Tag Archives: Northern Ireland

Squalor Victoria

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An unmarked police car crawled alongside us in the next lane refreshing our hopes for a parade passing through soon.  Not to mention the attitude of charcoal clouds holding court over sun-set; their brooding presence suggesting a menacing atmosphere that turned out to be little more than imaginings of impressionable old minds willingly losing the run of themselves.  Minds of two jumpy passengers on the mooch for some real-time iconography synonymous with televisual images alien to one, though proximate to both. For an island this size, anyway; where borders are all in the mind.

We’d already done two laps of the town at a glacial twenty miles an hour. Ordinarily, I try not to dip below 90 in case I remember where I am. As tour-guide skills go, mine are best applied to the cheese selection of the deli in Sainsbury’s, and the unsolicited pointing out of the declining ratio of pubs to churches.  Local civilisation is on the brink of collapse, I exclaimed wearily in manner of Scarlett O’Hara coming round with a raging hangover, before my fella attempted to skirt over my breakdown by pointing out a few obscure historical facts. It’s a two-hander that guests inwardly wish we’d hastily wrap up; though most have the decency to rewind and enquire if we were serious about Packie Bonner having slept in the bed they are staying in.

Little tests the limits of his hospitality, but I knew by the arched brow addressing me through the rear-view mirror, I was being given sole custody of my friend’s evening once she declared a need to see an Orange Parade. Mistaking the group of glamorous women hovering outside the old jail as fellow lambeg fans, we were swiftly dispatched at the gates and given the cross-community salute of g’luck before he sped off back home to the comfort of his personal safety, and sense.

Turned out the women were taking a guided tour of the jail before heading on for a few drinks. I thought I knew all there was to know about novel hen party themes. That’ll be one to add to the interrogation skills workshop, and build your own safe house weekend, so.  Without so much as the idle threat of an air-roll of a drum in earshot, there was nothing for it but to tag along.

The Victorians turned out to be an equal opportunity bunch – no child was too small or young to be incarcerated; no crime too ridiculous to land oneself a spell in the A or B wing in the company of 20 or more others in a space no bigger than a box room with irregular rations of food and the vacant stare into an uncertain future for company. Photos of previous occupants lined the walls. “Look at this wee fella, he couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. 1998?” “No ye eejit, that’s 1898”.

But enough on this latter day direct provision centre, and its shameful treatment of its in-mates; hark the unmistakable sound of marching men advancing towards us.

Our effervescent guide was wrapping up with an anecdote about the time the prison featured in Britain’s Most Haunted programme.

prison cell

Yup, enough room there for all of Mumford & Sons, Gaelgoirs, politicians, sun-worshippers, cinema pop-corn chompers, and the people behind on-line parenting magazines.

Descending the prison steps, I recognised the woman at the gate as a local community activist. “Are you down for a march? My mate here has never seen one”, I casually announced hoping my mate would twig the impossible nuances of this exchange and resist joining in. “Nah, I can’t be bothered, but there’s a band out tonight in fancy dress, sort of a tradition on the 11th night to collect money for charity”. With that, said band rounded the corner and stalled at the old army barracks at the top of the hill.

Is that…? Could it be? Noooo, I fought with myself, squinting again to be sure as we drew closer. Well, I’ll be damned. A few numbers on the spot before their leader put them at ease then finally dismissed them. Declaring it time to take a taxi home, I turned on my heel guffawing at the prospect of a clairvoyant turning up at the barracks in years to come convinced she had seen Spider Man and Bat Man marching on the eve of the 12th of July in this very street.

It transpired the taxi driver had played for the last few inmates in the prison forty years ago; a few blues numbers with his amateur band. They went on to play a Dublin club shortly after where their support was an outfit whose name he gleefully made us guess. Not Showaddywaddy nor or Bagatelle. Or The Boomtown Rats. Or Dickie Rock, who was already an internationally acclaimed artist by then.

He pressed us to give up for added shock value. All part of the repartee.

“OK then, who?”, we reluctantly played along, engine ticking over.

“Thin Lizzy”

No way, I thought. Imagine – those stone floors in that frighteningly austere building were home to inmates less than forty years ago. 29, to be exact.

Ordinary people

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Gearoid was already sitting at the table. He must’ve slipped in while the kettle was declaring its readiness. Upright, armed with an A4 folder, he assumes the role of dispenser of closed questions that preempt all answers. A conversational tic that keeps the mood light and away from awkward cul-de-sacs until he gets to the roundabout of discussion. This evening being no different.

“You’re needing a holiday by the looks of ya. You’ll be glad to get it”.

Couldn’t argue with that.

Daithi followed, pebbled dashed in freckles he’d picked up on a knock-down price holiday to Turkey. He and the family stayed within expertise-assuming distance of an ISIS controlled peninsula where it wouldn’t be unusual to see a few Kalashnikovs touted above heads of youngsters with little idea what they’re using them for. Everyone laughed the laugh that’s casual shorthand between folk reared within a square mile of where they sit on the first Wednesday of enough months for them to have added and shed layers of coats beneath signs bearing LOLs of a different meaning to the modern day, and modern-day thinkers executed back in the last century. He went on to explain the geographical nuances of the region, oozing the ease, softer enunciation and ten-year-younger glow of a man who had the luck to be able to brandish a pen above his head in lecture halls. Feeling it heavier at times than the weapons held by his neighbours round the table. He wasn’t altogether sure what he was aiming his pen at. Wisdom can’t be learned, it can only be lived. And even then…

Gary and Carole dismissed the offer of tea with a synchronised stretch of their palms as they apologised for being late. That traffic’s a killer. The Council is useless. Public services are a joke round here. So many ordinary people of the North so often talk about how they have more that unites than separates them. The everyday exchanges between these chequered folk prove it but they rarely matter to anyone unconcerned with everyday matters round here.

A quick re-cap then straight to the critical question: How did you get on since? One of those catch-all questions equally applicable to the mundane and the malevolent. An open question that works at the speed of an answer that can’t be preempted. With everyday matters, one can never be sure.

Carole broke off the nap her chin was enjoying on her thumbs. Concentrating on wiping away invisible crumbs from the table, she felt confident her people would have no problem working together with everyone else’s people. She only had time to speak to half of hers, and the half she spoke to couldn’t envisage any arguments against it from the other half.

“There’s nothing to lose at this stage”, she wistfully shrugged working the last stubborn non-stain.

How did everyone else get on?

“If it means us all having a chance at getting the money, then we’d have no problem with it either”. A more tempered show of enthusiasm from an unsubtle Gearoid; softening his own bluntness with a follow-up insistence that it makes sense, before proceeding to expose the delicacy of common sense by insisting everyone was dancing round it.

Daithi kept his head down throughout the exchange in earnest contemplation. His affirmative nod was out before his words. All this single identity work, he bellowed. How many more years of it can they really get out of it? If each community hasn’t managed to get on with itself by now then it’s never going to happen. And the arrogance of us to think we’re the only two communities out there. There’s more than us! His hands raised aloft in lieu of a Chrissake he hadn’t the stomach to add. Either way, his people had no problem. Buiochas le Dia, he thought to himself. Probably.

Shuffling awkwardly in her seat, Carole wondered aloud about that other crowd.

“What about them?”, arch-eye-browed Gearoid in rhetorical unease hoping everyone would quickly move on from Carole’s political first cousins, so to speak.

Layers of imaginary dust were wiped from the table before everyone conceded the need to bring them on board; to give them the opportunity to prove everybody right by giving them first flat refusal to sign up. Besides, what’s a few years of cold shoulders between groups essentially united under the one Union Jack when you think about it? But isn’t that the problem – thinking about it. No-one thinks about it too loudly.

The thirty seconds of silence were meant as a resigned approval of what must happen.

“See how you get on then”

An order to point the diplomacy shuttle in a sideways direction.

As if by some afterthought that too much had been conceded, Daithi issued a two-week deadline till the next gathering. Carole politely asked if putting it back half an hour would be better. The traffic and all. Gary echoed her request, claiming it would give him time for a shower after coming in from a day’s work covered in paint, while Gearoid cautioned against inviting the flies in next time. The annoying wee b*stards, he added before taking his leave and forgetting to bring his furtive glance with him as he emerged from the building.

Ordinary people; doing everyday things.

Collusion

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“A LOT of people are shocked and angry watching RTÉ’s documentary on collusion”

So runs the headline in this morning’s Journal.ie  report on the reaction to last night’s RTÉ documentary on collusion between British security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries. We can expect more of the same throughout the day until the next jaw-dropping documentary comes along to supersede current Twitter goldfish bowl outrage.

I find it quite galling that any folk North or South would find this shocking in 2015. Doesn’t that just roar volumes?

That joke isn’t funny anymore

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“Did you just hear that?”

We look up at the head rounding the door without either of us lifting ours; a rapid response technique we’ve perfected from having the misfortune to occupy the office right by the photocopier. Code body language for ‘Did you try turning it on or off? No? What about fucking off? Can’t you see we’re busy being apathetic here’

“What?”

“A loud bang”

He looks over at me looking over him; the disappointment is mutual.

“No”

“I swear I thought it was an explosion”

Both of us clamour for the quick retort. It’s a collision between his “I can think of a few people who’d happily blow the place up” and my “We’d be so lucky”. No polite you-firsts, just some bog standard word-on-word violence born of an opportunity to demonstrate how we regard the place in high esteem. By now the body has joined the head in the room.

“Maybe it was a door upstairs”. One of us pretends to break the indifference.

“Yeah maybe. It was loud though. Like an explosion”. The body has planted its backside on the corner of the spare desk.

I look over at him looking over at me. Your turn, I intimate with a slight narrowing of the left eye.

Five minutes later…

“Haha. Aye, the evacuations were good craic. Especially if it was during maths. And you never had to be on time either. Sorry sir, got pulled in by the peelers”

“I’ll tell you one better than that. My mate’s cousin got arrested for making a hoax call from a phone-box in London. The stupid fucker. His Da was some big wig politician in the South.”

“Did he not phone the Confidential Phoneline?”

Everyone laughs for reasons they’re not altogether sure about.

“Coleraine One *pause* Glentoran Two”

“What are you talking about?”

“We used to ring up the Confidential Phoneline and leave the weekend’s soccer scores”

They look at me looking back at them. I’m on.

“Did you just hear that?”

“What?”

“Ah had yiz there”

“Fucker”

The accidental tourist

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Two requests are guaranteed from visitors to our humble hovel:

1. Their insistence on doing the dishes

2. A look around the ‘local area’

Both are issued with the same level of overbearing enthusiasm, and greeted by the same underwhelming level of exhilaration. Interrupting the chat every five seconds with “where does this go?” while holding a plate aloft makes me forget what I was giving out about; and fearful our manky cutlery tray will be exposed and I’ll have to explain the presence of dead sweetcorn beneath the tin-opener. Or something more sinister.

Mention of the ‘local area’ is the surest way to unleash misplaced pride in the native I’d blame for the debris in the drawer. Nothing detonates my fella’s latent historian tendencies like a vague reference to the town’s Neolithic site. By which I mean “that hill thing”. Site of many a battle between various big cheeses from Irish mythology. No wonder they turned on each other. There’s fuck all else to do.

Once in a while, a Northern virgin crosses our threshold, wide-eyed with impossible eagerness to hit the biggest battlefield of them all: Belfast. On Friday evening our guest cheerfully bounded in handing a box of chocolates to the youngest resident to share with the group. I was none the better after the fitful sleep that followed an abandoned, cremated, dinner brought on by the unprecedented meltdown brought on by the unfettered access to sweets she’d no notion of sharing. The next visitor to pull this stunt will be frogmarched to that hill thing in the rain after washing every dish in the house. So, it was with a willingness to escape the residual trauma I carried out a quick spot-check of the car to ensure there was nothing growing in it before inviting my companion in for a spin to the city.

These days, my visits to Belfast are dictated by necessity, if you count Ikea a necessity. The malnourished streets of my studenthood have long been replaced by a city busy showing off its retail mid-riff and toned cultural abs. It had been an age since my friend and I had time to catch up. Years, in fact. So we eschewed suggestions of bus tours and taxi trips in favour of pounding the streets on foot, which turned into a hop on hop off tour of our feelings. In stoical, hands-firmly-in-its pockets Belfast, where smiling is a sign of weakness.

I blame the side-by-side exchanges of the car journey where thoughts are unrestricted by the absence of another’s eyeball catching their companion’s, leaving feelings unguarded and free flowing. As the façade of City Hospital crossed our eye-line, I had already owned up to my ostensible impatience with the place being the loudest expression of my affection for it. My passenger surveyed the urban sprawl and reflected on her reliance on city-life for comfort and anonymity; as well as her fear at the prospect of giving it up at 40 to satisfy her urgent need to acquire a mortgage after half a lifetime’s nomadic existence.  She concluded it was a consequence of her brush with death earlier in the year. Surgery. Chemotherapy. Roots.

By the time we reached the car-park, we were reconciling the mistakes made in our twenties with our resistance to taking responsibility for engineering opportunities for happiness throughout most of our 30s. The twenty minute delay in securing a parking space was not our responsibility, but time well-spent squaring up to ourselves and trading a dose of me toos.

Standing at the pedestrian lights opposite The Crown Bar, we were too distracted by talk of our respective parents to notice the crowd. How is it that the older we get, the more we become increasingly obsessed with our parents’ relationship with one another? And all their failings – though more visible now – become more forgivable. Sometimes.

We shrugged our way across into the pub to investigate the beautiful interior, pausing briefly at an empty snug to speculate on the damage we could’ve done in it once upon a time. A time now passed that ushered us onwards along the road to some quiet form of self-acceptance, and the Christmas Market at City Hall we couldn’t be bothered queuing for.  To George’s Market instead, with the iconic Harland and Wolff cranes peeping in between the soulless corporate monolithic structures now dominating the eastern dockside. Appropriate background to our thoughts on the criteria we adopt to judge our successes in work. We traced the overlaps in the confidence-diminishing effect of short-term working in disparate sectors that aren’t so different after all.  Roles with a defined life-cycle we complete with mixed success that haunt us as we recycle our respective bullshit to the next interview panel in a bid to win another.

Carols rang out behind us as we deliberated over lunch menus. The plethora of multicultural food stalls another healthy reminder of the City’s willingness to move on from the proverbial chips or salad. Against high calorie harmonies, my friend spoke of her regret at not having a family of her own, and her determination to convert her singlehood into something satisfying.  There’s a certain freedom derived from being in the company of rare honesty from another so I found myself answering her questions on motherhood that I had only barely attempted to ask myself. I spoke with what sounded like a lucidity I had been afraid of. Of months spent obsessively reading thoughts from only children, the halting desire to pre-empt what that experience will be like for our one before reaching the understanding that it is not mine to direct or second guess, or really my right or business to know.  It will be her experience alone to interpret; to undoubtedly change her mind about as her life unfolds.

Bellies full, we dusted ourselves off and snooped through the handmade trinkets, holding up earrings and necklaces to speculate on what they would best be worn with before being carried through the commercial heartland by throngs of festive shoppers. We took a right angled turn down a capillary lined with pubs and the type of restaurants we were studented far from.  I shook my hair in the mirror in the lift in the MAC to revive the curls that collapse with overgrowth; my friend took advantage of the unflattering light to top-up her lipstick. We emerged in the third floor to rotate the exhibits, and smile at the two children skipping through the spaces between their parents.  My friend spoke enthusiastically of her plans to start up a blog on contemporary Irish art, and implored me to write “something”. I confessed to the trips I’ve been taking here with a keyboard. I promised to send her “something”.  “Something you’re proud of”, she demanded. I couldn’t explain that the only possible source of pride was hidden in the notion of starting it at all.

I was sure my youthful ambition was down one of these streets

Sitting motionless on a bench in the dark, we watched the interactions of a random group of occupants of a high rise building in a video installation. The camera zoomed in to capture the grainy expressionless face of an office worker before it slid across to catch another brushing her hair at her desk before she put on her coat to leave. Neither of us had ever done this in our lifetime. Brushed our hair in the office, that is. Do women still do this?, we wondered aloud. The camera panned away to reveal the ant-like industriousness of humans from a distance as they went about their business. The voyeurism oddly hypnotic. “I love that there are no clues about where this is filmed”, observed my friend. The mix of ethnicities, the banal office set-up, the urban structure of the building. “It could be anywhere”.

It could even be Belfast. We took our leave, and I vowed not to leave it so long till next time.

The Tunnel

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tunnel

For five years I have been a reluctant resident of a Northern Irish town having made the ultimate sacrifice as a drifter by settling down in the birthplace of my fella. Since shoving his clothes over the far side of the wardrobe rail to make way for mine, I have endured a trying-to-like/hate relationship with it. Hating it for seeming to forever occupy a suffocating small-town mindset; trying to like it for not pretending to be somewhere it’s not, the likelihood of it remaining my permanent home, and some locals whom I have grown immensely fond.

My husband was reared on the curve of a side street on the periphery of the commercial heart of the town during the late ’70s and ’80s. He was relatively shielded from The Troubles by regular trips to his Granny’s in the countryside, teenage indifference, the shrill soundtrack of a clatter of sisters, and corresponding hypnosis from playing and dreaming about football. He’s not a very reliable narrator of local history.

In my job, I work alongside people he half-knows that he half-thinks lost family or served time. Some of these individuals are currently engaged in community efforts to have a pedestrian underpass on the far side of town closed up. It has become a magnet for young people who have few places to go except through a short cut towards risky behaviours a shadowy underpass allows. They will likely be displaced to somewhere new once the project is complete. Moving the problem along rather than dealing with it head-on. An Irish response to a Northern Irish problem.

Amid hand-wringing discussions, I have barely been able to snatch an insight to the site’s history. The odd throw-away comment and knowing laughs from a few of its now balding graduates was enough to suggest there is more to this underpass than discarded beer cans, abandoned young people, and foul smells. Inquiries are met with scarcely more than tight-lipped stares into the middle distance, and a nod to it being in the past. As if the past is a viewable monument just out of sight.

So earlier today, I Googled a locally revered surname in certain circles and my eyes fell on another that leapt out from the search: A local boy turned Guardian writer who, in an article from 2002, deviates from his usual topics (music, culture) to take the reader on a walk through his old neighbourhood.“Below it [the school] is a place known locally as ‘the tunnel’, where a pedestrian underpass runs beneath the road. Thirty years ago, the tunnel was the epicentre of most of the rioting locally at the beginning of what came to be known as The Troubles.”

He reminisces about his own tenure in the underpass. “I spent many a Saturday in the early 70s at the tunnel, throwing stones and bottles at the RUC and British Army patrols that regularly skirted the housing estates, playing cat-and-mouse with the snatch squads who hit the ground running from the backs of Saracens and Land Rovers. (Surreally, everyone would go home for dinner at one o’clock – no one called it lunch in Northern Ireland – and regroup at two, to start the ritual all over again.)”

The unremarkable site’s silenced history kept tumbling out. “The tunnel is where I helped hijack a coal truck, and watched enthralled as older lads set it on fire with petrol bombs. It is where a lorry carrying Dr Martens boots was commandeered, making us probably the best-shod rioters in the long, volatile history of Northern Irish insurrection. It is where I first tasted the blinding, gagging sting of CS gas, and where I was hit on the elbow – right on the funny bone – by a rubber bullet. It is, in short, where I had a lot of wild fun as a regular teenager in an irregular time. It is a place loaded with good memories.”

And, inevitably, with some very bad ones. In the weeks following Bloody Sunday in January 1972, trouble in The Tunnel, as elsewhere, intensified. “What once had been fun was suddenly fraught with very real danger. Like most of my friends, though, I was addicted to that danger. That same week, on the morning of Saturday 5 February, a bread van belonging to Irvine’s bakery was hijacked at the tunnel. On the way back from town with her shopping, my mother bumped into the distraught bread man. A lorry carrying bales of hay was also attacked. It sped through the crowd, flames leaping high into the air.”

“In the housing estate where I lived, a small family drama was simultaneously under way. My younger cousin, Dessie, who lived on the other side of town, had been drawn into the area by rumours of blazing lorries and bread vans. (He has since, incidentally, become a fireman.) In the afternoon, my father, sensing that more trouble was imminent, instructed me and my brother to remain in and around our house, while he set off to take my cousin out of the estates and into the relative safety of the town centre. Within minutes, they had literally walked into trouble.”

“On the ring road, a small gang of youths, impatient for an afternoon riot, had broken away from the crowd gathered at the tunnel area and headed for the turn-off [to the local church]. There, they attempted to hijack an Ulsterbus carrying passengers to a nearby town. In the confusion that followed, a Molotov cocktail was thrown through a smashed window. It exploded in the lap of a woman passenger.”

“My father and my cousin saw the crowd, mainly young teenagers, force the bus down on to the slip road; saw someone heave a large pole thought the front window; saw flames leap up inside the bus and frightened passengers leap from the emergency door. Alongside two other local men, my father boarded the smoke-filled bus and helped the driver carry the injured woman off. They waved down a passing car which took her to the city hospital. In the hazy, frantic moments between running on to the burning bus and laying the woman – unconscious, her hair razed, her dress and nylons melted into her skin – gently down on the roadside, the crowd evaporated. For years afterwards, my father would wake in the night, convinced he could smell burning nylon and flesh.”

The woman survived for seven weeks and two days before she died. She was 38 years of age and a cherished housekeeper for a prominent Protestant family in the town. The 323rd victim of The Troubles.

Haunted by these events, the writer made a visit to the woman’s family home thirty years later. He was greeted by the woman’s sister who talked about that day as it unfolded and her sister’s employer coming to the house to break the news of the incident.

Flicking through old photographs, he noted many of those teenagers he rioted with, kicked a ball about with, sat next to in school… are all gone. All young victims of The Quaint Euphemism. Included in this group is the man with the surname I Googled that brought me to O’Hagan’s article. I no longer half-know the facts.

Pausing on the ring-road that leads to the Tunnel, our tour guide remarked “Everything has changed in the interim, but everything looks just the same. A photographer is trying to capture the sweep of the road and, in the foreground, a lamppost painted green, white and orange. As if on cue, an Ulsterbus trundles by. My head is flooded with memories; vague images from another time, not that long ago, that now seems unreal, almost unfathomable.”

Twelve years on from the writer’s pilgrimage home, and his tour of the town’s soul, it all still looks the same. That generation of disenchanted teenagers has been replaced twice over. But some things have changed. The widow of the murdered aforementioned murdered woman’s employer, who made the journey to her family to break the news, is now a prominent local Unionist politician. The brother of one of the teenagers in the grainy photo, shot down in his prime by security forces, is a community activist in his Nationalist community. Today they sit alongside one another on the working group to close the Tunnel.

And in learning the sad legacy of its history, I feel a little less hard-hearted towards the place I’ve come to sometimes accidentally call home.

Singin’ in the reign

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Bono and The Edge were back in the terrestrial armchair with Tubridy on Friday night showcasing a few of the reasons that had them anxiously jumping the download queue and straight into the arms of Apple. Then dragging the unsuspecting iTunes subscriber into a non-consensual threesome. In the weeks following the release of the album, an immoderate amount of criticism has been levelled at the band. Wagging fingers shot up waving the consequences of their desperation to stay relevant on standards of artistic integrity. Listening to the unplugged offerings on Friday, it’s not hard to understand why they felt they could do with a leg-up from a sturdy pair of clasped corporate hands.

In Shane Hegarty’s excellent piece on the comparison of Bono’s subsequent apology with the sentiments of Booker Prize winner, Richard Flanagan, parallels were drawn between the desperation afflicting both parties. Flanagan’s anxiety was born out of a need to earn a sufficient amount to live, and generate sufficiently good material to attract an audience. Bono’s arose from the need to cling on to a sizeable  pre-existing audience. As Hegarty observed, “..the band’s privilege blinded them from the truth most artists, of whatever hue, know all too well. You have to earn both. Each and every time. Both men generalised – Flanagan about writers, Bono about all artists – but only the former sounded sincere, as if reflecting a universal truth that will never change. Bono, unfortunately, sounded as if he were really just talking about himself.”

Listening to the latter’s reflections on the criticism, he remains as impervious as ever to such truths. “You know, I’ve got an umbrella, and when the shit storm happens, I just put up my umbrella”. Which is the multi-millionaire musician equivalent of sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears while shouting I CAN’T HEAR YOU until the other person goes away. Presumably he pays someone else to hold said umbrella. “The truth of it is, the music business, the model for it was broken”. Can’t argue with that. Rock n roll is dead, embalmed and playing the eponymous lead in U2’s production of Weekend At Bernie’s.

Last time I remember seeing Bono with his hands up was on stage in 1998 sandwiched in another threesome with John Hume and David Trimble. Back in those heady days of hopeful peace-building in Norn Ireland. A year had passed since Mairia Cahill was raped by a known IRA leader. The kangaroo court was yet to process her hearing. Her traumatic reunion with the perpetrator as part of the medieval style reading of body language would take place two years later.

In the rush to shelter Gerry Adams from the ensuing shit storm this week, prominent members of the party faithful clamoured forth with offers to hold his umbrella. Commentary from all directions has been shrill and unrelenting. Definitions of justice and judgement are being tug o’warred with back and forth over the unmistakeable line of truth.

Like U2’s desperate determination to wade through the current ‘noise’ clutching their mid-life crisis album, Gerry and his comrades swerved by the truth with their fingers rammed into their ears chanting I CAN’T HEAR YOU in the vain hope everyone will just go away.

Sinn Fein doesn’t have a monopoly on the truth of the matter. And sadly, the victims and survivors of sexual abuse and rape among the nationalist community do not have a monopoly on the horror and trauma of that experience in that warped part of the world.

In their rush to throw enough legitimate shit at Adams that will stick, the fulminating establishment are at risk of dismissing the notion of ‘context’ in its entirety. In a thirty-year conflict, characterised by dysfunctional daily living with the state functions of law and order substituted by grassroots rule, a brow must surely be arched at the shock and surprise that has greeted the revelations.

This year saw the first tribunal open in Northern Ireland addressing institutional child abuse. Given its stunted standards of accountability, it is only now that efforts are able to be directed towards the legacy of victims and survivors in the broadest meaning of those terms. Given the Southern establishment’s pre-occupation with Sinn Fein, and that party’s amnesiac approach to bleaching history, there is a danger in ignoring the fact that it is not just Mairia Cahill who is being denied the right to truth. It is all those victims of sexual abuse during and immediately following the Conflict, irrespective of the colour of their flag or the cut of their God.

The likelihood that there were women on all sides who were condemned to ‘community’ police investigations shouldn’t raise a brow, but many questions. Long before now. That’s one shit storm that would have everyone scrambling for cover.

Little boxes on the hillside

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Our girl and the little boy next door are conducting a friendship through the gaps in the wooden fence that divides us. It’s cheap brown, the basic of garden dividers; a relic from when the development first went up. Others around have traded theirs in for something higher, fancier, sturdier.

In a flag-free estate with a mix of owners, renters, religious affiliations, political persuasions, cheese tastes, star-signs, careers, incomes, ambitions, dreams, and guilty pleasures – neighbours coexist in the maintenance of atomised lives.

Round after round of clothes are hung on the line and the weather is the only dependable chat-up line to spring on a neighbour hanging up hers. From across that fence, I’ve learned she had another baby recently, got hitched, and hopes her new husband gets a better-paying job soon. They are new residents, young; and like their predecessors, will move on from their impractical two-bed house first chance they get.

Our neighbourliness didn’t penetrate anything beyond the surface of small-talk but we retreated into our caves with the other half-stuffed in a box we guessed by the paltry number of cues unconsciously gleaned. Our names. The names of the children. It doesn’t take much. Welcome to Northern Ireland.

We are a little too high octane in our promises to reunite our little’uns on one side of the fence. They’re the same age with the same taste in fence-climbing and finger-pointing. It’ll happen, (Dastardly voice) if it’s the last thing I do.

I don’t want our child surrounded only by peers with twenty fadas in their name. Partly why I didn’t give her one. At two years of age the scene seems already set by the crèche. A prelude to conformity, the foundation of the status quo.

I would move from this impractical two-bed country the first chance I got, but that chance is increasingly elusive so we are sobering up to a future with an integrated school as our only viable option. It accommodates all religions and ‘none’. The none being the ‘other’ on the fringes of the two traditional shows in town.

We’re ‘no’ religion. And we’re no to discrimination based on it or carried out in its name. But we’re yes to integration and responsible education. We’re yes to not imposing a faith on children through formal education; by teachers who don’t subscribe to the faith they promote at the expense of precious learning time and parental responsibility. We’re yes to our children learning about religion in its wider existence and origins but not state school authorities monopolising religion to engender the formation of singular ideas on faith. We’re yes to our children learning to think critically and philosophically.  We’re yes to the right of families to celebrate ritualistic celebrations at pivotal moments in their school-lives but not all exclusively directed and sanctioned by priests and bishops. We’re yes to our children learning alongside their neighbours rather than snatching glimpses of them through gaps in fences.

The concept of non-denominational education remains light years away. Enlightened education policy makers belong to the next generation, if they will ever be permitted to participate in a political structure that protects the permanence of sectarianism.

The others just have to put up or shut up. To a system that builds flimsy, cheap wooden fences of segregation. That confers ownership of the Irish language on one group of people. A language they will learn not to be able to speak with any great proficiency. A system that elevates the pageantry of Irish dancing among groups of people who’d laugh at the banging of a lambeg drum. Insularity is based on continuous assessment so the pass rate is always high.

The yellow registration form has been lying on the shelf since she was a month old. You could say I was a little anxious. I can’t seem to ever shake the feeling.

Hoist a new flag

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I was pottering around earlier… No, wait, that line was done before. Let’s start again. I was skulking (that’s more like it) around my office today, straining to maintain indifference to the efficiency on display from my colleagues. The kind of multi-tasking that’s precipitated by lengthy arse-scratching; that precedes a mass exodus. The sickening type of conscientiousness used to flirt with interview panels combined with a frenzy of Holy Thursday intensity.

It’s the 12th week. No, I’m not up the duff.  July 12th. You know..bowler hats and bonfires. Thunderbolts and lightning. Very, very, frightening. Galileo. Galileo. GAAALIIIILEEEEOOO. They’re just poor boys etc.

Ordinarily, I’d have legged it out of here five years ago by now, but since I can’t simultaneously make a phone-call, email, and doddle a drawing of the person I’m talking to on the phone in an unflattering position, I won’t be going anywhere till August. Which is a pity because I like nothing better than leaving a stress pit to migrate West to roar obscenities at Lucinda Creighton on the box (this time last year).

Emotions and blood pressure remain consistent with July 2013 levels however, as I’m nearing the end of the second series of Borgen. Nyborg v Creighton. There’s a debate I’d pay Vincent Browne to chair. Top five ways Birgitte would slaughter St. Lucinda. That’s another post. Fuck it, I might just do that after this one. My blog ‘n’ all.

Meanwhile, back in the daily dungeon, I’ll be fantasising as I gaze out the window at the fresh Ulster flag flapping in front of my face. Another year, another head bowed in disappointment. Not at the politicians, or the community leaders, or the manufacturers of Daz washing powder that keeps them sparkling, or the cherry-picker vans that run them up the poles, or the sun that shines down on the spectacle, although that in particular upsets me greatly.

No. I recline, and wonder to myself… where are the bloody artists? The subversive thought ticklers? The culture terrorists?

I’ve calculated there are at least 4 hours of darkness per night during which the guardians of the flegs are tucked up in their wee beds. This gives sufficient time to strike a la the characters in The Educkators who re-adjusted the furniture of the rich to spook them out of their complacency; the erection of  police ‘Information Wanted’ signs around London, only the incidents included “two people hugging” and “someone seen smiling at 2:05pm”; or the landscape gardeners that produced glorious flowerbeds on urban roundabouts and desolated grounds overnight to the joy and bemusement of passers-by the following day.

Where is Banksy when ya need him? Let me guess. In a caravan in Bundoran?

Fucking knew it.

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Image: The Telegraph

The guineapigs

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Watching RTÉ’s investigation on internment the other evening, I was reminded of a gable wall on a building on the outskirts of Derry. I occasionally inched by it amid the Friday evening gridlock on my way through the border to my folks’ to load up their washing machine with my clothes, and my fridge with their groceries. Respected student traditions.

The tradition of murals had long been synonymous with the North; thermometers for reading the fever on the streets and reactions to a concoction of political drugs prescribed to the public.

On this particular wall, in unequivocal black and white (Calibri, I think), roared the following:

If those who make the law

Break the law

In the name of the law

There is no law

Stark. Quotable, even. But it’s signed by the Provisional IRA, which brings another quote to mind: “The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors”, which liberates many of us from entertaining their a la carte philosophising incompatible with our own.

Amazingly, to me, it would seem that many people on this island had not heard of Jean McConville until recently. With that in mind, the programme was a timely return to the exposure of state-sponsored human rights abuses; the horrific treatment of the ‘hooded men’ by British interrogation teams. Practices that would ordinarily draw gasps reserved for the victims of torture in orange overalls, or in countries with a culture of barbarism in languages we don’t understand.

The programme drew the axis of torture from London to Belfast to the European Court of Human Rights back to London over to Iraq, and crossing the Atlantic to Washington and back to the Middle East again. Oppression does not exist in a vacuum, the oppressed do not retaliate in a vacuum. Substitute either term with whatever group or rationale you’re comfortable supporting. That’s how the law tended to work. As Behan wryly observed, the terrorist is usually the man holding the smaller bomb. Internment turned out to be one of the more lethal ones dropped. Along with Bloody Sunday, it was the biggest recruitment event for the Provos.

Little has been made in the North of this latest effort at lateral truth-finding. Its First Minister is busy extinguishing the flames from another fire that threatens to burn his credibility. Peter Robinson finally caved in to pressure to publicly apologise to the Muslim community he had casually denigrated with his flat-earth ‘joke’ about trusting them to go the local shop, but not into local politics. It followed his defence of another bigot-at-large, Pastor James McConnell.

In addition to revealing his own bigotry, Robinson exposed the fallacy of certain Protestant religious fundamentalists. There’s a potential axis of bigotry that joins a strain of Ulster Protestantism with Tea-party politicians who rely on a defined enemy (immigrants, Muslims, poor people, the odd Catholic etc.) to enable the best of their Christian values to flourish. With God’s will, they shall be born again. Into material riches and a skewed idea of empowerment. All the stuff their man Jesus was vigorously campaigning about.

Much has been written over the past week on the rise of racist abuse and attacks towards the immigrant communities in Northern Ireland. The incident inadvertently lifted the lid on an ugly side of life that generally goes unpicked by the “two traditions”, presented by the media as a recent phenomenon.

Meanwhile, on the day Robinson issued his apology, a worker with a Traveller support group spoke plainly on the challenges facing the community to the few gathered in a draughty hall thirty miles away. She didn’t shy away from the need for Travellers to square up to themselves and take responsibilities. And sobered all up with stark facts on their comparatively shorter life expectancy and higher rates of suicide.

Strides made in education were also highlighted. One local school-leaver showing academic promise declined the chance to go university. He opted for the trades route at the further education college. University would have been perceived as a step too far within his family. Accompanying him to the interview, his mother proudly announced her son would be the first local Traveller to go further. The interviewer, a respected teacher, creased his face and warned there was a lot of equipment and tools in the building. He would be out on his ear if any of it were to go missing. A thing of the past, right? This happened last month.

I’d bet a bottle of the finest wine available to the pillars of the community, the very same man drew breath at Robinson’s anti-Muslim slur. We have a long tradition of shared traditions.