"We all know" says Joe Biden. Oh really?

It’s always a risky business to speak for other people. “We all know” Vice-President Joe Biden declared yesterday “that there’s been a chemical weapons attack; we all know that the Syrian government are responsible for that attack”.

Well, include me out.  There may have been a chemical weapons attack, it may have been carried out by the Syrian government, but I haven’t  a clue whether there was or not and who was responsible. What I’ve seen has been a number of men, women and children milling around and acting more or less the way people reacted in the Bogside in 1969 when the RUC attacked them with CS gas - people dabbing at their eyes, looking distressed, some flat on the ground. 

Nor has Joe Biden or any other leader convinced me that there is now justification for a military intervention. I saw a Syrian government official on TV last night and in halting English he said something very significant: “Show. Me. Evidence. Of. Chemical. Weapons. Use. By. Our. Government”.  Oddly, over something as distinctive as this, the media here seem very unforthcoming. You’d expect them to lay out in detail what a chemical weapons attack looks like, how it differs from other attacks in its effect, and how Britain or the US or anyone else can know that it was the Syrian government. 

If it happened, it could have been US agents. You think that’s laughable? US agents have done worse things in, for example, South America. Remember Chile and Allende?  Remember the regime change in Iraq?  Remember, on a massively greater scale,   HIroshima and Nagasaki?  We know that, if they deem it necessary, the British government of any hue will concoct any story about the dangers to Britain and will use that as justification for invasion and slaughter. 

On a much more local scale, I heard an equally skewed version of events yesterday evening as I drove home. Seamus McKee had Brian Feeney and Paul Bew  (Lord Bew to you) talking about the writing of recent history here. Former UUP adviser Bew believes that we have an ‘infantalized’ take on recent history here, which points the finger of blame to an excessive degree at Britain; he also insists that the NIO were the true progenitors of the Good Friday Agreement. Feeney was in fine form and noted how the British government has continually fallen  over itself in its efforts to keep hidden the record of what happened here during the Troubles.  I’m not a historian but I do know that the NIO were not the people who created the Good Friday Agreement. I also know that efforts to  present Britain’s role here as a benevolent ring-keeper is totally bogus. If you don’t think Britain was a central player, ask the relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday or died in Ballymurphy. However hard unionists like the good Lord Bew may try to argue otherwise, they trip over their own fake narrative.  And I keep coming back to the thoughts of Jeremy Paxman as he interviews yet another politician: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Britain would be the poorer without such men.

PS Did I mention that according to the Oil and Gas Journal, Syria had 2,500,000,000 barrels of petroleum reserves as of 1 January 2010? How remiss of me. Although of course it’s a concern for the well-being of Syria’s citizens, not a lust for oil, that has the US and Britain straining at the leash these days.  

No politics. This time it's personal

Remember the Senior Certificate Examination? Of course you don’t -  it was years ‘n’ years ‘n’ years ago -  the precursor, more or less,  of the present GCSE Examination. Well, once years ‘n’ years ‘n’ years ago, I sat the Senior Certificate Examination in a range of subjects - Latin, French, History, English  and about half a dozen others. But the one that sticks in my mind is Irish. 

That was because, in the last class before we began sitting this intimidating range of exams, our Irish teacher - let’s call him O’Hare -  liked to predict Irish marks in the Senior Certificate examination. And it wasn’t a quiet, whispered prediction, one-to-one, tete-á-tete so to say. He stood at the front and pointed to each of us in turn and then gave the projected mark in a clear, ringing voice. So he went round the classroom: “Dobbins, you’ll  get about  50% -  you’ve not killed yourself working but you’ve done enough; McCann, you’ll get a Distinction - you’ve really applied yourself and I can safely predict a Distinction, one well-earned too”. And so he went from pupil to pupil predicting. He left me until last. 

“Collins.[Pause] Collins, you’ll fail Irish. Not only will you fail Irish, but I hope you fail Irish. Not only do I hope you’ll fail Irish, I hope you’ll fail all your subjects in the Senior Certificate. Because a lazier, more useless waster never sat in a desk in a class of mine”.  He went on along those lines for several minutes, as I recall. Not pleasant. But then it hadn’t been very pleasant when he was strapping me or thumping me about the head throughout the year either. So his going-away bad-wishes sort of fitted into the pattern. 

I was seventeen then. For the next 30-40 years I loathed the Irish language and more or less everybody connected with it. Then eventually I began to see that I was allowing my bad experience (and my very bad teacher) to come between me and a beautiful language that had a unique value for anyone who was Irish. So I started attending conversational Irish classes from time to time;  then a couple of friends with a similar interest started attending with me, which helped with motivation. The upshot was that last Spring, over fifty years after I’d had my going-away bad-wishes for the Senior Certificate Irish exam from my teacher, I sat my GCSE exam in Irish. On Thursday of last week a letter plopped on my doormat. And while I’m normally the most reticent of men, I must at this point be frank and answer the question that’s balanced on the tip of your rosy little tongue: “What mark did you get?”  Answer [kicks the wall modestly]:  A*.  Picture me in my hallway leaping up and down for the next five minutes, pumping the air as I shout the name O’Hare and mix it with a selection of words that would make a flag-protester blush.

Which goes to show one of two things: (i) Revenge is indeed a dish best served cold - in this case very cold; or (ii) I am a pathetic grudge-holder who should sign himself into the nearest mental institution as soon as possible. 

You choose. 

Kieran Doherty: is it OK for the PSNI/MI5 to lie about him?

Interesting top story this morning on BBC Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster’s ‘Good Morning Ulster’  (no dodging that ‘Ulster’ in the BBC). It concerned Kieran Doherty, a Real IRA member who was shot dead and his body dumped by his own colleagues. The PSNI, using MI5 evidence, claimed that he was also involved in drug-peddling and that his family should not be entitled to compensation for his death. It now emerges that the PSNI/MI5 claims didn’t stand up and Doherty’s family has been awarded an undisclosed but substantial sum in compensation for his death. This, even though the original sum had been cut in half because he was a member of the Real IRA. This has vexed the UUP ex-leader Tom Elliott, who points to the much smaller sums paid to relatives of the security forces who lost their lives. 

Mmm. Let’s consider that last bit. Would it not make more sense to make enlarged awards to the relatives of security force people, if Tom or others feel they have been inadequately compensated? No matter how much or how little Doherty’s family gets, the security forces relatives will still have what they were given. The compensation sum paid to Doherty’s family doesn’t add or subtract a penny from what security forces’ families were paid. 

Then there’s that thing of cutting the compensation to Doherty’s family by fifty per cent. As Doherty’s uncle argued on the radio this morning,  Doherty’s relatives are innocent victims - regardless of what Doherty did, their grief is just as real. So if it is, compensation seems reasonable. Is someone saying the Doherty family’s grief is just 50% of normal grief? What daft reasoning.

Finally and most important: I was under the impression that lying in relation to evidence in such a case was a very serious matter - the kind of thing you could go to prison for.  It seems quite clear that the PSNI/MI5 cooked up some spurious story about drug-dealing that in reality was a pack of lies, in order to discredit Doherty. Yet Raido Uladh/Radio Ulster had no mention that this attempt to falsify the case might be punished. If you or I went into court and gave evidence that proved to be a pack of lies, we’d be done for perjury. It’d appear that the PSNI and MI5 can play fast and loose with truth and the notion of penalising them simply doesn’t arise. 

Has somebody taken the blind-fold off Justice and forgot to tell the rest of us?

The media: nostalgic for the violent past?

I was on Sunday Sequence this morning,  discussing the notion that today’s journalists secretly envy those who worked during the Troubles and tend to look for and exaggerate division to compensate. It was an interesting topic, although I think we strayed too far from it.

Anyway, here’s my own take on it.

Of course journalists today secretly lament that they weren’t around when the Troubles were at their height. Violence, injury and death from a human point of view are awful; from a journalistic point of view they’re great. That’s because the media thrive on bad news: no cameras out at JFK airport watching planes land safely and all that. People in general are hugely interested in the dramatic, the terrible. It thrills them. 

That’s why even the humblest newspaper tends to report goings-on in the local court. Swindling and embezzlement can be interesting but you don’t have to work as hard when you’re reporting crime, especially that involving violence or death. 

And it’s not as if our lives are affected by these disasters: most of us most of the time are blessedly free from dramatic violence. The fact is, our everyday lives are affected more by the economic recession but (i) most journalists know damn all about economics; and (ii) we’re more interested in gory stuff than we are in the competing theories of economics. 

As for the media telling it like it is, they don’t. They select a portion of how it is and then try to make it interesting. The more innately interesting the selection, the less work for the journalist.  When I was a child, I used to be amazed how my father listened to the 15-minutes of news on the wireless every day. How come the amount of things happening in the world always fitted that little 15-minute slot? Never more, never less. I soon learned that news is that portion of what’s going on which the media decide to tell me, and to which they give their own spin. 

So yes, I do think journalists hype up conflict here between parties and/or within parties. If they didn’t sex things up a bit, we’d maybe be bored and stop buying their product. 

Final thought: when we read about politics here, we read too much about the past and/or simplistic divisions. It’s really easy to get worked up about flag-flying. It’s a bit harder to get worked up about looking at those things we have in common - ground on which we might build. By and large the media ignore that - it’s too hard and they’re scared we’ll switch off.  

A night with Young Unionists: one reason to be cheerful and seven not.

I took part in a Young Unionist debate at the UUP headquarters in Belmont Road on Thursday last. It was, you could say, an occasion of two halves.

The first half - well no,  not so much first half as good part - was the civility and warmth with which I was greeted. It wasn’t a huge occasion (our audience was small but perfectly formed) and it wasn’t something that made any great demands on me, but people were repeated in their thanks for my participating. They were young people I enjoyed talking to and debating with. Which is how these things should be: a differing political stance should not interfere with decent relationships between political opponents. 

The not-so-good part...No, let me be frank. The depressing part was the view of politics  that emerged in the course of the debate and questions from the floor. The topic for debate was the SPADs bill and whether it was a good or a bad thing. In fact, the discussion ranged much more widely than that - back to the establishment of the UVF  and further. My reasons for being uncheerful?  I’ll try to list them as accurately as I can. If I get any wrong I’m sure I’ll be corrected.

1. The Troubles were the fault of a small group of violent republican criminals who murdered ruthlessly for several decades. 
2. The notion of any equivalence between the IRA and the state/British forces would be laughable if it weren’t so obscene. 
3. Terrorism is always wrong and to compare the IRA to the ANC, let alone Gerry Adams to Nelson Mandela (I didn’t actually), was ridiculous. 
4. The notion of commemorating  IRA  dead with commemorating British army dead was outrageous. So too was the comparison of dressing up of children in IRA uniform/regalia  with the Boys’ Brigade (I did actually).
5. The SPADs bill was a very good thing and had signalled to republicans that, having been elected to Stormont, they couldn’t just lower a rope-ladder and winch up their hard-line elements at will and give them jobs. 
6. The conditionality (yes, I hate the word too) of republicans in saying that violence should be suspended now but leaving open the possibility of its resumption in the future was outrageous. 
7. The formation of the UVF and its threat of violence to the British state was different from the IRA’s violence against the British state because the UVF’s was a defensive threat. It said ‘Here we are, come and get us, but if you do, we’ll use all means to resist’.  The IRA, on the other hand, threatened and engaged in violence against the legally-constituted government of the state. 

So what’s depressing about all that? Well, it’s that these young men (mainly young men) were full of suspicion of republicans, full of resentment at what they had done, appeared to believe the state played no part in creating the conditions for conflict, and saw no validity of any kind in the notion of Ireland, north and south, as a country. 

In terms of attitude, it could have been 1954 or 1961 - things would be fine if republicans would abandon their violent ways and  promise never ever  to revert to them again (that’s the conditionality thing), and drop this foolish notion of national unity. Meanwhile, the SPADs bill would soften Sinn Féin’s cough for them and would give no succour of any kind to dissident republicans. It would also let Sinn Féin know that because they’d been elected didn’t mean they could  enlist the hardline elements in republicanism to join them and work at Stormont.

In a way, the niceness of the people articulating these views made it all the more depressing.  Sinn Féin have a policy of outreach to unionism. Judging from Thursday night, lads, you have your work cut out for you. 

It takes two

It takes two to tango.  Try to tango on your own and you’ll end up looking seriously stupid. Maybe it’s the normal sadness of Summer’s near-end that’s infecting me, but I have a sense of one-person tango beginning to emerge in our little society. 

The other morning, for example, I heard a man on The Nolan Show  ringing in to express his outrage that Nolan hadn’t been sufficiently ‘neutral’.  How’s that? Well, apparently Stephen had John O’Dowd on earlier in the programme, alongside a unionist politician.Stephen, the caller said, had allowed O’Dowd to compare British commemoration of their war dead on Remembrance Sunday with Irish commemoration of their war dead in, for example, Castlederg! The man was livid: he didn’t expect any better from the likes of O’Dowd,  but that Stephen Nolan should have allowed him, unchallenged, to draw the comparison!  

Shortly after that I read a response to a blog I’d written about bridge-building.  I’d noted that Sinn Féin’s declared policy was to build bridges and reconciliation between former adversaries. Hogwash, my blog-respondent said in so many words. How did Castlederg fit into such a policy?

Finally there’s Peter Robinson with his hand-brake or is it commitment-breaking turn  regarding the peace centre at the Long Kesh/the Maze site.  The First Minister was going back on his word but that, Edwin Poots explained, wasn’t his fault,  leaderless Sinn Féin were to blame for that.  First their attitude to Union flag flying in Belfast City Hall showed poor leadership, and now their support for this Castlederg commemoration of IRA volunteers killed in the Troubles showed poorer leadership still.  

Can you see the common thread? It’s the pride the British have in their ‘fighting men’, living or dead.  In some ways you might say such pride is understandable.  The way they re-invaded the Falklands/Malvinas, their role in Iraq, SAS activities here and in other parts of the world  -  these are cited as reasons for holding the British soldier in high esteem. 

Except the three respondents in the cases I’ve cited go beyond pride in British soldiery. The Nolan Show  caller was appalled that someone should dare to speak in one breath of the British military war dead and IRA war dead.  Likewise my blog respondent.  The honouring of IRA war dead in Castlederg was cited as evidence that republicans were not interested in reconciliation, even though they agreed to a rerouting which avoided the  British army cenotaph in the centre of the town. And finally Peter Robinson, in his 12-page letter, declared  the Long Kesh/the Maze peace centre agreement impossible because republicans had commemorated their war dead in Castlederg.  

At the heart of these responses is a refusal to countenance any comparison between the British army and the IRA.  Why? Because the British army are proper soldiers whereas the IRA were mere terrorists.  But hold on. Terrorism is a military tactic, a methodology, not a philosophy.  It’s a tactic advocated and employed by ‘fighting men’ down the decades - George Washington, Che Guevara, Michael Collins, the SAS - even Winston Churchill:   “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

And I haven’t even mentioned the British army’s willingness to work with loyalist terrorists groups in the many cases of collusion here. Now let me be clear.  I don’t doubt that many unionists are still hurting from losses during the Troubles, as are many nationalists and republicans. But maybe the unionist indignation at comparisons of the IRA with ‘their’ soldiers has a deeper motivation. Maybe unionism’s refusal to equate the IRA war dead with British war dead springs from unionism’s unwillingness to equate living republicans with living unionists. 

Now there’s a thought that stops the music and freezes the dancers in their tracks. 

Have a Bushmills? No thanks

Say ‘Bushmills’ and what do you think? Whiskey, of course. Black Bush and all that.  Irish whiskey, what’s more. Been going for centuries. But Bushmills is well known for something more than whiskey. Something that leaves a sourer taste in the mouth. It’s called bigotry. There was a good instance of it recently. But bear with me - the story’s not all black. 

It seems that the Chair of Moyle District Council, Cara McShane, was to be at an unveiling ceremony in Bushmills recently. She was met by a protest group, led by Bushmills loyalist Derwyn Brewster, who is the chair of something called the Bushmills Residents and Environmental Group. They were angry and protesting, he said, because Sinn Féin were attacking Orange culture. The police had to hold back protestors from crossing the River Bush to where the unveiling ceremony was taking place, but they managed to unfurl a banner saying ‘No Sinn Féin in Bushmills’ and shouted insults at the Council delegation. 

So what about the chink of light? That came in the form of DUP councillor Robert McIlroy, who had the courage to stand by the council Chair during the protest. In fact, Chairperson McShane described him as ‘a real hero’ for his backbone, and for putting his head above the parapet. She added that remarks posted on Facebook about her and Councillor McIlroy were disgusting. 

There’s a pattern emerging here. Belfast’s Lord Mayor Mairtin O Muilleoir a few weeks ago was met with even more hostile protest, which ended in an attack  which left him and several PSNI officers in need of medical treatment. What we’re seeing now is legally-elected public representatives being hounded, insulted and even attacked if they show their faces in parts of their constituency. This is done in the name of defending loyalist culture. 

That’s the bad news. The good news is that a DUP councillor like Robert McIlroy exists. He said there was ‘no reason in the whole world’ why the Chair and Vice-Chair shouldn’t go anywhere in the Moyle district. It was time, he said, to get rid of the ‘broken-ness’ and time to get rid of all bigotry. Councillor Willie Graham (Ulster Unionist) said he’d like to ‘strongly condemn’ the Bushmills protest.

Nationalists and republicans sometimes feel uneasy when faced with men like McIlroy and Graham. They are aware of the political courage required for speaking out but they feel that to praise them may add to the hatred their response might arouse in the unionist community.  That’s to undervalue both the courageous men and the unionist community. There are unionists - a considerable number, I believe - who are sick to death with the insistence on tired, nasty attacks on everything that doesn’t fit a narrow vision of the world. People like McIlroy and Graham have put their shoulders to a door which could open on a door on a better future, not just in Moyle, but throughout this state. They have guts and vision, and they are in fact serving the interests of the Union much more effectively than their benighted colleagues.