Can a father-to-be have suicidal thoughts?

When my wife was pregnant with each of our four children, I never once thought of saying to friends or anyone else “We are going to have a baby”. Things have changed since then: in recent years the male habitually  says “We are going to have a baby” when his wife/partner is pregnant. In my unreconstructed mind this at first seemed daft. Men can’t have babies so why claim to be going to have one? Gradually light seeped into the dark corners of my skull and I realised that “having a baby” wasn’t just a biological event, it involved a lifetime of concern and care for the soon-to-arrive, and in this respect the man was equally responsible for the child.

So with the south on the brink of introducing its new abortion law, the thought struck me: where do the father-to-be’s concerns enter the equation? You might well respond “Hardly at all”, in that there are men who see their part in the whole affair as ending shortly after impregnation. But there are men who do care about their children, including the soon-to-be-born ones, and yet I don’t think I’ve come across any articles referring to the father’s role or rights. 

Take the suicide thing, which is the part of the south’s abortion law that’s creating the biggest furore. Under the new law, if three medics - an obstetrician and two psychiatrists -  rule that the pregnant woman is in danger of taking her own life, then an abortion can be legally performed. 

Now leave aside for the moment (yes, yes, I know it’s an effort) the accuracy of psychiatric prediction of suicide. The thing is, what would happen if the unborn child’s father was a suicide risk?  If the mother of the unborn child can have suicidal thoughts, isn’t it possible the father of the unborn child could equally have thoughts of suicide?  With the only way of resolving these thoughts being the abortion of the foetus? Or can a man only think in positive terms of his unborn child, so there’s no need to make provision for any male who might have suicidal thoughts at the prospect of becoming a father?

When you think about it, one of the more positive changes in family life in recent decades is the role of the father. He’s more involved with his children from the earliest years than ever before, and that’s seen universally as a good thing. So if a woman satisfies three medics that she’s contemplating suicide and the solution is the abortion of the unborn child, why is it not seen as being any of the man’s business? Because if the child gets lucky enough to be born, it’ll certainly be his business then. 

This time it's personal...

 OK - if you’re bloodthirsty for political comment today you may look elsewhere. This one’s personal. Since yesterday I’ve been bursting - the Collins clan has been bursting - with family pride in our dear and lovely daughter/sister Phoebe. Not content with notching a BA Hons at Oxford (Balliol) and working for several years in the fiery hell of the London media, she did a screeching hand-brake turn to her life four years ago and yesterday emerged as a medical doctor. As you all know, I’m normally the shyest and most modest of men but since yesterday I'm incandescent in delight over the sweetest and smartest daughter a man could wish for. Maith thú, Phoebe!

Tomorrow, le cuidiú Dé, back to the battlements, ...

Five things worth saying after last Friday

1. The Orange Order is a supremacist organisation. The Parades Commission ruled that yes, despite last year’s appalling behaviour, band members could parade past St Patrick’s church to the accompaniment of a single drum-beat. This ruling was ignored and and the defiance of the ruling justified by unionist politicians: “Who could object to the playing of a religious hymn?”.  Well, clearly the Parades Commission objected to it, hence their ruling. And if you watch and listen to the band on video, you realise that the tune may have been ‘What A Friend We Have In Jesus’ but the performance had a level of swagger and thump-thump-thump not normally related to hymn-playing. Parades Commission ruling? What Parades Commission ruling? We decide what we play, when we play it, where and how. If that’s not a supremacist attitude, look forward to my my granny spear-heading the Barcelona forward line next season. 
2. Gerry Kelly (and Alban Magennis and Carál Ní Chuilín)  should stop doing the PSNI’s work for them. Not only do you not get paid for it, but as Friday showed, you really enhance your chances of being hospitalized or even killed. The job for which the police are handsomely paid is to see that the law is upheld and that those who break the law are punished. That’s not the job of Gerry or Cáral or Alban. Yet they’ve gone out of their way to help the PSNI in maintaining public order.  Result? Carál Ní Chuilín ends up in hospital, Gerry Kelly’s life is put at risk by a police vehicle. That doesn’t sound like much of a reward for their efforts. Think of it the other way round: supposing Gerry had driven his car for fifty yards with a policeman clinging on for dear life?  The courts would beckon, along with a hefty fine or even imprisonment.
3. The PSNI must show more consistency, and quickly. Many people thought the police acted unwisely in their response to the flag protestors. They didn’t make arrests; they played a softly-softly  game and in the end, it seemed Matt Baggott was right - the protests fizzled out and those rioting were later arrested and charged.  But this approach demands consistency.  You can’t just treat flag protestors one way and anti-Orange Order demonstrators another. But last Friday, that’s just what they did. Imagine the brou-ha-ha had, for example,  if Jim Allister been carried on the bonnet of a police landrover during a flags protest,  or  Arlene Foster injured in a melee? Consistency, guys - and quickly as possible.
4. The Friday-night affair and flag-protestors comparison can be carried too far. There’s one big difference.  The flag protestors, or a considerable number of them, mounted vicious and sustained  attacks on the police.  Nothing comparable happened last Friday night in North Belfast. It’s never a good idea to mistake chalk for cheese. 
5. Last Friday’s events speak to our distant past and our near- future. After Friday, it’s hard not to feel anxious about the coming marching season. But no one should feel surprised. As Andy Boyd’s excellent book Holy War in Belfast details, civil disorder has been the hall-mark of Orange parades since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact, at two separate points in the nineteenth century, things got so bad the British government was forced to outlaw Orange Order marches for a period of years. Were I a unionist, I’d be truly embarrassed to think that Orange strutting and provocation had anything to do with my culture. 

“But what is the answer?” I hear you cry. “What can we do?” The answer to this centuries-old problem is simple: end all parades now. “Are you kidding?” you say. “All hell would break loose! Besides, that’d be taking away from the unionist culture”. Not necessarily - but OK then, let’s compromise. Like the flags issue, let’s go for continuation that is limited.  Let’s allow Orange marches, providing they are conducted outside an  Orange lodge and the marching route is a tight circle around the aforesaid lodge. Like the one they did outside St Patrick’s last year.  

Yes’ it’d be a concession to a bigoted organisation but sometimes you have to reverse a little to make progress. If the Orange Order must continue in existence, let its celebrations stay local and its marching pattern be in a circle that goes nowhere. It’d also offer a nice metaphor for the place of the Order in twenty-first- century Ireland.

Henry and Malachi - telling it like it is?

“Anyone who disagrees with the top cabal is suddenly transformed into a class traitor, unreliable, drunk / mad, lying irrational scumbag who must be shunned by decent society”.

That’s taken from a comment on sluggerotoole.com today. It’s the kind of comment you get from someone looking at powerful governments throughout the world and throughout history: the way in which governments firmly in charge make sure they stay that way, by labelling opponents as crazies and so discrediting anything they may say about anything. 

Except this particular comment isn’t talking about a government. It’s talking about a party  - Sinn Féin. So  if that’s true, how do Sinn Féin manage this trick of demonising opponents? They don’t have anything like the same media power as their opponents. Think of the main Irish newspapers - The Irish News, The News Letter, Irish Times, Irish independent, Irish Examiner, Belfast Telegraph. Leave aside what they frame as political news and how they frame it, and concentrate on their columnists, their writers of what is now called ‘op-ed’ pieces. With one exception - Jim Gibney in The Irish News - I can’t think of a single columnist who isn’t hostile to Sinn Féin. Mind you I don’t habitually buy papers any more, so I tend to rely on what I find online. So if I’ve been missing something I’ll be happy to hear about it. But it does seem to me that the tone and content of newspapers on this island is well over 90% anti-Shinner.

Take the Gerry Kelly/Carál Ní Chuilín incidents last Friday. There is video of the incident which shows Gerry Kelly assuring people of the area that the police vehicle that has passed is going to pull in and talk to them and particularly to the boy’s mother. When this doesn’t happen, Kelly tries to get another police vehicle to stop and talk. The upshot is, Kelly is carried some distance on the front of a PSNI vehicle and  Ní Chuilín is hospitalized.

The commentary on this incident in the Belfast Telegraph is interesting. There are two op-ed pieces - one by Henry McDonald, one by Malachi O’Doherty.  Henry’s is headed ‘Would the real Sinn Féin please stand up?’  In it he is critical of the DUP, but his main criticism is for Sinn Féin: one part of it in the person of Martin McGuinness  who is projecting responsible partnership to Barack Obama; another part is in the person of Gerry Kelly, reassuring grass-roots in on-the-street incidents that it is concerned for them.”For McGuinness, Kelly and Sinn Féin, heads are constantly twitching in opposite directions”.

Malachi’s piece is entitled “What did Gerry Kelly think he was doing?”  He argues that Sinn Féin scored an own goal by publishing their video of the incident, because sympathy for Gerry Kelly and Caral Ni Cuilean is lost when people see the incident. Kelly’s efforts to get the police vehicle to stop are denounced as the actions of someone “who should have had more sense than to be there”.  He speaks repeatedly of Gerry “barking” at the police vehicle to pull in. “He [Kelly] sees no contradiction between his presumption of the right to bark at the police and the legacy of opposition to political policing”.  He concludes that “the party itself, in releasing the video, has provided the evidence which damns him”.

Twitching, barking: maybe a clue is contained in those two words. Henry talks of the Sinn Féin neck “twitching” as it tries to reconcile Martin McGuinness commitment to power-sharing with street protest and Gerry Kelly.  Frankly, I don’t see the contradiction. If political opponents are prepared to share power and both parties work for the common good, that makes sense. It makes equal sense that Sinn  Féin’s MLAs should be doing all they can to maintain calm at crisis points created by Orange Order marching, and that they should insist on the police explaining actions that are inflaming the situation. But clearly that’s not the way Henry and Malachi chose to present the situation. 

The one thing that neither op-ed piece mentions is the SDLP’s Alban Maginnis. He also appears in the video and is clearly supportive of Gerry Kelly’s actions and attempts to avoid public disorder. In other interviews on radio the next day he confirmed that support. This, from a man and a party who are emphatically opposed to Sinn Féin politically. 

I take off my hat to Alban Maginnis for his presence at the scene and his honesty in response to what happened. It’s odd that both Henry and Malachi forgot to mention him in their pieces. 

Ken Loach and Irish bankers

I watched a documentary last night which was inspiring in one way and deeply depressing in another. It was the English director Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45, and how, against all the odds, Churchill was kicked out of office after the Second World War and a Labour government, led by Clement Attlee, won by a landslide. They then went to do what few governments do: they kept their electoral promises.

The great thing that the Attlee government did was to tap into the wartime spirit of the British people. Having seen how a united effort of all the people could do great things in terms of resistance to Nazism, government ministers like Aneuran Bevin embarked on a series of nationalisations - of health, of transport, of energy. People realised that by planning things on a country-wide basis, duplication of services could be abolished and industry organised for the maximum benefit, not of private profiteers, but the people themselves.

That was the good part. The bad part was with the arrival of the late 1970s and Thatcher, who proceeded systematically to instal greed as the motivating factor, unfettered capitalism as the dominant philosophy. One by one the industries and services that’d been nationalised by Bevin were privatised by Thatcher. 

This neo-liberal approach to politics swept the board and the very mention of the word ‘socialism’ was greeted by sniggers. Then came 2008 and the collapse of these marvelous systems of roaring capitalism. And who paid for the collapse? Not the people who’d created it. The people who’d suffered under it. 

There couldn’t have been a better summary of Loach’s outline of British social history than the recently-heard tape of a conversation between the Anglo Irish Bank’s CEO, David Drumm and his colleague John Bowe, head of capital markets. They joke about how they’ve drawn the Irish government into endless support by picking the figure of €7 billion “out of me arse”, until the government was in hock for €30 billion. “So fuckin’ what” Drumm is heard to tell his colleague. “Just take it anyway ...stick the fingers up”.

Nice. Nothing like the Irish sense of humour, is there? Or sense of outrage. Because instead of taking a holy vow never to vote for a party that allowed itself to be complicit in such a ghastly free-for-all followed by a bankrupting crash, the Irish people of the south have now shown that that party- Fianna Fail - is in their opinion the best party in the state. 

They say that people get the government they deserve.  The people in the south must have done something very very bad to have deserved Fianna Fail. That they have learnt nothing is seen in their attitude to the present Fine Gael-Labour coalition. As they might have sung in Ken Loach’s film but didn’t: “It’s the rich what gets the pleasure/And the poor what gets the blame/ It’s the same the whole world over/ Ain’t it a fucking shame”.

Ed, football and flags

Ed Curran is offering some thoughts on sport and politics in the Belfast Telegraph this morning. Some of his contentions are predictable, others are gob-smacking to the point of incredulity.  Talking of soccer he says “The international team and its supporters are drawn from across the community. They occupy a uniquely shared space in the context of the new Northern Ireland”.

Blimey, Ed. That’s the Northern Ireland soccer team Neil Lennon once played for? And stopped playing for when he received death threats?  I must lead a sheltered life: I don’t know any nationalist or republican who is a supporter of the Northern Ireland football team. Maybe you can produce evidence to the contrary, Ed?

He goes on to say “if the British national anthem was not appropriate on Saturday afternoon at Windsor Park, can we look forward to the day when the Irish national anthem is considered just as unnecessary to the enjoyment of a GAA game?” 

I’m afraid I see a difference between the crowd supporting Northern Ireland and the crowd watching Donegal beat Down last Sunday. The main difference being that one crowd would be composed of people supportive of the union with Britain, the other not supportive of it. But let me come clean on this: I don’t think we need to hear Amhrán na bhFiann played before every Gaelic game. Or any need to have the Irish tricolour flying. Just as I see no need for the British national anthem to be played before soccer games or the Union flag flown. Gaelic teams represent their club or county or sometimes province, but they don’t represent their country. And of course the state of Northern Ireland is not a country, so any team representing it should not be flying the Union flag. 

Ed goes on from there to talk about flags and our coming super-councils:

“The obvious compromise is to apply the Stormont protocol of designated days across Northern Ireland. It is hardly asking too much for standards of flag-flying on public buildings to be agreed in the Office of the First and deputy First Minister and applied to the reorganisation of the new council districts.”

Mmm again. I know that’s a compromise was reached in Belfast City Hall and Stormont but I’m less sure that it’s a true compromise. Where half the population sees its loyalty as lying with Britain and half sees its loyalties residing in Ireland, a true compromise would clearly be one of two things: no flags or both flags.  Or is it that some loyalties are more important than others - that the croppies can consider themselves lucky their flag doesn’t end up flown on top of a huge bonfire? ...But wait a minute...Um...Right.  

The police, the MLAs and a little old thing called trust.

“Contemplate the wider betrayal of the trust that is indispensable in a functioning democracy, the trust between citizen and state that rests on the belief that security measures are always justified and proportionate”.

A quoted comment on Friday’s  PSNI work that sent one Sinn Féin MLA to hospital and endangered the life of another?  No, this is actually from a recent editorial in the Guardian, talking about the now-revealed attempts of the Metropolitian Police to discredit the family of Stephen Lawrence, a young black boy stabbed to death. 

It’d be good if the editorial were made compulsory reading for all PSNI personnel. Particularly the bit about trust between citizen and state. When you’ve got people on your side - effectively doing your work for you by striving to maintain public order -  it’s not smart to lie to them or to put their lives at risk. The PSNI  are on a very sticky wicket this summer. Matt Baggott’s softly-softly tactics with the flag protestors seemed to have paid off, and he deservedly got some plaudits for it. But if he now approaches protestors in North Belfast with  people-ramming police vehicles followed by justification from unionist politicians, it’s putting at risk not just those involved, but public trust in the police themselves.

Maybe all PSNI personnel might also be given a brief history of the RUC so they can learn what bad policing does to civil order. Let’s hope Matt Baggott’s attendance at a Sinn Féin conference hasn’t left  him thinking all hearts and minds have now been won. The weather could turn out bad but we could still be facing into a long, hot summer.