Seamus Heaney: political seer?

Political predictions made by individuals are, by and large, a  waste of  time.   I can think of only  two that later events proved accurate. One was  by Gerry Kelly  who  predicted that  the TUV had peaked at a time when most people, myself included, thought  they were a growing threat. A week or two later Gerry was proved conclusively right  while the rest of us tried to wipe the egg off our faces. The other  was when I made a bet  with Eoghan Harris about  the fate of Sinn Féin candidates in a twenty-six -counties election that was four years away.  (Eoghan, who to his  credit stumped up, told me I’d got lucky.  Maybe he was right.)   So you’ll  understand if I don’t clap my hands to my head and run off shrieking,  now that Seamus  Heaney has predicted  there’ll never be a united Ireland.

I’m  not clear if he was asked a direct question about  the subject  in  the interview he did for  The Times, or whether he just came up with it.  But I found myself thinking about  a man I used to work with who was an outstanding practitioner of  drama in education.  He said that he found people had begun to ask him questions, not just about drama, but about  other things. Like climate change. Or vegetarianism. Or animal rights. He said he couldn’t figure out the jump  in logic people made, from his expertise in drama to his assumed expertise in  all these other areas.  

I also thought of Sam McAughtry, a man whose  views I wouldn’t share on a  number of subjects. Sam wrote an article once about his time in  the Civil Service, I think it was.   The main thrust was that his superiors at work, because they were  his work superiors, tended to assume superiority on any topic that  came up in a discussion.  Sam saw no sense in this and used treat their  ideas with no more respect than he’d give to that of someone he’d encountered in a pub.  His work superiors didn’t like this lack of deference and it got him into some bother over the years.

Seamus Heaney is a fine poet. But I’m baffled as to what part of his poetic imagination allows him to predict so firmly the never-never-never-never of a united Ireland.  Or,  for that matter,  quite what he means when he says “Loyalism, or unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland it operates not as a class system but a caste system. And they [the loyalists] have an entitlement factor running:  the flag is part of it”.  If he means that loyalist protesters believe they’re entitled to do whatever they want and to have the Union flag fly as often as they like, he’s right.  If he’s saying  “And they should be granted their  wish, because they have an entitlement factor”, he’s talking through his Nobel  armpit. Loyalists/unionists/whatever have no entitlement to reject a democratic decision reached by the city councillors in a democratic vote.  To talk about people   having  some sort of dispensation from democracy is to side with those  who, because they’ve done what they felt like doing for so long, think it entitles them to keep on doing whatever they like.

When Seamus and I were pupils in St Columb’s College, Derry in the 1950s,  unionism  saw itself as entitled to gerrymander and discriminate at will,  and the  nationalist population shrugged its shoulders in resignation. I  hope this doesn’t come as too big of a shock, Seamus, so I’ll whisper it gently: up here, we’ve stopped shrugging.

Interview with a Dame

[This is an edited version of  the interview in my stunningly readable book Whose Past Is It Anyway?]

I  know Nuala O’Loan by reputation. She’s the woman who ran a slide-rule over collusion here, she’s the woman who reduced former Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan to a hysterical blob. So picture my relief when I  visit her house and find her to be soft-spoken and friendly.  Maybe it’s because I’m not a Chief Constable. Yet.

She grew up in Yorkshire. Her father died when she was thirteen, so the family emphasis was on survival rather than politics. When she married her husband Declan and moved here, she soon got inducted into our labyrinthine ways.

“My first introduction to the politics of Northern Ireland, I remember, was sharing an office with some people who kept asking me which school I went to. I kept telling them I went to a girls’ school, a boarding school - I’d various answers for them. So I said to Declan ‘They just keep coming back and asking me which school’.  Declan said ‘Just tell them it was a convent and that’ll solve the problem’. And it did!”

She believes the 1912 Covenant could be construed as being anti-Catholic, and so celebrating it might be seen as denigrating a part of the community. “I think in a way that’s why the Twelfth marches can never be celebrated by Catholics; it’s what lies behind - and not just what lies behind, but what the people who are celebrating think they’re celebrating, which may be a different thing from what they’re actually celebrating”. That said, she believes the centenary of the Ulster Covenant signing could lead to greater understanding, if discussed in small groups rather than with marches and grand occasions. “You could argue that 1912 is responsible for everything that followed. I wouldn’t put the blame on the unionist people for what has followed; I’m just saying that that act of separation which followed the Ulster Covenant was the key to everything.”

In terms of the 1916 commemorations, she sees how the people of the south would want to celebrate the corner-stone of their state’s creation. But for unionists in the north, “1916 in a way consolidated the fears that the unionists had, and the separation then of the six counties was almost inevitable”.  She believes that northern nationalists will want to use the centenary to confirm their national identity. “I had a view of 1916 which was informed by the books I’d read to date. But I’ve seen more and more recently that questions whether 1916 had to happen at all, questions what actually did happen. So I’d like to learn more about it and maybe there are others who’d like to learn more about it”.  In fact she sees both the Covenant and Easter 1916 as learning points. “It would be more creative and more enriching if, rather than deepening a sense of nationalism and unionism, you were able to deepen a sense of the other’s understanding of history, to a point where you were able to accept the other in a better way, to move forward as a society. I think that would be the best outcome”. 

She has a particular interest in the commemoration of the Somme. Her grandfather was in the British army. “He joined from Dublin in the early 1900s, probably for economic reasons. He survived the First World War but was badly wounded. So maybe I come from a slightly coloured understanding of why the Somme should not be divisive. I also have a nephew who lost a leg at the age of eighteen fighting in Iraq, having walked out of school to help the Iraqi people be free, and suffered terrible injuries. I have another nephew who’s currently in the army and will go to Afghanistan again. So maybe my colours are sort of prejudiced there. All those young men fed over the wires into the machine guns, knowing what was going to happen to them, living in those trenches in the dirt and the water and the rats...No, I feel very strongly that war is such an obscenity.” 

She believes that north and south have common links to the Somme commemorations which they do not have to 1916 or 1912 commemorations. That said, there will be “some people, because of the connotations of the British Army in Northern Ireland, they will disengage from it, they will not want to be engaged. But I will be very surprised if there is any attempt to disrupt it or anything like that”.

The fact that she comes from an academic background perhaps explains the emphasis she places on the study of these historical events rather than the unquestioning celebration or even commemoration of them.

“I think these centenaries are an opportunity for learning.  There are a lot of people trying to ensure that this time is used positively and creatively. There will be inevitable incursions into boggy ground, but we have so much to battle at the moment, in terms of our economic recession and the social difficulties we have, that our energies should be concentrated on the positive rather than anything else”.

I remember at the time of the interview mentally agreeing that economic problems do indeed loom so large in people’s lives, and  the memories of the Troubles still fresh and raw, using these centenaries for anything other than enhanced mutual understanding would be unthinkable. But then, I interviewed  Dame Nuala O’Loan some eighteen months before the flag protest. How little any of us knows what’s around the corner. 

Garda Adrian Donohoe: death of a good man

OK - let me get the this bit out of the way. I shouldn’t have to say it but there are people with overheated imaginations who tend to see what they want to see rather than what is written. 

The recent shooting dead of garda detective Adrian Donohoe was a cruel and vile action. He evidently was not just a good garda officer, doing his job at the time of his death; he was a husband and father, a coach of local GAA youngsters, a man held in high regard by all in the area where he lived and worked.  It is good to know that Justice Minister Alan Shatter - and others - have said that no effort will be spared to bring his killer to justice. President Michael D Higgins has described the killing as a dreadful crime, one which all Irish people will be appalled by. Taoiseach Enda Kenny said the murder was outrageous, an appalling act of cold-blooded violence.  Former Justice Minister Michael McDowell has said “Revulsion towards this crime and its perpetrators is universal”. 

I went to see the film Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis,  yesterday.  (No, I haven’t changed the subject. Hang in there.) In the course of the film, there is a vote  in the House of Representatives to give black slaves their freedom and equality before the law. A great many in Lincoln’s own Republican party were opposed to this bill, but it squeaked through: it gave equal rights before  the law to people - black people - whom even some of Abe Lincoln’s own party  saw as innately inferior. 

Back to present-day Ireland. Last month a man called Christopher Warren was shot dead in Dublin. He was a known criminal with links to drugs gangs. Last year in the south of Ireland there were sixteen gun murders linked to drugs gangs. Can you name any of the victims? Did the President and the Taoiseach express their disgust at the killings? No. Why not? Because these were ‘drugs-related’ murders - people ‘known to the garda’  - i.e., criminals from the drugs world. 

There’s a part of us that says “Well, the more they kill each other, the fewer drug-pushers in our society”.  That’s true. There’s also less respect for the law. The murder of a good man like Adrian Donohoe should be no more heinous in the eyes of the law than the murder of Christopher Warren or any other drugs-related criminal. If we’re going to measure the goodness or badness of people before deciding how wrong their murder is, we’re effectively saying that Justice isn’t really blind - she’s actually peeking to check the moral worth of the person murdered. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The most contemptible criminal has the right to the same protection under the law as the most dedicated member of the Garda Siochana. President Higgins and Taoiseach Kenny don’t say “They got what was coming to them” but by their indignation only when a good man is murdered, they imply a distinction. There isn’t. 

By the way, when did we get to the stage where we accepted the existence of death-dealing drugs gangs as, well, hey, part of life, you know? Was it during the tenure as Justice Minister Michael McDowell who is now outraged by Adrian Donohoe’s death? 

I’ve a feeling there’s a terrible irony in there somewhere but I can’t quite put my finger on it.    Maybe you can. 

Basil McCrea and telling the truth

I like Basil McCrea. There’s something about his boyish chubby face and flop of fringe that reminds me of a bit player from Greyfriars School ( which Billy Bunter attended, and if you don’t know who Billy Bunter is, just trust me, OK?). He looks and sounds like a man who enjoys talking to people,  and he has shown himself open to engagement with political opponents in a no-big-deal way. (Actually when it’s put like that, it seems odd that he should stand out as different. But then we live in an odd place.)

Anyway, Basil is on the Unionist Naughty Step at the moment,  and it looks like he’ll spend more time there after his recent interview with a Lisburn local radio station.  In it he says some very interesting things. Here’s one, on the flags protest:

You first of all have to get people off the streets. And then you have to go through a long process of telling people the truth. You do have to explain to people that compromise is necessary. It is not a dirty word. It is the way you go forward in any democracy, trying to work out what is the best for the most people. 

I like some of the above paragraph a lot, especially the bit about ‘telling people the truth’.  If unionist leaders were to tell their constituents the truth, they’d remind them that Belfast City Hall has standing-room-only, it’s so packed with unionist memorials, paintings and statues. And they’d remind them that the city is saturated in streets, buildings and bridges, all of which loudly shout out “We’re unionist!”

Except that Belfast is no longer unionist. The city has more non-unionists than unionists.  If you reflect on that fact for a moment, you’ll quickly spot the bit of Basil’s paragraph that doesn’t work for me. He’s right to talk about the need for compromise, but psst, Basil. Flying the Union flag 17 times a year is not “what is best for the most people”. 

Try it from a Martian’s point of view. He gets out of his space-ship and is told that two more-or-less equal groups each has its own flag, how will they resolve this impasse fairly?  The Martian, assuming his brain hasn’t fried on entry to Earth, would almost certainly reply (in Martian) “Fly both flags or none”.  That actually would be a balanced compromise. But even when all 17 flag-flying occasions will feature the Union flag and none the Irish tricolour, all unionist hell breaks loose. So yes, Basil, there certainly is room for some more truth-telling.

Unfortunately, Basil’s position within his party is shaky, which tells you something about his party and about unionism in general. On Monday, even though still strictly speaking an Ulster Unionist, he voted against his own party. Clearly the Ulster Unionist Party is in a mess - rapid shuffling of leaders, mutterings against the present leader, people quitting the party. The DUP, in contrast, is much more cohesive, but it faces an appalling vista:  that its leader might be defeated not once but twice by an Alliance candidate. If that happens, the knives will be out and used. Then there’s the PUP,  intent on reviving its fortunes on the back of the flag protestors.  And after that there are all those unionists who are fuming with the laughing stock that’s been made of unionism by the fleg people.  In short, unionism is fracturing in the face of change, with more change, like it or lump it, on the way.   And the moral is? As Basil says, tell people the truth. And tell them it before it’s too late.

    

How smart is Arlene Foster?

Has the DUP’s Arlene Foster got a brain? She’s a lawyer so she may well have  (although not necessarily, since some members of that profession possess more in the way of low animal cunning).  But let’s give Arlene the benefit of any doubt and say she has a brain. If so, she parked at the studio door before appearing on the Nolan show last night. 

The topic was the border poll. Arlene made several points, sometimes cutting across others to make them. I can’t remember them all but two stick in my memory this morning. 

The first showed that she really really likes clichés. Her debate opponent was Alex Maskey, so when they came to discuss the possibility of a border poll, Arlene delivered the judgement that Sinn Féin were a party of “economic illiterates”.  You've almost certainly heard the term before. It  had its origin in the famous debate some years ago between Michael McDowell and Gerry Adams on RTÉ, where McDowell was seen to have exposed Adams’s ignorance of economics with a slam-bam-game-set-and-match disposal of the Sinn Féin president’s thinking on the economics of the south. "Economic illiterates" has now has passed into the off-the-shelf vocabulary of people who are averse to thinking and averse to Sinn Féin. If you go back and listen to the recording of that debate, McDowell certainly emerges as the one who talks with an air of great certainty, as did Arlene last night. The only catch is, the economic vision pushed by McDowell and practised by his government fell to catastrophic pieces a few months later, when the entire economic edifice of the south  did an imitation of the Twin Towers on 9/11.  In short, McDowell was the one preaching Stone Age economics and Adams the one attempting to resist it. Yet Arlene chose to parrot the phrase again last night rather than use her brain. 

The second incident which showed switched-off grey cells ( to put it charitably) was when she shouted Alex Maskey down as he tried to make the point that a border poll would ultimately be held.  Having made it clear the previous day that she was all for calling Sinn Féin’s “bluff” about a border poll, she informed Maskey last night that a border poll would “never happen”.  That went down well with the largely unionist audience (that’s two weeks in a row, guys) but it also denies what’s in the GFA document: that the British Secretary of State should call a border poll when she judges there are numbers sufficient to affect a constitutional change. It even suggests, according to the BBC’ s Mark Davenport, that she can call one more or less because she thinks it’s a good idea. So either the GFA has been scrapped while we weren’t looking or Arlene was showing that her debate line was unencumbered by anything like awkward fact. 

I was in the audience myself and, as expected, got asked my opinion. I had time to say I thought it would be a good idea, because the border has been the cornerstone of our main political parties and our voting patterns since the inception of the state, and ....At that point Stephen was hurrying on to the next comment.

And that was the final, slightly depressing feeling I was left with at the end of the night. I was sitting beside an English journalist, who got to speak briefly during the debate about gay marriage. At the end of the show I asked him what did he think? “Infuriating and frustrating” was the essence of his reply. The BBC’s founder, Lord Leith, declared that the Corporation's mission was to “inform, educate and entertain”.  Last night’s show certainly gave the first and second of Leith's goals a wide berth. When and if a border poll is called, let's hope it's characterised by thought, discussion and informed debate. In short, the opposite of last night's show.

A border poll: what a pity Theresa Villiers gets to decide.

Tonight, barring natural disasters and acts of God, I'll be on the Nolan Show. Not, I rush to add, as one of the top-table people: I'll be down there with the commoners (and boy, were they  common last week), with an occasional filler-in question lobbed my way if I'm lucky. The debate, again barring natural disasters and acts of God, will be about the pros and cons of a border poll.

What will I say? Well, I'd like to say I think it is an excellent idea. The border is THE issue here. It was created by Lloyd George under threat of "terrible and immediate war" if the Irish delegation to Downing Street didn't accept it.  It has shaped our voting patterns with uncanny accuracy ever since.  So yes, it would be good if we could see if thinking has changed since nearly 100 years ago.

I'd particularly like to see a border poll because it will - I hope - allow us to find out if we know what we're talking about when  we say we're pro-union with Britain or pro-united-Ireland. At present we tend to fill this great gap between us with flags, screeches of "No surrender!" or "Tiocfaidh ár lá!". I hope - I pray - that we'll be given time to look at the matter from every angle. If I were moving house to the other side of town, I'd consider house prices but also facilities like schools, shops, hospitals. I'd talk to people who lived there, I'd drive around and check out the neighbourhood. And after loads of thought and discussion I'd make up my mind, to move or stay. I wouldn't allow my granda, who always hated that side of town, or my da, who didn't like the way people on that side of town talked, to make up my mind for me. I'd make my decision in the light of the present day, taking all the factors into consideration. Constitutional change demands the same measured investigation.

If we could have a factual, contemporary look at the advantages and disadvantages of union with Britain, the advantages and disadvantages of a re-united Ireland, we' d really have done ourselves a service, almost regardless of the outcome of the poll.  In fact, a border poll is so obviously a Good Thing,  it's astonishing we've never considered it before.

When should it be held? Well, Alex Salmond has arranged that Scotland's referendum on independence should happen after a three-year period of thought and discussion. I think we're entitled to as much. The sad part is, the poll/no poll decision rests in the hands of a woman who lives  here only part-time, stays in a castle when she does come, and who obviously knows little about our history and cares less about our needs. The fact that an English secretary of state like Theresa Villiers is able to make the decision about the holding of a border poll here shows at least one drawback in being governed from London. Let's hope she has sufficient brains to say "Yes" to this request.

Inez McCormack: a great and good woman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j5pIaYjYWI

Today is a sad day, and not just because it's grey and cold out there, but because the light comes up on a day without the living presence of a great woman. I interviewed Inez McCormack first about twenty-five years ago and found her to be a woman full of warmth and idealism. When I interviewed her again about a year ago, the warmth and idealism burned even more brightly, if anything. That last time - we met in the Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich on the Falls Road, because she was on her way to give a talk to the students of St Mary's University College, just across the road. I asked her about a lot of things, including her name ( it should be pronounced something closer to "Eeen-eth", but as she said, about Belfast you'd be lucky not to get 'Agnes'). She spent her life with an unwavering focus on the needs of others and their rights as human beings. Long before the Women's Coalition was thought of, Inez was giving a voice to women, particularly women working in low-paid jobs.

Today, the tributes are pouring in for her - President Michael D Higgins, ex-Presidents  McAleese and Robinson, Hilary Clinton, Meryl Streep who played her on Broadway. In her life she shrugged and laughed at such fame, and pointed again at the women  - and men - she worked for throughout her life. Her final words at the end of our interview were that at some point, I should interview one the women living in sub-standard accommodation. "Not that I'd want to tell you your business!" And she laughs.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam uasal.     

(I've just discovered that interview from last March, so I'll reprint it below.)

NTERVIEW:

I’m already settled with my teapot and mug in the Cultúrlann when Inez McCormack joins me. She’s on her way to give a talk to the young people in St Mary’s University College across the road, but she pulls back her chair and pours a cuppa like a woman with time and attention only for me. 

That name – Inez - where’d it come from?  Well, her great-great-grandmother was Spanish and she met her great-great-grandfather, a sailor, and the name filtered down. ‘Though how in the whole of Spain do you meet a Protestant in Barcelona?” She laughs with delight at the thought. Her name should be pronounced “EE-nez”, but she’s given up on that long ago. In Belfast you’re lucky they don’t call you Agnes. 

She joined the Civil Service after leaving school early  (“The school I’d gone to in Bangor was about teaching an accent, not about teaching you to think”). At the Civil Service interview they asked how she’d react to her brother marrying a black woman and how she viewed homosexuality. “In a sense you were being asked the disguised question, which was about Catholics”. 

But she got the job, working alongside older women – “lovely women” – who covered for her while she went up and studied for O and A Levels in the Stormont library. And yet those same “lovely women” would talk openly of how “they can’t be trusted”. “I wasn’t that bright at the time but I worked out there couldn’t be Catholics in the room”.  It was an early and important lesson. “If you see people as a lesser being, because of who they are or where they come from, then it becomes permissible to treat them as lesser beings”.  

From there she went to London and found herself involved in the famous Grosvenor Square demonstrations in 1968, and was arrested. “I didn’t run – I’d relatives in the police and I didn’t know you ran when the police were coming for you. I learnt”. But she couldn’t ask questions about what was going on in the rest of the world and not ask questions about what was going on at home.  She married a Derryman and became involved in the civil rights movement of the late 1960s. 

“My father-in-law, a quiet, devout Catholic, had been wounded in the war three times. When the Bogside got raided that first night after the civil rights march,  and there was a march the following day of all the people,  I saw him do something I’ve never forgotten. He put on his good suit. That was his way of asserting that neither he nor his family were lesser beings. That taught me that humiliation is the absence of right”.  When she went home with her scars  showing from being beaten up at the march,  her family told her if she hadn’t been there, nothing would have happened -  “Instead of accepting responsibility that there was something wrong”.

She became “a very bad social worker”, working in places like Ballymurphy, where she was supposed to do counseling. “I just wrote vouchers instead. The budget for the place shot up”.  She saw women being treated by the public bodies “as less than animals, if they were looking for something for their kids or for something to do with their housing”.  She remembers making the case for a woman who had several children and was down to her last few pence. The official response she got was “She could withdraw her conjugal rights, couldn’t she?”. 

Shortly after she joined a trade union with two-hundred-and-fifty officials; she was the only woman. Working on behalf of women in lowly-paid jobs, she soon discovered that the reason for the low pay was, these women were not “at the table” – their voices were not heard. “And that’s as true now as it was then”.

The promises of the Good Friday Agreement are about dignity, respect and right. “Yet I look in areas of North Belfast and West Belfast at the absolute lack of opportunity for the last ten or twelve years, for young people in particular. In North Belfast, there’s a huge refusal to provide social housing and the gerrymandering of figures to redefine the housing lists. Some 90% of those on the housing waiting lists in North Belfast are Catholic. There’s a refusal to build houses on the grounds that you have to get agreement between loyalist politicians and republican politicians. I have a simple answer to that: if you had to wait for agreement on housing in the civil rights movement, we would never have got it”. And if building occurs on the basis of ‘good relations’ – 50% for Catholics, 50% for Protestants? “What you are doing is screwing the poor because of their religious background. I came into all this a long time ago to make sure that would never happen again”. 

She welcomes the political accommodation that’s been reached, but the facts and figures show there’s a growing gap between the prosperous and the poor. “What I see growing is not the problem with the peace walls. I see a growing wall with on one side, economic protections, and on the other side of the wall, the growing number of those excluded”. Protestants are among the excluded but “over 60% of long-term unemployed males are Catholic”.

She believes institutional behaviour that produced exclusion in the first place has to be challenged. “The majority investment which has come into Northern Ireland, both public and private, has not gone to north or west Belfast. That has to be challenged. Good relations are not good relations if they’re built on silencing the poor”. 

“Look at the work I’m involved with in PPR  [the Practice and Participation  of Rights project, which supports disadvantaged groups to assert their right to participate in social and economic decisions which affect their lives].  You ask a public body like the Housing Executive ‘How are you gathering data about housing under the equality requirements of the Good Friday Agreement?’ and they come back and say ‘It’ll cost you £33,000 to get an answer to that’. It is deeply disturbing that that can be said with  complacency, post-Good Friday Agreement.”  What about the notion that we sort everything else out and then a trickle-down system looks after places like north and west Belfast? “Well I’m telling you, trickle down doesn’t happen. Sixty-one per cent child poverty in New Lodge, two per cent in Malone”.

“All those years ago with my father-in-law and his good suit – the Good Friday Agreement is supposed to be that good suit. A lot of my work is to enable people to speak and challenge for themselves, because those women who speak to power are treated like rubbish. An example. The women among the residents in the Seven Towers brought in some of the best experts in the world to find how could you proactively change the Seven Towers, how could you bring in better heating systems, how could you actually work with architects and planners, to change the spaces in north Belfast to build social housing. The answer was to dismiss the work of these two men – one of whom is used by Obama in terms of federal housing authorities, one of whom is used by the Health Organisation – the response was to dismiss them in a half-page”. Who dismissed them? “The Housing Executive and the Department of Social Development”. 

She’s been asked to be a global ambassador for places like Haiti where the society has been shattered, she’s been awarded honorary degrees by universities, Meryl Streep is playing her life on a New York stage. But she looks at women in the New Lodge, women who’ve got water running down the walls of their flats, their children getting asthma : “You have to bring your victories to them”.  

She’s more than glad to see an end to violence here. “But there’s another violence – the violence that happens when there’s an absence of right. Change is not happening for the most excluded. In fact the gap is widening. And I’m saying now, as a wake-up call: ask what it will take to change the expense in education, health, investment, to change conditions in these areas – and give a timetable for change.”

As to the coming of the University of Ulster to Belfast, it’ll be good if the massive procurement contracts are handled properly. “The university must say ‘Anybody looking to us for money for a contract, must employ people who are long-term unemployed of twelve months or more – the ILO [International Labour Organisation] definition. Now suddenly this has been redefined as three months or more. This means that people who are just out of the labour market will get the jobs; people who are most excluded will go again to the back of the queue.  That will affect North Belfast – largely Catholic, but it’ll also affect the Lower Shankill.”

Some years back she worked, she says, with both communities, when Springvale was supposed to be coming to West Belfast – “and suddenly we find it over in the Titanic Quarter”. When I quote the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ulster who says the transfer of the university to central Belfast will raise local educational aspirations, she’s pretty brisk, not to say cutting. 

“What is needed is not talk about local people and their aspirations. What is needed is a systematic outreach that’ll allow them to fulfill their aspirations.” 

The one change above all that she’d look for in our society? 

“Accountability. I mean that in the Seven Towers, when they brought in the two international experts, who produced practical changes and brought proposals forward, and they were dismissed out of hand. There should be a requirement for public bodies to be accountable for that kind of behaviour. 

“Mary Robinson said to me thirty or forty years ago, when she took the first cases on social benefit in the Republic of Ireland, cases that went to Europe – she said to me ‘It’s about putting manners on them’. And in a sense that’s what the Good Friday Agreement is supposed to be about – manners.    I fought all my life for non-violent means of social change. Non-violent doesn’t mean ineffective change. I want local politicians to grasp cases like those I’ve mentioned and say ‘We want change and we want an outcome and we want it now’ ”.  

I pack my tape-recorder and leave as she bends over her notes for addressing the young people of St Mary’s in ten minutes’ time. If InezMcCormack, the woman with the Spanish great-great granny, doesn’t inspire them, nothing will.