Gimme that ol'-time cliché...

I’m in Sicily  at the moment for a short holiday. It’s  beautifully sunny, the people are friendly, prices reasonable - and yet I’m slightly disappointed. Where are the sheep with the bells attached to their necks, where are the clouds of dust rising from mountain tracks, where is Michael Corleone?  Isn’t Sicily supposed to be the home of Cosa Nostra/the Mafia/whatever you’re having yourself?

I guess this kind of clichéd thinking is similar to that of visitors to Ireland who get a bit tetchy when they find the waiter serving them in a hotel has a Polish or Lithuanian accent. Some tourists even complain openly - it disrupts their whole Irish experience.  And the same with some visitors to Belfast or other places of the north. Where are the burnt-out cars, the furious rioters, the gun battles?  How come walking through the centre of Belfast feels like walking through the centre of virtually any city in Britain or Ireland?  

Hundreds of years ago the French writer Montaigne, who lived in a time of great turbulence, made the point that even when there are wars and pestilence and disaster, most people most of the time go on living life, doing the ordinary things - cooking, working, eating, sleeping, quarreling, loving. 

I know what he means. When I lived in Canada during the 1970s, the impression through the media was that Ireland, from Malin Head to Mizzen Head, was aflame with religious war. It’s only when I returned that I realised most people accepted being frisked when they entered a store, evacuating when a bomb scare was announced, being stopped again and again by uniformed men with English accents.They could live with the Troubles because in the end they were insulated from them. Which is why many people condemned those  caught up in the Troubles. Why couldn’t they be reasonable like those of us who were outside the war zones and judge these things objectively? Such slow learners, really.

You’ll have to excuse me now. Our room has just been cleaned and I must  check if my bed contains a horse’s head. 

Pots, kettles and bombs

Dr Richard Haass, a former senior State Department official under Republican presidents who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations, told reporters  on Monday that cruise missile strikes on “anything associated with Syrian chemical weapons capabilities, storage depots or potentially the troops that are believed to be associated with their use” are most likely. Additionally, Haass predicted Syrian command-and-control facilities also could be targeted. “I would be in favour of a fairly heavy use of cruise missiles”  in Syria. This he thinks would “discourage the Syrians from using chemical weapons again”. 

Quite right, Virginia. This is the same Dr Richard Haass who is coming here shortly to tell us how to solve our problems. In light of the above I don’t think I can tell you how much I hope he’s on our side. 

Meanwhile, it’s useful to remember the US’s record on the use of chemical weapons.  Napalm was used by Americans in Vietnam from 1965-1972.  Napalm is composed of polysteyrene, hydrocarbone benzene and gasoline. This gets you a jelly-like mess which, once ignited, sticks to practically anything and burns for up to ten minutes. On the human body it produces unbearable pain and almost always death. It was at first used by American troops on the ground armed with flame-throwers; later B-52 bombers dropped napalm over huge areas. It’s reckoned that 20,000,000 gallons of this toxin were dropped on Vietnam. (Yes, that is the correct number of zeros after the 2.)

Has the world gone collectively mad?  A man who is in favour of dropping bombs on Syria, from a country which killed around 2,000,000 Vietnamese, let alone the numbers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, is coming here to show us how to put past hatreds aside and create a better tomorrow? Pinch me, someone. I know this is a bad dream. 

Finally,  three questions. When (if ever) did Britain and/or the US use chemical weapons?   Does the US store chemical weapons at present? Does Britain?  Just askin’, like.

    

Time for the DUP to know that actions have consequences

Why did Peter Robinson, and him in Florida, send a letter that threatens the very existence of the Stormont institutions? Maybe it was being too long out in the Florida sun. Or maybe there’s a clue in something he said earlier this year: “One of the elements of leadership that is always important is to know just how far ahead of the pack that you should be. And it is all right having great ideas and great wisdom on these matters but you have to be able to bring people along with you.”

That’s a leader talking. But are those the words of a shrewd pragmatist who knows the limitations of power,  or the voice of one who says “There goes the mob, I am their leader, I must quickly follow”?

Alas, it looks more like the second rather than the first.  For weeks now, various top DUP people, particularly Arlene Foster, have been loudly critical of the republican commemorative march held in Castlederg earlier this summer. In razor-sharp contrast, there hasn’t been a peep about loyalist rioting in Belfast City Centre which left over 50 PSNI officers injured. This isn’t a case of the DUP leadership having great ideas but the grassroots refuses to stomach them. This is a case of the DUP leadership being bereft of ideas and  its right-wing elements leading it by the nose. We saw the same thing in Belfast City Hall on Monday night, when the DUP couldn’t bring itself to support a motion condemning the Woodvale attack on Belfast’s Lord Mayor. 

Instead, Peter and Co have chosen to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to illegal activities (yes, Virginia, it is against the law to attack the police or assault a mayor) while using a megaphone to trumpet its outrage at the totally-legal republican parade in Castlederg. In fact, Peter Robinson used Castlederg as part-excuse for his Long Kesh/Maze U-turn.  He knows (I hope)  that his U-turn could be a deal-breaker for the whole Long Kesh development. He appears less aware that his U-turn could break the whole power-sharing deal.

How so? Well, let’s consider the options open to Sinn Féin. They either agree to go along with the DUP rethink and abandon the notion of a peace centre at Long Kesh; or they insist that the DUP have crossed a red line  - gone back on its pledged word - and that working with such people is impossible.  Martin McGuinness could say “OK, put Stormont back in moth-balls again, there’s no point in trying to work with a party whose face is so stonily set against power-sharing”.

I’d favour  the second response, for the good reason that it’d force the DUP to  face a choice. Either it accepts its equal part   in the governing of what Joel Taggart last week  on Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster fondly called  “our wee country”, or they face the massive loss of income and power that must come with a collapse of Stormont. And as the good Dr Samuel Johnson said,  there's nothing like the prospect of being hanged to concentrate the mind.

Wasn’t it  Arlene Foster herself who warned Sinn Féin to be careful what they wished for regarding a border poll, since they might just get one? Well indeed, Arlene. Maybe have a word with Peter so he doesn’t wish too hard for no shrine-to-terrorists at Long Kesh.  He could get his wish, and a whole lot more as well. 

Conall packs it in

And so farewell, Conal McDevitt MLA - or should that be ‘Slan go foill’ - G’bye for now?  In retrospect it seems inevitable that he had to walk the plank, but there were moments after that payments-to-his-wife’s-company thing broke, I thought he’d manage to tough it out. Or brazen it out,  if you’ d prefer that word. After all,  Peter Robinson came through the hell-fire of Irisgate and sure  now you’d think it never had happened. I know the two men had quite different problems but they both did have problems, big ones.  Peter made it across the fiery coals, Conall rolled his eyes and hopped off the sole-scorcher half-way. 

For me it’s another case of liking the person whose political view by no means coincide with my own. I liked/like Conall. I’ve never met him but I liked his fluency in interview and I liked his general good humour and I liked the sort of... open quality he had. Let’s say if all our MLAs had a similar civilized demeanour, Stormont would be a better place. On the other hand, he was caught with his trousers round his ankles. No matter what explanation for this state of undress, it was still unavoidably the case that his wife’s company received thousands of pounds when it shouldn’t have. The plank beckoned. 

What effect will his leaving have? There’ll be those in the SDLP who will have to restrain themselves from breaking into a tap-dance at the sight of his departing back. From what I’ve heard, Conall wasn’t at the top of everyone in the SDLP’s Christmas card list. Grumblings about the frequency of his media appearances, until some people were beginning to think of Conall and the SDLP as synonymous. Uh-uh. Not good.  That’s not to say there aren’t people rarin’ to fill his shoes (step forward Claire Hanna - no, not you, Fergal McKinney - once was quite enough). But to have someone who was thought of as a prospective leader of the party plunge from the skies must induce a sickening feeling in the collective SDLP stomach. 

A number of people have asked “What’ll he do now?” It’s no joke to lose an MLA job with nothing else lined up. But Conall was a PR man before (even if it was for the constantly-shrinking Labour Party in the south) so there’s no reason why he couldn’t go back to that kind of work. Still,  while admitting that I’m a lousy fortune-teller, I have a funny little feeling we haven’t seen the last of  Conall McDevitt in northern politics. Or even in the SDLP. So au revoir, Conall, rather than goodbye,  slan go foill rather than slan leat. 

About not getting it

One of the most revealing statements of a summer full of revealing statements was that by DUP councillor William Humphrey. He said that the Lord Mayor would not have been attacked at Woodvale if he’d listened to them. How so? Because he said people in Woodvale would not tolerate a visit from someone who’d been involved in tearing down the flag from Belfast City Hall. 

Whoa. That’s the democratic vote that was made at Belfast City Hall to fly the union flag on 18 specific occasions, as is the case at Stormont. But to suggest such a thing, much less vote for it, is totally unacceptable to Mr Humphrey.  So much for democratic politics.

The fact is, there are two communities here (OK, quite a few actually, but two main communities). One has allegiance to the Union flag, one to the Irish tricolour. What to do? What would be fair? Well, a half-wit on a bicycle could suggest that either both flags should be flown or none. But no. The agreement the Lord Mayor and his party accepted was that the Irish tricolour should not be flown at all and that  the Union flag be flown 18 times a year. That sounds to me like a decision tilted in favour of unionism.

Uh-uh. It’s outrageous, because it’s not totally, completely and without murmur made a 100% unionist decision. 

It’s a hard thing to say, but there are elements of  unionism that simply don’t get the idea of parity. I got a strong sense of that when I visited the UUP HQ and suggested that there was some sort of equivalence between republican honouring of their dead and unionist honouring of their dead. I believe William Humphrey was sincere when he said what he did about the Lord Mayor being to blame for the attack on him at Woodvale. I believe some unionist are sincere when they say the flying of the union flag 18 times a year is an outrage.  But being sincere, guys, isn’t good enough. Half the population here thinks differently and like it or lump it, you’re going to have to accept them and recognise the things that are important to them. Otherwise you’ll find yourself going back on your Long Kesh/Woodvale word and keeping this “wee country of ours” (copyright Joel Taggart, BBC)  an economic and dysfunctional desert. 

Would you like a good smack?

I once smacked my daughter. She was the first of our four children and she’d done something I told her not to, so I smacked her. She howled, her mother appeared and comforted her, and I exited feeling like a bullying brute. That was the first and last time I struck any of my children (Addendum to any of them reading this: so far...)

I hadn’t thought about whether I should or shouldn’t smack her - it was an instinctive reaction. Or rather one I’d learned from my own upbringing, where at home and at school smack and strapping and worse were the norm. And I remember in the early 1980s, when physical punishment was still permitted in schools here, there were teachers who warned that if a ban was placed on such punishment, teachers would be left helpless and an appalling vista would open up. But it hasn’t. That’s not to say that teachers don’t struggle on a daily basis to cope with youngsters who think it’s their right to say and do the first thing that comes into their head. But thinking about teaching and learning and the respect that one human being should show another has evolved. Schools manage.

The Irish Time  this morning notes that the southern government is under increased pressure to introduce a ban on smacking children  at home as well as at school. At present it’s legal for parents to strike their children. The Minister for Children in the south, Frances Fitzgerald, says that in recent years “considerable progress” has been made in “encouraging parents to use alternative non-violent forms of discipline”.  Frances Fitzgerald of course wants to keep as many of her voting constituency as possible on-side. What might be better would be if she were to forget about considerable progress and the pressure from Europe, and ask herself if she thinks big people hitting small people is a good thing. Then act accordingly. 

It’s not that most parental chastisement is physically dangerous or that parents don’t think they’re acting in the child’s best interest. It’s a failure of imagination. As with the plague of marching in this jurisdiction, the question that needs to be asked is “So you’d also be OK with things happening the other way round?” Few Orange marchers would agree to have thousands of republican marches throughout the six counties every year, and few parents would agree that it’d be all right for their children to strike them when angry. It's not rocket science.  Simply apply the do-unto-others-etc. rule.

A man without malice

It’s funny the way one death can eclipse another. On 22 November 1963, Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis both died. That same day John F Kennedy was assassinated. Most people remember not just the day of Kennedy’s death but what they were doing at the time. Few could tell you when Huxley or Lewis died, let alone what they were doing. 

I experienced this overshadowing more closely than I would have wished at the weekend.  Along with the rest of the world I was assimilating the death of Seamus Heaney on Friday.  On Saturday morning I was in the BBC in Belfast at 7.15,  about to go on air with a newspaper review. My mobile rang and the screen showed it was my wife. I knew at once it was something serious - normally on a Saturday she wouldn’t be awake at that time, let alone calling me. Her voice was clotted with unhappiness: her sister’s husband, John Delahunty,  had died suddenly.

They’d been on a holiday in Spain. They’d stayed near the place where they’d spent their honeymoon some forty years earlier. It had been a happy return - swimming, sunbathing, remembering. Their flight brought them back to Dublin airport at midnight on Friday. Trolleys loaded, they’d headed through the crowd for the exit; and as is the way of Gavin women, his wife was ahead of him by several yards. Then she heard frightened cries and someone calling “Help that man!” When she finally pushed through her husband was lying on the ground. There was blood coming from his nose and mouth. When she took his pulse he was dead. 

It’s easy to let the passing of the famous overshadow the loss of what some  foolishly called ‘ordinary people’.  John Delahunty lived a quiet life. He provided for his wife and children, he liked a drink (we once famously polished off a full bottle of brandy between us), he had a fine singing voice which he rarely used, he disliked ostentation and hated being the centre of attention. As his wife said, he would have detested having a  rubber-necking crowd around him in his final moments.

“Just another death” you say. True. But for him and those who loved him it was the most significant, the most calamitous of deaths.  I knew him for nearly fifty years and I never heard him speak ill of anyone. A quiet life ending in a sudden death, surrounded by strangers who, having seen what there was to see, moved on. John Donne had John Delahunty as much as Seamus Heaney in mind when he wrote: “Each man’s death diminishes me/For I am involved in mankind/Therefore, send not to know/For whom the bell tolls/ It tolls for thee.”

Slán abhaile, John, agus ar dheis Dé go raibh d’anam.