Matt Baggott: getting it wrong and getting it right

I was in the East Belfast Skainos centre last week. It is an impressive building, modern and elegant in an area that otherwise shouts “Poverty!” at every turn. I wonder would the people of East Belfast think differently about our politics if all of the area had buildings of that quality.

Meanwhile the PSNI Chief Constable Matt Baggott seems to have the notion of poverty on his mind when he called for politicians to tackle endemic poverty and youth unemployment. He believes that loyalist and republican violence has its roots in economic and social neglect. He’s also warned of the dangers of violence coinciding with the G8 summit meeting in Fermanagh. 

As to the second point:  whenever the police predict an “upsurge in violence”, you can be pretty sure it won’t happen. Remember all those Christmas run-ups where the RUC warned us they had intelligence that said the IRA was planning a concentrated bombing campaign? Any paramilitary group with half a brain chooses its own time, not Baggott’s. 

But he’s onto something with the first point. Something that’s rarely been addressed over the past forty years is the fact that most of the conflict was fought by those living in deprived areas.When you live in a system that clearly doesn’t give a damn about you, you’re more likely to seek radical means of addressing the wrong. As G B Shaw said so long ago, if you want to turn a revolutionary into a law-abiding conservative, give him £50,000, 

Watch me now...

I don’t know if you caught Alex Kane’s tweet yesterday about the BBC’s Sunday Sequence: "Sunday Sequence is probably the most challenging, interesting, informative and rounded programme on Radio Ulster.”  To which Martin McGuinness within minutes had responded: “I propose an amendment to @AlexKane  tweet re Sunday Sequence,drop 'probably.'’

Both men are right, and not just because I was on the programme yesterday. The  presenter William Crawley is head and shoulders above other presenters on BBC Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster - maybe even in Ireland. He’s articulate, he’s fearless and he’s always courteous. Plus he possesses an intelligence that leaves his peers in the starting blocks. You don’t need to think long about some of the programmes  that Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster serves up daily to conclude that the vision of the management in Ormeau Avenue is seriously purblind. It’ll be too late to lament his value if Crawley one of these days jumps ship and goes to London, or better still Dublin. 

Anyway, enough of that. Yesterday’s Sunday Sequence  had a look at the proposed Shared Future being served up by Stormont.  The initiative has been greeted with exasperated sighs  from a number of directions  but frankly I’ve little patience with that response. With people who say “But there’s nothing new here - we proposed that way back whenever!”. Or with parties who gurn about not having been invited into the shaping of the policy. Yes, maybe they did and maybe they should have been, but are they more concerned with their own self-importance or with the initiative itself? So what if it should have been implemented years ago? The past can’t be changed so let’s focus on where we are now and what we can do. 

Personally I cannot see what’s not to like about 10,000 work placements for young people, 10 shared education campuses, 100 shared summer schools, 10 shared neighbourhood developments.   No, the flags issue, the parades issue, the dealing-with-the-past issue - none of these has been directly addressed yet. But what has been proposed tackles the same problem: we live in a society that’s divided by mental razor-wire and it’s time we produced the wire-cutters. 

I have just one suggestion for those engaged in this task: let our political leaders lead. It's a truth universally acknowledged that leaders are most effective when they model the behaviour they look to cultivate in their followers. So let’s have the Stormont MLAs and Executive dropping off their children at shared education campuses, let’s have our politicians organising and attending their own shared summer schools, let’s see them living in shared neighbourhoods. Because as things stand,  the example some of them are setting in Stormont encourages not the best in society but the worst. 

Check it out on TV. Watch any DUP politician, up to and including the First Minister, when s/he is on-screen with a Sinn Féin colleague. What does their body-language say, how often do they establish so much as eye-contact with their colleague? Rather what we get is “ I may be standing beside this person but I really really don’t like it and frankly I detest them.” 

OK, I’ll go out on a limb and say that most DUP politicans in Stormont act like this because they’re fearful of their electorate and play to the lowest common denominator: ‘There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader'. That’s the charitable explanation. The less charitable is that they really do detest their partners in the Executive. In either case it's a bit daft to urge your constituents to work towards more civilized cross-community relations and even friendship when every time you appear on TV, you send exactly the opposite message. 

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.