Death of a priest

John McCullagh died a couple of days ago. He was a Catholic priest - or as the Belfast Telegraph  describes him, a "pervert priest" who "took his secrets to the grave, never having faced justice". The report goes on to talk about how McCullagh "fled" to a Maghera nursing home when it was revealed that he had sexually abused an eight-year-old girl over a seven-year period. "Other victims did come forward in the wake of the Belfast Telegraph expose, but McCullagh never faced justice in court", The paper then goes on to talk  about "his vile actions".

I haven't followed the case of Fr McCullagh so I don't know any more than the Telegraph  tells me. However, I did know John McCullagh when he was a young man in the town from which we both came - Omagh. He was older than me and I remember him on occasion playing football with my brothers.  Since his death I've talked to a number of people who knew him, as a priest in Derry City and elsewhere, and they've been emphatic if not loud in his praise (it doesn't do to be too loud when saying positive things about "pervert priests"), speaking of the amount of good work he did  over the years. The Telegraph doesn't talk about this part of his life - in fact it seems resentful that McCullagh will be buried "with full religious honours".

My guess is that McCullagh was like the rest of us - a mixture of good and bad. In the old days, the Catholic Church was rightly criticised for being obsessed with sexual sin, before which all other sins shrank into nothing. These days, the same people who would have been emphatic in their criticism of the Church for this are themselves most vocal in elevating sexual abuse to the exclusion of all other sins, in this case to the point where they are unhappy about how McCullagh's body is lowered into the grave.

When we measure the worth of a life,  logic and justice demand that we assess all of it, not just the parts or actions  we select from it.  We know that John McCullagh had dark areas as well as clear areas in his life - as do we all.  Maybe we should leave the stone-throwing to those among us who are without sin. Like the Belfast Telegraph. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.

Two tales of two novelists

It’s funny  (that’s funny-peculiar, not funny-ha-ha) the way things conjoin sometimes. Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about two books by writers that I know personally and whose work I find interesting.

On Thursday, Danny Morrison did a reading of his most recent book Rudi: In the Shadow of Knulp.  It’s a novel that draws its inspiration from an earlier novel by the German writer Herman Hesse. But Morrison’s book is set in Ireland and follows the central character through the post-war period and then the 1960s and 1970s. After the reading I asked the author how was it that, as a committed republican, he had made the Troubles a sketchy background and the central character Rudi an apolitical being. The answer I got was that there is a great deal more in life than politics or even political conflict, and besides as a writer he Morrison had learnt that when you write from a political perspective, you risk producing something closer to propaganda. 

The second writer is David Park.  A friend  today emailed me an interview with the author in the Guardian  newspaper. In it Park talks about his latest book, The Light of Amsterdam, and how although his eighth novel, it was his first truly post-Troubles work. In other words in this novel, like Morrison, Park doesn’t allow politics a centre-stage place.  I’ve read earlier works by both authors and I think these their most recent -  Rudi  and The Light of Amsterdam - are emphatically their best. 

So is that what makes them good and is Danny Morrison right - to give politics or political struggle the foreground  is to risk damage to the quality of the work? His book and Park’s most recent would suggest that that is the case. I’m not so sure. While it may be harder to successfully  include politics or political struggle in a novel, it can and has been done. For example, an early work by another Belfast writer, Ronan Bennett, Overthrown by Strangers,  gives centre stage to political violence. So too does his award-winning novel The Catastrophist.  Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve-up  is another case in point, and of course George Orwell’s Animal Farm  and 1984  are classic examples of the same thing.

It’s a fascinating issue. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that most people largely ignore politics, except as a kind of beauty contest: which candidate looks best, which would you like to have a beer with, which caters to your prejudices. And maybe that’s why most novels by-pass politics. Perhaps if we taught our young people that politics is something which everyone has an obligation to be interested in, even to be involved in, there’d be less room in politics for  phony smiles, back-stabbing and failure to deliver on promises. And more room in fiction for politics.

"Murder is murder is murder!" - The Nolan Show

“Murder is murder is murder!” the woman in the audience told Laurence McKeown and everyone in last night’s Nolan Show audience. “I don’t agree with you” McKeown said. Stephen Nolan was keen to have Laurence direct his comments to the woman who was sitting beside him. Her father, who’d been a member of the UDR, was shot dead by the IRA. McKeown told Nolan he wasn’t in the game of creating sound-bites.

It was an interesting moment because it brought into focus two ways of approaching our past. Nolan thrives on having adversaries make their acusations directly to those they deem responsible for their pain;  McKeown and most republicans prefer to look at the conflict in wider terms, including the state out of which the conflict grew. So while an argument between the woman who lost her father and McKeown would almost certainly have made for riveting television, it wouldn’t have told us much beyond the fact that the woman was filled with pain and resentment at her father’s death.  When it comes to making rounded judgements about the past, victims who are suffering rarely (and understandably) are the best choice. 

The word “murder” was used by the woman whose father was killed by the IRA; Jude Whyte ( or ‘White’ as the programme chose to call him) lost his mother in a UVF attack and he said he saw his mother as having been murdered also. Someone else - maybe Sinn Féin’s Raymond McCartney - said that the great majority of those incarcerated in Long Kesh would never have been there had our society been a normal one. In other words, it seemed that some of those involved in the show saw the deaths as murder, full stop; others saw them as a tragic part of a conflict in which everyone suffered. 

The last time I mentioned the word ‘murder’ in relation to the Troubles it evoked a fire-storm of vilification. I was saying it was right that Mary Travers had been killed, I was saying it was right that the Shankill bomb had killed so many people. The fact that I said nothing of the sort was brushed aside. I expect there’ll be a similar reaction to the McKeown-McCartney view on the Troubles. Particular killings will be highlighted and demands will be made to call them murder. I won’t say the people who make such demands are wilfully blind, but I will say that they are refusing to distinguish between deliberate killings for personal motives  and  deliberate or even accidental killings as part of a political conflict.  

The trouble with declaring all killings to be murder, regardless of cause or political end, is that logic demands you denounce any decoration for war activities  and embrace pacifism as a life-guiding philosophy. And not too many are prepared to go down that road.

Irish army WW2: deserters or heroes?

I’m always impressed by the public mind’s ability to perform somersaults. The latest example of this is the ‘pardon’ issued to those soldiers in the Irish Army who deserted and joined the British Army during the Second World War.  At the time they were declared deserters and when they came home they had problems getting work.  Now Justice Minister Alan Shatter is sponsoring a Bill to right that wrong posthumously  “The Bill is being enacted in recognition of the courage and bravery of those individuals court martialed or dismissed from the Defence Forces who fought on the Allied side to protect decency and democracy during World War Two”.

I’m afraid I detect a case of having your cake and eating it here. No matter what Minister Shatter or anyone else says, these men were deserters. They’re on record as having gone AWOL and to pretend they somehow didn’t is daft. “Yes, but they did it for the highest of motives” you may say. Indeed. But if as Shatter says, they were fighting to protect “decency and democracy”, then by extension the Irish army which they deserted failed to help protect “decency and democracy”. So Dev’s whole neutrality thing was simply cowardice? A failure to stand side-by-side with Britain and the allies against Germany?

Well yes, they didn’t stand side-by-side with Britain. But surely that was their prerogative as a sovereign state. What’s the point in having an independent foreign policy if you’re not allowed to use it?  And what has happened that Mr Shatter and this generation see the courage and even heroism of these men, while the generation or two before them saw them saw deserters who rejected their own army and joined that of Britain?  

The case is similar to the rehabilitation of those Irishmen who fought in the British Army in the First World War. In both cases, the hurry to rehabilitate has more to do with publicly sucking up to Britain than it does with wanting to do the right thing. Despite the considerable number of irishmen who have joined the British army over the decades, there has always been a sense that they have gone over, for whatever reason, to the ‘other side’.

So here are two tips for you, Alan:  (i) Accept that the men were in fact deserters from the Irish Army. Regardless of motive, deserting is deserting and no apology changes that. (ii) Accept that while these men may have shown courage and even insight by joining Britain in fighting Germany, they were effectively telling their government it should have entered the war. No state and no society reacts well to being told a central policy is totally mistaken, especially when the critics come dressed in the uniform of the British Army. 

As to Alan’s hand-wringing over the men’s difficulties in finding work when they returned, he might want to turn his gaze and his influence northwards to consider the work problems encountered by former political prisoners here.  Or maybe not. It’s always easier to speak up for the safely dead. 

Where's the parity?

Even allowing for the degree of friction within the power-sharing coalition, it’s still pretty startling stuff.  Sinn Féin councillor Jim McVeigh recently told  a group calling itself United Republicans that the PSNI were engaged in a “campaign of persecution against Catholics” and that “our women and our children” were being beaten back into their homes. McVeigh said this was a disgrace and that it was the result of Nigel Dodds having the Chief Constable wrapped round his little finger. “He has to go!”  McVeigh told the audience. The leader of the SDLP, Alastair McDonnell and a former INLA leader also addressed the  crowd.

Scary biscuits, eh?  Except I made that first paragraph up. Out of thin air. Well, not thin air exactly. The speaker was DUP councillor Ruth Patterson, not Sinn Féin’s Jim McVeigh, the charge was that the “Protestant people” were being persecuted and their women and children “beaten off the streets”. The group was the United Loyalists, and UUP leader Mike Nesbitt and the PUP’s Billy Hutchinson also addressed the crowd.

I spun that fictional first-paragraph version to show how off-the-wall it would sound, were it nationalists and republicans that had held such a rally. It’s safe to say that there would have been outcry from all shades of unionism as well as from our very own British Secretary of State. But because it’s the unionist voice of Ruth Patterson there’ll be relatively little response, and certainly no outcry from republicans and/or nationalists.

Depressing, eh? Despite the Good Friday Agreement declaring that only when a majority in the north want it can there be moves towards constitutional change, despite the destruction of IRA weaponry and the effective disbandment of that paramilitary group, unionist politicians like Ruth continue to encourage unionists in their belief that their Britishness is under threat and the authorities against them - to such an extent that an outburst like the one above will as I say provoke minimal condemnation from nationalists/republicans. Had the verbal attack come from the other side, there would have been a storm of flying fur and feathers. 

Which goes to support what I tend to say rather often: if you start with “One lot’s as bad as the other” your analysis of our political situation will be fatally flawed. 

"This is my home!" Oh God no.

Funny image of the past week: Edwin Poots sitting in that nursing home with a 90 + -year-old.  She’d been on the Nolan Show earlier in the week and had been encouraged to express her feelings of alarm and distress. So here was Edwin, the Health minister, with the very same woman, and what are they doing? Holding hands. And smiling delightedly (in the case of the 90+-year-old) and in a getmeoutahere manner (in the case of Edwin Poots). 

Edwin’s hand-holding companion was only one of a number of old people who were presented to the camera over the past week or two, insisting that the nursing home in which they lived was their home, and to take them out of it would be like ripping them from all they knew and loved. Which must have had the nursing/care homes of the statelet dancing on the ceiling. Up to now, these homes have been in the news for much more negative reasons -  hidden cameras showing the ‘carers’ thumping the defenceless patients,  bed-bound people being left in their own faeces and similar horrors. Now here were the very patients testifying that they loved their ‘home’. I wonder were there any relatives alarmed at the news that these homes were due for closure, not for the sake of their relative, but for the burden such closure might place on them.

Two quick points (after all, it’s Bank Holiday and I should be out frisking around like a little lambkin):

1. I have never heard anyone say that they’d placed a close relative in a home without at least some tinge of guilt. Often unasked, they’ll explain to you how they couldn’t possibly  have looked after them at home.
2. There’s little doubt that most old people want to go on living in their own real homes if at all possible. It may not be heaven but it beats the care homes. 
3. I’ve never visited one of these care homes without feeling depressed. That may have been because we all are headed that direction, and there’s the distinct possibility that we’ll find ourselves in similar circumstances - assuming we’re not six feet underground. But there’s also something semi-zombie-like about many of the old people in them. They sit there as if in a daze (medication or a sense of hopelessness?)  The only exception I’ve come on has been one old man who lived into his early 90s and whom I visited from time to time in his care home. He read, he watched TV and he was a vigorous conversationalist. He never left his room, and when I asked him if he didn’t want to mix with the other people in the home, he was very definite the answer was No. He didn’t say “I’d be fearful I’d catch their mood of hopelessness’  but it was clear that was what he felt. 

So while it’s kind of fun to see old Edwin being turned on the media spit - he really should have had a tighter hold on all those trusts before they announced their multiple closures - it’s a pity that the care homes are emerging as the hero of the piece , the place where at least some people seem keen on passing their final years. In my limited experience, they all have a faint whiff of despair. Any alternative arrangement for old people would almost certainly have to be better. 

One last question, related to a point an acquaintance of mine made to me some time ago. As years go by, he claimed, grown-up children love their parents less and less. They (the children) who were once powerless in the hands of their parents now find themselves all-powerful, with their parents’ fate in their hands. The result of this reversal is a hardening of hearts and an increasing sense of their aged parent as being inconveniently alive. I’m still trying to tell myself that my friend got it wrong.  But it’s not easy convincing myself. 

Who fears to speak of a border poll?

Sluggerotoole.com is one of those sites that I visit on a regular basis. You occasionally get daft debates but usually I'm struck by how informed and logical many of the contributors are. However, I usually resist the temptation to engage with its discussions since life is short and besides, this blog gobbles up enough of my time. But my eye was caught yesterday by a commentary on Sinn Féin’s drive to have a border poll. 

The usual grounds for dismissing such a poll is that it’s bound to fail - that is, the Belfast Telegraph and other opinion polls show that the great majority of people in the north want to maintain the union with Britain (aka continued government from London). So why waste time and money on a border poll when everyone knows what the result will be?  

The frequent argument for having a poll - at least by those who believe it will confirm the opinion polls and maintain the union - is that Sinn Féin’s bluff should be called, and that would take the constitutional question off the table. 

Both view are so persuasive I’m in danger of doing the splits. It’s true that, according to opinion polls, a border poll has a snowball’s chance in hell of going for constitutional change. And it’s also true that to hold a border poll and see it defeated would remove the constitutional question from the table, at least for the time being. 

However, my guess is that Sinn Féin are keeping three matters in mind. 

One is that while traditional nationalists may tell the Bel Tel that they're not in  favour of a united Ireland tomorrow,  it could well be another matter when they’re in the polling both and faced with putting their mark against the notion of Irish unity. If you want a parallel of sorts, look at the supposed fruitcakes in UKIP who did strikingly better in the polling booth than the opinion polls suggested. So a border poll would be a historic moment, and given that unity wouldn’t actually have to be tomorrow, we might be surprised how many nationalists would put their X beside Yes for constitutional change. 

The second reason I think Sinn Féin are pushing hard for a border poll is because many of their supporters are looking for more signs of on-the-ground progress in this core matter. So to agitate for a poll, regardless of outcome, is seen as electorally desirable.

The third reason I would guess to be behind Sinn Féin’s thinking is, if a border poll were called, people would be forced to confront core questions which in the normal course of things they don’t consider and in many cases don’t like considering. Questions like “What do we mean when we say we want to maintain the union with Britain? Why? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks, if any?”  And likewise, the question “What do I mean by a united Ireland? Why have one? What would be the benefits? What are the drawbacks, if any?”

It’s these questions that I’m guessing Sinn Féin want aired, and which a border poll would provide the opportunity for airing. Would it be divisive? Only if you get all agitated when someone puts forward an argument you don’t agree with. For so long the constitutional question has been at the core of our differences here in the north, yet nearly all the time our thinking stops with waving flags and shouting slogans. A border poll, Sinn Féin believe, would move things on to a measured debate. And if, after that debate, the electorate chose to maintain the union, then republicans and nationalists would have to consider if their ideal of a united Ireland was outmoded or if they needed to rethink how something which doesn’t yet exist might be presented in a way that would win more support. 

On the other hand, if the border poll were to say Yes to constitutional change, we’d see whether those  committed to union with Britain would respect the outcome of a democratic vote. What’s that? Never, never, never, never? I see. Mmm. Maybe. Or maybe not.