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http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/803/41342
18 July 2009
July is the infamous marching season of the Orange Order in the six counties in Ireland’s north still claimed by Britain. The Orange Order, a Protestant sect, is strongly “loyalist” (supporting British rule over the six counties) as well as anti-Catholic.
In the six counties, the Catholic population face discrimination and inequality. Support for British rule among the Protestant community is tied to the maintenance of Protestant privilege.
The Orange Order’s annual marches are deliberately provocative, aiming to celebrate British rule and anti-Catholic bigotry. The parades lead up to July 12, the day that celebrates the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, in which the Protestant forces of William of Orange defeated Catholic opponents to win control of England. The marches and songs celebrate the massacre of Catholics.
The mainstream media reported on three days of riots by Irish nationalist youth after an Orange parade passed through the predominantly Catholic and nationalist North Belfast district of Ardoyne on July 13.
The preceding anti-Catholic violence and provocations have been ignored.
Republican party Sinn Fein blamed the Orange Order for the violence that exploded and called for the Orange parades to be re-routed so as not to pass through Catholic areas.
It also accused “dissident republican” group the Real IRA, which opposes the peace process in the six counties, for instigating the rioting, saying those who took part in rioting were from outside the community.
Sinn Fein is in a power-sharing executive with loyalist parties to help administer the governing of the six counties as part of a peace process that ended around three decades of armed conflict over British rule. It accused the Real IRA of seeking to undermine the peace process and the Orange Order of providing the excuse.
In a July 14 statement, socialist republican group Eirigi condemned the violence towards anti-march protesters by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), which fired potentially lethal plastic bullets. Eirigi also denied accusations it was behind the rioting. It said the “violent response by some nationalist youths to yesterday’s situation was as predictable as it was undesirable”.
Eirigi said the actions of the PSNI revealed it was largely unreformed. Until 2001, the PSNI was the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The RUC was infamous for its brutality against the nationalist and Catholic community in the six counties, and for its ties to loyalist paramilitaries. Creating a new, reformed and non-sectarian police force is a key part of the peace process.
Eirigi said the PSNI’s violence showed Sinn Fein’s policy of taking part in the policing boards overseeing the PSNI had failed and called for Sinn Fein to withdraw.
The article below, by Laura Friel, is reprinted from Sinn Fein’s newspaper, An Phoblacht, from July 9. It details the anti-Catholic and nationalist violence and provocations that have accompanied this year’s “Orange Fest” marching season.
* * *
Loyalist flags and bunting are nothing new. During the Orange marching season, streets in loyalist areas are often festooned with Union flags, loyal order flags and loyalist paramilitary flags as well as the ubiquitous red, white and blue bunting.
But this year we have witnessed what joint first minister Martin McGuinness, from Sinn Fein, has referred to as an outbreak of “flag flu”.
Not only is there the usual cacophony of flags in loyalist areas in the run up to “The Twelfth”, but also the erection of flags in mixed areas and attempts to put up flags in predominantly nationalist areas.
But what loyalists routinely describe as an expression of their cultural identity and exercise of their democratic right to celebrate that identity has a long and well-documented history as a mechanism of intimidation, intimidation that has often acted as a prelude to violence.
Violence and intimidation
In north Belfast, the erection of loyalist paramilitary flags near mixed areas has been accompanied by attacks on Catholic homes and the daubing of threatening sectarian graffiti warning Catholics residents to stay out of council-run parks.
In the early hours of July 4, a mob of about 15 loyalists rampaged through nationalist Alliance Avenue, smashing car windscreens and wing mirrors. They smashed the front windows of a house in Newington Avenue before fleeing.
A spokesperson for the local residents’ group, Kevin Murphy, said people living there were worried the attack on their property was a prelude to something worse.
“This week is the mini-Twelfth and then we have the main Twelfth parades and residents are nervous about what could happen next. Could someone be attacked? Could someone be killed?
“There’s a sense of fear.”
Sectarian graffiti daubed on the walls of a north Belfast park announced “ATAT” (All Taigs Are Targets — “taigs” being an offensive term for Catholics) and “Warning all Taigs, use your own park”.
The playing fields are located between the largely loyalist Shore Road area and the predominantly nationalist Antrim Road. The park is used by both communities.
In the centre of Glengormley, an Orange arch is festooned with Union flags. Up to 300 loyalist band supporters converged in Glengormley for the opening of the Orange arch and hurled sectarian abuse at children and young people playing football in the predominantly nationalist Church Road area.
Hundreds of flags have been placed in predominantly nationalist areas in south Belfast. The Ormeau Road and Finaghy crossroads areas have been overwhelmed with loyalist flags.
A spokesperson for the area, Vincent Parker, said most residents in Finaghy didn’t want flags erected.
Shots were fired into a house in Ballymena after residents confronted loyalists erecting flags in a mixed housing estate in the Tullygarley area of the town.
Up to three shots were fired through the living-room window of a Protestant couple’s home. No one was injured.
The shooting followed an approach by the woman to people putting up flags of the Apprentice Boys Protestant order and asked if they had sought the residents’ permission. She told them they were in breach of an agreement concerning the flying of flags in Rossdale.
Increase
Across the six counties, nationalist and mixed residential areas have reported not only unprecedented increases in the number of unionist flags being erected but also the targeting of mixed and nationalist areas where none or very few have been erected before.
Last week, in Coleraine, there were disturbances after loyalists returned to the scene of the brutal sectarian murder of Catholic father Kevin McDaid and tried to erect paramilitary flags close to where he died and his grieving family live.
Nationalists don’t object to unionist flags simply because they are a cultural expression of “Britishness”, but because of their long association with anti-Irish and anti-Catholic hostility and violence.
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams described racism and sectarianism as “two sides of the same coin” and urged “all of us in political and community leadership to stand up against the racists and the bigots who are trying to stir up racist and sectarian conflict”.
From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #803 19 July 2009.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/killer-im-no-terror-boss-14417467.html
Catney rubbishes claims that he is the man behind street carnage
By Ciaran Barnes
Sunday, 19 July 2009
A former killer last night denied claims he was the Real IRA mastermind behind the riot mayhem in north Belfast. Tony ‘TC' Catney — who served a 16-year sentence for a sectarian murder — dismissed claims he leads the Real IRA terror gang in Belfast or that he orchestrated the destruction in Ardoyne on Monday in which a shot was fired at police.
The republican, who is a brother-in-law of Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly, claims he is the victim of a smear campaign by the party.
On Monday the Real IRA opened fire on police during serious rioting in Ardoyne after an Orange Order parade.
Twenty-one police officers were injured and 18 plastic bullets were fired in violence that was reminiscent of the darkest days of the Troubles.
The rioting continued into Tuesday and Wednesday night with petrol bombs and paint hurled at the PSNI.
Further trouble broke out in the lower Newtownards Road area near the Short Strand.
Sinn Fein accused dissidents of organising the rioting and blamed the Real IRA for the gun attack in Ardoyne.
Republican and security sources said they believed Catney was the Real IRA's Belfast boss.
However, the veteran republican rubbished the claims.
Catney, who was pictured at the protest at Ardoyne on Monday, told Sunday Life that the “time is not right for a military campaign” and accused former Provo pals of waging a witch-hunt against him.
“This is all rubbish. I have my ear to the ground and as far as I am aware the Real IRA doesn't even exist in Belfast apart from one person,” said Catney.
“The time is not right for a military campaign, the conditions don't exist.
“Why then would I involve myself with the Real IRA? It is nonsensical.
“Because I was a life sentence prisoner I always have the threat of being returned to jail hanging over me.
“I would say this to the PSNI — if you believe in law and order and you think that I am involved in the Real IRA, then arrest me and prosecute me.”
Catney admits to being in Ardoyne at the height of Monday's rioting.
But he insists he did nothing more than observe the violence.
“The cops had CCTV cameras pointed at me all night,” he explained.
“I was on the Crumlin Road watching what was going on along with fellow republicans.
“I can't work out how Sinn
Fein is able to say this group was involved and that group was involved.
“What I do know for sure is that the rioting wasn't organised but that it did involve people from Ardoyne.
“For Gerry Kelly to say otherwise is wrong.”
In 1974, aged just 16, Catney murdered Protestant Maurice Knowles on the shores of Belfast Lough.
Knowles (17) was duck hunting when he was approached by Catney who shot him when he refused to hand over his shotgun.
After his release from prison in 1990 Catney started work for Sinn Fein. As Director of
Elections he oversaw the party's huge vote increase from 70,000 votes in 1993 to 163,000 votes in 2003.
But his questioning of Sinn Fein's support for the Good Friday Agreement led to him being increasingly sidelined.
Despite being the party's Director of Elections he was barred from involvement in the 2005 Westminster and local council polls.
Catney says that when he resigned the following year the whispering campaign against him started.
“Once I left Sinn Fein I became the victim of a witch-hunt, sniping and Chinese whispers,” he added. “In the autumn of 2006 a senior Sinn Fein member was briefing IRA members that I was the head of a heavily armed military organisation that wanted to kill Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness or Gerry Kelly.
“That was total rubbish then and it's total rubbish now.
“Because I have been the victim of a whispering campaign before it isn't surprising to hear this stuff linking me to the Real IRA now.”
Catney believes IRA bosses have it in for him because of his involvement in the Republican Network for Unity (RNU) group, which has a large ex-Provo membership. “The RNU includes former members of the IRA, INLA and independent republicans,” he said.
“It's about sitting down with each other and working out a common way forward.
“The Good Friday Agreement hasn't achieved anything, it's a sectarian document. When people voted for it they were voting for peace, not the contents of a deeply flawed document.
“Sinn Fein see our group as a threat and they see us offering an alternative, that's why I believe they have singled me out and are trying to depict that I am bathed in blood.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8157225.stm
A man who had been driving a stolen Range Rover has been shot by police in the County Down village of Gilford.
The vehicle had earlier been taken from a house in Craigavon, County Armagh, at about 0430 BST on Saturday.
At the house in Carrigart Crescent, a man threatened the occupant with a petrol bomb, police said.
It is understood the man crashed the 4x4 and then tried to escape when one shot was fired. He was taken to hospital with an injury to his abdomen.
His condition is described as not life threatening.
A police patrol car came upon the vehicle at Castleview Drive, Gilford, shortly after 0500 BST.
The incident has been referred to the Police Ombudsman, who will investigate whether the use of gunfire was justified.
Sinn Fein Upper Bann MLA John O'Dowd claimed if the incident had happened in "Dundalk or Leeds, lethal force would not have been used".
"Stingers would have been used, the car would have been rammed off the road especially in the early hours of the morning when there were no other vehicles about," he said.
"So there are other ways of stopping stolen vehicles, but my first and primary concern is with the family from which the vehicle was stolen from."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8157225.stm
Published: 2009/07/18 16:34:32 GMT
© BBC MMIX
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/15/united-ireland-gerry-adams
Despite the challenges ahead, a dialogue started by Sinn Féin in Westminster this week sets us on a path to Irish reunification
Gerry Adams
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 15 July 2009 10.00 BST
The single most important issue facing the people of Ireland and Britain is the achievement of Irish unity and the construction of a new relationship between Ireland and Britain based on equality.
Economic crises, however severe, will come and go. Governments will come and go, but for more centuries than any of us care to contemplate Britain's involvement in Ireland has been the source of conflict; partition, discord and division; and great hurt between the people of these islands.
The peace process has delivered an end to conflict and that is to be welcomed and applauded. But the underlying cause of conflict persists – the British government's claim of jurisdiction over a part of Ireland. It is this denial of the Irish people's right to self-determination, freedom and independence that is the core outstanding issue that must be resolved.
Sinn Féin is initiating a conversation this week in Westminster about achieving this. Sinn Féin believes that a national representative democracy in a sovereign reunited Ireland is desirable, viable and achievable in this generation through peaceful and democratic methods.
To succeed in this there are three interlinked challenges facing us. These are: getting the British government to change its policy from one of upholding the union to one of becoming a persuader for Irish unity; getting the Irish government to begin preparations for Irish unity; and engaging with Ulster unionism on the type of Ireland we want to create.
To achieve all of this requires those of us who share these goals to find ways in which we can work together. Is it possible to put in place a formal structured broad front approach to campaign for a united Ireland? Or would it be better to opt for an informal, organic and popular movement based on core principles?
That's a matter for the dialogue we are beginning. Some progress has already been made. The Good Friday Agreement has put in place all-Ireland political institutions which can be enhanced and developed. It contains a legislative, peaceful and democratic mechanism to set up a new and democratic Ireland. Advancing this means reaching out to others, including those who are unionist, and engaging with them on the type of Ireland we want to create.
We need to address the genuine fears and concerns of unionists in a meaningful way. We must be open to listening to unionism, to look at what they mean by their sense of Britishness and be willing to explore and to be open to new concepts.
It is worth noting that within the British system, unionists make up fewer than 2% of the population; they cannot hope to have any significant say in the direction of their own affairs. As 20% of a new Ireland, unionists will be able to assert their full rights and entitlements and exercise real political power and influence.
So, our vision of this new Ireland must be a shared Ireland, an integrated Ireland, an Ireland in which unionists have equal ownership. The shape and structure of that new Ireland must be a matter of agreement.
At the Unite Ireland conference in early June in New York, Professor Brendan O'Leary, in his contribution to this very debate, suggested that republicans and nationalists and unionists should examine the possibilities of some form of federal arrangement. Others may have different ideas and suggestions. This is one part of the debate we must have.
All of this presents a daunting challenge. But it is a challenge I believe we can rise to and meet. This is not about some pie-in-the-sky naive discussion and aspiration, about an unachievable goal or meaningless political outcome. No. This is about solving one of the great unresolved and contentious issues of Britain's colonial past. In preparation for this, Sinn Féin has already held discussions with people in Britain from different sectors; trade unionists, academics, Irish community groups and others, including elected representatives in Westminster and the Welsh and Scottish assemblies.
Next February we will hold a major conference here in Britain to move into the next phase. Of course this conversation, this dialogue, with people here in Britain or in the US or elsewhere will not in itself achieve a united Ireland. That is a matter for agreement between the people who live on the island of Ireland. But British policy toward Ireland is key to unlocking the potential for this change to occur. So, we need the active support of people in Britain.
We need to reach out to the widest possible public opinion, to the trade unions, the business sector, the community and voluntary sector, to the political class, as well as with those of other ethnic minorities who have experienced a similar history of colonisation and immigration.
I believe we can be successful. Why? Think back 20 years. Then my voice could not be heard on the British media – censorship ruled courtesy of Margaret Thatcher. For much of that time I was a banned person – unable to travel to London. British policy was locked into a military/security strategy and a policy of criminalisation, and the conflict was dug in and vicious.
Had I been in London asking for support to build a peace process I would have been thought of as at best naive or just daft. Had I predicted cessations, peace talks, an international agreement, a resolution of issues as difficult as policing and arms, I would have been dismissed by the Guardian and others as crazy.
Well, it happened. All of those difficult and some said, unimaginable goals have been achieved. So – Irish reunification is achievable. With the right strategies and a determined commitment to a united Ireland can happen. Join us in that task.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/adams-still-repeating-the-same-old-boring-inanities-1829600.html
Get real, Gerry, a united Ireland is off the menu and won't be cooked again, says John-Paul McCarthy
Fans of the wonderful HBO television series The Sopranos will all have their different favourite moments. Maybe that epic knifing in Satriali's Pork Store? Ralphie's grisly demise in the bath-tub? Or Tony's whipping of a corrupt local politician with the belt from his pants?
My favourite moment comes when one of the secondary characters, Christopher, as he is lying in his hospital bed recovering from a serious shooting.
In his delirium he recalls his near-death experience and tells Tony Soprano that he has actually seen Hell, and it's policed by its very own bouncer. Hell, as Christopher explains, is an Irish pub on the New Jersey coastline called the Emerald Piper where it's St Patrick's Day forever.
Gerry Adams's vapid article in last Wednesday's Guardian (see above) should be pinned on the door of this horrific establishment, because, for him, and his cohorts, the rallying cry is the same, "A United Ireland very soon", and this is a record they're going to play forever.
He writes sweetly about the tough questions that he's willing to ask on this journey towards the 32-county Utopia, which must begin not in Northern Ireland (perish that thought), but in London.
We are assured that "to achieve all of this requires those of us who share these goals to find ways in which we can work together.
"Is it possible to put in place a formal structured broad front approach to campaign for a united Ireland?
"Or would it be better to opt for an informal, organic and popular movement based on core principles?".
It isn't so much the repetition of these inanities that is so profoundly depressing, so much as the deep intellectual and emotional vacuity that lies at the heart of the non-analysis here.
His sentences are suffused with the latest buzzwords about ethnic empowerment, community organisation and outreach programmes, though we are happily spared any mention of "ecologism" (!) or "the Irish Freedom Charter", those vital components in his under-butler Eoin O Broin's prescription for unity, as outlined in his over-priced and under-argued pamphlet, Sinn Fein and the Politics of Left Republicanism.
Even Toireasa Ferris can't stomach this nonsense, having recognised that the Northern mafia around Adams is leading the party into intellectual and political oblivion with the kind of cod sociology that Eamon Smullen was ridiculing almost 40 years ago.
Time is at a stand-still in the Emerald Piper and Adams remains wedded to hardcore republican theology and the same tattered parade of arguments.
Ulster Protestants still remain mere chattel in this analysis, pawns on a chess board to be moved and manipulated according to the whim of more powerful actors.
The article once again emphasises "British policy" as the "key to unlocking the potential for this change to occur", and his references to Britain's "colonial past" are simply a coded way of denying the democratic basis of the unionist desire to go their own way in 1920, however imprecise the constitutional line-drawing was at that point.
So, having waded through the conciliatory references to dialogues with 'ethnic minorities' and Professor Brendan O'Leary's ecstatic theories of future Irish federalisation, we are left as ever with an argument that would have cheered Slab Murphy and Brian Keenan: Get the Brits to force the Prods into line; talk for a bit with them, then start pushing.
His name checking of O'Leary here makes a lot of sense, since he is a worthy companion in the Emerald Piper.
He wrote a bizarre essay in 2005 called Mission Accomplished? Looking back at the IRA, where he cleaned up every one of PIRA's historical arguments for modern consumption, and tinkered with PIRA's kill-rate statistics in a manner that few other experts accepted, leading many of us to wonder if this had been written by the ghost of Liam Lynch in high dudgeon.
Here, O'Leary said PIRA punishment beatings were simply "by-products of the absence of legitimate state institutions" (ie the Brits made them do it).
He also wrote that the "IRA demonstrates the power of the weak", an argument that is never squared with the fact that they killed more innocent Catholics than all of the security forces combined at full gallop. And his claim that "the IRA famously does not do drugs'' must have come as a severe shock to its new friends in FARC.
For all the constitutional pyrotechnics here about future confederations and pooling of sovereignty, there are the usual malevolent mutterings about "demographic transformations" which must strike self-respecting unionists as a Tim Pat Coogan-style threat. If the "political process" doesn't get you, then the breeding sexed-up Catholic minority will, so you better start making a deal.
And O'Leary's conclusion that "the IRA may in good faith amend its constitution to accomplish its own dissolution in a manner that the majority of the ghosts of the first Dail would approve" showed just how warped the premises of his arguments actually were.
So, even when Adams makes an appeal to academic opinion, the best he can do is to an academic who writes papers which channel the ideas of a mouldering generation of revolutionaries and political fantasists.
Has the Irish historical argument ever seemed so palpably threadbare?
It is clear from Adams's non-analysis that even after all these years -- even after Enniskillen and those "human bombs" -- modern Sinn Fein still has no answer to the question posed by Taoiseach Jack Lynch in the white heat of 1970.
Rounding on the fundamentalists and the sectarians, Lynch asked them whether they wanted to "adopt the role of occupying conquerer over the one million or so six-county citizens who at present support partition?
Would we compel them to flee the country altogether, or live under our domination, in constant opposition, feverishly nursing hatred and secretly plotting revenge?".
Adams may have some monologue prepared in answer to this profound question, but we can't hear him.
The music in the Emerald Piper is too loud, and even his own colleagues like Toireasa Ferris are heading for the door.
John-Paul McCarthy teaches Irish history at Exeter College, Oxford
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/19/seamus-heaney-interview
He's Ireland's greatest living writer and its first Nobel prize-winning poet since Yeats. As "Famous" Seamus Heaney turns 70, he talks to Robert McCrum about celebrity, surviving a stroke and drinking poteen with Ted Hughes
Robert McCrum
The Observer,
Sunday 19 July 2009
Seamus Heaney, photographed in Dublin, 2009. Photograph: Antonio Olmos
Seamus Heaney is taking a taxi from his home in Sandymount, which overlooks the bright grey waters of Dublin Bay, to the centre of town. Our driver is silent, but bursting with respect. When the poet compliments him on the ingenuity of his route through the lunchtime traffic, the cabbie exclaims, with a sudden loss of discretion, "Only the best now for Ireland's favourite son."
Everyone wants a piece of Ireland's first Nobel-winning poet since Yeats. When we arrive at our destination, an oyster bar overlooking St Stephen's Green, the ebb and flow of Irish pride in Seamus, as he is universally known, surges up in a succession of spontaneous greetings. Everyone recognises Heaney's professorial spectacles and silvery mop.
A frisson passes through the restaurant. This woman wants to tell him about her daughter, recovering from leukaemia, and to ask for an autograph. Two punters, checking the starting prices on a laptop, volunteer a tip about the 2.30 at Leopardstown. Another old chap wants to be remembered. And the maître d' is beside himself with getting the best table ready.
I wonder how Heaney can stand it.
No need to worry. The object of this attention seems to move in a serene bubble of modesty and unconcern: he likes the attention, and it does not really trouble him. He's had it, in different ways, all his life, and he knows that, for an Irish poet, it comes with the territory.
There are many ways to be a famous writer in Dublin. You can be mad and grand, like Yeats; or mysterious, like Beckett; or drunk, like Flann O'Brien; or absent, like Joyce; or what? A long time ago, Clive James nailed Heaney with "Seamus Famous", but that's a gag, at best half true, spun off Heaney's brilliant self-presentation. There is rather more to the poet than his fame, dazzling though that can be.
For someone who has been so remorselessly scrutinised, Heaney is still something of an enigma. He works hard to make "famous" seem normal. Unfailingly courteous and attentive, he can also be grave, remote and occasionally stern, always watching himself, like the king of a vulnerable monarchy.
In keeping with that vigilance, and a well-defended uncertainty, Heaney is always asking himself the essential questions articulated in Preoccupations, his collected essays. "How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?"
I've known Seamus Heaney for about half of his writing life. The key to our friendship was always a third party: the mischievous, antic figure of the folk-singer, broadcaster and lord of misrule, David Hammond, from Belfast. Last summer, after a long illness, Hammond died. I was in America at the time, and unable to go to the funeral.
As part of my farewell to "Davey", I knew I had to see Seamus, pay my respects to the dead, and share the recollection of old times. Quite apart from my deep affection for Hammond, I'm conscious that Heaney is keen on the proper obsequies (he loves funerals) and will be only too glad to raise a glass to our old friend.
It's a good moment. Heaney has just turned 70. On the table in the window of his attic study - the place that he calls his "hutch" - there are three piles of poetry books: he wants to pass on good first editions of his life's work to his children. As well as copies of the best-known volumes (Death of a Naturalist, North, Field Work, Door into the Dark and Station Island) there are the translations (Sweeney Astray, Beowulf), the plays (The Cure at Troy, The Burial at Thebes), and some very rare editions from small presses, an accumulated bibliography of between 30 and 40 titles.
With three score years and ten behind him, Heaney is in a quasi-mystical mood, ready to take stock of his life and to address the question of growing old as a poet. "The problem as you get older," he says, "is that you become more self-aware. At the same time you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky. You're either obsessed or you're surprised. There's no halfway house."
Lately, his age has given him both an extra reason to take stock and also a premonitory surprise, a sudden tap on the shoulder. In August 2006, Heaney had a stroke, something he's not spoken about publicly before.
Heaney and his wife, Marie, were up in Donegal for the 75th birthday of Ann Friel, wife of Brian, the playwright. "We flew up there," says Heaney, taking up the story. "There were many old friends. We all stayed in a boarding house, and went to bed at around 12.30." In the past, Donegal has been the scene of certain bardic revels, but on this occasion, he says, "it wasn't a wild night. David Hammond was there, Brian Friel himself. John Hume. Tom Kilroy [the writer], Desmond Kavanagh. I went to bed around one o'clock, and woke at eight the next morning. We were in a twin-bedded room, and I spoke across the gap between us to Marie, reporting a remark made to me the night before by Brian Friel about another distinguished Irish writer. You know, in the middle of the floor, he'd said to me, 'X is a real shit, you know.'"
Heaney goes on, "So we had a good laugh about this, and then I made a move to get out of bed, and I felt strange. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I made to move, but I couldn't move, and I felt very odd. My speech wasn't affected. When Marie came over to help me, she saw my leg was twisted, and she began to cry out. And I said, 'For God's sake, calm down.' Yes, I spoke roughly to my little girl, and then I realised there was something seriously wrong, so I apologised to her and said. 'Yes, you'd better go to the Kavanaghs.'"
This was a piece of luck. Mary and Desmond Kavanagh and their children are medics.
"So immediately the family went into action," Heaney continues. "The medical grapevine across the country was alerted and the ambulance was on its way. [The poet] Peter Fallon and Kavanagh carried me down the stairs."
Heaney reports his instinctive Ulster sang froid, saying: "My sense of humour was intact as they were carrying me down." Almost everyone involved in getting the bulky, 6ft figure of Heaney down the stairs had been involved with the Field Day theatre company, and many of the group had recently suffered minor illnesses. So now, with his natural detachment, Heaney made a joke. "It's the curse of Field Day, I said. But within an hour I was in the ambulance."
"The trip in the ambulance I always remember," he says, "because Marie was in the back with me. I just wrote about it three weeks ago. To me, that was one of the actual beauties of the stroke, that renewal of love in the ambulance. One of the strongest, sweetest memories I have. We went through Glendorn on a very beautiful, long, bumpy ride to Letterkenny hospital." There, they did a scan, he continues. "And the woman who was doing the scan - this is Ireland for you - the nurse said, 'I believe you were at Friel's last night.' Her uncle had been at the party. So this is Ireland," he repeats, with satisfaction. It's certainly Heaney's Ireland.
Heaney's stroke - the festive occasion; the circle of old friends; the jokes; the Irish grapevine; the observation of the self from afar; the country drive - is all of a piece with the poet's character, good fortune and his unflappable temperament. Within a comparatively short time, a matter of weeks, he was on the road to recovery. Looking back, he can even refer to his hospitalisation as "a rest cure".
But I've had my own experience of stroke. It is much bleaker than that. So I pressed him about the darker side of his experience. "Yes, I cried," he says. "I cried, and I wanted my Daddy, funnily enough. I did. I felt babyish." But the public Heaney cannot enjoy the luxury of self-indulgence. Even by his standards, the next stage of his convalescence was surreal, a visit from a friend, the former president of the United States.
"Clinton was here for the Ryder Cup," he says. "He'd been up with the Taoiseach [Bertie Ahern] and had heard about my 'episode'. The next thing, he put a call to the hospital, and said he was on his way. He strode into the ward like a kind of god. My fellow sufferers, four or five men much more stricken than I was, were amazed. But he shook their hands and introduced himself. It was marvellous, really. He went round all the wards and gave the whole hospital a terrific boost. We had about 25 minutes with him, and talked about Ulysses Grant's memoirs, which he was reading." Then Clinton was off, back to the airport.
Around this time, perhaps responding to the larger stage on which he always finds himself, he began to write a poem, Miracle, inspired by the gospel story of the paralysed man lowered through the roof into Christ's presence. Heaney insists that it's not a spiritual poem, but one that marked "being changed a bit by something happening. Every now and again you write a poem that changes gear."
He had never written a poem in response to scripture before, and says he is not a believer. But clearly the stroke had come as a powerful moment of punctuation in his intensely busy life, and gave him the idea that he should devote more time to himself. "I looked at the calendar after these days in the hospital," he says. "I thought, 'My God, you've never stopped, Seamus.' So, for a year afterwards, I just cancelled everything. I decided that in hospital."
So now there was another pressure, a new conflict to wrestle with. "I spend a lot of time saying 'No' to people," he says, "and then being anxious about saying No." He says his illness has heightened an inner sense of private doubt, confiding, "I'm less confident about public speaking. I spend a lot of time worrying about it, and getting it ready. I'm not good spontaneously at all. I suppose it's balancing a sense of obligation against self-preservation."
Meanwhile, in hospital, making a steady recovery, he read more than he had in ages, finding a special comfort in thrillers by Henning Mankell, Donna Leon and Robert Harris. With time on his hands, inevitably he also reviewed his situation. His mother had died of a stroke at 74, never regaining consciousness; his father from colon cancer at 76.
Did he, from his hospital bed, have any regrets about succumbing to the pressures of celebrity? "I can't regret myself," he replies. "I mean, it's part of me, for better or worse. I'm aware now that I've repeated myself, but it's my temperament. I'm stuck with it."
Seamus Heaney was born in 1939, just before the Second World War, on the farm of Mossbawn, near the village of Castledawson, County Derry, into an Ulster farming family. In one of his poems, he recalls a strangely tranquil haven from the storms raging across the west - the thump of a sledgehammer, and the "heavyweight silence" of cattle in the rain.
Mossbawn is equidistant from Derry and Belfast, in deep country, a one-storey thatched and whitewashed house set back from a main road, though the traffic was always intermittent. Heaney says that the dominant notes in Mossbawn were the clucks and cackles of the hens, and sometimes the roar of a calf or cow from a nearby field. He also remembers the screams of the pigs from the slaughterhouse across the way.
His mother, who was a McCann, gave him the convivial side of his character. "The Heaneys were more kind of native American," he jokes. "They were always in the wigwam, facing each other, and very grave. There was a kind of stoicism about the Heaneys and an Anglo-Saxon melancholy, and everything was very measured. Marie once said of them that they didn't carry a spare ounce of emotional weight. That was completely true."
To be crude about it, his McCann side nurtures his public face, while the Heaney part fuels the graver and more introspective reflections of the poetry. His wife Marie also tells me that Mossbawn holds the key to her husband. "It's his paradise," she says. "His Eden. All he's ever wanted to do is go back."
Both the McCanns and the Heaneys were Roman Catholic families in Protestant Ulster. This has placed him at the murderous crossroads of sectarian conflict and Irish nationalism throughout his life. It's an unenviable and dangerous location at the best of times, and there's a part of him that's highly attuned to the history and heritage of oppression. He has always moved, as he puts it, "like a double agent among the big concepts". On both sides of the border, some still question his loyalties.
"My mother's side," he goes on, speaking carefully, "were much more alert to the exacerbations of the situation, and with a stronger sense of injustice, and a more articulate mockery. The irony is so important. In the north, northern irony has allowed people to stand at the edge of the rift and shout across to each other. This is very important, actually. David Hammond used to say, 'Banter, banter is the curse of us all.'"
Life in Mossbawn, in the Ulster countryside, is what gives Heaney his language and imagery - words like "braird", "seggans" and "sned", titles like A Hagging Match, The Haw Lantern, and Broagh, a placename almost impossible for an outsider to pronounce correctly. I remember asking him about the nuances of Ulster English for a television programme some years back. Heaney's reply expressed not only a deep reverence for the sanctity of his country paradise, but also articulated the source of his creative energy. He remains, pre-eminently, the poet of the peat bog and the home fire. He said: "Your language has a lot to do with your confidence, your sense of place and authority." He added that speaking his own language, Irish English, was to acquire a trust in the pronunciation and in the quirks of vocabulary, and "to go through a kind of political re-awakening".
Heaney's poetry has a distinctive poetic language that comes from a direct and intimate connection with the Irish landscape and its culture rather than any academic literary ambition. He has often said that he showed no special aptitude or poetic promise as a child.
A poem like Alphabets recalls a small boy wondering over the alphabet, but showing no precocious mastery - "First it is 'copying out', and then 'English'" - until, as he puts it, "the poet's dream stole over him like sunlight." If there was poetry in Mossbawn, it came through holiday, festival and party recitations.
Then, in 1953, this paradise was shattered when his brother Christopher was killed in a road accident, aged three. In the elegiac poem Mid-Term Break, Heaney wrote about this dreadful episode in his young, adolescent life (he was 13). He describes being "embarrassed by old men standing up to shake my hand", and then, with the poet's detachment, seeing his baby brother's corpse laid out in an upstairs room with "a poppy bruise on his left temple". Even by the stoical traditions of the North, Heaney learned early to ingest his pain.
Young Seamus was the scholarship boy in a family of seven boys and two girls. As the clever, eldest one, he was bound for the city - the great Protestant industrial and shipbuilding inferno of Belfast. As a country boy, banished from Eden, he was lost. His first poems were written under the pseudonym "Incertus". He has described the personality of this pseudonymous poet as expert in obeisance, "a shy soul fretting. Oh yes, I crept before I walked."
"I was describing my own unsureness," Heaney explains, when I ask him about the Incertus pseudonym. "Describing exactly the inner state of the creature. When I was an undergraduate [at Queen's, Belfast], I was in the poetry-aspiring business, and I didn't feel confident. I didn't feel I had crossed any line. I was still scrabbling on the outside, not entering."
Heaney, who often harks back to the Anglo-Saxons, has many of their qualities. Behind his homespun bareness there's a highly wrought editorial process at work, and a good deal of artifice in which things are not quite as they seem. It's this that can sustain an accusation of deviousness and even cunning. In his own career, "Incertus" was soon replaced by "Seamus J. Heaney". This was the young man from Castledawson who, at the turn of the Sixties, began to experiment with poetry.
In the autumn of 1962, Heaney met young Marie Devlin, his future wife. "We met at a dinner. That evening I walked her home, and I lent her a book, saying I needed it back by Thursday. The disgraceful truth was that I had a girlfriend, and she was returning on Friday." It's a long time ago, but he is still rather sheepish about the memory. "So we met on Thursday, and then there was a kind of stealth. It took a long time to clear the decks. But there was a kind of immediate recognition, yes."
As well as falling in love, he began to write poems with "a new sense of possibility, and a new confidence". He protests that "they weren't any good," but remembers "I was excited." He had joined Philip Hobsbaum's influential Belfast poetry circle, a group, he once said, "who used to talk poetry day after day with an intensity and prejudice that cannot but have left a mark on all of us". It was within this circle that he first wrote poems such as Digging, Tollund Man, Mid-Term Break and Death of a Naturalist.
With an exhilarating sense of discovery and excitement, these early poems were published by Karl Miller in the New Statesman. Then Faber showed interest; everything was happening very fast. "I knew I wasn't quite ready," Heaney says, "but I wrote like hell and sent the manuscript in." That was January 1965. When he describes it now, it seems to him as if it was yesterday. "To be truthful, it wasn't until North was written, and had come out, that I felt I had followed a calling or done something in the name of it."
Death of a Naturalist was noted for poetry that sprang from the farming life of Heaney's youth, and its subtle communication of a physical and pastoral intensity in a language of profound and unforced simplicity. Heaney, whose work appeared at the same time as Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson found himself hailed as a standard-bearer for a "Northern Renaissance", a movement centred on Belfast that some have dismissed as a journalistic construction but which, nonetheless, signalled an end to the poetically barren 1940s and 50s.
Edna O'Brien, who has followed Heaney's career from the beginning, "devouring everything he wrote", believes that, once he had emerged from the cocoon of literary Belfast, "his place in Irish literature was guaranteed, secure, and goldplated." "There's a poem in his collection District and Circle [called] The Lift, that is truly great," she says. "His essays, too, are so marvellously luminous, so erudite and accessible." Invited to compare him to Yeats, she demurs blithely. "I'm not going to go down that road," she laughs. "Great writers are unique, and beyond comparisons." From the beginning, then, Heaney always seemed destined for greater things.
Despite his precocious flying start, Heaney says he was still "uncertain at that stage what I was doing". He took a postgraduate year of teacher training, not realising it was a blind alley: "I thought I was going to be a teacher," he says. "The first guy out of the family, and into the trade with a degree."
At this early stage, and throughout his career, Heaney has been susceptible to the influence of stronger artistic talents. Now he met a poet, later a great and enduring friend, who "actually sent a charge of energy through me, a kind of electric Hopkinsian transmission". He had met Ted Hughes.
"I always felt safer for Ted's friendship somehow," he says now, recalling the poet laureate. "He was foundational to me. As you know, he transmitted a desire to be more yourself to yourself." Of their first meeting, he says, almost bride-like, "I recall trembling with excitement and shyness."
The next time they were together, for a reading, Hughes came over with his wife Assia Wevill. "We sat up in my house in Belfast that night after the reading, drinking poteen and singing. Marie sang songs. I think Assia sang some Israeli songs, and Ted sang 'The Brown and Yellow Ale', which he said was [James] Joyce's favourite song. Everybody was young. Assia was quite magnificently beautiful. She said a wonderfully grand and affected thing to me. She could see I was excited and in awe of Ted, and she said 'Poets ought to be like bishops. Each should have his own diocese and meet not all that often, and quite formally.'
I remember Marie had a strong sense that Assia was somehow halted by Sylvia [Plath], and in competition with her."
Now that we're talking about Ted Hughes, a poet who was always so attuned to an unpoliced unconscious, and even the astrological side of creativity, it seems like the right moment to ask about the question of inspiration. Where does poetry come from? In his response to this question, Heaney is probably more pragmatic and Anglo-Saxon than Hughes would have been.
"I think it comes from all the other poetry that's there," he replies. "I think that a relationship with something else is called for - all the other poetry that's around, or the culture, or the times, or your clique - and it calls the poetry out of you." Is there someone who does this? "To get started, what starts you?" he wonders. "You can call it the muse, but it's excitement, the beloved. Certainly, there's a kind of quickening." He begins to describe this excitement. "There is a physical need. I need to feel a purchase on something. I used to say that it was like a bite on the line, or a tug. With me, the purchase is a 'thingyness' or a 'memoryness'". Now he's becoming slightly Delphic, and I sense we're drifting into some ancient Celtic cave.
"It really comes out of - from the side... Like a ball kicked in," he goes on, speaking of this private moment with a tangible, strange reticence. "It's rather risky. I don't keep a notebook. I'm superstitious. I always felt that if I started to be assiduous about it, and looked for it, then it might go away. Or I would turn into a different kind of writer."
So is Marie his muse? "Well, she was a muse, certainly," he replies. I'm not exactly sure what to make of this answer, but before we can go down that avenue, he's switched back to Hughes. "Ted's phrase, which I love quoting, is that the only thing that distinguishes what we call poetry from the other literary arts was that it arrived from 'the place of ultimate suffering and decision' in us." He repeats the phrase with relish and satisfaction, as if it defines something important about his own work.
For Heaney, the Irish Catholic from the North, the central and inescapable fact about his creative life, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to the present day, is that it had been shadowed, haunted, and occasionally blighted, by the Troubles. If ever there was a place of "ultimate suffering" in Heaney, it must be located somewhere in the historical and psychic trauma of Northern Ireland.
But when you read Heaney's poems, you rarely find any committed parallel narrative. It's as though, from very early on, out of temperament as much as self-preservation, double-agent Heaney chose to step back from, or to the side of, the crisis. To be detached, and uninvolved. To elevate his uncertainty into art, and transmute it into the lyricism of everyday life and the "thingyness" of things. How he executed this manoeuvre is not exactly clear, but there's a story he tells against himself that says a lot about his innate diplomatic skills in navigating the bloody waters of the sectarian North.
When he lived in Belfast during the beginning of the Troubles, Heaney used to buy fish and chips at a shop on the edge of fiercely loyalist territory. One night in the chippy a new assistant, not knowing Heaney as a regular, recognised him from a television arts show the night before. "Oh," she cried, lashing on the salt and vinegar. "I saw you on the box last night, didn't I? Aren't you the Irish poet?"
Before Heaney could answer this, the most loaded of all local questions, the owner of the shop turned from her frying to correct the girl. "Not at all, dear," she said. "He's like the rest of us, a British subject living in Ulster. God," she went on, now speaking directly to Heaney, "wouldn't it sicken you? Having to listen to that? Irish poet!" When he repeats this story, Heaney confesses he was afraid to contradict her. Aren't you the Irish poet? The irony is that, having used all his resources to evade the question, Heaney is now, more than ever, defined in this way.
At this point, Marie Heaney, climbing up the stairs to the poet's "hutch", arrives with cups of coffee. She is recovering from a successful cancer treatment, and wears a wig. Today, she has lost her voice. There's a whispered conversation in which Heaney wonders if it's not too early for "a nip" (of Bushmills), and then we continue.
At first, he says he had been carried along on "a generational conveyor belt". He'd been the "scholarship boy, chosen boy, first class degree. I'd gone into teaching, and had blessedly encountered poetry, the magic of print. I'd been published, and it all just came along. It happened very fast, and I knew that I was being overpraised in my first three books. I wasn't as sure as other people were."
Then, in 1970, he was invited to Berkeley, California, and his eyes were opened. "This gave me a sense that I could make a choice. I wasn't just on the conveyor belt. I could step off it. When we came back from Berkeley in 1971, I was ready to make the move and become a writer, as it were. America influenced me in taking the step to leave Queen's and go freelance."
He doesn't see this as leaving Belfast because of the Troubles, as some have alleged. "I said, I have to verify myself to myself. I would give up the job [at Queen's University]. Among other things, I felt I was drinking too much. The relationship between the move to County Wicklow and the happenings in the North wasn't cause and effect at all, no."
Heaney insists that the cause of his move was what he calls "the writerly desire. It was the right thing at the right tine. But, of course, once I moved there was the sense of historical change, and an editorial in the Irish Times, 'Heaney moves South'. So this was already mythologised, and I couldn't escape the sense that it was a public act as well as a private."
Just before I met Heaney, I had come across a quotation from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which seemed appropriate. Now I read it out to him for his reaction: "A man lives not only his personal life as an individual but also consciously or unconsciously the life of his epoch and his contemporaries."
Heaney listens thoughtfully, and after a pause, he agrees. "That's true," he says. "You didn't need to be a writer to be living the same life [of the Troubles]. That's what gave everybody who came to the fore in my generation a charge." Temperamentally, he cannot be unambiguous about his answer, and launches into a complicated and not wholly convincing theory about how the poetry of Belfast in the 60s was not related to the violence. But then, having given the diplomatic answer, he concedes that the Troubles had given him "something of consequence" to write about, and that "Something was at stake. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I'm aware of it since the peace process."
"These were very dangerous times," says Heaney, yielding a point with hindsight. "When the Provisional IRA began their campaign, people like myself, with a strong sense that things needed to be redressed, were excited." Bloody Sunday and its poisoned aftermath polarised everything. Even Heaney lost his cool sufficiently to write a polemical poem, speaking of "My heart besieged by anger, my mind a gap of danger" and of justice waiting to sprout "in Derry where the 13 men lay dead". Looking back to those dark days, he insists that this was a protest poem, commissioned for a rally but never actually performed.
The worst year was 1974. "There was a sense of an utterly wasteful, cancerous stalemate, and that the violence was unproductive. It was villainous, but you were living with it. Only after it stopped did you realise what you had lived with. Day by day, week by week, we lived through this, and didn't fully take in what was going on."
But he always felt it was impossible to take sides, and I ask him if he has ever regretted not being more vocal. "Speaking out," he insists, "one was cornered. My sympathy was not with the IRA, but it wasn't with the Thatcher government, either." He says now that he "didn't want to enter into bigotry," but his deep Irishness was never far below the surface. Again, there's a little episode in his creative life that's more revealing than any commentary.
When, in 1981, Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison placed Heaney in an anthology of contemporary British poetry, he was indignant at being "cornered" and protested in rhyme. "My passport's green", he wrote, "No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen".
He now says of this furore that "it was complicated because at the same time I didn't want to pull my books out of Britain. I didn't want to be bigoted. I just wanted clarification, but it was complicated... It was a hell of an uneasy time here, savage. It was an awkward time for anybody who wanted to stand apart from both sides. I didn't want to be too rabid, or enlisted as an IRA spokesperson either.'
He goes on, "As I was living in the Republic, I wanted to call myself Irish. I just felt totally conflicted. I felt I wasn't owning up to something in myself if I ran with that ["contemporary British poetry"]. It's a very ambiguous, uneasy thing, having the British cake and eating it, as it were." Lately, Heaney has become more political, for instance, urging Irish voters to say Yes to the Lisbon Treaty, but the Troubles remain a closed book.
Heaney turned 50 during the murderous final decade of the war in the North. To mark this milestone, he gave himself a year off in County Wicklow, and went to Rome for the first time. Does he go to church? "No. I mean, I go into it. I go to funerals and weddings." He doesn't pray, but "I find myself mantra-ing a bit. I'm not addressing a godhead, but repeating a mantra. But it's like nursery rhymes and belongs in the realms of things known by heart."
During this season of solitary communion with his Irishness, to occupy himself as a fulltime writer, Heaney began some translations from Irish Gaelic literature. He had learned Irish at school. The language was real to him. "If you lived in the Irish countryside as I did in my childhood," he says, "you lived in a primal Gaeltacht." So he translated the Madness of King Sweeney, a classic Irish text. Other commissions followed, notably for Beowulf, a translation which, to his amazement, was awarded the Whitbread prize in 1999. This was part of a prize-winning sequence he shared with his friend and collaborator, Ted Hughes. Several times in our conversation Heaney referred to "Ted" with a deep sense of personal loss.
Hughes died in 1998, three years after Heaney's Nobel Prize. The poet's death was like a great tree falling in the forest; the prize a sudden gale of public exposure: these two events, so unconnected, have combined to leave Heaney isolated, reflective, and facing up to the inevitability of the endgame. A poet who has conducted his life so successfully wants to manage his last years with grace and distinction, and to continue defying expectations.
"Between the stroke and the 70th birthday," he says, "I suddenly realised I had boxed myself into a kind of closing cadence." So now he's doing his best to break out of that box, and says "I'm trying to finish a book of poems to counteract that." He wants to call it Human Chain, another reference to his downstairs exit to the ambulance after the stroke.
There'll be no Yeatsian madness for Seamus Famous. In fact, he takes secret inspiration from one of literature's classic enigmas, confiding that when recently asked by an arts programme which character from fiction he'd like to be, "I said I'd like to be Jeeves."
He is still elucidating the mystery of his life as a poet. "If the truth be told," he says, "it's only now, 14 years later, that I'm realising that I really did win the Nobel Prize. All that time,
I was holding it at bay and diving underneath it, and hurrying through it."
Heaney has reached a moment in his life where he wants to be at peace with himself, and with his society. He quotes, as a kind of epitaph, the messenger's line from his translation of "Oedipus at Colonus": "Wherever that man went, he went gratefully." Here, he catches his own quotation, and laughs. "I'd better watch out that I don't talk myself into a conclusion."
Nothing's easy, but he can find renewal and take comfort in the solitude of his house in Wicklow. He says he still finds it hard to say "No". "I'm haunted by 'ought'," he confesses, conceding that he's probably done too many interviews (including a whole volume of them, Stepping Stones, with Dennis O'Driscoll), and accepted too many honorary degrees. "Again, after the stroke I thought, 'This has got to stop now.'"
Now, more than a decade after the peace process was signed, the lethal, divisive times through which he worked in his prime are part of the Irish past that is always so vivid and present in the everyday lives of the people. "British" and "Irish" have become written into the constitutional settlement inaugurated by the Good Friday Agreement.
The sectarian scars are healing, despite the occasional flaring of violence. Now, says Heaney, "You can have an Irish identity in the North, and also have your Irish passport. As far as I'm concerned, the language has changed, the times have changed, and we have signed up to an open relationship with Sinn Fein." He seems relieved that the ancient Irish blood feud is in abeyance for the moment.
Heaney says he was not involved in the Good Friday Agreement "in any way". But he's known John Hume, its chief architect, for years, and when President Clinton threw himself into the peace process, he recruited Heaney's work to his cause, quoting one of Heaney's most memorable lines "Between hope and history" at every opportunity. The loaded tranquillity of the peace process mirrors the pregnant understatements of Heaney's own poetry.
He will never be drawn into an explicit exploration of his place in this history, or his contribution of "hope", but in answer to his own inner and urgent questions, Heaney knows that poetry must be a private matter. So how does he reconcile the pressures of the Nobel laureateship, and prevent the wind of celebrity from extinguishing the flame of inspiration? "Well," he admits, slightly baffled, "I don't know the answer to that."
The taxi is waiting downstairs. It's time to go into town.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/FEATURE-Republican-tells-of-a.5472628.jp
Published Date: 18 July 2009
By Sam McBride
IT'S not surprising that a republican who visited this year's Twelfth parades for the first time concluded his review of the day by saying that he would not be back.
What is surprising is that he found parts of the day, where he toured around several parades – enjoyable.
Mark McGregor who was one of a group of bloggers – those who write online columns, who got together to report and review this year's Twelfth.
The group published their reports on Slugger O'Toole, the Northern Ireland politics and culture website, which has a number of contributors who cover most of the political spectrum – including supportes of the TUV, DUP, Sinn Fein and UUP.
One of the website's regular writers from a republican perspective, Mark McGregor instigated this year's Twelfth coverage, suggesting that they go out to different parts of the Province and report the day's events.
Writing ahead of the Twelfth, Mr McGregor stressed that he was attending the parades with a negative perception of Orangeism and was not out tot take part in any sort of 'reconciliation' project.
Starting his review, he wrote: "How do you write about the Twelfth after your first proper one? I've no idea. I've just had a fascinating day."
He recalled setting out to see a parade leaving the Co Antrim village of Crumlin: "Up early to get the local Crumlin parade before they headed off to wherever and I'm glad I made it.
"At one point it looked like we'd miss the parade due to a bus connection to Lisburn for the Belfast parade, before they left, but we ended up getting to enjoy (and I think I did enjoy it] the noise of two proper Lambegs beating out a deafening sound across a village deep in sleep.
"No noise, no cars, just a deep drumming spreading for miles. Almost hypnotic over an empty street."
Unsurprisingly, Mr McGregor was less impressed with other aspects of the Twelfth. Still writing about Crumlin, he continued: "I almost forgave those that thought this inconsequential parade needed to take place without an Antrim GAA flag in sight. A display of music and culture rarely found the rest of the day."
By contrast, he was unimpressed by the music on display in Belfast, describing it as an 'utterly tedious' parade.
"Blood and thunder flute bands belting out the same kind of stuff time after time. The lodges aren't the centre of attraction, it is gaudy bands with flutes."
He questioned the culture where many parade spectators drank huge amounts of alcohol – often, he said, within sight of police officers – at the Belfast parade, but said that in Bangor it was very different, with officers doing more to enforce on-street drinking laws during a 'civilised parade'.
"Still a bit of drinking on the street but better bands – accordion, brass, pipe and an easy atmosphere.
"Up to the field and it was like an expanded school fete – still drink but not drunkenness going on."
Mr McGregor said that he did not intend to go to the Twelfth again and advised readers wanting to experience their first Twelfth to avoid the Belfast parade.
Other contributors to the website, some of them Orangemen, wrote for the perspectives on the day.
Mick Fealty who runs the Slugger website, said of the team who had reviewed the Twelfth for the site: "Some of them were members of the Orange and some of them were people who'd never been near an Orange demonstration, who did the usual thing, this is in the middle classes – turning their back on it and going to their holiday homes in Donegal, north Antrim or the Mourne Mountains.
He said that his team had reported on the marked differences between the Twelfth in places as diverse as Belfast, Bangor and Fivemiletown.
"We had a guy at the demonstration down in Fivemiletown and I had nothing from him except a few text messages which were primarily photographs", he said.
"It told it's own story – it was very small, very intimate, in a roughly cut hay field, small scale, bouncy castle for kids, everybody sitting round eating their sandwiches… it's the kind of thing that is obvious to anybody whose family's been in the Orange or to the parades when they were younger.
"None of this stuff is terribly obvious to people like myself who grew up as a Catholic, who saw the parades, …who were perhaps fearful at times, particularly in the early 70s when the Troubles were bad and there were a lot of random assassinations.
Updated: 11/1/2009
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