, the one you should rush out and buy for Christmas - Whose Past Is It Anyway? - and if the shop hasn't got it, ask me and I'll sort it)...Where was I? Oh yes, brief commercial...But I was struck during those interviews by the frequency with which I found myself liking people whose political opinions are totally at odds with my own. I find no problem in separating the two  - the politics from the rest of the man/woman - but I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't  something wrong with me. Most people seem  happy to confer sainthood on those whose opinions they agree with and to consign to damnation those whose opinions they disagree with.  Does that make sense?

Not as I see it; but I suppose it's linked to affirmation. To that good feeling we get when someone tells us, either implicitly or explicitly, "Your political views are excellent - they agree with mine. You are an intelligent chap".  And when someone disagrees with us, it's easy to feel they're dismissing you along with your opinions.

Really, this shouldn't be. Political thinking is only part of our intellectual make-up. There are views on sex, religion, art, psychology,  plumbers -  the rest of human knowledge, in fact; and on these you may very well agree with your political opponent. Or maybe you like your  political opponent  simply because s/he is a cheerful and thoughtful conversationalist. There are so many elements go to make up the entire person, it strikes me as daft to dismiss someone because we see one part of them as being defective, or at least different from us. That's why I've always had a slight question-mark over that line from the Bible, where the heavenly choirs at Christmas sing of 'On earth, peace to men of goodwill'.  Leave aside the non-reference to women: shouldn't we be wishing peace to those we consider to be of ill-will as well? Or even especially? Note, I'm not  saying befriend them, but do leave yourself open to enjoying other aspects of their personality.

See? I'm doing my damnedest to move away from the instinctive ba-humbug that this time of year tends to provoke in me. So in case I miss tomorrow,  Nollaig shona duibh go leir -  Happy Christmas to all, especially to those who detest my political take on the world.

Two thoughts to ruin your Christmas

I know I should be cheerful with the time of year that's in it, but I came across two statements today that have plunged me into serious gloom. Move over, Scrooge.

The first was on the car radio, where I heard RTÉ give a free five-minute plug to the Irish Independent.  Apparently that organ is going to go 100% tabloidy as from tomorrow so they had the editor on to say how significant it was. Well, said the editor, people had told them they liked the tabloidy thing - apparently some of the Indo  is already in tabloid form  - so they responded. The public were happy with the tabloidy news because (and he repeated this at least twice) they looked for a paper, whether online or in hard copy, that was “trusted and authoritative”. Oh, and unbiased. The interviewer didn’t slap the table and tell the Indo editor  to get the hell outa here, he was such a joker. Nor did the phone lines to RTÉ, as far as I know, flood with calls from people saying in effect what Jeremy Paxman says he asks himself when confronted with a politician: why is this lying bastard lying to me? No - the interviewer played it straight. Accepted every word from the editor’s lips as gospel truth. That, I thought, is the south’s national broadcaster responding to the Indo. And then I thought of Miriam O’Callaghan and switched off the radio before I plunged in gloom so thick, I’d crash the car.

The other uncheerful statement I read online when I got home. It was an article in the News Letter,  headed “Ulster’s drivers urged to join in protest”. Apparently the guardians of the Union flag will be out in force at a place near you this evening at 6.00 pm, and they’ve urged “people that are stuck in traffic instead of sitting in your car get out and join in”. WTF? You expect people who can’t get home or to the shops or to wherever they’re going to abandon their cars and join in with the people who think that blocking roads and issuing death threats is being clever? God give me strength.  Adding insult to injury, the flegboys  say:

“We would encourage all members of the PUL (Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist) community taking part in Friday’s nationwide protest to do so in a peaceful and dignified manner to ensure that we can portray the right image of unionism/loyalism and gain support from the wider PUL community.”

Now there’s a statement that’s calculated to take us all forward to a reasonable, shared future. PUL the other one, guys.  The only consolation I can think of is that I’m not a unionist, which means I don’t have so much as a smidgen of responsibility for these head-bangers intent on chaos.

Please - don't befriend me. Just play straight.

OK, cards on the table. I like William Crawley. He’s smart, cheerful and maybe the best presenter in BBC Belfast. ‘Sunday Sequence’, the radio programme he presents, has become a must-listen for anybody interested in political as well as religious developments here and elsewhere. 

Right, that’s the nice stuff. Now the point on which I disagree with him. Yesterday on Twitter he said “We need to learn how to talk about one another without alienating the other. We can’t do that without befriending one another.”  I agree with him on the first bit, I fundamentally disagree with him on the second . He’s quite right that there’s not much point talking to someone if all you’re doing is getting up his/her nose. But the notion that we have to be friends with people in order to talk to them is plain wrong.

It’s also dangerous. During the Troubles there was a view touted, mainly but by no means only by the Churches, that what was called for was a conversion in each of our hearts. If we could all go through the day being nice to each other, the Troubles would be over. The gap in that reasoning is that we act towards each other partly through free will but to a considerable measure by the kind of society structures we live within.  In other words, politics matters.

The present flag dispute is a perfect example. Working-class unionists, or some of them, appear to believe their Britishness is being torn down, stripped from them. The facts contradict this, in terms of what flag flies on public buildings, what iconography and imagery adorn public buildings, what names streets have, what political view is exemplified 3,000 times over in marching form each year. Leave aside the brute fact of partition for a moment. The existence of the conditions described above are what need addressing, in an open, logical, fair-minded manner. Certainly if people involved are also friends, that’s fine. But I don't like everybody and I wouldn’t presume to expect that everyone likes me. I will insist, and so should everybody, that society is organised on a basis of fairness and justice, and if there are competing political viewpoints, that the cities and towns and society people live in reflect this. Forget the ‘befriending’ bit, William. Let’s just start building in a business-like, decent-minded way. Then friendship will flourish.

Park name insult debate

A: They have a nerve, don’t you think? But no feelings. Imagine naming a kiddies’ park after a well-known terrorist. 

B:  Who did?

A:  The terrorist called Raymond McCreesh. Somewhere around Newry they’ve gone and named a park after him. Probably in retaliation for the loyalist protests about tearing down the flag.

B: But I thought that park got McCreesh’s name in 2001 or something.

A: And?

B: And nobody objected at the time. Including Danny Kennedy, the deputy leader of the UUP.

A: Well, sometimes it takes time for an outrageous insult to sink in. 

B: I’m anti-monarchist myself.

A: What’s that got to do with anything?

B: Well it’s just that when I come into work I have to come over Queen’s Bridge and past the King’s Hall. During lunch-time I sometimes do a bit of shopping in Royal Avenue.

A: What are you suggesting? That the Royal Family are dead terrorists?

B: And then in Dublin there’s Pearse Street and Connolly Station and Heuston Station and Cathal Brugha Street.

A: And your point is?

B: Well, they’re dead terrorists too.

A: No they’re not. They are revered patriots.

B: How’dymean?

A:  They gave their lives for their country. After fighting against the British army.

B: And what’s the McCreesh story? I keep forgetting just what it was he did.

A: He fought against the British army in South Armagh and then he ga...Oh very clever, very droll. Ulster is different. No surrender. Not an inch.

B:  I see.

A: Long live Maggie Thatcher.

B: Right. Unlike the Belgrano.

A: What’d you say?

B: I said ‘Unlike the Belgrano’. You remember the Argentine light cruiser that was moving away from the conflict zone. Mrs Thatcher gave orders and it was sunk. Over three hundred men died.

A: Yes indeed, and if I  might echo her words: rejoice in that.

B: What - in the death of over 300 men?

A: Of course.  It was a war. They were trying to take our island. Just because it’s thousands of miles from Britain doesn’t mean it isn’t British. 

B: Pat Finucane.

A: I beg your pardon?

B: I said ‘Pat Finucane’.  Some people think Thatcher was ultimately responsible for his death. 

A: Why, that’s outrageous! Who ever heard of a prime minister giving an order that resulted in someone’s death?

B: Mmm. 

A: Mmm indeed. Perhaps we’ll talk again, when you learn some basic logic. You know, jaw-jaw is always better than war-war.

B: Mmm  (exits stage left, pursued by a bear wrapped in a Union flag)

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'?