We get the politicians we deserve. And the police too?

The Nolan show was discussing the matter of policing last night. The questions tended to be directed at comparisons between the way the police have dealt with the flag protesters and the way they’ve dealt with (and will deal with?) nationalist protesters when they tried to block the road at Ardoyne to prevent an Orange parade.

I think it’s bigger than this ‘Are they as hard with them ‘uns as they are with us ‘uns?’  A few examples.

* The PSNI Chief Constable was on TV a few weeks back explaining why his men didn’t just go in and clear the road of flag protesters, given that they were breaking the law. He said this would be inadvisable as it could provoke worse demonstrations and you could have ten, twenty, thirty thousand people on the streets. On the other hand, Matt, you could have a lot less people on the streets. And it’s hard to see in what way, after eight weeks, Baggott’s policy has produced results. The protesters are still what Prince Harry would call ‘in play’. Any Saturday there’s a rally suggested, people make a point of not going into Belfast and hard-pressed city-centre trade suffers further.
* How is our police service doing if we make comparisons with, say, Britain, or the south of Ireland? The answer to that lies in your imagination. Can you imagine a situation where, for eight weeks (with a short break for Christmas festivities) a small group of people held illegal marches, blocked roads, fired bricks and petrol bombs at police, issued death threats to elected politicians, burned the office of an elected politician, damaged severely city-centre trade and spattered the state’s international reputation in terms of inward investment and tourism - while the police hung back and spoke vaguely of making future arrests?
* Isn’t the PSNI saying anything about the presence in this dispute of the UVF? It’s a generally acknowledged fact that this illegal paramilitary group is working in the background of these protests, yet politicians and police talk about them as though they were members of the local bowling club. Would someone please tell me: isn’t this organisation supposed to have decommissioned and dispersed years ago?
* Public confidence in our policing service is the bedrock of a settled society. If the police show signs that their training stops with issuing speeding tickets and administering breathalyser tests, people are quickly going to lose faith in them. And that’s without comparisons between how they conduct themselves when faced with nationalist/republican protesters.

It’d be wrong to describe the PSNI strategy for dealing with the flag-people’s blatant defiance of the law as inept. It’s worse than that: it seems literally clueless. If it’s a matter of police control vs mob rule, the mob are miles ahead at the moment. Jamie Bryson was on the Nolan show last night via a screened earlier interview, and you could see how deep was his satisfaction at featuring in the limelight and refusing to divulge what further tactics they would employ beyond a white line one. “But it will be peaceful” he told Nolan. That’s probably what Peter Robinson said, when he told the printers to run off 40,000 leaflets urging people to protest against Belfast City Council’s democratic decision. Things can only get better? Don't bet on it.

Gerry Adams and that apology

I’m just off air from the Nolan show where I was discussing with Gregory Campbell and another individual (whose name I missed) the apology that Gerry Adams offered in the Dail for the killing of garda Jerry McCabe. It wasn’t a discussion that got very far but it did raise a number of issues that bear further consideration.

1. What else would Gerry Adams, could Gerry Adams have done in the circumstances, than apologise? The press in the south get very upset - not unreasonably - when one of their police officers is killed. They don’t have the same sense of tragedy  when a police officer in the north is killed, otherwise they wouldn’t have leap-frogged the more recent killing of PSNI man Ronan Kerr to arrive at the killing of garda Jerry McCabe. But then that might have revived memories of Martin McGuinness’s robust reaction to the Kerr killing and how he condemned Kerr's killers as traitors, and that might have given  political traction to Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin. And that wouldn’t do at all at all.
2. Gregory, when pressed about apologies from the state, said that David Cameron had apologised and anyway, the IRA killed more people than anyone else. That’s the kind of muddying of waters that leads to discussions going nowhere. David Cameron apologized for Bloody Sunday, full stop. He didn’t apologise for the killing of the innocents of Ballymurphy, he didn’t apologise for the killing of Pat Finucane - he apologised for one mass slaughter by state forces. Thanks, David. As for who killed most: in the great majority of armed conflicts, that’s exactly the idea: who can kill the most. Hence Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden. So to take the discussion up that bye-road was pointless.
3. Gregory kept talking about the need for sincere apology about IRA killings north of the border but he couldn’t quite bring himself to talk about the need for apologies from the RUC, the UDR, the British Army.  That would be to draw some sort of parallel between the two sides engaged in the conflict and that is one thing  unionism has always resisted. 
4. Gregory talked about the context of this apology by Gerry Adams, as I did myself. The one context we didn’t get round to talking about was the state of this state pre-Troubles. About the development of the civil rights groups in response to that state; and about the response of the RUC, UDR and then the British Army to those civil rights groups and anyone who looked like they might want to change the state for so long wrapped up in a big cosy Orange sash.  But then if we had got round to establishing that context, there might have to be some apologising done for the warped state that existed here and the damage it did to so many lives for so long.
5. Will we ever hear the British and unionism acknowledge their sustained wrong-doing, both before and during the Troubles?  I would say never, never, never, never, except the word has become devalued. Let's say you'd be better not holding your breath and leave it at that.

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.