On lop-sidedness and neutrality

Don't shoot the messenger but do have a look at his/her track-record. I'm fresh and panting from the Nolan Show look back at the year that was in it, and he has (or had - it's taped) four commentators on. They were Alex Kane, Finola Meredith, Andrea McVeigh and  Denis Murray.  Now the theory is that all commentators here come at events from a detached viewpoint which allows them to see the Truth, unlike other people who are mired in prejudice and one-sidedness. To which I would reply with a rude word only I'm working up to going off swearing for the New Year. Let's not say we had four unionist commentators  but let's say we had no sign of a commentator with a nationalist perspective. It's a bit like the British-identity thing - what we've been taught to accept is that a civilized unionist perspective is the decent, unbiased view to take and all else has the whiff of cordite to it. By the way I'm arguing this on purely political stance - I've met and talked with all of the above and I've found them pleasant, friendly people of considerable intelligence. So I promise you there are no old personal grudges involved here or sour grapes.

On the other hand, I may be doing them an injustice. I listened to only the first twenty minutes or so. The topic under discussion was  unionist working-class alienation. We heard several views - that the press and commentators treated them unfairly, that the flag was the last straw, that their educational under-achievement is holding them back, that Catholics (read that as nationalist, please) have a sense of coherence, discipline because of their religious background, whereas unionist tend to be much more fragmented because of their religious background. There could be some truth in that, although I really get good and growly when I hear people talking about Protestants and Catholics when in a great number of cases they aren't Protestants or Catholics. But the one thing I didn't hear discussed - maybe they got to it later - was that the flag-protest people were called onto the streets by the two unionist leaders, Robinson and Nesbit, Robinson with the clear intention of doing some political damage to Naomi Long. Odd, that. You'd think people talking about the Big Picture would have included that. Or maybe you had the stamina to keep listening and they did?

Anyway, my main point is simple: whereas you'll get commentators galore who are either frankly unionist or implicitly unionist, you'll search fairly hard before you'll get a committed republican or even nationalist commentator on the air. It's true, y'know. It's not just the Yuletide booze talking.

It's a question of respect

Well, that's breakfast done. Verging on abstemious to leave room for what is to follow. Here in Beckenham the rain has been PISSING down during the night - eased off a bit at the moment but dark and threatening. No matter: I have That Speech to look forward to. Needless to say there are  people lacking the respect that is required for proper reception of The Speech (see http://www.anphoblacht.com/contents/22587). How sad, that  seditious elements should fail to adopt a properly respectful posture for  The Woman that Ireland-  North, South, East and West - was so filled with delight to receive not so long ago. What a pity the Eire president could not find himself capable of delivering a similar speech to his subjects ...sorry, citizens.  Or maybe it's better not - he wouldn't suit a tiara.

That said, enough already. The day beckons. There is a light in the east. Enjoy.

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”.