This picture was taken at midnight on the Summer Solstice at White Park Bay in County Antrim, looking North, with a little help from a half moon. (On a nikon d70s at iso 200, f 1.8 and shutter speed of about 2 seconds.)
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I was standing in Guildhall Square in Derry yesterday with 12,000 people listening to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s apology for the killings of 14 innocent people on the Bloody Sunday parade of January 30 1972.
Judging by the rapturous applause from the crowd, most were as surprised as I was by the frankness of the statement. I have always understood that, whatever the lip service paid to law and order, the army was effectively immune. So this contradicted that understanding.
However, my prejudices about the army are grounded in experience during the early Troubles of witnessing the bullying manner and thuggery of the Parachute Regiment in particular and other regiments too.
I never had any doubt that the dead of Bloody Sunday were murdered, and I believe that many civilians were murdered by soldiers in Ballymurphy and Springhill and other areas.
Mr Cameron was conceding that the paras who killed on Bloody Sunday had disgraced the army and their country but insisting there would be no other open ended enquiries and that he believed the record of the army in Northern Ireland was a proud one. His concession is limited.
Perhaps he is allowing that the killers of Bloody Sunday will be the scapegoats for Britain’s excesses during the Troubles. And if the Republican community is of a mind to offer similar scapegoats, he appears to be hinting that the head of Martin McGuinness would be welcome.
Posted in Politics, Northern Ireland | 3 Comments »
Ed Moloney
Voices From The Grave
Two Men’s War in Ireland
Faber and Faber
ISBN 978-0-571-25168-1
A lot of courage went into this book so it should be better.
I want to concentrate on the first part, which is unfair to David
Ervine whose interview completes the book, but the story of Brendan
Hughes has been more poltiically relevant.
Brendan Hughes risked his standing within the IRA’s collective memory to give an account of the armed campaign and what he saw as its betrayal by Gerry Adams.
As a committed IRA militant over a period of decades, with uncounted
killings under his belt, he was in a position to tell us much more
than he did.
He will have known that he was likely to be dismissed as a traitor by
some and reviled as a coward by others when the story he told to
Boston College was published.
And that is how it has been.
He has been accused of whinging that big boys made him do bad things, a reading of the book which sees Hughes eschewing his own moral responsibility. By this version, he now regrets having killed people and is unable to face the reality that he didn’t get what he thought he was fighting for.
Actually there is little sense in the book that Hughes regretted
anything that he did, apart from ending the first Hunger Strike to
save lives.
There is also very little indication that he personally did anything bad at all.
He says that he wanted to kill as many soldiers and policemen as
possible and get as many bombs into Belfast as he could. But far from pleading innocence of bad deeds by attributing the blame to others who directed him, he does not actually own up to anything.
And, harsh as it may seem to say this, it is because we never have an account of Hughes actually killing anyone that we can’t judge him from his words.
For example, in the story about the murder of Jean McConville, Hughes attributes the decision to ‘disappear’ her to Gerry Adams. But he says he heard this from Ivor Bell. He never puts himself close enough to the decision to kill her to give that claim authority.
As it stands, it is hearsay.
Now, of course, Brendan Hughes may know more than he is owning up to.
He will have felt a responsibility to defend those close to the
action and he was making some concession to the IRA’s requirement of secrecy.
But it’s still just hearsay.
As one of the key leaders of the IRA in Belfast at the most violent
period of the Troubles he had blood on his hands. But this account
puts him at a distance from the action, and that is ironic given that
his charge against Gerry Adams is that he denies what he did.
The contrast offered between Adams and Hughes is that the one denies his IRA past and the other owns up to his and is proud of it.
But Brendan Hughes does not own up to very much.
And the reader will suspect that that is because he wants to think
well of his IRA career and he wants us to think well of him as a
person.
So we have the old myth that the IRA defended the community, was loved by the community and that Brendan was a hero to his people.
Moloney has responsibilities in this too.
The account of the riots in August 1969, in which Brendan Hughes
decided he needed to arm himself and defend the people is just the old standard republican baloney that the Catholic Falls was attacked by the Loyalists. I thought this was dispensed with years ago.
The fact that the rioting was initiated on the Falls Road in an
organised effort to burn out Hastings Street police station, and that
this attack was kept up for hours before there was any shooting at all by any side, or any intrusion of Loyalists onto the Falls, undermines any claim that those who were there have to being innocents caught unawares.
A lot of men on the Falls that night were up for a rattle and it seems
likely that Brendan was one of them.
And if there are questions about the integrity of Hughes’s incomplete
account and of Moloney’s grasp of the events of that month there is
also a weakness in the main thesis that Hughes develops.
Gerry Adams is a smart man, no doubt and an extremely devious one too, but is it really plausible that he singled handedly dismantled the
IRA? If it is true, then he is a genius, both tactically and
charismatically. Maybe he is. We should be all the more wary of him
then.
But there never was a prospect of Brendan Hughes’ dream being
fulfilled, of the IRA forcing the reunification of Ireland.
How would Brendan have preferred that that reality be incorporated
into the political evolution of the IRA?
There would have been integrity in the IRA saying that the cause was lost and urging others not to pursue further armed struggle to achieve what could not be achieved by those means. That would have been a surrender. It’s what defeated armies usually do.
The Adams way was to dress up the surrender as a victory. That he has got away with that, largely, is appalling, but it’s not hard to see
how many a republican would enjoy the joke.
Yet, for all these criticisms, this is the most important history of
the IRA yet written.
It gives us a flavour of life in the prisons and how IRA OCs at times
abused and brutalised their own men.
It gives us the appalling account of the murder of Paddy Joe Crawford, hanged by men who were effectively made to collude in their own intimidation – for why else was Paddy Joe killed but to warn others not to break under questioning.
But more than anything, this book and the promise of others to follow, as other interviewees die and their accounts are released, puts a bomb under the paramilitary projects to write the history of the Troubles on their own terms.
The simple, widely endorsed account, of how the IRA had to do what it did and made Ireland a better place, has been refuted and will be refuted over and over again down the decades to come.
As will other versions too.
The creation of such an archive by Boston College was an act of
courage and brilliance which leaves no liar safely proofed against
disclosure in the future.
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It’s not hard to imagine the jaws dropping onto desktops when the
letter arrived from Culture Minister Nelson McCausland asking museum
heads to pay a bit more attention to matters of vital concern to him
like the Ulster Scots heritage, the Orange Order and the origin of the
universe.
On reflection, museum managers might have considered a range of
options short of telling him to get stuffed.
Mr McCausland’s view is that a museum should reflect the culture and
beliefs of the community it serves. In seeking to refute this, the
museums might seek to actively explain the world to a community with
reference to the gaps in the understanding of even its leading
cultural funders.
In short, if Mr McCausland wants the university to offer discussion of
Intelligent Design theory, let them do it. There are a lot of people
among us who believe that religion can still hold out against
scientific discovery. They would have been on the side of the Pope
against Gallileo and they still think they can refute Darwin. They
want to retain the conviction within scientific institutions like
universities and museums that God created the world in seven days.
Well, let them try.
The first comfort for museum heads is that Intelligent Design theory
is already a concession to science. It is a relaxation of the demand
by religious creationists that the Book of Genesis be taken as a
sufficient account of the emergence of the universe, life and
consciousness.
The court cases in the United States, around the demand for the
teaching of Intelligent Design , were attempts by religious
fundamentalists to argue science with scientists, conceding in effect
that there was no point in trying to impress them with scripture.
Scientists and secularists saw this as a threat. It was in fact, the
movement of religious fundamentalists on to ground on which scientists
can defeat them, if they are confident of the strength of their case.
Why shouldn’t we have an exhibition on Intelligent Design
incorporating a discussion of the arguments around it in the museum?
People like Nelson McCausland might soon discover that there is no
comfort in it for them. If they are hopeful that Intelligent Design
restores the Christian explanation of the Universe to them, then they
may be well served by having the full case and its implications laid
out for them.
The problem for creationists is that their argument, if won, might
only establish that an intelligence initiated the Big Bang.
For all they know, that intelligent being might have been killed in the blast.
He, she or it may reside still in another universe and have lost all
interest in this one. There are no grounds for supposing that that
being knows about us or has any benign intentions towards us. There
are no grounds even for supposing that it is an infinite Deity. There
may be another universe in which children spark off Big Bangs with
their chemistry sets. They may not even know that they are doing it.
They will live in a different time frame so our whole span of
existence in this universe may be just a blink to them.
The problem for Intelligent Design freaks is that they don’t read
enough science fiction.
Rationalists might say this is absurd. But we are already making black
holes under Geneva ourselves with the CERN project, so what is so
implausible about an intelligence more advanced than our own
conducting similar or more radical experiments elsewhere?
What Intelligent Design believers do read – some of them – is the
theories of John Polkinghorne, a scientist and minister of the Church
of England who won the £1m Templeton Prize for research that
reconciles science and religion.
The usual experience of religion in the contest with science is that
literal interpretation of scripture loses every encounter. Then those
who continue to insist that religion retains lost ground begin to
sound more desperate and absurd in the secular world. Scientists feel
little need to go on arguing points that they feel that they have won,
like natural selection. Some scientists like Richard Dawkins continue
to wave the victory in the faces of the religious defeated, but there
is no scientific need for them to do so.
Polkinghorne said that the universe looks like a ‘put up job’. If the
pull of gravity was fractionally greater than it is, the universe
would compact into a hard ball; if less, it would scatter like vapour.
It has to be just right if you are to have solar systems and planets.
Look at the Earth. Without a wobble in its revolutions there would be
no seasons and without seasons no cycle of nature. Without our
unstable crust there would have been no volcanoes and we would be a
ball of ice, but the instability has to be just enough to allow life,
not enough to destroy it.
So, what is the scientific answer to the perfect ‘just-rightness’ of
this universe for life? One answer, seriously put forward, is that
there are millions of failed universes, or universes that turned out
differently, and that this is the one that by chance is just suited to
us. That explains our survival agains the odds.
In other words, the answer is a call to faith in the existence of the
unknowable; the sort of thing that religious people come up with.
The difficulty in this debate is that both the religious and the
scientific contenders have cranks on their side; adamant Christians
who think the Bible tells them everything they need to know and ardent
rationalists who fantasise that the job of explaining the universe is
complete.
What about an exhibition at the Ulster Museum that acknowledges the
mystery of our being here as mortal but self conscious beings in an
unlikely universe?
Would Nelson be happy with that?
I suspect he would want to see models of humans hunting dinosaurs, but
it is easy to deny him myths for which there are no evidence.
But just because we have a crank for a culture minister doesn’t mean
that the unexplained universe shouldn’t enthrall us.
And some smarty pants in the museum is bound to agree that a serious
discussion of intelligent design theory would tick the right box to
get Nelson off his back.
Posted in Culture and Society, Politics, Northern Ireland, Religion | 3 Comments »
If you are missing Belfast you might like to take a walk around it with me on my new slideshow, History Behind Bars, currently showing at The Street.
Posted in Belfast, Culture and Society | 2 Comments »
Tim Brannigan’s new book, Where Are You Really From? recounts the life of a black boy born in Belfast who became a Republican activist.
Is having two identities a freedom or a burden? That’s a question I explored with him and others in similar double identity situations.
Posted in Belfast, Culture and Society, Politics, Northern Ireland | Leave a Comment »
I have often sat out in the garden in sunshine and marvelled at how accustomed I had become to what you’d expect would be a major disruption; having to break off conversation, for instance, as another roar descends.
Now that the planes have stopped the peace is creepy.
Others – many of my Facebook friends among them- are remarking on how pleasant it is to have this silence. Well, yes. I go on holiday for silence like this. I pay good money for it, but I live in a city and I expect a city to sound like a city. And if it doesn’t, then something in me reacts instinctively, a bit like the cowboy in a hundred films who notices that the war drums have stopped; far more ominous than the drums themselves.
There is no point pretending that our world hasn’t changed. OK, the threat of volcanic ash drifting down from Iceland is obviously one we should have anticipated. What else has Iceland got, apart from volcanoes?
But a perfectly inevitable disruption has arrived and reminded us how complacent we have been. The change is that we can not be so complacent again.
I have been planning to fly to Barcelona at the weekend. The weather forecast says I might be able to get away. Can it assure me that I will get back; that the winds over Ireland or Spain or the skies in between won’t have closed the route again while I’m gone?
For now we anxiously await the reopening of our airports, but how stable will air traffic seem even when flights are cleared for take-off?
On this little archipelago off the west coast of Europe we have been obsessed with the winds. If we didn’t have weather forecasts with every news programme telling us what way the winds are blowing and whether they are carrying rain, snow or clearing the way for ridges of High Pressure (Yo!) we would feel isolated and deprived. Now we need Angie and Celia to keep us informed about ash flow.
It is intrinsic to our lives as islanders that we take the first buffetings from arctic storms and that we also receive balmy southern breezes that bring whiffs of the Azores to us. Our collective mood draws on the weather, as the weather draws on the wind. Now we are reminded of our dependency on the wind and our freedom to travel abroad seems once again as reliant on its force and direction as in the days of sailing ships.
We can not feel secure any more in booking flights abroad and must always consider the danger that we will be stranded; certainly as long as this volcano blows, but in the long term too, considering that there will be other volcanoes.
The question we are confronted with is whether our modern technologically based life style can be maintained on a fickle and unstable planet.
We had been anticipating that the great reverses of our growth and development might come from climate change or awesome calamity, an asteroid strike or a super Volcano like Toba in Sumatra, which deforested India and started an ice age. And we have no assurance that something like it won’t happen again.
But we enjoy the comfortable delusion that we don’t really suffer natural disasters in Ireland. The tectonic plates grind each other only thousands of miles from us.
We have the evidence all around us of volcanic seizures reshaping the landscape, but we all know that’s not going to happen again, don’t we?
Who’s afraid of Slemish or Knocklayde?
But now we do know that a fundamental or our lifestyle, air travel, can be stopped by a minor volcano, far away, and we are suddenly much more vulnerable than we ever imagined.
For the moment we must plan our practical adaptations. The wind may scatter the ash back north and release us, but air travel has suffered already. The fall out will be financial. Travel must now become more expensive to cover the losses. Some companies will fold.
And the public will remember which companies looked after them and kept them informed and which didn’t.
I find that I can not cancel my flight to Barcelona; but can only transfer the payment to another flight some other time. That’s Easyjet and online booking for you. The stranded and those who have had to change their plans will want to be sure in future that they are dealing with people not computers, and a company that can adapt immediately to problems like these.
Coming after a winter of delays and on top of the ludicrious policing of the liquids in our hand luggage, people must be starting to wonder if travel by air is, after all, worth it at any price.
It may be as expensive to holiday in Ireland but at least you have a better chance of getting home afterwards.
In the long term we have to adapt philosophically and incorporate our new understanding of our vulnerability into our world view.
Humanity has spread over the earth like an infestation, with incredible rapidity, and that recent growth has relied on technology of a kind that can be disrupted by minor and routine natural events; indeed, if we think in terms of Nature’s routines, we have to include climatic and seismic disruptions that we could not survive.
We can not defeat Nature, so perhaps we just have to be more stoical, like our grandparents were. Some days you just have to accept that you are going nowhere.
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A few private thoughts will have circulated among churchmen and their
critics when the news came through on Tuesday night that Cardinal Sean
Brady had been rushed to hospital.
Those who love and defend the Cardinal, as many do, will have worried
that this was the outworking of the pressure put on him by media
manipulators and scandal mongers who have never understood the
Catholic church or known what a good man he is.
Others will have thought, more deviously; Isn’t this convenient?
At 70 the Cardinal does not look like a spry and durable man but he
climbed the pilgrim mountain Croagh Patrick just a few years ago and
he may have a more robust body under that black suit than is suggested
by his ambling manner.
He is not due to retire until he is 75 but an early retirement on
health grounds might be the best diplomatic response to the pressure
on him to resign.
In 1975 Fr Sean Brady, as he then was, administered an oath of secrecy
to young people who had been abused by the horrific Brendan Smyth.
Smyth was one of the most prolific predators on children to have
emerged from a church that has, we now know, never been short of the
type.
Cardinal Brady told his congregation on St Patrick’s Day that he would
take the season of Lent to reflect upon his position. That now extends
to Pentecost. Other bishops similarly tainted by their association
with inadequate episcopal procedures for curtailing paedophiles -
usually by shifting them to other parishes – had offered to stand
down.
Brady was heartened that his congregation applauded him and he said
that we wanted to consider whether the church still had a place for a
wounded healer, comparing himself to St Patrick.
If this seemed not the right tone for a man who was conceding that he
had done wrong, few in the pews seem to have been offended.
One of the concerns of many Catholics in Armagh is that Sean Brady is
being reviled for doing what any other priest of his standing at the
times would have done, he followed the instructions of his bishop, to
whom he had sworn obedience.
Another concern is the old rivalry btween Dublin and Armagh over who
leads the Irish church. Armagh is proud to be the seat of the Primate
and to have a primate who is a cardinal. Some would worry that the
centre of gravity of the irish church would shift south and that the
historic ecclesiastical capital would lose it shine.
And in Dublin there is an archbishop who now makes a more credible
case for himself as a champion of the new clean up in the church.
Of course, the church is making such a botch of presenting itself as
more concerned to protect children than to preserve its good name,
that it can not be safely assumed that men like Archbishop Diarmuid
Martin will prevail anyway.
After the publication of the Murphy Report, disclosing the scale of
abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin last year, the church had seemed
ready to accept radical change.
Since then it has made a series of horrific mistakes.
The pastoral letter to the people of Ireland from the Pope himself
plainly dismissed the claim that the application of canon Law had been
part of the problem. It said that Canon Law had simply not been
properly applied.
So it was still, in his eyes, the job of the church to punish
paedophile priests, though the state should be deferred to in its
‘areas of competence’.
The latest smug riposte was the drivel from Cardinal Bertoni in
Brazil, suggesting that child abuse was more likely to stem from
homosexuality than celibacy.
Other senior churchmen have maintained the line that the church is
under attack from the media.
One said last week that he had heard the persecution of the church
compared to the persecution of the Jews.
The men who would be the moral leaders of the whole world may preach
the parable of the mote and beam but many appear not to have grasped
its meaning.
And this deepening defensiveness within the church comes in the run up
to a papal visit to the UK.
And anger is growing there, so much that it seems unlikely that the
Papal visit can proceed without protest.
Gays will not accept that they are more likely to rape children than
are men who commit themselves to living celibately for God.
And the legal case that the Pope is himself answerable for the cover
up of abuse all over the world now seems strong enough to warrant
testing if there was a court he could be brought before.
In all of this, there must be many in the church who realise that the
only way to prove good intention and a proper sense of moral
responsibility is to sacrifice a sacred cow.
And there he goes, striding the holy hills of Armagh, fit as a sandboy
but succumbing to pressure.
They may hope there are medical grounds for prompting him to make a
dignified stand down. On the other hand, they may be starting to
realise that sacking him out right would be the better face saver.
More likely they will do nothing, for this is a church as frail as the
dim old men who lead it, men unfit for clear action or moral courage,
hobbling through every crisis.
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