Oh I tell you, I'm so disillusioned (bites lip to hold back tears)

Maybe it’s that people are getting a bit narky waiting for spring to put in an embarrassingly-late appearance, but I’ve just read three articles looking back on the Good Friday Agreement fifteen years ago, and all three say the Agreement was next to useless. They concede that it did bring to an end the near-daily catalogue of death and destruction, but other than that they’re deeply disillusioned. 

Why? Because, they say, when they signed Yes they had to swallow hard over such things as the release of prisoners and the positioning of ‘terrorists’ in government.  As Mary McAleese might say, “Wow!”.  Where in the use of that term is there any concession to the fact that these ‘terrorists’  believed, like so many Irishmen and women before them, that Britain had no right to administer its rule in Ireland and that violence was the only option available?  If you can’t see that perspective on the Troubles, as well as your own, maybe you shouldn’t be writing about the subject. As to ‘terrorists in government’ -  gimme a break. Africa, United States, South America, south of Ireland: again and again history presents us with examples of people who were considered ‘terrorists’ but when negotiations had been completed, were voted into government. Anyone who’s shocked/saddened to see Martin McGuinness or Gerry Kelly or others like them in  government has a mental vacuum where historical knowledge should reside.

The other disillusionment much penned nowadays is that we have a sectarian stalemate in Stormont, with Sinn Féin in particular totally uninterested in making Northern Ireland a better place. How they know republican motivation I’m not sure. But if you try to guess at it through observing republican actions, you’d surely draw a different conclusion. In fact   you’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to notice that Sinn Féin have repeatedly made overtures of reconciliation towards unionism, overtures which have been received sometimes deadpan, sometimes frostily and as often as not with  contempt. The fact is, this talk of tit-for-tat, sectarian gridlock because of the two big parties doesn’t add up.  Remember when Paisley was First Minister and referred frequently with horse-laugh disdain to his ‘deputy’?  And the  way in which McGuinness responded with a smile and courtesy towards the other man? And can you imagine Paisley reacting similarly, had the shoe been on the other foot? And have you noticed how McGuinness has repeatedly stood by Robinson, in personal as well as political terms, while receiving little or nothing in return?

I don’t believe the Good Friday Agreement  delivered all that it seemed to promise - few things do, as George Mitchell pointed out to us this week. But it has brought peace, it has  persuaded republicans to do what other parties and governments were forever urging them to do -   seek their goals through political means. And it has moved a considerable degree of control - not all, but a considerable degree - from  English hands in Westminster into Irish hands in Stormont.  Even if the  Agreement hasn't fulfilled every rosy expectation, that in itself is no small  achievement. 

Now if the DUP could be persuaded to defrost even a little...

Fifteen years on: republican progress?

If you’re a unionist, you may or may not think that things are on their way to hell in a handcart, with nationalists/republicans gaining on all fronts while unionists’ culture and sensibilities are being dulled into numbness. And if you’re a nationalist/republican?  Well, there are two views you can take.

One, that those favouring justice and and national unity are on a slow but steady line of progress. The old Orange state has indeed been dismantled, relations between Ireland north and south, and Britain, are better than they ever were. The Catholic/nationalist population is growing steadily as the unionist population declines, so that by the next census it’s perfectly possible there will be a Catholic majority in the north.

The second view is less sanguine. I had an email from a friend the other day which listed the sense of frustration among those republicans who reject the Sinn Féin analysis of the situation.  He argued that as the old Nationalist party was replaced by the SDLP and the SDLP by Sinn Féin, so Sinn Féin will eventually be replaced by those republicans/nationalists disillusioned by a lack of progress over the past 15 years. “Those who go down the road of compromising with British rule inevitably get replaced. The reason: it never delivers Irish unity”.  Far from seeing progress in winning unionists to see their place in a reunited Ireland, he believes that republicans/nationalists are faced with “An increasingly ignorant, unforgiving, obdurate, inflexible and hostile unionism”.  

It’s a credible commentary as to where we are a decade and a half after the Good Friday Agreement.  However, it ignores one thing: that if a true republic is to be created in Ireland it must include and respect that “ignorant, unforgiving, obdurate, inflexible and hostile unionism”. It is true that there are few signs of change in unionist attitude. By and large, the DUP still regards all things republican as loathsome and finds it hard to adopt a civil air when in the presence of republicans. And while there has indeed been a dismantling of the unionist state, there has been little evidence of major change via the cross-border bodies. 

Perhaps the answer is in a comment from Gerry Adams about thinking in terms of 40-year blocs. To an individual 40 years is a long, long time. In terms of history, it’s but the blink of an eye. Perhaps republicans/nationalists need to see movement towards unity in those terms.

Alternatively, of course, my frustrated friend might be right.

Discuss. 

Farewell, Baroness Thatcher

I know people who have (and wear) ‘I still hate Thatcher’ t-shirts. I haven’t one myself but I always understood what they meant. What baffles me are the people who think she was a great leader. 

She replaced a crippled Britain with one where greed and selfishness were dominant.  Remember ‘Loadsamoney’? You got it. She destroyed not just the livelihood of thousands of British workers but the very communities in which they lived. She made decisions which resulted in policemen on horseback charging down striking miners. She claimed some windswept islands thousands of miles away as British and gave orders for the deaths of all on board the Belgrano to reinforce her point. She spoke of the Long Kesh hunger strike as the last sting of a dying IRA wasp and in the cause of giving them the label ‘criminal’, allowed ten men to die. She told people that there was no such thing as society, only people and their families. 

So apart from the fact that all the men in her cabinet were scared shitless of her, where’s the greatness? I hope God shows greater mercy to her than she showed to others.

Mother Britain sings mum

I’ve some reservations about raising the question of the financial benefits to be derived from the ending of partition in Ireland. Not because I don’t believe they’re there, but because I believe other arguments are stronger, like the right of the Irish people, rather than their next-door neighbour,  to decide how Ireland is ruled, regardless of how the sums add up. That’s what happened with German reunification.

But the financial question and Irish partition came up again in Derry last Tuesday. At a meeting looking at the impact of the Good Friday Agreement and looking forward, Sinn Féin’s Martina Anderson said she was convinced that duplication of services on both sides of the border clearly made no economic sense. But what is needed, she said,  is a clear picture of what  money the British government gives us and what money we give them in taxes of various kinds, but the British government won't provide these. If they did, the economic argument could be examined for its validity. Will this happen? I’m beginning to doubt it. Despite repeated requests, the British government won’t release the figures on what the subvention to the north costs Westminster. 

This refusal of the British  to come clean on the facts of a case is part of a pattern. Ask the Finucane family - they’ve been trying to get the British government to hold a public inquiry into the death of their father, Pat Finucane, but the British government keeps refusing.  Mind you, even when you have a public enquiry like Saville into Bloody Sunday, you still don’t get to the root of the matter. Do you really believe that the decision to shoot dead in broad daylight thirteen innocent people, and fatally injure a fourteenth, was taken at the level of colonel? That it doesn’t go higher than that? And then there are the dozens, maybe hundreds of people whose loved ones were killed under circumstances that suggest British collusion. They too face a blank wall when they try to get information from the British government.  

Why do the British do it? Why does the British government resist all efforts to get them to come clean on matters that relate to Ireland?  Because they can. Because politics is about power and Britain has the greater power in these matters. And you thought right and wrong entered into judgement on these matters? Go away and take a running jump at yourself.

Tale of an Admiral (maybe)

Understanding the past is a tricky business . A recent commenter (is that the word?) to my blog on Patrick Pearse mentioned Ruth Dudley Edwards’s book on Pearse. I haven’t read it so I can’t be certain as to what it says.  But I could guess by looking at Ruthie’s track record, notably her admiring account of the Orange Order, The Faithful Tribe.  The fact that her late husband Paddy Cosgrove wrote an admiring biography of Margaret Thatcher might also give a hint of the flavour to be found in Ruthie’s thinking and writing. 

But it’s actually a book headlined by today’s Sindo  that’s caught my attention. The headline is ‘New book sheds light on dark deeds of republicanism’ (no surprise there) and the book’s called Voices from the Great Houses:Cork and Kerry.  It’s by a woman called Jane O’Keeffe, and she’s put together interviews done by her husband with people from those same great houses. The Sindo recounts the killing of Admiral Boyle Somerville by the IRA in the 1930s. The interview is with Tom Somerville, the admiral’s great-great-nephew, who tells how local young men who wished to join the Royal Navy would go to the Admiral to get a reference, which he cheerfully did. The IRA saw this as recruiting young men to serve in British navy and they shot him.

Those are the facts of the matter. His great-great-nephew goes on to give other reasons for his killing: (i) the IRA wanted to give some momentum to its flagging campaign of the time; (ii) he was an admiral and a Protestant, so his death would generate headlines. The great-great-nephew also claims the admiral “was simply trying to do a good turn in helping to get employment for local boys, rather than to recruit for the Royal Navy”.

The great-great-nephew may be right in his interpretation of the Admiral’s motives. He may, on the other hand, be wrong. How he knows them, he doesn't explain. It certainly seems as though the Admiral was someone who was making it easier for young men living in the area to join the Royal Navy, which sounds like part of the recruitment process. Likewise, the IRA may or may not have wanted to generate momentum for its campaign through the killing; and the fact that the Admiral was a Protestant may or may not have been a factor in their decision to kill him. 

What’s at issue here is the interpretation assigned to the Admiral’s role in recruitment and the motivation ascribed to the IRA’s actions. His great-great-nephew goes with the decent man/morally bankrupt IRA interpretation, which allows the Sindo  to produce its usual anti-republican headline. But little or no attempt is made  to offer other possible interpretations to the thinking behind the event. The great-great-nephew gives no evidence other than his belief that the Admiral thought that way and that the IRA thought in another way.

History, Napoleon said, is an agreed myth - and, he might have added, a myth that’s used to shape the present and create the future. Never let it be said the Sindo  hasn’t done its little bit to nudge things its desired direction. 

Was Pearse mad?

Among the tens of thousands of words spoken during interviews for my book Whose Past Is It Anyway?,  those of Ian Paisley Jr  are among the most memorable - particularly his thoughts on the Easter Rising. 

“I’m an avid student of history, so I’ve absolutely no difficulty in exploring the Easter Rising further.  As I say, the more we study, the more we learn from it, and hopefully we learn not to repeat it. Regarding attendance [at Easter Rising centennial commemoration ceremonies], I don’t see why I would be inspired to attend. I’ve read about that history. It’d almost be like going and celebrating and understanding what happened in some of the death camps. I’ve always wanted to avoid going to Auschwitz.”

Then he gives his thoughts on P H Pearse. 

“I studied what happened with Pearse. I think he was a lunatic...I can only say that Pearse was, in my view, a madman. In his own writings he compares his blood sacrifice to that of Christ’s. Those are the words of a lunatic. I mean, he was going there deliberately to die. You go into battles to win - even if you know you’re going to die.” [Laughs].

So was Pearse a little bit insane? 

Hardly. For a start, his famous speeches about the need for the blood of young men to nourish Ireland’s soil were typical  of the rhetoric that was used at the time. The same images were used of those who died that same year at the Somme and in other Great War battles. 

My second reason for believing in Pearse’s sanity is that Pearse was right in his predictions. In a final letter written to his mother on 1 May 1916 from Arbour Hill Barracks, he writes:

“We have preserved Ireland’s honour and our own. Our deeds of last week are the most splendid in Ireland’s history. People will say hard things of us now, but we shall be remembered by posterity and blessed by unborn generations.”

Which is precisely what happened. Hard things were indeed said about them.

“We said a week ago, with the scant knowledge we then had, that the connection between this disloyal movement and Germany was now complete; that the manner of Sir Roger Casement’s capture proved that German gold and German influence had all along been at the back of the sedition mongers in this country”. Belfast News Letter Tues 2 May

“No terms of denunciation that pen could indict would be too strong to apply to those responsible for the insane and criminal rising of last week. .. Were it not for the glory which has irradiated the Irish arms in the fields where the battle for human freedom is being fought [in the Great War], our heads might now hang low in shame for the misdeeds of those who have been the willing dupes of Prussian intrigue. - Irish Independent, Thurs 4 May

The Irish News  speaks of “ the terrible week that began with the seizure of a few public buildings and the posting of that unhappy ‘Proclamation’ “ and talks of the Rising in terms of ”the catalogue of the week’s blunders, disasters, crimes and retributions.”  - The Irish News, Thurs 4 May. 

But as history shows, Pearse got it right when he foresaw  defeat in the Easter Week battle but victory in the war for freedom, at least for most of the country. 

Above all, Pearse’s sensitivity and sanity shine through in his final letters to his mother and others from prison. Consider this poem, The Wayfarer, written on Tues 2 May 1916 in Kilmainham Gaol, the day before he died.

“The beauty of the world hath made me sad,

This beauty that will pass;

Sometimes my heart has shaken with great joy

To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,

Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,

Or little rabbits in a field at evening,

Lit by a slanting sun, 

Or some green hill where shadows drifted by,

Some quiet hill where mountainy men hath sown

And soon would reap”.

Lunatics don’t write like that. Beannachtaí na Cásca oraibh.    

How to be transparent

Transparency - lovely word, isn’t it? A word without jagged edges, a word that’s almost a sigh, a word that puts nothing between you and its meaning. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of it about.

Let’s take two examples - both fairly current at the moment. 

On 19 March 1988, two British soldiers, Derek Wood and David Howes were beaten and then shot dead when their car was intercepted in a funeral procession in West Belfast. When the recent motion expressing sympathy for these two men was widened to sympathy for all victims of violence in the Troubles, the DUP got very upset. Despite that upset the wider motion was passed.

The question no one chose to address in the Belfast City Council debate  is  fairly obvious: what were the two soldiers doing in the middle of that West Belfast funeral? OK, perhaps City Hall the other night wasn’t the time or place for an answer to that question -  but what about over the past twenty-five years? The only answer I’ve been given is that the two men “stumbled” on the funeral - that is, they got sort of lost and by mistake drove into the middle of it. Frankly, that sounds absurd. The first thing a British soldier arriving in the north would get during the Troubles was a clear notion of where to go and not go. There have been allegations that the two men were FRU operatives on reconnaissance.  There are also allegations that even the families of the dead men have been kept in the dark regarding their role. 

Given the detail which we have available on the horror of the two men’s deaths, you’d think that some detail would be available as to why they were there, what was the purpose of their presence, who sent them if they were sent.   Astonishingly, not so. I’ll be happy to be corrected but this window’s transparency looks to have been totally blacked out. Why?

The other, unrelated question no one can get answers to is “How much money does the UK Treasury give to the north each year?”  The prompt unionist answer is  £10.5 billion. Prompt but less than transparent, it seems, because it’s based on some dodgy British Treasury calculating which even they admit is flawed. For example, the British claims its expenditure on the north is just over £23 billion. But then it appears that some £5.7 billion never gets here. Over £3 billion gets spent on British forces in Afghanistan, War pensions,  Royal palaces, Royal travels - stuff like that. 

Equally muddy is how much money gets sucked out of here. You’d think, since they’re receiving it, the British would know how much we pass to them annually. But if they do they’re just not telling. The Department of Finance and Personnel here estimate  we cough up  £12.7 billion each year. So if you do the sums with that, you get Britain propping up this place with under £5 billion, not the £10.5 billion usually quoted.  And even that doesn’t allow for all the corporation tax and VAT generated by the many big British firms here. The bottom line? The facts and figures about the financial advantages of being part of the Union are as muddied as a pig-stye window. 

You think that these two matters are so important, the truth should be demanded and given? Me too. But it ain’t. The blinds are firmly down on both cases. I'll let you guess why.