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http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/12/northern-ireland-continuity-ira-attacks
* Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
* The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009
The terror group responsible for the murder of Stephen Carroll, the policeman killed last month in Craigavon, Co Armagh, has issued a defiant message predicting similar attacks.
In its message on the eve of commemorations for the 1916 Easter Rising, the Continuity IRA said: "In the year since last Easter the war has been carried to the English enemy. Nobody should be surprised at this development
by the Continuity IRA. As long as British occupation forces remain in Ireland, that will be the inevitable result of their presence here. The lessons of history are working out again in our time."
The terror group also denounced Sinn Féin for what they claimed were "smears" against them.
"In particular we salute our Republican prisoners in Portlaoise and in Maghaberry, Co Antrim, and assure them of our full support. They are not forgotten and we take this opportunity to endorse the recent action of the Maghaberry prisoners in clearing their wing of non-political prisoners.
"This move was never more necessary in view of the circulation of garbled media messages which we believe to be British-inspired. We cherish our reputation and repudiate the smear spread about by the Provo leadership that we are criminal and not political and that it is permissible to inform the British forces about us.
"We condemn criminality inside and outside the prisons and deplore the misuse of our name by those who collaborate with the British and urge young people to join the enemy's occupation forces in Ireland. We uphold as equal partners and comrades 'the Felons of Our Land' in the various prisons."
Carroll was the first Police Service of Northern Ireland officer to die at the hands of terrorists.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/UKNews1/idUKTRE53B02Z20090412
Sun Apr 12, 2009 2:25am BST
DUBLIN (Reuters) - A dissident nationalist group in Northern Ireland will carry out armed attacks in mainland Britain as part of its campaign for a united Ireland, its representative said in a newspaper interview on Sunday.
The Real IRA, a splinter paramilitary group of the IRA, also claimed responsibility for the 2006 murder of Denis Donaldson, a former Sinn Fein chief administrator and spy for the British, and made threats against Sinn Fein deputy first minister Martin McGuiness.
Sinn Fein is the political wing of the IRA and McGuiness was a senior IRA commander in the 1970s.
In the interview with Ireland's Sunday Tribune the Real IRA representative said it planned to attack Britain "when it becomes opportune."
The Real IRA, thought to a small group with only marginal support from the Catholic community, has previously shown it can carry out such threats.
In 2000 it launched an audacious missile attack on the headquarters MI6. No one was hurt in the assault, but it was a propaganda coup.
The Real IRA, which has already claimed responsibility for killing two British soldiers outside Northern Ireland's Massereene Barracks on March 7 this year, said it would also continue to target soldiers in the province.
"Orlaigh na hEireann will continue to strike at the British occupation forces wherever and whenever we decide," he added, using the Irish name the group refers to itself as.
The Real IRA split from the IRA in 1997 over that group's involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process, which in 1998 ended 30 years of fighting between minority Irish Republican Catholics and protestants which killed more than 3,600 people.
The Massereene attacks were the worst since the peace deal.
The newspaper said the group will publicly admit on Sunday to killing Donaldson at a commemoration of the Easter Rising, the 1916 insurrection staged in Ireland against British rule.
Donaldson was shot dead in April 2006, four months after he admitted to being a long-serving British spy, and no group claimed responsibility for his murder.
"We always intended to claim the operation but we wanted to wait until we had first executed crown force personnel. That was secured at Massereene," the spokesman said.
"The days of a campaign involving military operations every day or every few days, are over. We're looking for high-profile targets, though we'll obviously take advantage when other targets present themselves," he said.
The newspaper said the group will also threaten McGuiness, who denounced last month's attack as well as the killing of a policeman by another splinter group, the Continuity IRA.
"Let us remind our former comrade (McGuiness) of the nature and actions of a traitor," read a printed version of the statement, referring to what happened to Donaldson.
"No traitor will escape justice regardless of time, rank or past actions. The republican movement has a long memory."
The statement also threatened members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
(Writing by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Matthew Jones)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/12/housing-estate-northern-ireland
The Springfarm housing estate, just minutes from where two British soldiers were shot last month, is being hailed as a triumph of integration, reports Henry McDonald
* Henry McDonald
* The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009
A housing estate just minutes away from the spot where two British soldiers were gunned down last month by the Real IRA has become a symbol of hope in Northern Ireland.
Springfarm, on the edge of Antrim town, has become the most successful area in the province to integrate Catholics and Protestants, as well as families from ethnic minorities.
As the town still reels from the aftershocks of the double killing on 7 March, which marked a new offensive by dissident republican terror groups, residents are celebrating their status as the most religiously and racially integrated place in Northern Ireland.
The local community group has ensured that Springfarm's population reflects a 40%/40% Catholic and Protestant mix, with the remaining 20% comprising people from all over the world who have come to the area.
Springfarm has a large ethnic minority population in part due to the three major hospitals in the county. Families come from as far away as Africa, eastern Europe and the Indian sub-continent to live and work there. The Housing Executive (HE), Northern Ireland's public housing authority, is now holding up Springfarm as the best example of voluntary integration as it seeks to establish more "shared future" projects across the north.
Inside the offices of the Springfarm & District Community Association, reminders of darker times are plastered all over the walls. Newspaper cuttings scream headlines about racist attacks, with photographs of swastikas daubed on homes and stories about drug dealers operating on the estate. Pointing at the stories, Seamus Davis, the community association's chairman, stressed that they belonged to the past.
"Springfarm used to be known as an army estate," he said. "The families of soldiers who served in places like Massereene barracks, where the two young guys were murdered last month, lived here. About 15 years ago, after the first ceasefires, the army families started moving out and there were a lot of vacant properties.
"Unfortunately they were occupied by undesirable families from Belfast with long criminal records who tried to take over the estate. It was not easy standing up to them. There were five drug-related deaths. My house was pipe-bombed and a pitchfork was thrown through my window. But eventually, in co-operation with the police and the Housing Executive, the decent people prevailed."
After this victory, it was decided to turn Springfarm into a new model estate. Davis, who has lived in the area for 28 years, said the HE, the community association and the residents were determined to make it the most integrated area in Northern Ireland. "There are a few basic rules everyone adheres to: no flags to be flown at any time of the year; no paramilitary or political murals; no kerbstones painted red, white and blue or green, white and orange. And while we can't vet anyone coming into the area alongside the HE, we do try to ensure that our religious and ethnic balance is maintained."
There are 550 houses in this semi-rural corner of the town close to the main motorway into Belfast. The neatly kept streets on one side of the Niblock Road - a main route in from the motorway - are devoid of paramilitary trappings or tribal symbols. The community association and the HE said there is a long waiting list for those wanting to live in their "shared future" environment.
So did the murders of Sappers Patrick Azikham and Mark Quinsey as they collected pizzas outside nearby Massereene Barracks threaten to undermine this integrated ethos? As a mark of respect for the soldiers and the police officer shot dead 48 hours later, Springfarm cancelled its St Patrick's Day festival.
Paul McKeown, a voluntary worker on the estate, said the Real IRA double murder had the opposite effect: "People stayed calm. The people here said, 'We are not going back to the bad old days.' Sure, we were all very depressed and saddened that something like that could happen in Antrim, in a town not as sharply divided as Belfast. People stayed united, especially here in Springfarm."
'It's great to live where there are no flags'
Vivien Law grew up in the Village area of south Belfast, a hardline loyalist redoubt that saw its fair share of violence during the Troubles. The 32-year-old came to Springfarm to make a new life for her family, especially her son, Cody.
"It's great to live in a place where there are no flags, no murals, no paramilitaries. Cody loves it here. It's funny because he is in the junior Orange Order, but loves wearing the Ireland rugby jersey with Ronan O'Gara's name on the back. He recently asked me to buy him a Gaelic football so he could play GAA with his Catholic friends.
"When I grew up I remember seeing masked gunmen patrolling the streets where I lived. I'm glad that in an estate like this- hopefully - Cody will never experience anything like that."
'There is no racism in Springfarm'
Kwatinobva Ludwick has lived on the Springfarm estate since coming to Northern Ireland a year ago. The child of Zimbabwean and Italian parents, Tino, as she is known to her friends, says Northern Ireland - and Springfarm in particular - is a far more tolerant place than Italy.
"When I moved out of Zimbabwe to Italy, I experienced racism on a daily basis. So did my seven-year-old daughter, Saiyana, especially at school. It got so bad we contacted an aunt of mine who lived in Northern Ireland and she suggested we come over here.
"It was the best decision my husband and I have made. People were very welcoming and within a short time made me feel we were part of Springfarm. Saiyana is settled at school on the estate and has made many friends. There is a great community spirit."
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1239488111539&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Apr 12, 2009 1:36 | Updated Apr 12, 2009 2:48
"I visited the Holocaust museum in Washington. I deeply appreciate the huge suffering the Jewish people have endured. I have huge affinity with what people came through in the Holocaust and the concentration camps, and anti-Semitism and all of that. And I stand firmly and absolutely against all of that.
"But there was a time when there was no dialogue in Ireland, and there was conflict," he said. "Once we opened up the process to allow dialogue, and made it inclusive, we started a very difficult process that challenged everyone. It challenged Sinn Fein, it challenged the British government, challenged the unionists."
Adams said there was a "certainty" about war "that people can be comfortable in, because you don't have to take chances."
But, he said, "you can take chances and ensure that no person has to be killed, or live in fear or be imprisoned and subjected to all the people of Israel and the people of Palestine have been subjected to. We took the chance in Ireland. It wasn't easy, but the rewards more than vindicate and validate the risks that were taken."
Asked if he thought the two conflicts - Northern Ireland and Israel - were comparable, he said they were not, but there were parallels.
"I do think there are broad principles like political will that can be applied to the conflict resolution process," he said.
When reminded that the IRA never set out to destroy Britain, as Hamas has declared it wanted to do to Israel, Adams said that the Irish example has shown that "once people have a peaceful way to make progress, sensible thinking people will not use armed actions. So it's not a matter of who wants to destroy what, people should be able to resolve differences peacefully and through dialogue."
Adams, who left the region early Saturday morning, said he believed Hamas when they said they "are not al-Qaida, they are not the Taliban, they want peace with their Israeli neighbors."
Adams, who was in the region for the second time in three years, said he was not here to curry favor, "I'm here to bear witness for those who want to listen that there is a way to sort this out, and that the leaders have a responsibility to do that."
Adams said that Hamas "told me they wanted a peace settlement, that they are prepared to accept a two-state solution."
Asked if he believed them, he said, "It's not whether I believe them. The fact is they are duly elected representatives of their people, let's test them, if need be. Let's enter into talks, let's have proper talks, let's have inclusive talks. Let's develop a project that ends aggression of all kinds. My position, and the Sinn Fein position, is that all aggressive actions should cease. There should be no armed actions by any of the Palestinian factions, or by the Israeli state."
Adams, who in addition to Hamas officials, also met during his four-day visit with Kadima MK Shai Hermesh at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, as well as with representatives from some Israeli NGOs such as people connected with Jerusalem's Van Leer Institute and Rabbis for Human Rights, said that neither Israelis nor the Palestinians believe the other side was genuine about wanting peace. "I think both peoples are serious about peace," he said. "Who wouldn't be? Who would want to live in conditions of war and perpetual threat and conflict and all the negativity and degradation and loss of life and destruction that goes with it?"
Adams, who spent two nights in Gaza after visiting for a number of hours in Sderot and Kfar Aza, said he thought the Israel military operation in Gaza earlier in the year "was wrong." "I watched it at home in Ireland," he said. "I think the siege should cease, it is just a dreadful situation. The people of Israel are a very proud and decent people and this should not be done in their name, it something that humanity calls out must be stopped.
"The people of Palestine and people of Israel are destined to live together," he said. "It is an accident of birth where you are born. And people should live together respecting each other's rights.
Asked how he would recommend Israel respond to constant rocket fire on a large swath of its territory, he said, "I'm against the rockets, and I made that clear, that's why I went to the places I went to. And I also made clear wherever I spoke that I'm against that. But the solution lies in recognizing that the people of Palestinian have the right to a state that is viable and sustainable, and recognizing that the security of Israel is interlocked into the rights of dignity and security of the people of the Palestinians territories."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6077817.ece
From The Sunday Times
April 12, 2009
Liam Clarke
Thatcher's role in the offer of IRA concessions is no longer of any real importance - but Adams's is
Sinn Fein was quite disorganised last Sunday after this newspaper published British government documents, released under the Freedom of Information act, about the 1981 hunger strike.
The documents showed that around July 5, 1981 Margaret Thatcher made a substantial offer to the IRA leadership through a secret conduit known as Mountain Climber. The prime minister conceded that republican prisoners could wear their own clothes, and gave ground on other issues.
The offer was not made public at the time and was officially denied after it was turned down. Had it been accepted, the lives of as many as six of the 10 hunger strikers who died might have been saved. The rejected offer was similar to what did actually happen after the hunger strike ended months later.
Sinn Fein wouldn’t comment on the documents before publication, and afterwards told The Irish Times “these allegations are not true. They emanate from British Military Intelligence”. Danny Morrison of the Bobby Sands Trust welcomed the release of the papers but accused me of misinterpreting them. “The British government documents, far from being incriminating, actually corroborate the account of what happened at the time by Sinn Fein [and] surviving hunger strikers,” he claimed.
Both interpretations cannot be true and, judging by the current edition of An Phoblacht, Morrison’s comments are now accepted by Sinn Fein. The documents are reproduced in full in the republican newspaper, while the Sinn Fein press office’s contribution has been quietly dropped.
Denial may still be a fallback position. The only comment on the Bobby Sands Trust website in response to Morrison’s interpretation reads: “Danny, it is just propaganda to drop the leadership into the ashes. Hold your heads up. We have faith in you and your words.”
The schizophrenic reaction shows how difficult this is for Sinn Fein. One of the problems was set out by the Northern Ireland Office as it explained the four years of denial, equivocation and delay in releasing these documents and why it was still withholding the most sensitive material. “Many of those involved in the original issue are still intimately involved in the ongoing political process,” it told me. “To release this information at such a sensitive time might have an adverse impact on the relationship between the British and Irish governments and consequently impact on the completion of devolution of policing and justice powers.”
The main people active in 1981 and still important to the political process are in the Sinn Fein leadership. British and Irish ministers are dead, like Charlie Haughey, or long retired, like Thatcher. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are still operating at a senior level.
As a result of the peculiar circumstances of Northern Ireland, and their own consummate skills, Adams and McGuinness have survived long enough to accumulate the political baggage and the skeletons in the cupboard that only retired political leaders usually have. This is the most obvious reason why Sinn Fein and the Northern Ireland Office have a common interest in dampening disclosure. While Thatcher was in active politics, it was expedient for the British government to deny offering the IRA concessions. Now it doesn’t matter to the Tories or the British government what she did, but it does to Adams, who received the messages.
For a time, British figures such as Sir John Blelloch and Sir Humphrey Atkins denied any concessions were offered. Now we have official records of discussions between Atkins and Thatcher on this issue, the denials are redundant.
Yet last week Sinn Fein relied on Blelloch’s 1980s denial to maintain its position that the Brits offered nothing worth talking about to Adams, who denies he was ever in the IRA. Since he is the party president, Sinn Fein has to back Adams even if his position makes no sense.
The blanket protest was started in 1976 after Kieran Nugent told prison officers the only way he would wear the garb of a criminal was if they nailed it to his back. The anthem of the subsequent protest, the H Block song, ran: “I’ll wear no convict’s uniform or meekly serve my time/that Britain might brand Ireland’s fight, 800 years of crime.” The issue of prison uniform was the rallying cry of the whole protest. That is why Thatcher’s offer was so significant.
Ending the strike in July 1981 might have spoiled Sinn Fein’s chance of winning the Fermanagh/South Tyrone by-election. As it was, Owen Carron’s victory secured its entry into electoral politics and paved the way for the IRA ceasefire 13 years later. Richard O’Rawe, part of the IRA prison leadership, revealed in Blanketmen how he and Brendan “Bik” McFarlane, the IRA’s prison leader, discussed the British government offer and agreed it could end the hunger strike. McFarlane denied there was any offer, while Morrison says there was but it was not pinned down.
In the face of these contradictory attempts to rubbish his account, O’Rawe appears to be winning the argument. Gerard Hodgins, who was on hunger strike when the protest was called off, is a recent convert to his point of view. When O’Rawe first published his claims, Hodgins sprang to the republican leadership’s defence. “The more I see his spurious accusations in the media, the more I am inclined to believe that he is following a political agenda through which he is happy to intensify and prolong the hurt and anguish the families of our dead friends and comrades endure,” he wrote to the press in May 2006.
Last week Hodgins courageously said he had changed his mind after weighing the evidence, including the recent papers. Describing the issue as a festering sore, he called upon both the British government and the Sinn Fein leadership to “come out with full details to set all this to rest”.
Another former hunger striker, Liam McCloskey, underwent a religious realignment of his life around the time of his 55-day fast and now repudiates violence. Like Hodgins, he went on hunger strike believing that defeat was inevitable. “I didn’t think it would work but I felt a duty to the others and I knew that if I didn’t go on it, someone else would have to take my place,” he said.
McCloskey believed the offer would have been enough for him if the leadership of the INLA, of which he was a member, had endorsed it. However the INLA, three of whose members died on hunger strike, was not given any say.
Danny Morrison is clear that he gave a full explanation of an offer to the hunger strikers on July 5, but Sean Flynn, an IRSP leader who went into the prison with him on the second of his two visits that day, recalls nothing of the kind. Flynn met Kevin Lynch, an INLA hunger striker and friend of McCloskey, who was to die on August 1. Flynn is quite clear that Lynch “knew nothing about the Mountain Climber or that there was going to be a deal”. Lynch died a few weeks later.
Tommy McCourt, now a community worker but then a leader of the IRSP, visited Michael Devine who died on August 20, the last hunger striker to expire. He told Devine that the hunger strike was unlikely to succeed and that if he came off it, the INLA would back him. Devine replied that to end the strike would represent complete defeat and moved the conversation on to his funeral arrangements. He was aware of no honourable way out.
The question is, were he and the last few hunger strikers in possession of all the facts when they made their decision to die? Protecting political positions is no reason to hold back information that could answer this question.
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.05-field-notes-walk-to-the-black-rock-montreal-irish/
Montreal’s Irish community remembers its dead
by Shelagh Plunkett
I lower my head and pretend to pray. The sun is scorching the back of my neck, and my pale Irish-stock skin is pinking rapidly. Around me, the crowd has stopped all talk of cousins promoted, uncles dead, or aunts shifted to care facilities. The chatting is done for now, and we’re getting down to the business of worship. The padre, wearing a sombre black suit slashed by a kelly green sash, is reciting the Lord’s Prayerover a microphone. His voice carries traces of a brogue; his hair is white and fluffy, his eyes a snappy blue.
Behind him, a 30-ton chunk of black granite sits inside a wrought iron fence that’s worked into a shamrock pattern. Today the fence is festooned with orange, green, and white fabric — the colours of the Irish flag. The rock and the padre are in the middle of four lanes of busy traffic leading onto the Victoria Bridge in Point Saint Charles, Montreal. Behind the rock, looming over the padre’s right shoulder, I see a billboard for Fujitsu that reads, Du pas de sexe de l’été. It is the only French I see or hear.
My friend Denis is beside me, mumbling fervently. He’s wearing his signature white sweatshirt emblazoned with the names of Montreal’s dead and dying Irish neighbourhoods. Standing off to the side, head bowed over his white-gloved hands, is my neighbour Tony, who is leading the Legion colour guard, and praying along in full spate with about 150 other people in the middle of the road. Most eyes are closed, most heads are bowed, and everyone knows the words. Cars whip past. The curious stare. We ignore them. We are thinking about the 6,000 Irish buried beneath the asphalt at our feet.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Black Rock memorial, a century and a half since the stone was dredged from the St. Lawrence River by men building the Victoria Bridge. The Irish community has gathered for a walk to the Black Rock on the last Sunday of May since the 1880s. They gather in memory of the Irish who were evicted from their homes by their aristocratic landlords during the potato famine, lured by the promise of payment onto ships bound for Canada, endured a three- to six-month passage in fetid cargo holds, contracted typhus, were dumped in what was then called Goose Village, died, andwere buried en masse and unmarked right where we stand.
Besides, it’s an opportunity to show some fighting Irish pride.
Point Saint Charles is one of Montreal’s oldest, poorest, and most stubbornly anglophone neighbourhoods. Most of the Point’s 13,210 residents can trace roots back to Ireland (as can, apparently, about 60 percent of Québécois). Their ancestors came over to dig the Lachine Canal, build the Victoria Bridge, work on the Grand Trunk Railway. Some are like Tony, who has never been to Ireland but speaks with a subtle lilt. A few months back, he asked me how I was settling in. I moved to the Point from BC two years ago. I said I was struggling with the language (I came to Montreal with no French), and he looked very puzzled. It seemed to take him a moment to realize what language I was referring to. Tony speaks no French; nor does his wife or his young daughter. Many of my neighbours refuse to learn the language either, though they and their parents and grandparents grew up in Montreal, where almost 90 percent of the population speaks French.
A chorus of amens signals the prayer’s end. We can look up and make eye contact. At the base of the rock, Victor Boyle, national president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (all male, all Catholic, all of Irish descent), takes over the microphone. He says a group in Ireland is prodding the government into officially remembering the famine dead. Victor tells us the Irish of Montreal are ballyhooed for keeping the memory alive. We are “a beacon,” he says.
I find all this Eireann go brách somewhat disorienting. I moved here to learn French and experience a bit of the culture, yet the storefronts of my Montreal neighbourhood are peppered with leprechauns, and the girls at the local depanneur can barely get past bonjour. So it’s a small relief to me when I spot two kids from the neighbourhood’s English-language school laying a wreath at the base of the Black Rock. They aren’t speaking French but are clearly not of Irish descent. I think they may be Bengali.
Victor is thanking us and reminding everyone that a feast is waiting back at St. Gabriel’s Church, where the walk started. The whole thing has taken less than half an hour, and people are wandering away. The padre is moving toward me. I introduce myself, and he recognizes that my name is Irish. I tell him I’ve moved to Montreal from the West Coast. “Well,” says the bucktoothed fellow beside him, “you’re halfway to Ireland. Now you’re halfway home.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6077768.ece
From The Sunday Times
April 12, 2009
Brenda Power
A few weeks ago, on an RTE documentary entitled I See A Darkness, a distraught mother was taken by a film crew to see the tree from which her son had hanged himself just a couple of years earlier. The woman had never been to the spot before, so, for us viewers settled in for our night’s entertainment, this was definitely the highlight of the programme.
She hadn’t been to see the tree, to lay her hands on the convenient and sturdy branch that her son must have tested with his weight before he killed himself, because she had not wanted to. Presumably, she feared the experience would be unbearably agonising. Well, bring it on! This was television gold, a perfect set piece of real-time drama, and all of it masquerading as valuable and sensitive so as to assuage the consciences of viewers.
A heartbroken mother making her first trip to the scene of her son’s suicide — when did this become appropriate fare to consume on a Monday night over a cuppa and a ginger nut? Of all the emotional pornography paraded as offering an “insight” into the scourge of suicide, this was the most exploitative I’ve seen, made worse by the veneer of solemn worthiness to absolve any voyeuristic unease.
What possible insight into the causes of suicide could this exercise offer? And what lessons did it have for fearful families or fragile souls? After all these years of agonising and puzzling and raking over the subject of suicide, after all the desolation and bewilderment visited on unsuspecting families and all the pointless questions asked of dead people, we’ve learnt absolutely nothing about the real conversations we need to be having on this wretched subject.
I really had expected more of this much-hyped RTE series, made by celebrated director Alan Gilsenan. I’d hoped he’d bring the story forward in some way. Would the series identify any specific and connecting social pressures on young men, regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds, some subterranean flaw that makes that generation particularly susceptible to suicide? Would it offer a respite from guilt for bereaved families by positing the respected theory that suicide is an extreme personal choice and never anybody else’s fault? And would it explore the possibility that criminalising suicide, blunt an instrument as that statute was, somehow acted as a social brake on the act?
Instead, it was as though the years of academic study and hard-earned experience and nuanced enlightenment never happened. The most dangerous clichés were propagated by the series. Suffering parents were asked exactly how guilty they felt, quizzed about whether they now believed they’d really loved the dead child enough. Former girlfriends cried for the cameras and grieving siblings tortured themselves with the memories of their last, off-hand conversations with the deceased. For me, the thrust of the series ran completely counter to the approach endorsed by an otherwise unlikely consensus of commentators, psychiatrists and clergymen.
There’s now a growing view that families should be encouraged to take a more low-key approach to the obsequies for suicides, for fear of glorifying their end in the eyes of impressionable mourners in the at-risk age groups.
Imagine the troubled, angry, confused teenager, fighting with his parents — punished for smoking, maybe, or for a bad school report — railing against the injustice of his lot and the indifference of his unfeeling family. He goes to the funeral of a friend who has killed himself and sees that boy’s parents, previously as cranky and inattentive as his own, crying and berating themselves while schoolmates who’d ignored him weep on each other’s shoulders, and his iPod and football jersey are borne to the altar like precious relics.
To be the centre of such fevered and gratifying attention, the star of such a show, that’s got to play on an immature mind that can’t yet conceive of the irreversibility of one impulsive act. Just look at the messages other youngsters leave on the Bebo and Facebook pages of dead friends — “miss u, luv u, hugs and kisses” — as though they might, when all the fuss blows over, read them and reply.
A few years ago I interviewed Aidan Troy, the priest at the forefront of the Holy Cross siege in Belfast, and he spoke to me of how Northern youngsters were being assailed by a far more stealthy enemy. In one weekend alone he’d buried two young suicides and had been stunned by a letter he’d received from a 15-year-old girl from a different parish. She wanted him to say her funeral Mass because he was on television, and her best friend had beaten her to a better selection of music, readings and offertory gifts, so she wanted a celebrity celebrant to trump her pal. When they both committed suicide, obviously. So they’d been competitively planning their funerals, these two young girls, as though they were choosing their debs’ dresses.
In the light of such chilling caprices, you’ve got to wonder about the impact on the “instant celebrity” generation of a television programme which, while it may not have intended to, appeared to lionise young suicides as loveable victims and egged on their guilt-ridden families to review and regret every thoughtless or unloving word.
People kill themselves for myriad reasons. A conference organised this month by Console, a suicide support group, considered the likelihood that recession, with attendant redundancies and financial difficulties, will bring about an increase. Without naming him, the conference instanced the suicide of the businessman Patrick Rocca as evidence that high-flying individuals, suddenly stripped of the wealth and status that were bound inextricably with their self-esteem, were now at risk.
This may be true although, counter-intuitively, suicide rates tend to drop in times of war or other calamities, because the unifying trauma binds people in a way that peace and prosperity do not. The rise in suicide rates of the past decade kept pace with our economic growth, as though the impression that everybody else was happy and rich was a morbidly isolating one. By contrast, the sense that “we’re all in this mess together” seems an antidote to suicidal urges. This suggests there is a critical mass in suicidal reasoning of feelings of solitary misery and being misunderstood.
The search for a formula to identify and address those feelings, and possibly save lives, would make for a fascinating and invaluable television programme. While it might not pull in rubbernecking viewers who get off on seeing bereaved parents beating themselves up on screen, it would make for a better use of the national broadcaster’s cash.
Why should we foot the street angels' Jimmy Choo bill?
The strongest argument against taxing or means-testing the children’s allowance was always the rather dated one that, even in the richest families, mean and controlling men can leave their dependent wives short of spending money. For such women, child benefit was a source of financial independence.
I never found that line particularly compelling: why should taxpayers subsidise some “street angel’s” image by keeping his wife in nice shoes, handbags and girlie lunches?
If this allowance was to be clawed back — and at the height of the boom there was a good case for doing so — then the height of the boom was the time to do it.
Because now we’re in the depths of recession and the middle class is taking the biggest hit. And the number of women who’ll be able to splash that money on Jimmy Choo’s, and not school shoes, however generous or tight-fisted their partners, are few and far between.
http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/
The household returns and ancillary records for the censuses of Ireland of 1901 and 1911, which are in the custody of the National Archives of Ireland, represent an extremely valuable part of the Irish national heritage.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/12/northern-ireland-easter-rising-film
On the anniversary of the Easter Rising, a historian warns that a Hollywood version of the story could be used as justification by the men of violence
* Henry McDonald and Rowan Walker
* The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009
One of Ireland's foremost historians has warned that a Hollywood take on the 1916 Easter Rising might be exploited by dissident republicans in their campaign against the peace process.
Easter Sixteen stars Guy Pearce as James Connolly, the Irish Marxist who took part in the rising and was executed at Dublin's Kilmainham jail, and Ian Hart as Thomas Clarke, another key figure in the uprising.
Paul Bew, a professor of Irish politics and a leading historian, has expressed concern that unless the complexities of the Rising are explained, the simple message that a dedicated minority can use violence will encourage present-day dissidents.
Hollywood's last major examination of early 20th-century Irish history dealt with Michael Collins, the revolutionary who ran the war of independence against the British, including fighting in the 1916 Rising. Michael Collins, which starred Liam Neeson, was criticised by some historians, who alleged that it contained inaccuracies such as the use of a car bomb to kill a number of police officers brought into Dublin from Belfast. The car bomb was not used as a weapon by armed republicans until the 1970s.
Nicola Charles, the producer of Easter Sixteen, which has a $25m budget, has defended the project and denied that Brendan Foley's script romanticises violence. She also revealed that there were six other scripts floating around Hollywood about the rebellion. "It's a film that has to be made and Foley has spent 14 years working on the script", she said.
"The film is really the prequel to Michael Collins. Our final scene is their opening scene. It's a human interest story and in no way does it glorify violence. It's not about violence and revolution, it's about hope and heroism."
Charles said the characters in the film such as Connolly "are not essentially rebels, they are ordinary people who didn't want to fight for the King or the Kaiser". She admitted that "European factual purists will rip this film apart completely. We have actors from all over the world. It's a dramatisation. A story about the fight for freedom."
The film's producer added: "Americans will learn something in the process - we want to educate and entertain. I just want to produce a fair story. I am British and these atrocities happened under the British government. Europeans have learnt from past mistakes."
Bew, however, said the claim that the rising's leaders did not want to fight for King or Kaiser was historically inaccurate. He pointed out that in the proclamation of Irish independence read out on the steps of Dublin's General Post Office - the focal point of the rebellion - Patrick Pearse [a leader of the Rising]referred to Ireland's "gallant allies".
"Who does she think these 'gallant allies' whom the proclamation referred to were?" he asked. "Are they not the Germans? They can't be anyone else. It was a rising in alliance with the Germans. That was part of the rebels' thinking at the time."
He said the danger was that such a film about the Rising would simply portray the events of Easter 1916 as a struggle between the Irish and the British. In fact, added Bew, Pearse's targets were also the constitutional pro-Home Rule Nationalist Party, which at the time had the overwhelming support in nationalist, Catholic Ireland.
"The worrying thing is if she sees this as simply an Irish-British story, whereas a very important part of Easter 1916 and its aftermath is the displacement of the democratic elected Irish leadership by the insurrectionists. It's about internal Irish politics too.
"The story of the Rising is the decision by an unelected group of politically motivated to destroy the democratic, leadership of Irish nationalism."
The academic from Queen's University, Belfast, said this was happening once again at the moment, with both the Real IRA and Continuity IRA ignoring the will of nationalists in Northern Ireland who vote for Sinn Fein, and to a lesser degree the SDLP, and continuing their "armed struggle."
"They (the dissidents) can surely say 'Well, we may be so-called micro groups but we have an historic legitimacy as saviours of the nation. One would hope that such an irony of our history would not be missed, but I wonder."
"I hope this film doesn't resort to the same old simplistic cliches of 'we, the Brits and our imperialist guilt and what we did to the Irish'," added Bew. "The circumstances surrounding Easter 1916 were much more complicated than that."
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article6067409.ece
From The Sunday Times
April 12, 2009
AA Gill
The English and the Irish, with their profound and deep wells of literary achievement, have had a great deal to say about each other, but for all the eloquence and logorrhoea, they’ve rarely been able to rise above turgid, purple, otiose drivel. It’s astonishing when you remember how much of each other’s lives we’ve taken up and how much thought, emotion, prose, poetry, history, drama, essays and epistles have been poured into Anglo-Irish relations and how embarrassingly bad most of it was and is. Try to think of some piece of our shared culture that is still readable, watchable or repeatable. Swift’s A Modest Proposal, perhaps, Yeats, a bit of Brendan Behan, though he’s little more than a coarse period piece now. The three recent decades of Troubles were replete with chronic journalism and buttock-clenchingly clichéd drama. It is as if we were too close to see each other clearly.
No medium has suffered from Hibernian hyperbole as much as television, slickly addicted as it is to the pleasing truism, the received emotion and the collectively guilty sentimentality. TV’s relationship with Ireland and the English has grown out of buckets of unquestioned colonial grovelling and Celtic whimsy plus an addiction to tragedy. On television, Ireland is a nation obscured by mythic truths that everybody already knows. The latest offering in the Irish blood and Guinness soap opera was Five Minutes of Heaven.
I’m not entirely sure what this thought it was. It wasn’t strictly a mick-taking docudrama. Neither was it faction, nor a straight piece of storytelling. It said it was based on the experience of two real people and was a story of reconciliation, or its absence. Strictly as a piece of drama, it was cast in the long tradition of Anglo-Irish overwriting. As ever, the Celts were credited with being in love with words at the expense of coherence or logic, and its plot came on like a 19th-century French operetta without music, so after an opening that was contemporary and vaguely believable, we were worked up to an ending that was fancifully and mawkishly melodramatic.
And all this would have been, in Yeats’s phrase, just more blood and sucked sugar stick, if it weren’t for two strikingly credible performances: Liam Neeson as a reformed and emptily born-again UVF assassin and James Nesbitt as the messy and raging brother of his victim. They were characters that were watchable in a drama rather than as impersonations in a reconstruction. So it had a greater truth by being freed from the hobble of mere facts. As ever with Ireland, the audience brought in its own packed lunch of prejudice, not least the knowledge of the re-emergence of terrorist killings and Neeson’s own personal tragedy. Both actors were remarkably succinct at revealing a speechless internal anxiety and conflict. They made this not just simply watchable but compelling.
Oratory is all anyone talks about at the moment. Apparently it’s back, and it’s been returned to the podium and the lectern by Obama, of course, who is turning out to be a veritable Swiss army knife of civic lost property. He is the Roy Castle of politics. Is there no bleeding end to his talent? The thinking woman’s doner kebab, Alan Yentob, took his camera off to the presidential inauguration and used it as a platform to declaim on the history of public speaking. Yentob is as pixelated and thunderstruck by the new president’s presence as everyone else. There was no question of objectivity here, he was a pilgrim. Now I’ve heard Obama speak, and I’m less enamoured than most of you. He sounds like another skinny lawyer with a mellifluous voice and he’s not as good as the West Wing.
In Yes We Can! Yentob compiled a collection of the predictable highlights of speechifying down the ages in a sort of Top 10 Now That’s What I Call Talking: JFK asking not; Roosevelt with nothing to fear; King’s dream; Churchill on the beaches; Mark Antony borrowing ears and Henry V filling his breaches. It was all a bit like a hurried school project pillaged from the internet.
The programme’s assumptions seemed to be all wrong. Oratory didn’t go away, it just went everywhere. It’s only the politicians who stopped being good at it. Everybody else has been talking 19 to the dozen. Listen to DJs on the radio or advertising or the thousands of motivational speakers or TV chat shows. The world is full of the sound of voices. There must be thousands of years of them on the internet. We’re replete with spoken words. Lecture halls, theatres and literary festivals are all sold out with audiences yearning to hear stuff. Oratory, in all its variety, has never been more cacophonous. It’s only politicians who have become dull and tongue-tied and self-conscious and guarded about speaking in public. Obama sounds as good as he does because he came after a president who purposely dumbed up and because everyone else around him is so god-awful.
Yentob naturally went to the Lincoln Memorial to dissect the Gettysburg address, a fine and ringing funeral oration. On the opposite wall, he might have noticed another speech, perhaps more appropriate to the occasion: Lincoln’s second inaugural address, made a few months before the president was assassinated. It is, I think, the most perfectly moral, just, conciliatory and thoughtful wartime speech ever made. It contains the eye-melting phrase: “It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just god’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”
Yes We Can! failed to listen to its own subject. It wasn’t a coherent argument. It was never clear what it was trying to tell us: was oratory a good thing or a selection of glib tricks and sophistry to gull the public? Is it content or delivery that counts? The great thing about Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is that none of us heard how he said it. Those who did were singularly unimpressed. It’s the written word that continues to move and sustain long after the spoken one has disappeared into thin air. The very best American orator was publicly mute. Thomas Jefferson refused point blank to make speeches, but wrote the single greatest piece of declamatory prose, the Declaration of Independence, which has shouted across 300 years, but was never spoken out loud.
Oratory was passed on to the most bizarre of reality talent shows this week. The Speaker is what Methodists and the United Reformed Churches might have come up with as a godly answer to The X Factor. It is a nationwide competition to find the best teenage orator, to discover, or rather uncover, a whole regiment of wannabe William Hagues. The judges were decent: Jo Brand, the district nurse of cheap and hopeless TV, always on call to help out an ailing format; a motivational basketball player; and a Rada drama teacher out of an Ealing comedy with a terminal case of dressing-up-boxitis. The problem with this programme is everything about it and everybody on it. I mean, what sort of 17-year-old wants to make public speeches for the sake of speaking? In fact, this wasn’t about oratory at all. It was auditions for dramatic presentation, attracting strange overmothered stand-up drama kids. My own monosyllabic teenager took a cursory look and declaimed down her nose: “What do they get for this?” It’s a question that still hangs. There is no cash, no recording contract, no invitation to the Conservative party conference. Perhaps the winner gets a bell and a job as an apprentice town crier.
Alexandra Tolstoy had a moment in the Tatler spotlight some years back when she turned up waving a mane of blonde hair, her famous name and an Uzbek/Mongolian/Tajik horseman who she’d found on the Silk Route and married. If I remember, they planned to raise foals together. Now she’s back, fronting Horse People, a series on horses and the people who live with them, a sort of a four-legged Top Gear. For all her Russian background, she is severely handicapped by one of the worst cases of St Trinian’s delivery you can find on TV, but gamely the gel compensates by being up for it. Sadly, having gone all the way to Siberia, she took a cameraman called Wayne who was as bad a photographer as I’ve seen outside of CBBC.
We watched small, wizened horse farmers who herded small hairy horses that didn’t appear to be much good for anything except eating. Alexandra’s steely, Sloaney aplomb dissolved into tears as she watched them whack some old mare on the head for dinner. What’s really odd about horse people is that they don’t mind putting vicious metal bars in horses’ mouths, kicking them with spiked heels, whipping them with sticks, making them pull carriages or ride into riots, but they have hysterical fits of the vapours when someone suggests eating one. As great old uncle Tolstoy might have said about this programme, all happy horses are alike, every unhappy horse is unhappy in the same way.
Updated: 11/1/2009
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