Where does it hurt?

There’s a danger when you feel strongly about something that you'll see attacks and opponents where none exist. Which is why I try to check my initial reaction to a lot of the things I encounter in the media.  Last Thursday was an example.

I was watching The View, the BBC’s successor to Hearts and Minds. (Ah, taximan, where are you now? Endlessly prowling the streets of Belfast, talking to yourself...)  John O’Dowd was on with Edwin Poots and Mark Carruthers was interviewing them about Gerry Adams’s apology in the Dáil for the killing of Garda Jerry McCabe. For years,  Sinn Féin have been criticised for their claim that the killers of McCabe should have been released under the Good Friday Agreement. But they weren’t, probably because it was kept in the public consciousness by the southern media in a way that no other death in the Troubles was.  Much ink was spent on condemning the heartlessness of what happened,  so  you might have expected that Gerry Adams’s apology would have been welcomed as a sign that the Sinn Féin leader and his party shared at least to some extent, the feelings of horror and dismay that the killing evoked. But not so. Since that apology was made, Adams has instead been the focus of relentless criticism.  The View  quickly fell into the same pattern.

John O’Dowd was asked in so many words to explain Gerry Adams’s hypocrisy in doing such a thing. O’Dowd responded by explaining (or trying to explain) that apologies and dealing with past hurt should involve all those who had suffered.  Edwin Poots was then asked his thoughts and he in so many words rejected Gerry Adams’s hypocrisy in offering an apology, when he hadn’t apologised for all the IRA-related deaths in the north. 

It’s at this point that I had to check my initial reaction. And then check it again. And a third time. Because it seemed to me that Carruthers was grilling O’Dowd  but letting Poots simply join him in the grilling rather than pressing him on the need for apology to be many-sided. What I saw was a seriously lop-sided interview, with BBC balance conspicuous by its absence.

As I say, there’s always a danger that when you’ve strong feelings on a topic, you see attacks and opponents where none exist. I know Mark Carruthers and I’ve always found him a pleasant, friendly guy. But it still seems to me that The View  last week was one-eyed where it really should have been two-eyed. Tell me I’m wrong. 

Fearless and original journalism

I see the VO today is maintaining its usual creakingly-high standards of even-handedness . On p 18 Patrick Murphy lays into Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin, and on p 19 Newton Emerson lays into, um,  Sinn Féin and several others. It’s what we media people call balance.

Murphy has a truly enquiring mind: he asks sixteen questions in the course of his article. Questions like “Was Sinn Féin apologising on behalf of the PIRA?” and “Since the PIRA no longer exists, who made the decision to apologise?” and “When was PIRA’s war downgraded to a mere conflict?”  Gerry Adams gets hammered for daring to apologise for the death of Garda Jerry McCabe : “An apology for some deaths suggests that all other deaths were justified”. Now there’s an interesting inference to draw.  If I’m late for an appointment and apologise for my tardiness, it suggests I don’t give a damn about any other occasion on which I may have been late. Mmm.  A bit later he admits that “if Sinn Féin had not apologised it would still have been criticised” which pretty well sums the matter up, wouldn’t you say?  I have this Animal-Farm-type memory of a time when republicans were urged to turn from violence, express regret and commit themselves to democratic politics. Now that they’ve done so, they’re accused by the likes of Murphy of being “politically expedient”. Hey ho. Damned if you don’t and damned if you do.

But the heart of Murphy’s onslaught is given in big black type in the  middle, in case you’d miss it in the body of the article: “Despite the undoubted bravery of some PIRA actions, and the criminal brutality of most of them [ I wonder what criteria he uses to distinguish one kind from another?], it was a futile escapade which betrayed the civil rights movement, handed the political initiative to the British government, institutionalised sectarianism and abandoned the concept of the Irish nation”.

Yes, I can see that. Clearly if someone’s taking a different path from you they must be betraying you. And of course the setting up of the Assembly was a British initiative and Sinn Féin were to blame for that. And yes, Martin McGuinness and his mates have been acting in a very sectarian way up on the hill and we haven’t heard a peep out of them or Gerry Adams about an Irish nation, a border poll - not  even a half-peep. I don’t know how they can look at themselves in the mirror of a morning.  But at least we’ve now had their actions laid bare and explained by this adept analysis. The abandoned nation owes a debt. Thank you very much, Mr Murphy.

And Newton Emerson on p 19? The first half of his piece simply bursts with witticisms, even if they are a bit soggy. The second half? Probably more of the same but  I’m afraid by then I’d nodded off. I do hope Mr Emerson doesn’t come looking for an apology.

Mindless violence? I think not.

Given the enduring nature of violence and political unrest, it’s tempting to conclude it’s in our nature. And what nature doesn’t supply is made up for by nurture, as old bad habits are handed on to a new generation. I hope I haven’t done Malachi O’Doherty an injustice by extracting that as a central notion in his article in the Belfast Telegraph the other day.

Because it’s too easy. If you blame the enduring violence and political unrest on DNA and traditional habits, it removes the unrest from the need for analysis. It is, literally, mindless unrest, mindless violence.

But it’s not. The Troubles, although frequently referred to by British politicians as ‘mindless’ was nothing of the sort. The IRA knew just what they were fighting for. You might not agree with their means, you might even not agree with their end; but that they had a specific political goal is undeniable. That’s what the hunger strike of 1981 was about. 

Likewise, the flag protest is sometimes dismissed as mindless. There’s indeed a temptation to do so, since for those of us old enough, it has some echoes of the civil disobedience of the 1960s: a group of people determined to demonstrate that they don't feel they are being treated equally, clashing with the police. But the differences are several.

For a start, the civil rights campaigners were led by men and women who were educated - most of them graduates, in fact. John Hume, Bernadette Devlin, Eamonn McCann -  you can make up your own list. The flag protestors are notable as working-class, and certainly not educated working-class.  Whereas the civil rights campaigners could draw their inspiration from similar movements in the United States and South Africa,  the flag protesters would have a difficult job locating a group anywhere that is similarly flag-obsessed. The link they often establish is with British soldiers fighting and dying under the Union flag in Afghanistan and Iraq. And of course the civil rights campaigners of the 1960s knew exactly what they wanted - one person  one vote, an end to housing and job discrimination. The flag protesters want the Union flag back up over Belfast City Hall 365 days a year, but they also want as many inquiries as them fenians are having, they want jobs and investment, they want their leaders to represent them, not use them. It’s not that the flag protesters don’t have any goal for their lawlessness; they actually have too many. 

There’s a part of me that feels sorry for the protesters. Not because they don’t get to fly their flag 365 days a year, nor because they engage in mindless violence, which they don't; but because they have so many other legitimate grievances, rooted in poverty and lack of educational achievement, that will continue to be ignored. They’re not mindless. They’re focus-less and leaderless, and panicking in the face of inevitable change. 

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.