Malachi O'Doherty

He can smile when he tries..

I doubt if Peter Robinson is the angriest politician in these islands. There have been stories of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair having shouting matches with each other, swearing and blustering in naked rage.
The first rule of politics, however, is that you don’t show emotion without having cleared it with your media adviser first.
Tony Blair was quoted on this by Alistair Campbell: you don’t lose your temper, unless you’ve planned to.
Beside Mr Robinson yesterday stood Martin McGuinness, who is accused routinely of far worse things than have ever been levelled against our first family. Indeed, the Sunday Times has just accused the IRA leadership of 1981 of allowing six hunger strikers to die in order to help Sinn Fein’s electoral prospects.
Top that Peter.
Yet, McGuinness stood aside looking every inch the considered and avuncular helpmate who knew he could get Peter out of that jam in a second, if Peter would only shut up.
Peter Robinson is obviously under enormous pressure; his big mistake is to let it show.
He has Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice snapping at his heels in the forthcoming European election.
He and his wife are the first Northern Ireland politicians to have been seriously targeted by the tabloids. In the past, they had no interest in what people got up to over here.
Peter Robinson may think that the whole thing is a contrivance of the Ulster Unionist party, but even they could not interest London in affairs here unless London had agendas of its own.
But they did enjoy Peter’s flash of temper. They saw plainly that he was only damaging himself.
The Robinson temper has always been with us. During the worst of the troubles when he was directing it at the IRA and those he accused of selling out to them, his gift for high dudgeon seemed righteous and invigorating..
We have more recently seen the naked blast of his rage directed at Margaret Ritchie and Martina Purdy. And both times in circumstances in which, merely stating his case flatly, and without emotion, would have carried the argument more convincingly.
There is one simple reason why no male politician in Britain wants to be seen on television shouting at a woman; it is because there is a perception of a woman’s vote out there. A careless politician can lose an awful lot of women voters in one stroke.
Of course, usually our sectarian political structures protect party votes in sectional blocks, and the secondary considerations like personality and policy count for little.
That is why we have had so many dull people in high office.
But I wouldn’t bank on things staying that way.
This morning, people may be saying to Peter Robinson that he needs a rest. Easter is coming. He should go away and clear his head.
But that isn’t the answer. His problem is that he resorts to anger, exultantly, with relish, never seems to feel more himself than when he is flaunting his umbrage at people he regards as smaller than himself.
The advice he needs is this: even when you are right and know it, the whole world will assume you are wrong when you scowl. Anger is a losing throw, said the Buddha. And when you come out fighting like a cornered rat, people will assume that it’s because you are cornered, that you have resorted to rage because you don’t have the argument. And for a man who puts his case as well as Peter Robinson can, that is a particularly ridiculous strategy.

Perhaps for most it seemed as if the Pope was merely repeating himself when he went to Africa and urged people not to use condoms because they are an inefficient way of controlling aids infection.
But read closer.
The Catholic church’s objection to contraception is not that it doesn’t work. It is that it enables people to have sex exclusively for pleasure.

He might as well ban the hand.
That objection would stand if condoms were perfect.
When he attacks the inefficacy of condoms in preventing infection, the Pope is not speaking out of a theological understanding.
If Benedict had been consistent with church teaching, he would have landed in Africa and announced that people should stop using condoms because it is God’s will that every act of congress between a male and a female should have the prospect of generating new life.
Maybe he now thinks it is better to get people to do the right thing for the wrong reason than not at all.
It is as if Peter Robinson had said that he stands four square behind the Union with Britain because it facilitates cheap ferry travel to Scotland and enables his electorate to go to football matches.
It is as if Cardinal Brady, facing the education committtee last week, had told them that the Catholic church needs to retain control over its schools because it might be able to sell them one day and make loads of money.
It is as if Mervyyn Storey had said we need a museum of creation because children are entitled to fairy stories and shouldn’t have to study too hard.
It is as if Martin McGuinness had said we should have a united Ireland to cut down on dole fraud and cross border shopping, and not because it is somehow right in itself, however costly, which is what the signatories of the proclamation of 1916 thought.
It is as if the Real IRA said they wanted to go on with the Troubles because a man gets more respect if people know he has killed someone.
These would be masking an the actual conviction with another excuse for coming to the same conclusion.
And those who argue practical points from coy principled positions are always going to exaggerate the merits of their case, but worse still, sometimes, are those who stick to principles when all practical reason is against them.
Like those we call dissident republicans; in reality the last of the traditionalist republicans, who still believe Patrick Pearse called a republic into existence.
Like creationists who imagine God made the world in six days then threw in a few fossils to confuse us.
Like language campaigners who want street signs that would only lead to more people getting lost.
Like ghetto minded students who think Belfast can still have No-go areas.
Which is not to say that the Pope and others should stick to practical arguments alone. But when they shift that way, they are making cases that can be contradicted. That’s what we call politics.

It has been an odd week.

On Saturday, March 7, two men with automatic rifles killed two soldiers receving a pizza delivery at the gate of their base in County Antrim and two nights later, a sniper killed a policeman in his car on a housecall.

The media has taken an interest in whether the Troubles are back on or not, so I – and all the other journalists I know – have been doing wee interviews for the World Service and Sky and others, explaining what we know, or at least trying to sound plausible and helpful.

For me, this has been like retuning my brain to where it was ten years ago. I like the new directions I have taken in journalism and writing, away from intense preoccupation with terrorism and the politics of a divided society, but it seems urgent now to be fresh and lucid on those subjects again.

So, a few thoughts.

This is not the start of a new campaign. That campaign is already well advanced and into a routine; it just has not been very competently pursued.  Last autumn I was asked to chair an event for the police and it was canceled because the security threat was too high. There have been bombings, shootings, kneecappings and beatings by Republican dissidents. They just failed to persuade most people, until now, that they were worth noticing for the threat they presented to government and good order.

We don’t expect to see a campaign because we can see no point in it. There is no major grievance in the Catholic community to drive it.

The common argument against a new campaign is, roughly, this. The dissident republicans have no hope of achieving what the Provisional IRA failed to achieve in thirty years.

We will understand what viable objectives the dissidents might have if we understand what is wrong with that argument. The  Provisional IRA failed to achieve a united Ireland but succeeded greatly in the secondary objective of stalling all political compromise in Northern Ireland until it was ready to participate itself. No attempt at a settlement could work until they permitted it to work. Their campaign presented a veto rather than a demand. (This is the basic thesis of my book  The Trouble With Guns)

So, can a new campaign by dissidents be effective also in vetoing government here?

It might. One of the conditions of the peace process is that there be a major increase in the recruitment of Catholic police officers. That can be stalled if Catholics are made fearful of joining.

And there is another opportunity presented by our uncompleted policing reform.

A condition of the continuance of power sharing government, for Sinn Fein, is the devolution of policing and justice to Stormont. Can this be prevented if Unionists and Republicans move to polarised visions of how the police might respond to a terror campaign? Possibly. Unionists are traditionally hardline and favour tough responses and Republicans are already protesting against stop and search and the use of army reconnaissance teams.

And what about those republicans who are now sceptical of power sharing but do not support the dissidents; those who have been with the peace process so far? Is there a danger that they will be disillusioned and will defect to support a growing dissident campaign?  Well, they are miffed that Sinn Fein has been humiliated in its power sharing relationship with the DUP.   And they surely can not be much impressed with the Sinn Fein claim to be providing a route to a united Ireland.  This is the weakness in the Sinn Fein position; it actually has virtually no chance of uniting Ireland. Then again, neither have the dissidents, though they might aspire to scuppering the Sinn Fein project and see that, at least, as progress in the right direction.

The hopeful sign, for most, is that the new threat to the stability of the region has been met with a dogged show of unity between Sinn Fein and the DUP, and clear calls from Sinn Fein for republicans to support the police against the dissidents.  The threat has strengthened the centre. This is what happens. In a sense, our power sharing government now has an opposition, an armed opposition. First indications are that this has actually improved the quality of government. And that makes me think of Israel, a country in which disparate and antagonistic political forces rally together against the external threat of violence. A country can come to identify itself against a threat rather than by its own native characteristics. I have a horror of a new plucky wee Ulster emerging that would need to threat of the dissidents to hold it together. But, hopefully, we are a long way from that still.

I am playing with audio visual presentations using soundslides. I have posted my first one on blogspot.

It is a radio report I did for Sunday Sequence nearly two years ago, about the annual pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick, or The Reek,  in County Mayo. It is illustrated by pictures I took there for my book Empty Pulpits, which has a section on the pilgrimage too.

Heads down, onwards and up.

WordPress doesn’t let me embed html here, so I have set up another blog just for the audio visual pieces. I will link them to here.

Agnes Houston from Coatbridge in Glasgow should have recognised dementia when it started to afflict her; she had nursed her own father through it.

Agnes came to Belfast to take part in a conference on Dementia and Human Rights, to argue that life is worth living after a diagnosis.

I found her one of the loveliest and most heartening people I had ever interviewed.  This is the full interview recorded for a report for Radio Ulster’s Sunday Sequence programme.

And this is the full report I made for Sunday Sequence of the conference on Dementia and Human Rights, held in Belfast on Feb 18. This incorporates clips of the original interview with Agnes.

The Minister for the Environment in Northern Ireland has blocked a Government Information Ad on energy saving.

The disheartening part, for me, of the unfolding of the strange story about our Environment Minister’s theories on climate change, was not his decision to block a public advice advertisement: it was the relish and wonder with which the English media stroked its collective jaw.

Sammy’s decision may not have much impact on the campaign to save the planet from human pollution, but it has a massive impact on the British and international perception of us.

And now they have confirmation of what they have always thought, that we are awkward and backward. You could hear it in the tone of some of the journalists covering the story, the little – ‘here we go again’. You could see it in the way the story was reserved for the novelty item at the end of the news, the little funny to wrap up with.

During the troubles, you would hear that tone on the news: The sigh with which they said,  And now Northern Ireland – meaning, ‘and now for that tiresome tale of cantankerous folk’.

There are simplistic little stereotypes that prevail in media world and one of them is that we are just a bit daft and intransigent. For a blip in historic time, we got credit for working the miracle of peace processing, and then they started to notice that nothing much had really changed; that the executive partners were scowling at each other, that the first minister’s wife thought it was important to thump the tub against the abomination of homosexuality, and now that – what do you know? – we have an Environment Minister who doesn’t believe that C02 emissions cause global warming.

We have once again taken our place among the nations of the world as the daft one at the back.

And the worst of it is that we know what the English media doesn’t yet know, that there are more of these stories in the pipeline. Wait till they get hold of our collective answer to the inability to agree on academic selection: A Catholic 11+ and a Protestant 11+. That’s as good a story as the one about the separate Protestant and Catholic sewers under Belfast.

Any day now there will be a rerun of the local enthusiasm for the teaching of Creationism as science. In fact, the momentum of the current story, about our inherent dimwittedness, probably makes that story just the one to go for on the next slack day. There’ll be no problem getting someone on the education committee to make a complete ass of himself – and of the rest of us for putting him there.

Well, in some ways it doesn’t matter. Sammy is playing to a different gallery. There are probably a lot of DUP voters in the sticks who think he is doing a good job of sneering at the phoney liberal intelligentsia and the world wide leftie/roman conspiracy.

And you and I know that most people here are fairly easy going and accommodating, whatever the world thinks of us..

And Sammy playing the clown the odd time is no harm; even the Greens are delighted that they got so much publicity out of him yesterday. This is just the sort of rollicking knockabout that Sammy and others enjoyed in the council chambers before he became an executive minister. He wouldn’t be our Sammy if he didn’t give us a bit of crack.

And who cares what the English media think of us anyway? Certainly not Sammy.

It is hard to knock a Pope in Ireland without being seen to be taking sides in an old sectarian quarrel – or are we passed that?

When the MP Iris Robinson said that she found homosexuality an abomination she was gloriously pilloried by those of us who defend gays as equals and friends. Now the Pope has said that ‘human ecology’ requires the abolition of homosexual activity. Nasty old Nazi. Imagine saying a thing like that!

Pope Benedict has provided his critics with all the evidence they need that he is a throwback, except that you don’t get to throw a pope back to where you got him from; you are stuck with him until he dies.
He tells us from his wisdom that homosexual activity is something man has to be saved from, much as the earth has to be saved from the destruction of the rain forests.  What offends here is not just the recitation of the old teaching that same sex union is sinful, but the sense of proportion implied.
You would think that, had the pope been looking for an example of sinful sexual behaviour that might be an affront to nature, from which our salvation is urgent, he might have noticed that his own priests have been molesting children in huge numbers and that his own office has been covering it up. Or is that below the belt?
Strangest of all about what he says is his assertion that he is defending human nature. The Catholic church theology of nature is shown now to be a fraud. Benedict understands human nature from his reading of the Book of Genesis, not from his reading of nature itself, which would show that some people are sexually attracted to and bond with people of the same sex as themselves.
Benedict does not want you to live by your nature but to fight against it, the way he fights it himself. Surely priestly celibacy is as much a divergence from nature, as he teaches it, as gay sex is.
But, some will argue, he has to say these things from time to time; you can’t expect him to change Catholic teaching on homosexual activity, or on a whole host of sexual considerations, like contraception or sex before marriage.
Well, the church does change its view of things. It no longer repeats the old law that the word of a Christian is always to be accepted before the word of a Jew, for instance. The hygiene laws of the book of Leviticus, which would seem to require you to ask a woman if she is having her period before you sit beside her on a bus, have also fallen into disuse.
Of course the papacy, we are often told, does not defer to public opinion, and this coming badly timed in the wake of Iris Robinson’s remarks, is beneath notice in the Vatican. So a few western liberals will be appalled, the world is wider than the West  and many others will be impressed.
Pope Benedict, of course, may indeed be thinking more politically than morally, given how popular his words will be in some quarters. With the episcopal churches in Africa splitting the Anglican communion on gay ordination, Benedict might be effectively hoisting a sign to let them all know they would be perfectly at home in his church, which shares their horror and their sense of what Nature requires.
But there will be a cost for this among western Catholics, many, perhaps most, of whom are liberal in their theology and generous in their understanding of sexuality.They know the calamity for the church that past obsessions about sex have turned out to be, particularly the  teaching on contraception, also grounded on the bizarre Papal understanding of the laws of nature, and integrally bound up with its abhorrence of homosexuality. As theologians explained at the time, if you couldn’t argue that sex was for procreation rather than pleasure, then you would have no argument against all the other things that couples do, or that people do on their own, that give them pleasure but don’t produce offspring.
These teachings, in Ireland anyway, are almost universally ignored and the loss of moral authority in the church, which followed from them, has been massive.
Pope Benedict has done a service to anti Catholic secular liberals every where; he has made himself an easy target.
But  a Pope is never an easy target for liberals in Ireland. yet there has been speculation that he is coming here soon.

When he does, he must be met with a sea of pink derision. We should nopt be inhibited bythe legacy of sectarianism from giving him the full Iris treatment.