Let's reconcile but don't forget we're British

What does ‘reconciliation’ mean? In everyday language it suggests that people who for a short or long time weren’t getting along together have now made up their differences. Does it mean the same thing in politics? Presumably.

Sinn Féin is pushing forward with a reconciliation programme headed by Declan Kearney. It’d be fair to say that  the bit in Gerry Adams’s Ard Fheis speech where he spoke about working class republicans and working class loyalists uniting to pursue mutual concerns was part of that reconciliation programme. Sounds good to me, especially when we remember that the thirty years of the Troubles were conducted - and suffered - very largely by people from and in working-class areas. The middle classes - again, for the most part - remained blessedly free from the impact of the conflict and so had an insulated view of what was happening. In which case it makes sense that the working class, who suffered most, should be the focus of reconciliation. If that’s what people want.

“Eh?” you say. “ ‘If that’s what people want?' Of COURSE it’s what they want”. Mmm - maybe. There are people so bigoted they can’t entertain the idea of getting closer to those who were their political and sometimes paramilitary enemies. These people feel more comfortable within their own insulated bubble, confining their contact to those of a like mind to themselves. It's cosier, less stressful.

But there are others who are open to new thinking, who  see the need for new approaches to people who were pitched against them for decades. Recent comments from the PUP suggest they are open to such thinking. Their very existence suggests they don’t feel the DUP (or UUP) are reflecting their concerns or working for their benefit. 

But there are at least three problems with the PUP position.

1. They are electorally very weak. So weak, in fact, they’ve changed their leader almost as often as some people change their socks. Given that, what they have to say may not reflect the thinking in unionist working-class districts.
2. The PUP has made it very clear that this coming-together, this reconciliation should be carried out at a social level and not a political level. I don’t know what that means - do you? Is it suggesting that the people we elect to represent us have no part to play in achieving reconciliation? On the face of it that’s absurd. Everybody has a political perspective, even if s/he isn’t aware of it. Politics is about pursuing particular goals for your society and reconciliation is one of them.
3. The PUP, having finished saying that politicians or political involvement won’t work in terms of reconciliation, goes on to say that the position of Northern Ireland within the UK for the foreseeable future must be accepted by all sides if reconciliation progress is to be made. Whiffs of having your cake and eating it. Having dismissed  politics and politicians as facilitators of reconciliation, the PUP immediately poses a precondition:  anyone working for cross-community reconciliation must accept a common political viewpoint: that we’re all British and we’ll be staying that way for as far ahead as we can see.

        In other words, they'll allow into the Reconciliation Tent only those who carry a ticket with                  'British’ stamped on it. If that’s the case, the PUP have nothing to contribute to reconciliation and not much to anything else. 

Does the Observer know about Marian Price?

Did you know there was a hunger-strike in progress at Guantánamo Bay? Neither did I until I read it in The Observer  last Sunday. Prisoners are on hunger strike because half of them - some 86 - have been cleared for release, only it hasn’t happened. The Observer  editorial highlights the case of a British man, Shaker Aamer, who has been cleared for release yet is still being held in Guantánamo.  The paper notes that Barack Obama in 2009 promised he would close the detention centre: “The existence of Guantánamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained”. The paper goes on to widen its argument, commenting on the damage done to democracy by such detention. “It is a fundamental principle of open and democratic societies that those accused or suspected of serious crimes should be submitted to due legal process within a reasonable time period. Indefinite detention of those cleared of any crime, or if those authorities have insufficient eveidence to prosecute, is a gross violation of human rights”.

I wonder, then, what The Observer  would make of the case of Marian Price. She is facing two charges - (i) that she allegedly provided a mobile telephone for a terrorist purpose in March 2009; and (ii) that she aided and abetted a meeting in support of an illegal organisation on 25 April  2012. She had been granted bail but Owen Patterson revoked her licence. 

Is four years a “reasonable time period” to be kept awaiting legal process?  Is the imprisonment of people on the decision of a British Secretary of State something that looks like justice to you? Gerry Adams in his Ard Fheis speech called for her release and that of Martin Corey, who’s been imprisoned three years now with no reason provided. But Sinn Féin are caught in a cleft stick here, since both Price and Corey are vocal critics of the party and the Good Friday Agreement. Naturally they hang back from shouting too much about the release of two people who would probably repay them by denouncing them as sell-outs.

That’s not a good decision. I remember asking a young Dublin barrister how he felt about taking on cases of people he knew were guilty. His reply was that he sought out such cases, because even those apparently guilty are entitled to the full support of the law.  The same applies in the Price-Corey cases. For the very reason that Price and Corey are their political opponents/enemies,  Sinn Féin - and every other party - should be exerting themselves to the maximum to secure their release. As John Donne told us not to ask for whom the funeral bell tolls because “it tolls for thee”, so with Price and Corey. While they are in prison without trial or jury,  we are all interned. And that should worry us all. 

Crime and punishment: Barack Obama

I was on Sunday Sequence (Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster) yesterday morning with Catherine Clinton, an American academic  from Queen’s University.  Our topic for discussion was the Boston Marathon and subsequent events. It was an interesting conversation -  Catherine is an intelligent  woman, and when you’ve William Crawley as presenter, you know you’ll have another thoughtful  voice in the debate.

My immediate reaction to the Boston Marathon deaths was that they recalled the Omagh Half-Marathon a couple of years back. I took part in that race and only later discovered that PSNI officer Ronan Kerr had been killed in a booby-trap bomb. So it was easy to empathise with the sense of shock and outrage the people of Boston must have felt after those explosions. 

But  the explosions in Boston called for more than just feelings of grief or even anger. For example:

• President Obama was impressive in his determination to locate those responsible and let them feel the full weight of justice. What he didn’t mention and the media conveniently omitted is that his orders have led to the release of drone bombs in Pakistan which have killed over 3000 people. Of these it’s estimated that 1.5% were ‘high-profile’ - i.e,  active military enemies of the US. The pain and grief of the remaining 98.5% innocents were just as real as that felt in Boston. But the media didn’t mention the irony of a man speaking of the ‘evil’ of the deaths and mutilation of the Boston bombs, when he himself had been responsible for ‘evil’ on a far more massive scale. 
• The two suspects - one of whom was killed, the other shot through the throat - were just that: suspects. Yet the way that it was reported, it seemed their guilt was beyond question. What ever became of being innocent until proved guilty?
• The flooding of Boston with over 10,000 heavily-armed men, to search for and engage a 19-year-old fugitive was massively excessive. I kept waiting for Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis to appear wearing a sweaty t-shirt. The ‘lock-down’  which confined millions of Bostonians to their homes was highly theatrical, with the authorities essentially saying “We’re the guys in the white hats, you just stay clear and we’ll sort this out for you”. Then when it was all over, the confined people were let out and patted on the head and told they were the salt of the American earth. I call that infantilization and a very bad precedent for future, similar events. 
• While we were on air, somebody texted in to castigate me for introducing drone bombs into the discussion of the marathon explosion. They’re entitled to their view - even my massive vanity concedes that not everyone loves me. But I’m convinced that US drone bombs have everything to do with what happened at the Boston marathon. Both killed innocent people, the difference being that the drone bombs were launched and continue to be launched on the say-so of the US president, that they cause death and destruction on a far more massive scale than in Boston, and that nobody came after Barack Obama as he hid in a backyard boat hoping he wouldn’t be shot dead like his brother. What’s more, no one in the media (that I’ve read/seen) mentions the hideous irony of Obama posing as the defender of life while dealing out death in distant parts with no sign of pity for the innocent.  I’d say that was a parallel well worth drawing, and it’s to the shame of the mainstream media that they haven’t done this. 

Stormont: what d'you think of it so far?

I generally view The View (BBC TV) a day after it’s aired. While Hearts and Minds went out in the early evening, The View  has been exiled to the post-10.00 pm wilderness, so I usually tape it.  Anyway, it was yesterday before I got to hear that businessman on the programme, with his take on the Stormont Executive. It was, to put it mildly, damning. The man said he just got on with his business, doing what he could, ignoring the politicians who for him were an irrelevance, spending their time arguing over the past and offering nothing to the present or future. 

He was impressive in his understated sincerity and to some extent I found myself agreeing with him. Martin McGuinness likes to recall the first time he met with Ian Paisley in Stormont, as First and Deputy First Minister respectively, and how Paisley said “You know, we can do a lot better ourselves than these British ministers coming over here”. But as that businessman sees it,  they either can’t or aren’t doing better. 

It may be because it was the area I was involved with during my working life, but education seems the one area where the Stormont Executive has made a radical move, with the abolition of the 11+. But even that consists in catching up with what happened in Britain over 50 years ago; and should you ignore that awkward fact, you’re still faced with  the DUP and the UUP (I’m not really sure what the SDLP position is) condemning the move with some intensity. And of course there's free travel for the oldies, which Peter Robinson I think claims as his achievement, but again, they've had that south of the border since the days of Charlie Haughey.

Maybe there have been striking advances in other areas but  I can’t think what they are. Doesn't mean they aren’t happening, but you’d think  the Minister responsible and his/her party would be trumpeting any achievements from the rooftops. As for the progress made by  the cross-border bodies, I'm frankly underwhelmed. 

And yet, despite all that, I'm still an admirer of devolution. Maybe it’s like democracy itself:  devolved government is the worst of all systems, except for everything else. 

I got those lonesome, homesick A5 blues...

In the wake of bombs like those in Boston earlier this week, people say all sorts of things. Remember the Omagh bomb?  British and American politicians hurried to the town to join in the general sense of outrage and to assure local people of their support in rebuilding. Nothing would redress the terrible loss of life but  everything possible in material and emotional terms would be done to restore the town. Simpleton that I was, I believed their reassurances. 

It didn’t happen. Talk to business people in Omagh and you’ll find that no flood of American or British money came in to transform the stricken town. Walk down the main street today and while you don't get a sense of deprivation, you're a long way from the hum and bounce of a town that's thriving. And now this week, the decision to build the A5, running from Derry past Omagh to Aughnacloy has been put on hold because, we're told,  the Department of Regional Development screwed up in assessing the road’s impact on the environment. The road will now be built in two years’ time. Maybe. MAYBE.

It is indeed a big maybe, a MASSIVE maybe. For a number of reasons.

1. It’s  west of the Bann. That’s the place where a lot nationalists/republicans live,  a place that’s got a touch of the political desert for unionism. Few or no votes to be won there by unionist parties. So why would any unionist Minister bust a gut in the interests of people opposed to his/her party's political thinking? 
2. Danny Kennedy of the UUP is in charge of the scheme and Sammy Wilson is the Finance Minister. Sammy is on record as being agin the scheme - not against building roads, but just not there. Kennedy was on TV on Monday night and sounded as pumped up  about the project as a balloon that's had an argument with a bull-dozer. Best not look to Danny as an A5 saviour.
3. Several dozen farmers along the route, most of them unionist, are opposed to the A5 scheme. Tens of thousands of business and non-business people in the area, most of them nationalist/republican,  are very much in favour of the scheme, which would provide a much-needed injection to employment and business. But do you think the superior numbers will mean anything? That the will of tens of thousands is bound to win the day?   Uh-uh. We’re talking power here, not a head-count of population. 
4. The southern government originally promised £400 million towards the building of the A5. A couple of years ago it announced that, um, it’d done some sums and they’d now be giving something under £50 million. Considerably under. It’s kind of like the thing about urging people from the south to be ‘patriotic’ by shopping  in the south rather than the north. Of course the Dublin government recognises that all of us  on this island are Irish, it’s just that some are more Irish than others.  Count yourselves lucky to get a quarter of what we promised. 

Maybe at this point you’re half-thinking “Well, tough on the Omagh ones, and the Derry ones too, but we’re not going to be spending much time driving on those roads anyway”. Or maybe you’re thinking “Since those sodding southerners have gone back on their promise, of course it won’t get built, but that's life”.  I don’t blame you if you're thinking along those lines. But here’s the question: do you think the decision to build or not to build will be made on environmental or financial grounds? I think not. They’ll be factors, of course. But in the end it’ll come down to a political decision. So if I were a businessman in Omagh, or someone who longed for a Derry-Dublin road that’d match the Belfast-Dublin road,  I’d be opening a big box of chocolates before settling down to press Play on  my favourite escapist  movie. Because in my gut I’d know that once more, west of the Bann is at the end of the line.

Long Kesh/The Maze: a shrine to terrorism?

So - the Long Kesh/Maze site will very probably get the go-ahead this morning. A long time coming maybe, but better late than never. 

There were two politicians on BBC Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster this morning disputing the whole idea. You might think that, as the BBC is to balance what that guy who walked the tightrope between the Twin Towers was to death-defying,  one of those politicians would have been unionist and the other nationalist/republican. Wrong, I’m afraid. They were both unionist  - Tom Elliot (UUP) and Jeffrey Donaldson (DUP) - and they couldn’t have disagreed more. 

Tom said the site would be a shrine to terrorism and it was all the DUP’s fault, so it was (btw, have you noticed how Tom pronounces ‘h’ as in ‘H-blocks’?); Jeffrey said that Tom’s party were the ones that signed up to the deal in the first place and what’s more, Noel Thompson was lying in the way he was presenting the project. Bang, wallop, thump, and all you’re left with is the feeling that the UUP and the DUP have some way to go before they find unity in their political thinking and Noel Thompson must be hoping he can meet Jeffrey up a dark alley some night soon. 

The justification for the site’s development, as presented by Jeffrey, was that there’d be loads of other stuff too - the Royal Ulster Agrticultural Society, a WW2 aircraft hangar - loads of stuff that would kinda diminish the impact of that pesky H-block and hospital area where the hunger strikers died. Sorry, Jeffrey. They won’t. Whatever they say, people coming to visit the site will have one central matter in mind - the hunger strikers. 

Will it be a shrine to terrorism or a peace and reconciliation centre, showing us a better way for the future? I think Tom’s nearer to the truth on this one than Jeffrey. It may not be a shrine to terrorism - we don’t remember the hunger strikers for what they did before they were sent to prison and embarked on their fast - but it will be a place where those visiting will be reminded of the matchless courage of ten men who decided that they’d rather die than be classified as common criminals. The woman laid to rest yesterday out-stared all ten men until they died, but in doing so unleashed world-wide sympathy for the dead men and gave birth to a new and powerful force in Irish politics, a force that continues to grow. 

Whatever the pressures that squeezed the DUP into going along with the development of Long Kesh, they must have been formidable, for given a choice, 99% of unionism would follow David Ervine’s advice and flatten everything on the site. It might be possible to kid yourself that Ulster-Scots provides a balance to the Irish language, but  there just isn’t anything to provide a balance to the sacrifice of these ten men. The Long Kesh development, like Kilmainham Jail, will jolt visitors into awareness of the courage and selflessness of those who died there. 

Thatcher and Boston: how art shapes life

Funny the link between what we might loosely call art and life, and how one affects the other.   Years and years ago a song called ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead’ was written and performed in a much-loved movie. Then it’s resurrected today and suddenly everyone is full of tortured conscience: should we play this song, is it offensive in the light of Margaret Thatcher’s death, but she wouldn’t have wanted censorship, not much she wouldn’t, tell that to the Shinners, oxygen of publicity and all that, we are the BBC and we always strike a balance so play five seconds of it and fill in the rest with a mini-history lesson. 

All that over one little children’s song.

But in that case there was/is a link but not a causal one between art and life. ‘Ding-dong the witch is dead’ didn’t cause Thatcher to die. But what about this, now?

You know the way we’ve all been shocked by those explosions at the end of the Boston marathon. I love Boston - was in it last summer and it was a delight; and I quite like running, although my total maximum is a half-marathon, not a full one. Now I could go on - and maybe I will just a little - about how we feel more deeply about events, especially sad or tragic events, when they’re televised. Reading about them in the paper isn’t quite the same thing. And of course we feel more deeply about events which happen to people like ourselves. President Obama has never made any secret of his orders for the use of drone bombs in Pakistan, which have led to the deaths of thousands. And was it in Pakistan that around 70 people died in an explosion the same day as the Boston marathon? Such things get nowhere near as much attention as Boston, because what’s far away and dissimilar in culture from our one seems, well, less human. Logical in our compassion, aren’t we?

But get this one. I bought next week’s Radio Times  yesterday and as usual flicked through the movies listed for showing. Anything with four stars gets my attention so when I saw one in that category called Four Lions  I checked the detail. It’s scheduled for showing next Monday night but my guess is it might just get pulled before that.

If you’ve seen the movie you’ll know what’s coming next. It’s by TV satirist, the wonderful Chris Morris, who made The Day Today and Brass Eye. So what’s Four Lions  about? Well would you believe it’s an “audacious jihad comedy” about a gang of four whose plan it is to bomb the London Marathon. The Radio Times says Morris’s film is “fast, very funny and disturbing mostly in the sense that, despite wanting to create murder on a vast scale, the suicide bombers are actually a likeable bunch”.

Did they say “likeable bunch”?  That seals it. Art will next Monday affect life once again and the movie will be pulled. But think positive. It’s scheduled for Film4 and not the BBC. Think of the agonising, think of the compromise finally reached had it been Auntie:  showing five minutes of the movie and giving a lecture during the remainder of the scheduled time.