Nigel Dodds and 'child abuse'

It’s good to see the DUP’s Nigel Dodds concerned about child abuse. There’s something particularly cowardly and cruel about taking helpless children and submitting them to your selfish desires. Hellish wouldn’t be too strong an adjective to use of such actions. Right?

The abuse Nigel is concerned about is the dressing-up of children in dark glasses and semi-uniform by their republican parents. As abuse goes, it doesn’t seem immediately cruel. Children love to dress up. When we were small, my sisters were forever getting into their mother’s shoes and clanking around the place; and I, like my classmates, was constantly to be seen darting around the Christian Brothers school-yard pretending to be a cowboy shooting Indians in the Wild West. 

No, the abuse Nigel has in mind here is that the parents are inducting their children into a view of life and in particular the situation in Ireland. They’re encouraging their children to believe, however indirectly, that violent struggle against occupying British forces is commendable. That, as Nigel and many others would see it, is child abuse. 

But then one person’s abuse is another person’s revered creed. In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins claims that teaching children about religion amounts to a form of child abuse. Again, the act itself seems relatively non-abusive but, in Dawkins’s book, the belief behind it, being inculcated, is where the abuse lies. As a committed Christian, Nigel  would probably reject such an interpretation as a vile slur. 

So what it comes down to is what you believe in. If you hold something to be valuable and noble, you’ll want to pass it on to your children. It might be religious faith, it might be atheism, it it might be a way of looking at the world, it might be politics. In fact, if you didn’t pass it on, your conscience might trouble you. 

Ultimately, then, Nigel is saying he doesn’t like republicanism, especially republicanism which has suggestions of violence behind it. Just as lots of other people don’t like Orangeism and the history of sectarian violence behind it. And as Nigel is concerned for the welfare of children he believes are being abused by republicans, so Dawkins is concerned for children who are being abused by Christians and Catholics might be concerned about children who are being abused by anti-Catholic Orangeism. 

If you believe the philosophy behind the dressing-up is misguided or evil, you will condemn those who induct children in such a philosophy. If you believe the philosophy behind the dressing-up is noble or glorious, you will rejoice in the chance to dress children up in the garb their fathers wore. Simples.

Mr Edwin Poots and his disagreeable tweet

The DUP’s Edwin Poots may not cut what the Italians call a ‘bella figura’ but that’s no reason to attack him when he opens his mouth to express a view. Although in this case it’s his fingers he’s opened, so to speak, with what has now become a famous tweet. As republicans marked the anniversary of the 1916 rebellion on Sunday, Mr Poots tweeted: "Had forgotten it is the 97th anniversary of a failed rising by subversives."

This got a number of people going, in particular the SDLP’s Conal McDevitt, who told Mr Poots it was time he decided whether he was going to be part of a decade of reconciliation between parties or the opposite. I think Conall’s being a bit demanding.

For a start, it is possible that Mr Poots forgot Sunday was the anniversary of the Easter Rising. We all forget anniversaries. I forgot one last year and the love of my life has been making me pay ever since.  Mr Poots isn’t a republican so it is possible the whole thing just slipped his mind.  Who are we to claim we know the spaces inside Mr Poots’s head better than the owner of that head himself? Back off, Conal. 

Then there’s his description of the Easter Rising as 'a failed rising by subversives'.  Well, that’s how he sees it. His fellow-DUPer Ian Paisley Jr believes, after careful consideration, that Padraig Pearse was a lunatic. He told me so during an interview. And I’ll bet every last man and woman in the DUP would agree with Messrs Poots and Paisley on all counts.  After all, Pearse and his associates were trying to subvert the union with Britain. The DUP view of things was quite popular at the time, especially in newspapers like the Belfast News Letter and the ironically titled Irish Independent. And yes, the men who seized the GPO were, inside a week or so forced to surrender. Most people would call that a defeat. 

Except that it was a defeat that led to victory in the war.  Within six years of the Rising, republicans  had succeeded in achieving independence for twenty-six out of thirty-two counties. But again it’s worth emphasising - Mr Poots’s failure-thinking is not unique.

Let’s be frank: most people who got annoyed with the Poots tweet did so because they disagree with its judgement. I disagree with it myself.  But that doesn’t mean Mr Poots isn’t entitled to his views. I could call him a bigot, as that other DUPer Nelson McCausland called me when I wrote something he didn’t agree with; but that’d be pointless and stupid.  Besides, Mr Poots may well have been hoping for a backlash from nationalists/republicans. Just the thing to keep the backwoodsmen happy and voting right. 

But my basic point remains:  even if you think Poots’s point is loony-tunes bunkum,  he’s entitled to have it and express it. Now if he’d tweeted “Just remembered this is the 97th anniversary of a glorious republican Rising”, that’d have been something to shout about.  

Paolo di Canio: head coach as fascist

One of my sons is a Sunderland fan. Since he’s in New York, I haven’t had a chance yet to ask him what he thinks of the appointment of Paolo di Canio as the team’s head coach. I know what David Milliband thinks of it, since, although he’s about to depart for New York himself, he was since 2011 a director on the Sunderland board. Now he’s resigned over “past political statements” that di Canio has made.

Which were? Well, Virginia, Paolo has declared himself to be a fascist. When he played for Lazio, he was pictured giving a Nazi salute to adoring fans.  He has made no bones about being “a fascist but not a racist”.  And he has received support from an unlikely quarter - Stan Collymore, former star of Nottingham Forest and other clubs. According to today’s Guardian, Collymore has tweeted : 

“Faux outrage as always on twitter. No Italian ex footballer ever called me N*****. Just plenty from the wonderful UK shires."

Odd, the sources from which sane comment comes. 

Which leads me to ask when it was the great British public started judging their sporting men and women by their political stance (di Canio)? Or private life (John Terry/George Best)? Or drinking habits? (Paul Gasgoine, Best again) or their belief in reincarnation (Glen Hoddle)? The defence is that these sporting heroes are models for youngsters,. True enough. But they’re modelled for their playing skills - not for their wife-beating or thoughts on the after-life. If a brain surgeon is operating on me, I just want him to be really good with that scalpel or drill. His views on other matters are his affair. 

Paolo di Canio will be judged (I hope) on whether he can perform the miracle of keeping Sunderland from dropping into a lower division next season. That’s it - not, as Collymore puts it, “faux outrage”.

Running and cogitating

Well phew. And pant and gasp. Yesterday I did the Omagh Half-Marathon on behalf of Trócaire ( and thanks yet again to the generous sponsors of my run, we smashed the £1000 target and are currently sitting around £1750. If you haven’t donated and would like to, you can do it at  http://www.trocaire.org/sponsor-me/judejcollins/omagh-half-marathon .

What was it like? Long. And painful. I gather there’s a torture technique, used in places like Iraq, which involve slapping hard on the soles of the victim’s feet. That’s what it was like. There must be an answer in terms of cushioning your ageing soles against ground-smack. If you know tell me, or my running career just did its swan-song yesterday. 

This morning I was on BBC Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster’s ‘Sunday Sequence’ with Andrew Dougal, CEO of NI Chest Heart and Stroke.  Appropriately enough we were discussing - no, not torture - charities and their place in our society. Andrew naturally argued the case for them and the good they do. Who could quarrel with that? Seeing a need and responding to it goes back to the Good Samaritan. But - and this was what I argued - this often opens the doors for government to cut back on funding for the area in question. What does it say about a society when it spends billions on weapons of death and leaves the purchase of cancer-treatment equipment to local generosity? Reverse it for a year and let’s see. Have the government pump money directly into hospital equipment/addressing poverty and have a Defence-Forces-in Need day, where celebs can dance and sing and dress up, and the donations be passed on to the Defence Forces. Or does our society believe in giving death-dealing equipment more support than it does life-giving? 

What we didn’t get round to discussing - and I wish we had - was the philanthropy of massively rich individuals. In one sense as well as being fashionable in the US of late,  it’s a good thing; in another it’s a display of power, of the loaded one’s pity for unfortunates not as rich as him/herself. Doing good, as someone once said, “with thunderous stealth”. With probably some tax advantage lurking in the shrubbery.  Until governments decide to arrange long-term policies so that the injustice at the heart of these matters at home and abroad are addressed, we'll be saving one beaten-up beggar and there'll be another ten thousand waiting down the line. 

We see people’s principles, George Bernard Shaw said, not by what they profess but how they live their lives. If the same goes for societies, the Western World has some pretty ghastly principles.  

President Obama: should we listen but not see?

I sometimes have to struggle to stop myself going with the more-pleasing vision of things,  rather than accept the sadly-more-sour reality. An example? I found myself moved when Barack Obama made his victory speech after being elected president for the first time. That huge crowd, those Afro-Americans in tears, the great hope of a bright new day after the bumbling and bellicose Bush.  I was glad, too, to see him win out over Mitt Plastic-man Romney. In his second and final term, I thought, Obama'll come through. He'll live up to that bit about talking to one's enemies rather than resorting to force against them. 

And today I feel myself being nudged towards the more-pleasing vision. The American president tells us  "The people of Northern Ireland and their leaders have travelled a great distance over the past fifteen years. Step by step, they have traded bullets for ballots, destruction and division for dialogue and institutions, and pointed the way toward a shared future for all...On behalf of the American people, I salute the people and leaders of Northern Ireland and the model they have given to others struggling toward peace and reconciliation around the world."

Gives you a warm glow, doesn't it? The man who overcame all the odds to become American President, supporting us in our peace-and-reconciliation efforts. A warm glow providing, that is,  you don't look at Obama's drone-work in Pakistan. No, not home-work, drone-work.  There, well over 3,000 people have been killed during his time in office. The claim is that the drone-attacks are taking out  (aka killing) the bad guys - al qaeda activists. There's truth in this. There's also the awkward fact that if a drone demolishes a house containing an al qaeda activist and at the same time demolishes a house next door containing, say,  six adult males who are leading peaceful lives,  those six adult males are counted as al quaeda activists. This gets round the tedious notion of having to talk about drones doing "collateral damage". Mind you, we're still left with a lot of dead women and children but hey, nobody's perfect.

So that's the reality. The man who's praising us for our drive towards peace and reconciliation, and promising his support and that of his country as we do so, is in charge of a foreign policy that kills people in their thousands, many of them innocent people, and then lies about what's been done. This man is also ultimately responsible for Guantanamo Bay,  a torture centre which he promised he would close if elected. 

I know the world of politics and power is a rough old world, but I think there's a strong stench of hypocrisy comes with high words from a man who presides over so much continuing pain and death, much of it inflicted on innocent people. And I know T S Eliot said humankind cannot bear too much reality. But sometimes you have to grit your teeth and see the world as it is. Fifteen years ago a peace process was put together, with considerable American help.  It looks as if the Yanks were implementing a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do policy. 

Alan Shatter, his wife and some gardaí

The south’s Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, has a soft voice and an ego as big as the Ritz. When four representatives of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors ( AGSI) walked out on him at their conference, he said he was glad he hadn’t brought his wife, presumably since she was even more sensitive to the “discourtesy” of the garda representatives than he is.

AGSI president Tim Galvin sees things a bit differently. With more than a hundred garda stations closed last month, he said to Shatter: “You told us the lack of consultation in relation to the first series of closures would not be repeated and that we would be updated and kept informed. Twelve months on nothing has changed. Your words were lies”.

And wouldn’t you know it: power sucks up to power. Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan has expressed his outrage at the “discourtesty” to Shatter and there’s talk of tough disciplining of the four representatives who walked out. 

All this bluster, of course, is to put the frighteners on the upcoming conference of rank-and-file gardaí who are traditionally more militant than the AGSI. We can only pray that they tell Shatter where to put his umbrage.

Of starfish, masochism and a final call

OK people. Der Tag minus 2 and counting. Forty-eight hours from now will find me girding what are left of my loins and heading towards my native town of Omagh. Shortly after getting there I will force my ageing body into two hours of serious pain which will end either with a discreet funeral (no flowers please) or my form collapsed in a corner of Omagh Leisure Centre sucking on a free bottle of Lucozade and trying not to slip into unconsciousness.

Either way it'll all be in, as they say, a good cause. I'm indulging in this masochism to raise some money for Trocaire, who do sterling work in the developing world. OK, OK, I know - it's all only scratching the surface of things, governments should be driving global reform, trade should be organised so that charities to developing countries become superfluous. But they aren't and it isn't.

It's like the man who came on this young boy on the beach.  There are hundreds of starfish hpelessly stranded in the sand and he's picking them up one by slow one and throwing them back in the water. The man says "I can see you've a kind heart but you do realise  there are thousands, maybe millions of these stranded starfish all along the coastline? What you're doing will really make no difference".  The kid picks up another starfish and lobs it back into the sea before replying: "Well, it made a difference to that one".

So please, please, PLEASE click your way to the donation site. You'll see my goal is £1000 - not a lot of starfish there - and I'm still that bit short of it. If you don't want to think of your contribution as pushing me over the line, think of it as pushing me over a cliff. OK? But. Just. Do. It. You'll be literally saving/making lives that, without you, would struggle to get through another day.

The site is   http://www.trocaire.org/sponsor-me/judejcollins/omagh-half-marathon

Time is running out. I'm in your hands.