2 Irelands together

A crumbling ‘end of days’ feel in Northern Ireland as infrastructure totters

Posted on Thursday, 28 September, 2023 by andypollak

It’s not very often that this blog plagiarises a column from an Irish daily newspaper. But a truly shocking column by that fine Belfast Telegraph journalist Sam McBride¹ is worth reprinting (almost) in full because it outlines in graphic detail the terrible current state of key parts of agriculture, the environment, electricity, health, education and infrastructure in Northern Ireland these days. And because many readers of this blog are in the Republic, and the Southern media rarely cover these vital areas of life in the North. And because McBride is a journalist with a broadly unionist outlook, what he writes is strikingly honest and truth-telling.

He writes: “There’s an end of days feel to Northern Ireland. It’s not that Irish unity is necessarily looming, but that dramatic elements of what society has taken for granted are breaking down, with limited reason to believe that they’ll be coming back soon. A sort of half-hearted anarchy pervades. There are still laws, police and regulatory bodies. The streets aren’t filled with looters. But so much of what an advanced democratic society takes for granted is crumbling.

A veteran unionist politician recently said to me: ‘The whole place is an absolute mess’….One senior business figure phoned a week ago to lament how so much of Northern Ireland is falling apart. He likened the situation to Libya – there, two warring leaders had fought while their infrastructure collapsed, killing thousands of people when two dams burst. Here, he said that the two sides were expending their energy on tribal disputes while critical infrastructure degrades around them.

The consequences might not come while these politicians and civil servants are in power, but come they surely will. He said that spending on roads had been almost £1 billion short over the last nine years – a false economy because the more roads regress, the more expensive they become to maintain.

The Civil Service isn’t trusted by the Treasury, the Irish Government or business to spend their money, he said, because the scandalous behaviour of ‘cash for ash’ had not been addressed – despite what the head of the Civil Service claims [McBride was the journalist who exposed the full horror of the NI Civil Service’s catastrophic dysfunctionality during the Renewable Heat Incentive fiasco in his superb 2019 book Burned].

“Having sown the wind, we’re now reaping the whirlwind. This day next week [30th September], Northern Ireland enters a critical period of electricity insecurity. Kilroot power station’s coal-fired units shut next Saturday evening, but the gas-fired generators which were meant to replace them are nowhere near ready.

Even when those generators come online some time early next year, they will not replace the lost capacity due to a gaffe by those overseeing the electricity system. There will be a critical gap in generating capacity which means that on calm, cold days when problems develop at other plants there could be blackouts. Yet no one seems terribly exercised by this. There’s scant evidence of it being treated as a crisis.

Twenty miles west, Lough Neagh’s poisoning is clearly visible from space.² It will remain dangerously polluted until 2043 even if the sources of those pollution are slashed – but they’re still growing.

Stormont didn’t just let this happen; it actively facilitated it. The ‘Going for Growth’ strategy overseen by Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, but backed by all five major parties, used public money to subsidise a move from traditional farming methods to industrial factory farms.

That means a dismal life for hundreds of thousands of pigs and millions of birds cooped up in soulless buildings. But it also means vast quantities of excrement coming from what might just be a few acres, with nowhere near enough land on which to spread it without polluting watercourses.

Poultry farms increased production by 35% in the six years after 2012 before falling back. The number of pigs has increased by 72% in the last decade. Farms now produce nine million cubic metres of slurry a year – enough to fill the Great Pyramid of Giza almost four times, or to fill more than 800,000 concrete mixer lorries.

Stormont has turned parts of Northern Ireland into a vast toilet so that multinational companies like the Brazilian-owned Moy Park can export mass-produced food. Rather than cracking down on polluters, last year DUP minister Edwin Poots slashed the fines on farmers who repeatedly pollute waterways.

Dr Les Gornall, an expert in slurry, yesterday told the BBC Nolan Show that without intervention Lough Neagh will become “a stinking septic tank that’s 400 square kilometres with no lid on it” from which we can no longer draw drinking water. Before that point, he said it could attract foreign pests like fever-bearing mosquitos.

Lough Neagh is at a tipping point, he warned, and “when you hit these tipping points, nature is unforgiving”. Dr Gornall said “there’s no doubt” that Stormont’s policies have created this crisis. Yet civil servants this week told journalists there’s no evidence that ‘Going for Growth’ had harmed the lough.

40 miles north-west of the lough lies another environmental catastrophe. Mobuoy illegal dump on the outskirts of Londonderry is on such a scale that it can only be compared to dumps run by the Italian mafia.

Stormont’s Department of the Environment was repeatedly warned about an enterprise so vast that many local councils and the PSNI were (they say unwittingly) having their waste dumped there. By the time it was shut a decade ago, 1.6 million tons of waste was in the ground. It’s still there and is polluting the River Faughan which supplies much of Derry’s drinking water.

Ten years later, civil servants are still discussing what to do. A public inquiry into the scandal was blocked by a minister – Edwin Poots.

The DUP also blocked an independent environmental protection agency which would have been outside ministerial control. A very senior civil servant who sat in Executive meetings told me that even within the Civil Service the Department of Agriculture was regarded as a lobby group for farmers, having been ‘captured’ by the industry. The fact that chief vet Robert Huey hounded a conscientious vet out of her job when she found uncomfortable evidence of rules being broken does nothing to dispel that concern.

In 2015, agriculture and environment were bundled into one department in which agriculture would be overwhelmingly dominant. A former minister said that the original name for the department was simply ‘the Department of Agriculture’ and this only changed when Alliance ministers David Ford and Stephen Farry objected. The DUP and Sinn Fein went into a room for a while and returned with a new name – the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA).

“That just shows you what the thinking was,” the former minister said. But while the name changed, the substance didn’t. What had been created was farcical: a department of pollution which was also a department to prevent pollution. The conflict of interest was obvious, and not accidental.

It wasn’t the only conflict of interest. NI Water now tells us that the tap water which 40% of Northern Ireland drinks after being taken from Lough Neagh’s polluted waters and treated is safe to drink. But NI Water has a vested interest in us believing that it can ‘safely’ keep flushing 200,000 tons of sewage a year into the lough.

All of this could get dramatically worse. The Secretary of State has set a deliberately sparse Stormont budget, presumably in the belief that the collapse of public services would force the DUP back into Stormont.

NI Water says that this budget means that in a few months’ time it will be releasing even more raw sewage…and sewage will back up into homes and businesses, closing schools and hospitals.

Meanwhile, the police are leaderless and overseen by an inept Policing Board. Even before its dangerous data breach, the PSNI’s budget was plundered to an extent which meant basic policing would be impossible. A toxic culture means staff are trying to get out as soon as they can afford to do so, leaving inexperienced officers who will inevitably make more and more mistakes, thus exacerbating the crisis.

As winter looms, people are needlessly dying in hospitals which are unreformed because of calamitous cowardice by politicians who thought that doing do would cost them votes. Staff are burnt out, strikes have become routine, and medics are leaving for other jurisdictions. Patients able to pay can escape their agony at a price; those who can’t are left to suffer…Now health faces a £470 million shortfall. [On 25th September the Irish Times reported on an Irish Department of Health study which showed that proportionately more than twice as many people in the North were on a waiting list for appointments (inpatient and outpatient) than in the Republic].

“The Department of Education is £382 million short and admits that disabled children will experience ‘major negative impacts.’ The infrastructure budget is £167 million short. Officials there say all streetlights will have to be switched off and salting of the roads will end.

Department by department, there are scores of other unthinkable outcomes. Some cuts in one area will create more spending elsewhere: no longer gritting roads and footpaths will see more people ending up in already overwhelmed hospitals.

For many of us, this is not the Northern Ireland we recognise. The schools our children attend still excel, the roads seem much as they were a decade ago and environmental collapse is not visible where we live. Northern Ireland is still for many of us an amazing place to live and to work. Our cost of living is lower than anywhere else in the UK or Ireland, and so much of life has improved dramatically from our childhood. But the reality of these problems is no less tangible just because we don’t experience them ourselves…

Above all this sits the need to reform Stormont’s bureaucracy. Civil servants could do this themselves relatively easily. A few high-profile sackings or demotions for scandalous behaviour would do more to put the wind up the organisation than any number of reviews, reports or new rules. But the current crop of senior civil servants shows little inclination to do anything beyond talking. We also obviously need a government – and one which is radically better than what we’ve had.

This is not to say that returning to Stormont is easy for the DUP. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. The party – in full knowledge of the consequences – chose to collapse government and promise voters that it would not allow its restoration until the Irish Sea border was demolished…

But for a party which says it cherishes Northern Ireland’s place in the Union, the DUP’s fingers are on a staggering number of the problems which might persuade people to back Irish unity. Northern Ireland’s public services are breaking, and in so doing they’re breaking people. Only those insulated from this reality could believe that this can continue indefinitely without significant political consequences.”

¹ ‘NI’s frightening decay is breaking public services – and breaking people’, Belfast Telegraph, 23 September

² Sam McBride, ‘Lough Neagh has become a scene of Biblical disaster, and Stormont was central to its destruction’, Belfast Telegraph, 9 September

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, The island environment | 3 Comments

Straws in the autumn wind around the Irish unity debate

Posted on Tuesday, 19 September, 2023 by andypollak

There have been some interesting straws in the autumn wind in recent weeks as politicians get ready for the new political term and general elections in both Irish jurisdictions in the near future. Leo Varadkar doesn’t very often talk about Irish unity, but when he does he often says sensible things. He reiterated his belief earlier this month that he expected to see Irish unity in his lifetime (he is 44). More importantly, he stressed that the success of such an existential change would depend on how such a new entity treated its minorities, and that would mean recognising and acknowledging the British identity of around one million Northern Ireland unionists.¹

People in the Republic needed to start thinking more about this, he said. “It’s really important that those people in a united Ireland should feel wanted, should be respected, would want to stay here and would want to throw their weight behind a newly united state in the way southern unionists did, in fact, get behind the Free State and made sure it survived.” My experience is that the vast majority of people in this jurisdiction haven’t even begun to think about how Britishness will be recognised and cherished in any ‘new Ireland’. When I ask them point blank, they tend to respond like the Trinity College Dublin politics students I talked to last year: they felt uneasy about bringing “British colonisers” into a united Ireland.²

One of the major things that will have to change if unionists are to be made to feel at home, is for Sinn Fein not to “triumphalise the horrible deeds” of the Provisional IRA, in Tánaiste Micheál Martin’s words.³ There is little or no chance of that happening if the former political wing of the IRA becomes the new power in the land after the next Dáil election.

However the most interesting comments about this issue came from an entirely different kind of politician. Wallace Thompson was a founding member of the DUP. He is a respected member of the Independent Orange Order (who basically think the Orange Order is too liberal); secretary of the Evangelical Protestant Society (which campaigns against the errors of “the Catholic of Rome”), and an ex-special adviser to former DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds.

This is a man who is rooted in the fundamentalist Protestant heartland of Northern Ireland. Yet he now states his belief that a ‘new Ireland’ is inevitable, that the Union with Britain was perhaps always doomed, and he is willing to consider and discuss with nationalists how Irish unity could come about.⁴

The Belfast Telegraph political columnist Sam McBride, who interviewed Thompson earlier this month, said it was important to clarify that he “is not saying he supports a united Ireland, and for now remains a unionist. But he is open to a ‘new Ireland’ — the more oblique language now preferred by most Irish unity campaigners which is vaguer about exactly what constitutional arrangement it would entail. Most people take the phrase to mean a united Ireland (whether federal, unitary state or some other arrangement) and the ending of British sovereignty in Ireland.”

Wallace Thompson says: “Unionism as a philosophy probably was always in many ways doomed because of Ireland’s nature, the fact that the north was carved off from the south… now you’ve got a position where: Do you partition again? Do you accept that demographic change is such that we have to run to the walls and again shut the gates? Or do we recognise that we can’t keep doing this? We need to recognise that there are fundamental issues that have always been there really – from centuries ago – that we need to now recognise and try to address.”

Thompson has not been afraid of speaking out when other unionists have remained silent. When Martin McGuinness lay dying in 2017, he wrote on Facebook: “It is obvious that Martin McGuinness is seriously ill. There are those rejoicing in this and hoping that he suffers a painful and lingering death. I have been around a long time and I’m under no illusions about Martin McGuinness… however, if we profess to be evangelical Protestants, we need to reflect upon the words of Christ who said…‘Love your enemies’”. McBride points out that “comments like that are rarely heard from unionists – even deeply religious ones.”

Like so many unionists, Thompson felt betrayed – “we were like the unwanted child in the house” – by Boris Johnson’s decision to opt for an Irish Sea trade border. “If anything, my view since then has been [strengthened]. I do wonder at the future of the Union and I think we need to waken up and recognise that. The emperor has no clothes.”

He says that recently at the Apprentice Boys’ parade in Derry the consensus was that the DUP should not return to Stormont until the sea border goes. But he goes on: “Those who say ‘don’t go back’ need to set out: How long are we away for – 10 years, 20 years, 50 years… forever? And if that’s the case, what’s the alternative?”

Thompson regards himself as both British and Irish. He is tied to Britain by nostalgia, by a “deep-seated thing in your psyche that you were born and brought up within unionism” – but above all by the religious freedom which he cherishes.

Yet he also says: “I was born an Irishman. And people in my community again say ‘oh no, no, no, we aren’t Irish’ – but we are Irishmen and it’s nonsense to believe we’re not. We need to rediscover some of that Irishness. We’ve washed our hands of it completely. A hundred years ago our forefathers were happy to be Irish and to be seen to be Irish.” Does he fear Irish unity in the way he did as a young man? “No. I think it’s a different animal now,” he says.

He still isn’t entirely convinced that his Protestant faith and Britishness would be safe in a united Ireland and worries about it being “easy to come out with honeyed words but then to abandon pledges. Nationalism as a philosophy has a blind spot about how deeply held some of those things are to us… I would be concerned that we would [in a united Ireland] lose stuff; lose some of the key elements of our identity.”

However, he is prepared to sit down with those planning Irish unity to try to make it a more appealing idea to unionists. “I think we are in an inevitable move towards that – when it comes, I don’t know, but there’s an inevitability in my mind that we are moving towards some form of new Ireland. Hopefully, new and not absorption…but we need to ask the questions and we need to ask for answers and we need to talk to people. That shouldn’t mean then you’re thinking that we’re suddenly going down that road. We might not. We might decide [based on] all the evidence that we don’t want to go down that road. But we’re closing our eyes and pretending there’s no problem. This is the problem with unionism – we’re in denial, constant denial. To talk to these groups that are calling for a new Ireland to me is not an indication of weakness; it’s an indication of strength.”

To me – a very moderate nationalist from a unionist background – Thompson’s voice sounds like an authentic if rarely articulated one. I remember talking to a close associate of Rev Ian Paisley’s nearly 40 years ago who said similar things. Over a late night whisky, male members of my own Northern Irish unionist family have privately said the same thing: unionism’s days are numbered and some kind of future Irish unity is on the way.

But what will that mean for the cosy and all-pervasive Irishness of Southern society, with its continuing undercurrents of anti-Britishness and its probable Sinn Fein-led government in the near future? I listened recently to a clip from a speech at the 2021 Fine Gael Ard Fheis by Lorraine Hall, a young Dun Laoghaire councillor from a Protestant background, which struck a chord with me.

She said that when she was growing up in Cavan in the 1990s, she asked herself at times whether she was fully Irish: “At every stage of my upbringing I was made to feel I was different because of my religious background. I was sent to a separate primary and secondary school, segregated. I attended a different church. I participated in different sports from my peers and celebrated different cultural events. My 1990s self remembers questioning the logic of it all. If the objective in my mind was peace and integration, why were there so many barriers keeping us all apart?” She finished by saying that it was only in recent years, partly as a result of working with Minister Heather Humphreys – another Border Protestant – on the government’s remarkably all-embracing programme to mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising, that she began “to really appreciate that you can be Protestant and proudly Irish, that you can be of Ulster Scots heritage and proudly Irish, and you can play so called garrison sports and still be proudly Irish. And it is those who make you feel as though you are lesser Irish – or those who behave as though there is a hierarchy of Irishness – who do not live up to the ideals of our republic.”

“If we really consider ourselves to be a modern, multicultural Ireland, that includes accepting those of us who don’t readily fit into the Gaelic Irish stereotype, and allowing all of us to express our culture, without fear or judgement.” She appealed for “a broader definition of Irishness that is inclusive of all our traditions and backgrounds.”

Councillor Hall’s words should give us pause for thought. I live in Rathmines, a liberal, middle class, multi-cultural suburb of south Dublin where these barriers are far less significant than they were 40 or 50 years ago. However, all but one of the dozen schools in the area are still denominated by religion. Do many children from a Protestant background here play gaelic football or hurling? I have my doubts. On the other hand, nobody would dare in a hundred years to fly a Union flag on Armistice Day in this formerly unionist area.

Are we generous and open-minded enough to admit large numbers of fanatically pro-British (and often anti-Irish) Northern unionists into our comfortable, consensual and proudly Irish society? What are we prepared to offer them in terms of inclusive laws and symbols to make them feel at home here, so that, like the tiny and timid group of Southern Protestants who acquiesced to becoming part of the Irish Free State a century ago, they will – in the Taoiseach’s words – “throw their weight behind a newly united state and make sure it survives?”

¹ ‘Taoiseach says Irish people need to reflect more on how we would accommodate those with a British identity in a united Ireland’. Irish Times, 8 September

² Discussing Irish unity over dinner with Trinity College politics students, 2Irelands2gether, 14 April 2022

³ ‘Martin notes ‘huge incompatibility’ between Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein when asked about future coalition’, Irish Times, 11 September

⁴ ‘Unionism was probably always doomed – a ‘new Ireland’ is now inevitable, says DUP founding member’, Belfast Telegraph, 4 September; ‘Wallace Thompson is a remarkable opportunity for Irish unity campaigners – but also a threat’, Belfast Telegraph, 10 September.

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

The IRA’s Christmas present to the Niedermayer family: the murder of their father

Posted on Wednesday, 30 August, 2023 by andypollak

Earlier this month I saw ‘Face Down’, a powerful and heartbreaking documentary by the Dublin film-maker Gerry Gregg about the IRA’s 1973 murder of Thomas Niedermayer, the German manager of an electronics factory on the edge of west Belfast. The script was by David Blake Knox, a former RTE producer who had written a 2019 book about the case. In the words of a senior RUC investigating officer in the film, Niedermayer and the terrible circumstances of his death and its aftermath have been “absolutely, utterly forgotten”.

Niedermayer was an entirely innocent and uninvolved bystander in the Northern Ireland conflict, and he certainly believed he was safe because of that. A former aircraft mechanic, he had come to Belfast in the early 1960s to manage the Grundig factory in Dunmurry, which had created over 1,000 jobs in this unemployment blackspot (it closed after its former manager’s funeral in 1980). He was also the honorary West German consul in the city. He was highly regarded in the Grundig plant by management and workers alike; one worker who spoke to the BBC called it “a model factory” where “Catholics and Protestants can work equally together.”

On the night of 27th December 1973 he was in his home in Andersonstown along with his younger daughter Renate (his wife Ingeborg was in a Belfast hospital receiving treatment for depression). The 15-year-old girl opened the door to two unmasked men who said there had been an accident and some damage to Niedermayer’s car. He went outside to inspect this, but a neighbour saw him being bundled into a car which was driven off at speed. He was never seen alive by his family again. There was no claim of responsibility.

What appeared to have happened was that the German factory manager had been kidnapped by the IRA to be held as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the British government to get the return to a Northern Ireland prison of two IRA bombers in Britain, the sisters Dolours and Marian Price. The Price sisters, from a fiercely republican Belfast family, had been on hunger strike and had been force-fed in Brixton prison in London, where they were demanding that they should be returned to serve their 20 year sentences in the North, where they could claim the ‘Special Category’ status privileges then afforded to IRA prisoners.

The kidnap operation had been planned and organised by Brian Keenan, the IRA’s quartermaster general, described by journalist Ed Moloney in his authoritative A Secret History of the IRA, as having “entered IRA mythology as one of its hardest men, a skilled and ruthless commander who was as determined a revolutionary as existed anywhere in the IRA.” There may also have been a personal grudge involved: Keenan had been a shop steward in the Grundig factory and had been fired by Niedermayer.

However the kidnap went wrong. The German was kept blindfolded, gagged and bound in a house in Andersonstown less than a mile from his home. On the third day, he tried to escape while going to the toilet, and screamed and shouted when he was restrained. Four men held him down and one pistol-whipped him with a Browning revolver until he stopped moving. An autopsy after the discovery of his body revealed two depressed fractures to his skull.

Keenan instructed the kidnap gang to dispose of Niedermayer’s body secretly and the following evening they buried him ‘face down’ in a rubbish dump on parkland in Colin Glen, in the hills on the edge of West Belfast. Meanwhile his wife was issuing anguished appeals for information about his fate and whereabouts. “Please let me know what has happened to my husband,” she begged on television. “Give me peace within myself. No one can appreciate the agony and strain you are putting me and my daughters through.” A few weeks later she asked again: “Please give me some sign to put an end to this dreadful uncertainty…at least give me some information of where his body may be found, so that he can be decently buried and can rest in peace.” But nothing came back. Six months later she issued her “last and final” appeal: “It is terrible living like this and never knowing. I beg these people to let me know – my life has been shattered.”

However not content with such a cruel silence, the IRA (in tandem with British intelligence) went into lie-spreading ‘black propaganda” mode, with the international media as willing dupes. The Times Ireland correspondent informed his readers that he had been personally assured by the “Provisionals in the IRA battalion in Andersonstown” that “they knew nothing about it.” The Irish Press in Dublin carried an interview with an unnamed loyalist paramilitary ‘commander’ claiming his group had killed the German. Blake Knox believes this line had come from British intelligence: MI5, along with a professional fantasist called Colin Wallace who worked for British Army HQ in Lisburn as an ‘information officer’, also blamed loyalists, claiming that Niedermayer was having an affair with the German wife of unionist politician, Bill Craig. The German tabloid Bild carried the same story (and was successfully sued by Craig for it). The respected German current affairs magazine Der Spiegel again claimed “militant Protestants” had kidnapped Niedermayer, and that he had been having numerous adulterous affairs. All lies: anything but the actual truth about who had killed him. The well-known Irish journalist Kevin Myers, who was then a Belfast-based freelance contributor to the Observer (and is a rare journalist willing to publicly admit his mistakes), admitted in the film that journalists had been “useful idiots” for the IRA.

It not until March 1980 – nearly six and a half years after he was kidnapped – that Niedermayer’s body was found in Colin Glen. Tipped off by an IRA informer, a group of very determined and courageous policemen (with Walther automatic handguns under their waterproof jackets), posing as the ‘West Belfast Environmental Action Group’, spent a month clearing tons of stinking rubbish that had been dumped in the park before they uncovered it.

But the story of this tragic family was far from over. Ingeborg Niedermayer had been declared a widow by a German court in 1976. She believed that if she “knew for certain” what had become of her husband, she might feel better. It was the “not knowing”, she said, “that continually nags at my mind and brings on periods of depression and anxiety”. Since the kidnapping, she had only managed to survive “from day to day.”

In June 1990 Ingeborg returned to Ireland and booked into a hotel in the seaside resort of Bray in County Wicklow. A few days later her body was washed up on a beach at the neighbouring resort of Greystones. Within a year, her younger daughter Renate – who had opened the door to the kidnappers – and was then living in South Africa, also killed herself. In 1996 her older daughter Gabrielle, who had emigrated to Australia with her husband and raised two daughters there, also committed suicide. A few years later she was followed by her husband – a family utterly destroyed.

‘Face Down’ follows Niedermayer’s two brave young grand-daughters, Rachel and Tanya, as they try to piece together the tragic story of their family. Has there ever been any statement of admission, let alone apology, from the IRA? Absolutely not. Perhaps the most arresting clip in the film is of the Sinn Fein leader, Mary Lou McDonald, helping to carry Brian Keenan’s tricolour-draped coffin, after he died of cancer in 2008. This is the woman who will almost certainly be our next Taoiseach, representing our peace-loving nation on the international stage.

Brian Keenan is now a great republican hero: Sinn Fein puts on an annual memorial lecture in his honour, as well as a ‘Brian Keenan mountain run’ to celebrate his ‘love of nature’. One can buy an icon of the IRA leader, described in party publications as a ‘Republican Legend’, in four sizes. He was in charge of the IRA’s 1970s bombing campaign in Britain, in which scores of people, most of them innocent civilians, were killed; he was found guilty of eight of those murders and sentenced to 18 years in a British jail. The Garda agent and former IRA man Sean O’Callaghan said he had also planned the January 1976 Kingsmill killings in South Armagh, in which 10 innocent Protestant workmen died. He is believed to have planned the assassination of the British ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, along with his young assistant, Judith Cooke, in Dublin in July 1976. He was a ruthless and amoral killer and organiser of killings, who was utterly shameless about his multiple murderous activities, boasting shortly before his death that “the IRA changed urban warfare on a world basis. Other armed revolutionary organisations have borrowed the IRA’s tactics.” In fairness, I should add that Keenan was largely instrumental in swinging most of the IRA hard-liners behind the Adams leadership’s ‘Time for Peace’ strategy in the 1990s.

Meanwhile the disinformation goes on. Last year, nearly 50 years after Niedermayer’s death, RTE London correspondent John Kilraine reported that released British state papers showed the British government had refused to pass on to the Niedermayer family what it knew about his fate. He said that talks between the British government and the IRA about releasing the kidnapped man in return for the Price sisters’ return to Northern Ireland “came to a halt when Mr Niedermayer was accidentally killed by the kidnap gang.”² So as usual the fault lay with the dreadful Brits. As it continues to downplay its past connections with the IRA, while simultaneously glorifying that secret army’s sanguinary deeds, Sinn Fein must have been delighted.

‘Face Down’ has been shown throughout August in cinemas in Dublin, Belfast and Galway. Several thousand people will have seen it in that time. If it gives pause to even a few of those people who might be contemplating voting for the party of the Provisional IRA in the upcoming general elections, it will have been worthwhile.

¹ David Blake Knox, The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer, 2019

² ‘British withheld information on Niedermayer kidnapping’ – UK State Papers, RTE, 19 July 2022

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein | 5 Comments

The Border Region as a microcosm of opinion across the island

Posted on Monday, 21 August, 2023 by andypollak

I have a particular fondness for the border town of Clones; it was a place I visited frequently during my 14 years running the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh. It was in the news earlier this month for all the wrong reasons. Two lovely teenage girls (one of them the daughter of Syrian refugees) were killed in a road accident at a notorious local blackspot on their way to their school’s ‘debs’ ball.

Clones is a pretty place. Anyone who has sat in the Diamond on a summer’s day and looked out over the small green hillsides of County Monaghan stretching away to the south and east will attest to that. It is also a town that has picked itself up off the floor several times in its recent history. In the 19th century it had been the hub of the railway network in Ulster – ‘the Crewe of the North’ – with over 40 trains passing through every day on lines linking it with Dublin, Belfast, Derry, Dundalk, Sligo, Bundoran, Enniskillen, Armagh and points in-between. In the early 1920s, before the newly drawn border started to destroy its economy, Clones was described by the Boundary Commission as the most prosperous town in the region.

But then came the border, and Clones became a deserted and neglected frontier outpost, forgotten by the new government in faraway Dublin, cut off from its natural hinterland in Fermanagh, with most of its people crossing into Northern Ireland to work and shop. The final blow was the onset of the Northern ‘Troubles’ at the beginning of the 1970s: three of the four roads leading out of the town went into Northern Ireland and were cratered by the British Army; 45 businesses closed in the course of the conflict; the town was twice bombed.

“Clones became, in effect, a microcosm of the conflict, exhibiting in sharp relief the experience of the Southern Border communities as a whole: loss of hinterland; waves of economic decline; disinvestment by the state; the effects of physical violence and tension arising from the militarization of the surrounding area; the fractured social connections arising from the road closures; a Protestant exodus”, wrote the authors of a 2005 study of the Southern border region, The Emerald Curtain.¹

But since 1998 it has bounced back. The EU-funded cross-border Clones-Erne East Partnership invested in several innovative projects: notably the Peace Link, a multi-disciplinary sports complex aiming to build better relationships between people in the Monaghan-Fermanagh cross-border region using sport as the medium. The Upper Lough Erne to Clones section of the Ulster Canal was re-opened. The extremely hard-working Clones Family Resource Centre, headed by local woman Angela Graham – a model of its kind – was set up to address poverty and social exclusion, running everything from family support and mediation services to baby and toddlers groups, from ‘peace dialogues’ to women’s groups, from a men’s shed to a ‘hens’ shed. There is even a Clones Film Festival, now 22 years old (put the date in your diary: the bank holiday weekend, 26th-29th October).

Now the Clones Family Resource Centre have published a fascinating little book called Our Shared Way of Life: Listening to Border People (written by that excellent journalist, Denzil McDaniel, former editor of the Impartial Reporter in Enniskillen). It features the views of over 40 people from the border region on a range of issues including unionism, nationalism, religion, sport, history, politics, major contemporary issues, the ‘border question’, new communities and the future of Ireland and the region.

As the book itself points out, this represents a microcosm of views across the whole island of Ireland, although with a border region slant. It brings out the complexity of views in a region that is viewed as peripheral to – and usually forgotten by – the centres of power and influence in London, Dublin and Belfast. And despite what outsiders might think of an area that has been traditionally deeply – even fiercely – divided between ‘green’ and ‘orange’, these views are not always along the expected binary lines.

In a short article like this, I am going to have to be selective. One thing that struck me was the difference between unionist and nationalist views on the state of morale of the two communities. Elizabeth, a young Fermanagh Protestant with an Orangeman father who doesn’t know how she would vote in a Border poll (although since Brexit she has carried an Irish passport), said: “Nationalists seem much more savvy. At the election count parties like Sinn Fein had young nationalist women topping the poll. They were very well turned-out, although that may not seem that important. But they were all immaculately dressed, and all came from an educated background and showed real authority. By comparison, unionists looked pale, male and stale.” In the west of Northern Ireland some Ulster Unionist candidates had anti-gay and anti-GAA attitudes (much less so in the east). She believed many young people “see unionism as a hopeless case.”

In contrast, Brenda, a Fermanagh Catholic, talked about how hopeless and helpless her community used to feel in the past, but now they have “total access to expressing who you are.” “We were a community, Kinawley, very united in our Irishness and nationality. It was just such a massive cohesiveness of togetherness – even though that was outwardly suppressed, you had such a kind of strength.”

Brian, a Protestant from the Fermanagh border area, admitted to feeling “a little bit jealous, especially [of] the GAA, the way they have communities and their parishes. I think the Protestant communities, we don’t really have that relationship as much. They have great camaraderie between them, and I feel a bit envious of that at times.”

Gerard, a Catholic nationalist with a small ‘n’ from County Derry, said he knows border region Catholics who would call themselves conservative on the basis of their “economic view of the world” and were happy to be part of the UK. But Brexit and the behaviour of the British government and the DUP have meant they would now “countenance a united Ireland – they wouldn’t have done that before. Some are actually being active supporters of it now.” He is “shocked at the DUP’s lack of strategy. The Sinn Fein thing is always to prove the North doesn’t work as an entity. The DUP is doing it for them, and it’s the lack of strategic vision to see they they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”

However he doesn’t think much of Sinn Fein’s strategy either. “Sinn Fein go out and do these memorials to IRA people. Is that supposed to make any single Protestant feel any more likely to want to join a united Ireland – particularly now when they are becoming the biggest party down there [in the Republic]?

There were relatively few comments about the 1971-1997 IRA border campaign, which took such a toll on local members of the RUC and UDR. John, a Protestant from Monaghan now living in Fermanagh, believes the legacy of the conflict is one-sided against Protestants. “A lot of men were murdered and forgot about. We have to forget and move on, whereas a lot of communities [he obviously means the Catholic community] want answers and want justice. They want compensation and they want to blame someone; whereas I have to live every day and meet the man (at the shop) that perpetrated those deeds.”

Derek is an unusual Fermanagh man, christened in the Church of Ireland but now an atheist with “a disdain for all religions equally”. His uncle, who was in the UDR, was shot dead by the IRA before he was born, and he grew up the shadow of that murder. A businessman, he believes the Protocol gives Northern Ireland a great opportunity: “All I see is opportunity. Why are none of our political leaders shouting about this opportunity? If we have to deal with this bullshit that is Brexit that was forced upon us – let’s make some lemonade with the lemons we’ve been given.”

Michelle is an unusually empathetic Fermanagh woman: as a northern Catholic who has worked on both sides of the border, she said “the people I most identified with were the Southern Protestants. Somebody said I understand their situation because I experienced the same, being a minority community.”

Sarah, a Fermanagh teacher who calls herself a humanist (she says the Republic is “streets ahead” of the North in terms of womens’ and gay rights), described the views of young people: “They want to talk about anxiety, about mental health, about their sexuality. They want to talk about politics, about poverty and being more progressive in this society and more accepting. And the environment. Those are the things that matter to them.”

There are differing views from Northern Protestants about the prospect of Irish unity. Robert and Tom, both from south Armagh, said, respectively, that it is not being discussed in their community and it won’t happen “in my lifetime.”

On the other hand Dougie, also from south Armagh and a member of the Ulster Unionist party (who has been involved in high-level meetings with politicians in Dublin) said: “We’ve a lot of learning to do. People are implying that constitutional change is coming, but from a unionist/loyalist perspective they don’t want constitutional change. If you demonstrate to me that my children would be healthier, wealthier and better off, then I have an open mind. But nobody has done that.” He said nobody has addressed the question: “What do we do the day after a Border poll with the losing side?”

Pamela, a Protestant from the Fermanagh border who works in the Church of Ireland, says in her network people are talking more about the potential of a united Ireland. “Me personally, I have no fear of a united Ireland. I’ve worked cross-border all my life. But the fear is what becomes of the Protestant community in a united Ireland. How are they catered for? How are their traditions and cultures respected?”

Pamela talked about the “cognitive dissonance” of community relations, particularly in farming communities. “People of one side who generalise and criticise the other’s political affiliation also see the value of friendships, human connections and working with each other on a daily basis.” There are probably more cross-border contacts now than at any time since partition, the book’s author believes.

Eddie, a former IRA man whose family moved from Belfast to the Clones area when he was in his early teens, believes “there’s no need for armed struggle” any more, even though he has “big problems” with the Sinn Fein leadership’s strategy in “legitimising the Six County state.” Having come into contact with Protestants for the first time, he said: “I have a lot more understanding of why the other tradition was fearful, and hopefully they understand why we were fearful as well.”

One of the most interesting things about Monaghan is that it is one of the counties with the largest proportions of immigrants (including refugees and asylum-seekers) in the whole island, and for the most part they seem to have settled in well. Amazingly, estimates in Clones put the proportion of such ‘new communities’ in that small town at a third to a half of the population. They have come from Ukraine, Syria, Brazil (to work in the local meat factory), Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and East Timor, among other countries. “I was very heartened by the fact that young Syrian lads were saying they loved Clones; they feel welcome,” said Shauna, who works for an organisation in Monaghan helping new communities. Largy College, the town’s secondary school, was the first School of Sanctuary – a school pledged to offer welcome and integration to immigrant children – in the Republic.

Immigration is a sign that a country is on the right tracks. Despite the rather ignorant populism of some of the remarks of border people about the Republic’s politicians, with unemployment at a level lower than at any time in its history (4%) and government coffers groaning with tax income (with a €65 billion budget surplus forecast over the next four years), that optimism seems well-founded. Our Shared Way of Life ends on a firmly upbeat note: “When asked directly about their hopes for the future, virtually everyone interviewed expressed optimism, even if some slightly tempered it with concern.” The return to the area of younger families and the influx of new communities leads to “a belief that the area’s people are ready to leave a difficult and dark past behind and grasp new opportunities.”

¹The Emerald Curtain: The Social Impact of the Irish Border, Brian Harvey, Assumpta Kelly, Sean McGearty, Sonya Murray, 2005.

Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 1 Comment

Why not a loyalist woman as the symbol of the ‘new Ireland’? Why not Bessie Burgess?

Posted on Thursday, 3 August, 2023 by andypollak

I was in Galway last month to see the brilliant production by the Druid theatre company of Sean O’Casey’s classic play set during the 1916 Rising: The Plough and the Stars. This is the tragic story of Jack Clitheroe, who abandons his young wife Nora to fight with the Irish Citizen Army: he is killed and she goes mad with grief. But it is also a fabulous comedy performed by the inhabitants of a poverty-stricken Dublin tenement, led by a raucous, drunken carpenter, Fluther Good, and a loyalist street fruit-vendor, Bessie Burgess.

This is a pacifist and socialist play in its portrayal of the pointlessness of nationalist violence and the effects of that violence on poor people. The author of the definitive O’Casey biography, Christopher Murray, says that without a doubt it is his greatest play. “It is the one with the greatest intensity, the one which most ambitiously addresses the human comedy at the point where violent public events suddenly transform it into tragedy.” It is no coincidence that it has been performed all over the world, in dozens of languages.

Born a Protestant, O’Casey was formerly a fierce nationalist: a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Gaelic League and secretary of the workers’ militia, the Irish Citizen Army. But the great Dublin lock-out of 1913, led by Jim Larkin, convinced him that that the cause of labour took precedence over the cause of Irish freedom, and he was bitterly critical of Larkin’s successor, James Connolly, for bringing the Citizen Army out to fight alongside Padraic Pearse’s rump Irish Volunteers in Easter Week 1916. O’Casey believed that (in Professor Murray’s words) the Rising was “the root of a succession of wars and acts of terror succeeded by the civil war of 1922-23” I would add that the succession continued into the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ of 1968-1998. He also believed – and wasn’t he right? – that it laid the foundations for the conservative, bourgeois Free State six years later.

In Galway, for the first time (and I must have seen The Plough and the Stars three or four times), I was struck by a new thought: the centrality to the play (along with Nora Clitheroe and Fluther Good) of the working-class Protestant woman, Bessie Burgess (beautifully played by Hilda Fay). She is an unashamed loyalist, singing ‘Rule Britannia’, bemoaning her soldier son coming back from the Western Front with a shattered arm, and taunting the women of the house for “cuddlin their boys into th’ sheddin’ of blood. Fillin’ their minds with fairy tales that had no beginnin’, but, please God, ‘ll have a bloody quick endin’!

In the end she is one of the few heroes of the piece (albeit a flawed, human hero). She dies courageously, after being shot trying to pull Nora away from a dangerously exposed window. But she also shows generosity, tenderness and extraordinary love and kindness (as well as being an aggressive harridan when she’s roused). She is the one who gives the dying consumptive girl Mollser a mug of milk. She mothers, nurses and protects Nora, taking her into her own cramped apartment when the young deserted wife is on the verge of madness.

So here is my unlikely proposal. Bessie Burgess should be held up as a symbol for the ‘new Ireland’: a Protestant loyalist woman who embodies the heroic values of courage, fortitude and kindness that we will badly need if we are going to forge a harmonious and peaceful Ireland in the years ahead. Wouldn’t it be wonderful and amazing if the ‘new Ireland’ were to have a unionist woman as one of its symbolic figures? There could be a Bessie Burgess stamp and a Bessie Burgess festival. And a Bessie Burgess playwriting competition: is it totally outlandish to suggest that one of our talented young woman playwrights might even write a play around a Belfast Protestant version of Betty who might represent a vision of reconciliation in Northern Ireland and Ireland? I can think of a few possible models: the Shankill Road community worker, the late May Blood; the East Belfast Irish language activist, Linda Ervine; or even that great, pro-Irish moderating force on her extremist husband, Eileen Paisley.

Because the ‘new Ireland’ will need some new reconciling symbols if any element of Ulster unionism is going to feel any smidgen of loyalty to it. Some traditional symbols are clearly too embedded in Irish nationalist iconography to be changed. The tricolour, with its white ‘peace line’ between the Green and the Orange, has come to be seen as an entirely hostile banner by most unionists because of its expropriation by the IRA. However, very few people in the present Republic will be prepared to give it up.

But what about pledging a referendum to insert into the Irish Constitution a clause recognising the loyalty to the British monarchy of a significant minority of people on the island? Will Irish people be prepared to make such a generous gesture of inclusion to the monarchy-loving unionists – to make the ‘new Ireland’ a tiny bit more British in order to make it a warmer house for them? Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy understands the need for this. He wrote last month: “The question of a new united Ireland that is, in order to reflect and accommodate the allegiances of Northern Ireland’s unionist/loyalist community, a bit more British than the current Republic is, you might think, an important part of any discussion about that subject. But it is one that many enthusiasts for national reunification with the fourth green field seem unwilling to contemplate.”¹

And what about adopting the unifying rugby anthem, ‘Ireland’s Call’, as our national song, given that it is already sung enthusiastically by followers of that all-island game from the Protestant and unionist North? It’s an artless little jingle, but even so, it’s surely more appropriate to our times than the militaristic early 20th century dirge that we all sing at the moment.

Here’s a better idea. Let’s have an all-Ireland competition to compose a new anthem alongside the Betty Burgess playwriting contest. Let’s encourage writers and composers to look to the anthems of some of the other small European republics which are the same vintage as ourselves, countries like the Czech Republic and Finland. The Czech anthem is full of lines glorying in the peace and beauty of its countryside: “Midst the rocks sigh fragrant pine groves/Orchards decked in spring’s array/Scenes of paradise display.”

The Finns proclaim: “No hidden vale, no wavewashed strand/is loved, as is our native North/Our own forefathers’ earth.” In sharp contrast, what do we in Ireland have to offer in the third decade of the 21st century, with bloody war again in the East and climate catastrophe threatening the marvellous planet that is our common home? “Mid cannon’s roar and rifle’s peal/We’ll chant a soldier’s song”, we sing mindlessly (me along with everyone else) in Croke Park and the Aviva. It’s not as though those two countries haven’t also suffered from war and oppression: shortly after independence in 1918, Finland went through a horrific six-month civil war in which 36,000 people were killed (1,600 died in our equivalent); and what was then Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis and later invaded by the Soviet Union.

What I’m proposing is that the leaders and people of the Republic should make a couple of large, unilateral gestures of welcome and generosity to the beleaguered unionist people of the North to begin to show that we really want them as part of a new all-Ireland polity and society. We should not leave such gestures to be part of the hard-nosed negotiations that will inevitably have to accompany an eventual Border Poll, but offer them some open-hearted assurance in the near future that they need have no fear of joining with us to build that new society on the island.

My friend Frank Schnittger believes such gestures would be pointless, not impressing the unionists and giving the unfortunate impression that we want to return to becoming more like Britain (and the kind of old-fashioned, imperialist Britain that too many unionists hanker after).² He may be right about the first point, although I hope not – I believe a small but increasing number of people of Ulster unionist stock are beginning to look at closer relations with the confident, prosperous Republic with new eyes since Brexit. They are already impressed by the practical, mutually beneficial cross-border projects set in motion by Micheál Martin’s Shared Island initiative.

He is certainly not right about the second. Trying to understand and accommodate unionists in order to help them move towards a peaceful, harmonious future in Ireland does not have to dilute our Irishness in any way. My wise friend, Bob Collins, who knows Northern Ireland well from his time as head of the Equality Commission there, put it well at a British-Irish Association conference a few years ago. “For those nationalists in the Republic (and not everyone in the Republic is a 32 county nationalist) who desire a united Ireland, the first step on any road that may conceivably lead to the achievement of their goal is to get to know unionists, to come to understand their Britishness, to recognise and value their traditions and, gradually, to seek to persuade them, by their words and by their deeds, that they have in mind a future democracy that would respect and protect Britishness with the same fervour and commitment as they would respect and protect Irishness. That is not the work of a referendum campaign, nor of five years leading up to a referendum. It is the work of at least a generation. And that is only the beginning. Not to realise that is not to want a united Ireland that would be worth having.”

¹ ‘A united Ireland would have to be a bit more British’, Irish Times, 15 July

² Recent Comment on blog: ‘A United Ireland will have to include unionists – so let’s get on with the difficult task of including them’, 16 January 2023

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

What has really changed in Northern Ireland over the past 30 years?

Posted on Monday, 10 July, 2023 by andypollak

Last week I attended a reception in the Irish government’s splendid house in Notting Hill in Belfast to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Opsahl Report.¹ This landmark report, based on the views of around 3,000 people in over 550 written submissions and the opinions expressed at 19 public hearings about ways forward for Northern Ireland during a period of particular deadlock and despair, has been seen as one of the early seeds of the NI peace process. It was chaired by an internationally eminent human rights lawyer from Norway, Torkel Opsahl, and I was its coordinator. However, it has been almost completely forgotten and, until now, unmarked.

The 1992-1993 Opsahl Commission’s uniqueness was that it collected and highlighted the views of civil society in Northern Ireland: community and voluntary sector groups, women’s groups, churches, business groups and trade unions, cross-community dialogue groups and a wide range of individuals from prelates to paramilitaries, taxi drivers to bankers, prisoners to schoolchildren to academics. It was itself a venture that came out of the idealism of a group of 200 people active in civil society who called themselves Initiative ’92. Many prominent people contributed submissions: people like the 20th century’s most influential Irish civil servant, T.K.Whitaker; distinguished former senior British civil servants Sir Kenneth Bloomfield and Sir Oliver Wright; the Church of Ireland primate Archbishop Robin Eames, the poet Michael Longley and the broadcaster Robin Day.

There is no room here to detail its many conclusions and recommendations. Among the latter were at least four that would find their way in some form into the 1998 Good Friday Agreement: an equal voice for the two communities in the government of Northern Ireland; the legal recognition of such ‘parity of esteem’; the necessary involvement of Sinn Fein in any settlement (although it would have to renounce its justification of the use of violence first); and a Bill of Rights (still to be implemented).

The Opsahl Commission’s distinctiveness was in the fact that it gathered the views of ‘ordinary’ people rather than politicians (although the political parties, with the exception of the DUP, were persuaded to take part). What I want to do in this blog is to take a few submissions from those ‘ordinary’ people which particularly impressed the Opsahl Commissioners and ask if in the past 30 years there have been any significant improvements that represent real progress in Northern Ireland on the issues they raised.

Dr Brian Gaffney, a GP from Downpatrick, started his 1992 submission by saying: “I feel, as a Catholic, no sense of belonging to the fabric of society that makes up the official state of Northern Ireland”. He said that “as a person of liberal and left-wing political leanings, I have no means of expressing my views and feelings in a public forum”. He stressed that he abhorred violence.

He noted that the British government insisted that it was perfectly legitimate for someone like him to aspire to a united Ireland, “so long as this is deferred to the far distant future and not pursued by violent means.” Also that “such unity could come about if a majority in Northern Ireland so wishes. This indeed makes this issue a respectable political aim for anyone to hold.” However, he felt that many of the important structures of NI society (the RUC, the district councils, Queen’s University) “discriminate against this viewpoint by emphasising the relative ‘superiority’ of holding the similarly legitimate wish to maintain the link to Britain.”

“I would like to play a role in our society. I would like to feel at home in the city hall of my home city. I would like to assume that my local police constable had my safety and security as high on his or her agenda as my Protestant neighbour’s. Indeed, why should I not feel these things are so? I am a respectable member of the community, I wish no one ill, I pay my taxes and so on. But I would like to do all these things and still hold my ‘legitimate’ aspiration, still feel my Irish identity. Yet if I express these feelings, am I not assumed to be a closet ‘Provo’? Am I not forbidden open access to officialdom? These are feelings which I believe prevent a sizeable proportion of the Catholic community from playing a proper role in Northern Irish life. It is my belief also that both sides lose in this situation: we are frustrated in our wish to take part; Northern Ireland is denied the benefit of using our talents and diverse abilities.”

I met Dr Gaffney at last week’s reception and he was pessimistic. He said some things had changed for the better in the North: violence is now an “anomaly” and nationalists like him can support Irish unity without harm to their job or education prospects. “However, no one could argue that the North has become a normal European society whose concerns are the typical bread and butter issues of political and civic life. Yes, of course, we too are facing the consequences of economic austerity, globalisation and climate change. We too have issues around gender identity and ethnic discrimination. But always in the background and frequently in the foreground our political leadership and priorities are still based on orange and green. Sectarianism would appear to be the only effective way to engage the wider population, young and old.”

Raymond Ferguson is a former Enniskillen solicitor and liberal Ulster Unionist councillor in Fermanagh. He wrote in his submission that since the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, British policy had been “to try to weary unionists, in particular, into a state of mind where they eventually accept what Whitehall policy-makers conceive to be the inevitable – that their political future lies on this island and not on the British mainland, and that they really have to make the best of it.”

He also looked at the inevitable consequences of Northern Irish business expanding into the all-Ireland market as part of the removal of European Community trade barriers: “to the vast majority of Northern Ireland businessmen, this market is much more readily accessible and understood than the markets of Britain and the rest of Europe.” [Remember that this was just before the 1993 Single European Market opened and six years before the Good Friday Agreement].

“It is to this new commercial situation that unionist politicians must address their minds…Because of the greater facility with which business can be transacted on the same land mass rather than over sea journeys of 30-300 miles and longer, it is entirely foreseeable that, regardless of what attitude is adopted by politicians North and South, commerce will develop and grow between the North and South of Ireland. This will inevitably give rise to the need for political direction and structures to deal with the demands and problems created. It is difficult to see how the Unionist Party [this was before the DUP became a power in the land] could sensibly ignore these developments. Of necessity, political representatives of the North will become involved in dealing with representatives of the government of the Republic. To date unionists have fought shy of acknowledging any entitlement of the Republic’s government to input into Northern Ireland affairs…but as time passes it will become clear that this position is no longer tenable.”

Paul Sweeney (who was then director of the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust, and would go onto head several Northern Irish government departments) agreed. He believed it was only a matter of time before the political structures on the island of Ireland would give greater expression to its “economic and social coherence”. He went on: “I am convinced that terms such as ‘united Ireland’ are redundant and delay any sophisticated discussion of pan-Ireland issues.” He urged that “the maximisation of cross-border co-operation in the island of Ireland and between the island of Ireland and Britain should be a central plank of British government policy.” Parallel with this, “every effort should be made in the Republic of Ireland to convince a besieged unionist community in Northern Ireland that their welfare can be advanced by the forging of closer relationships with the South.”

He also emphasised the direct correlation between deprivation and political violence in both Northern communities: “to remain indifferent to these levels of deprivation is to remain indifferent to peace”. In particular, he said a major anti-poverty programme would have to be aimed at young people: “Our young people, whose lives have been blighted by the sins of their fathers, need major compensatory programmes and life opportunities if they are to become the leaders, parents and citizens of tomorrow.”

Three women active in deprived Catholic and Protestant areas of west Belfast – May Blood (later Baroness Blood), Kathleen Kelly and Geraldine O’Regan – called for the establishment of Community Development Trusts in local neighbourhoods. These would help to eliminate the sense of powerlessness felt by local working class people and offer a focus for “new and emerging leadership which ultimately could bring new energy to Northern Ireland’s political structures.”.

They went on: “In our experience many local people in west Belfast work long hours, all day, every day, to provide the basic care that supports the needs of their neighbourhood. This activity is often in support of young people, unemployed, disabled, women and children. In all these areas of activity local leadership and activity has developed. Those of us who have experienced this growth of confidence feel buoyant and confident about the future of our communities.” Yet these people felt that their involvement was of “peripheral interest” to officialdom. “They have little opportunity to effect change and there is no local accountability concerning the aspects of government policy and resources which are directed towards their communities.”

From commerce and community development to culture: Dr Bob Curran, a teacher and folklorist from Portrush in north Antrim (and from a Presbyterian family), believed that the Northern Ireland problem lay not with politics, but with something more fundamental: “our perception of ourselves as having two distinct cultures and traditions.” He argued that “there may be more to unite both cultures than to separate them”, and much of this could be discovered in a common musical and folklore tradition. “Rather than there being two cultures to be accommodated, there is a single tradition – that of Northern Irishness – from which certain sections of the community, either by accident or design, choose to exclude themselves.”

In his studies, Dr Curran had found stories, tunes and traditions in Northern Protestant communities with counterparts in Catholic communities in the Republic, even though most Northern Protestants dismissed these common traditions as ‘nonsense’ and not worth passing on. He believed this could be overcome by educating children to value their culture and traditions. He did not see this as a cultural process of ‘Irishisation’ in a narrow sectarian/religious sense, but a “a celebration of our common heritage – both as Catholics and Protestants – within our respective communities and upon the island of Ireland.”

He proposed a Northern Irish version of a schools-based 1950s folklore collection project in the Republic, in which children were encouraged to collect from their parents, grandparents and relatives. Such a project could “provide the basis for a shared community experience and could open the eyes of those who are going to form the next generation in Northern Ireland to the wide and rich spread of tradition which exists in Ireland.”

He went on: “Protestants have constantly struggled with (or have been hostile to) any concept of an ‘Irish identity’ because they perceive it as being different and alien to their own. It was almost as if Ulster was not a province of Ireland, but rather one of the English shires. All talk of ancient Irish heroes and study of localised folk tales has been heretofore viewed (by Protestants and Catholics alike) as exclusively Catholic in tone. Such a view must be effectively challenged within the classroom. Such a perspective must also be challenged within the Catholic population – folklore, Irish myths and legends must not simply be seen by Catholics as their exclusive province, but rather as having roots within the Protestant tradition as well.”

So what has really changed in the Northern Ireland economy, culture and society over the past 30 years? Have we moved towards a more rational all-Ireland market? Probably. Have we moved towards a more sophisticated discussion of pan-Ireland issues? Probably not. Have we tried to bring the teaching of a common Northern Irish culture and history into the classroom? Not to my knowledge. Have we seen a comprehensive programme to overcome poverty in the areas most affected by the ‘Troubles’? Certainly not. Above all, have we seen any significant efforts to combat Northern Ireland’s most defining evil – sectarianism? Absolutely not: in their drive for power, tackling sectarianism is low on Sinn Fein’s priority list, while the DUP is steeped in it.

Let me finish with a comment in a submission from an extraordinary group of people, rural dwellers, none of them well-off, from the Fermanagh village of Tempo. They had been meeting across the communal divide in the Tempo Historical Society, to explore issues of local and common history, for decades. Their best known event – a day of lectures, drama and music – was called ‘A Brotherhood of Affection.’ “The United Irishmen are very attractive from a cross-community viewpoint because that was a time when Presbyterians and Catholics united against the establishment. It proves that our divisions are not of immemorial origin and the idealism of that time is inspiring. These are also the roots of republicanism. Can someone not discover common ground here and produce an ideological breakthrough?” they wrote in their submission to the Commission.

They concluded their submission by saying that Northern Ireland’s problems “need the application of the very best minds to suggest a way forward. We do not think that these are our politicians.”

¹ A Citizens’ Inquiry: The Opsahl Report on Northern Ireland. Andy Pollak (editor), The Lilliput Press, 1993

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 3 Comments

Refugee crisis reveals the racism in our smug republic

Posted on Monday, 19 June, 2023 by andypollak

I don’t usually write about contentious issues in the Republic of Ireland, because – although I have lived here for many years – I feel I have little to add to the hundreds of thousands of words on television, radio and in the newspapers. I prefer to write about the North because I know it better and because it is less written about here.

But this month I am going to write about the refugee crisis that has been hitting the headlines in recent weeks and months. It is a issue close to my heart because I am the son of a refugee. Last month, for the first time, it became a headline-making issue in this country, as groups of local people in the townland of Inch in County Clare and the suburb of Santry in Dublin blockaded a disused hotel and a commercial building where asylum-seekers had been moved (or were about to be moved). Homeless asylum-seekers camped out near the office handling their international protection applications in central Dublin had their tents and other possessions burned by right-wing thugs. The Garda Siochana reported that there had been 125 anti-refugee/asylum-seeker street protests since the start of the year (one banner I saw at a Dublin demonstration read: “Our children are in danger from these immigrants. Fight back”). Members of far-right groups were extremely active on social media and were touring the country to stir up ignorant, fearful people in small places like Inch.

At the same time hundreds of Ukrainians were arriving in the country every week. Ireland has been among the most welcoming countries in Europe to people fleeing the brutal Russian invasion of that country (more than 83,000 received so far). Rosita Boland, who had covered the Inch protest for the Irish Times, wrote about the hostility she encountered from locals when reporting on the arrival of 34 young male asylum seekers (‘international protection applicants’ is the more politically correct appellation) from Africa and Asia to be housed in bungalows on the grounds of a disused hotel there. She remembered covering a similar protest in Achill in 2019, when 150 locals protested around the clock for six midwinter weeks at the imminent arrival of 38 asylum seekers, women and families – with the result that those unfortunate people never turned up.

She concluded her article: “For whatever reason, to my knowledge, there were no round-the-clock protests over the arrival of Ukrainians into our communities, some of them as small and remote as Inch and Achill. Why is this?”¹

I would have thought the answer was obvious (as, clearly, she does): the Ukrainians don’t have black and brown faces. We in Ireland have an extraordinary capacity for denial and doublethink: what Fintan O’Toole calls our “larger capacity for being in two minds simultaneously.” I remember the shocked, almost unbelieving reaction of letter writers to the Irish Times when I wrote an article in that paper back in 1999 about racism in Dublin. Refugees, asylum-seekers, solicitors, campaigning groups and black Irish people all agreed then that around two years earlier, when the number of asylum-seekers in Ireland for the first time had started to rise above miniscule levels, there was a perceptible change in racial attitudes here.²

The Rough Guide to Ireland of that year reported that “if you are black you may well experience a peculiarly naive brand of ignorant racism,” and this was particularly so in Irish cities. A survey of 157 asylum seekers by a Catholic campaigning organisation, Pilgrim House Community, found that 95% of African asylum-seekers interviewed had been verbally abused, while more than one in five had been assaulted. A study from the Irish Council for Overseas Students found that 89% of non-white students had experienced racial discrimination and over 40% racist abuse.

I quoted one the first political refugees to arrive here from Zaire (now Congo) who found people here friendly at first. However his attitude to Ireland changed when he was beaten up by a group of youths in broad daylight in a street in Dublin’s Temple Bar, with passers-by failing to intervene. “Older people are usually nice, ” he said. “But younger people are often nasty and become particularly aggressive when they are drunk.”

If this was happening when Ireland had infinitesimal numbers of refugees with coloured faces – among the 424 people seeking asylum in 1995, 3,883 in 1997 – how much more must it be the case when we now have over 20,000 asylum-seekers in the country?

It is not that we are more racist than other white, European people. It is that we are just as self-protective and xenophobic when it comes to welcoming (or not welcoming) to this peaceful and prosperous country our luckless black and brown fellow human beings fleeing war and persecution in countries like Congo, Somalia, Syria and Afghanistan. We have plenty of room in this (by European standards) under-populated country and we are now one of the richest countries in the world, and one with serious labour shortages in areas like construction and the health service which could be partially filled by refugees who are extremely anxious to work. Yet it took many years for an asylum seeker to get the right to work here until a 2017 Supreme Court decision finally forced a reluctant government to open the labour market to these usually skilled and well-educated people (because it is largely skilled, well-educated and extremely determined people who manage to overcome the massive obstacles to reach this far corner of Europe).

One thing I find objectionable is the smug belief among many Irish people that we are somehow more righteous than British (in particular) and other European peoples because we never had an empire and thus never – almost uniquely in Western Europe – oppressed people in Africa, Asia and Latin America (and indeed had our own, pioneering anti-imperialist war of independence against the British empire). We feel morally superior because we are ‘neutral’ with no attachment to any nasty military bloc. We love to think that we are the most friendly, open, welcoming people in the world – “global darlings” in the words of a recent Irish Times letter-writer – who are universally loved by everyone. Maybe that’s true for tourists, and to a lesser extent white Ukrainians, but it’s not true for people with black and brown skins.

In a previous era Jews were seen as a problem. Successive Irish governments refused – along with most Western governments – to take in Jewish refugees from Nazism in the years up to the Second World War. In the late 1940s the Department of Justice refused to allow 100 orphaned children, survivors of Belsen, a temporary refuge in Ireland, calling Jews “a potential irritant in the body politic.”

Of course, most Irish people are not racist, and there are good and bad people everywhere. I have an African friend who was so badly bullied during her placement at a major Irish hospital that she completely lost her confidence and was forced to give up her heart’s desire to become a nurse. On the other hand, the daughters of another African family I know well have gone on to have successful careers in industry and the media with the support of helpful colleagues.

In a small place, good people can make a real difference. In Lisdoonvarna, at the other end of Clare from Inch, 130 asylum-seekers first arrived to stay in a local hotel in 2018. They have since been joined by many more asylum-seekers and Ukrainians, so that in this community of 800 there are now around 1,200 refugees and asylum-seekers from 23 countries. There is the inevitable grumbling that the town is being taken over by outsiders, and local services are being stretched to the limit. But there have been no protests, no marches, no fights, no graffiti. The schools have played a huge role here, welcoming and integrating the newcomer children. “It has evolved, become a fait accompli, we just got on with it,” says one local woman. She also notes that some asylum-seekers have gained healthcare qualifications and are now working as carers for elderly and other vulnerable local people. Wexford and Waterford are other places where the schools – through the Schools of Sanctuary movement – have taken a leading role in welcoming refugee families.

Meanwhile in the Mediterranean 78 people died and hundreds more – including children – are missing after an overloaded fishing boat full of Egyptian, Syrian and Pakistani refugees sank off the Greek coast last week. Can we even begin to imagine the terror of those children trapped in the hold as that boat went down? An estimated 51,000 people have died trying to reach Europe in this and other ways since 1993. As the brilliant and courageous Africa-based Irish journalist Sally Hayden says, these dead people are “victims of the world’s inequality. They are the victims of the fact that the privileged people on this planet have freedom of movement due to the luck of where they were born, while much of the rest must risk their lives in the hope of accessing a secure, dignified life.”³ We Irish are right up there among those privileged people. As Almut Schlepper, a Dublin friend who spends many months every year working with refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, points out: “We can fly to Egypt for a fraction of the price these unfortunate people paid for a passage in an overloaded coffin ship.”

I do not underestimate the problems facing politicians dealing with this extremely difficult humanitarian issue (I recognise, for example, that Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman has had to move mountains to get hundreds of homeless asylum seekers off Dublin’s streets over the past month). I also recognise that there are some economic refugees from Eastern European countries like Georgia and Albania misusing the asylum process. But weren’t hundreds of thousands of Irish people economic refugees not so long ago? Is it beyond the ability of this now rich country to accommodate a few thousand people who only want to get jobs and thus contribute to the Irish economy? Is it beyond the capacity of the resource-rich super-state that is the EU (and the 10,000 staff of its border agency Frontex) to deal with a relatively small group of people smugglers without bringing down the shutters on the hopes for a better life of a few million desperate people in the Middle East and Africa? Should we not be following the urging of the International Organisation for Migration and the UN refugee agency UNHCR by increasing safe migration pathways to Europe and boosting search and rescue capability in the Mediterranean? I believe future historians will judge this episode in European history to be a shameful one.

PS I will outline a more positive picture of immigration and multiculturalism in Ireland in a forthcoming blog.

¹ ‘Ireland is not as welcoming as we would like to believe’, Irish Times, 7 June 2023

² ‘Welcome to Dublin, unless you’re black, Irish Times, 24 April 1999

³ ‘How have we normalised mass drowning?’ Irish Times, 16 June 2023

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Republic of Ireland | 4 Comments

Why I am an (Irish) Unitarian

Posted on Tuesday, 6 June, 2023 by andypollak

This is a slightly edited version of an address I gave in the St Stephen’s Green Unitarian Church, Dublin, on 30th April.

I’m going to talk today about why I am a Unitarian. But I am going to start with something about my family background, which is a bit unusual for a Dublin resident. My background on my father’s side is full of ambiguity. My father, whom I loved and admired greatly, although he was often an unhappy person, was born a German-speaking Jew (of Polish extraction) in that part of the old Austro-Hungarian empire which was soon to become the independent republic of Czechoslovakia. As a young man, like so many idealistic young Central Europeans of his background, he became a Communist and fought and was badly wounded in the Spanish Civil War. He then lived a wandering existence – complete with false names, false papers, constant danger and finally imprisonment – in France, the Balkans and India. He returned to Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, worked as a journalist, met and married my mother, an adventurous young Presbyterian woman from County Antrim, who was teaching in Prague, before falling foul of his erstwhile comrades soon after the Communists took over the country in 1948. His sin was his continuing and passionate belief in freedom of expression as a cornerstone of any civilised and humane society. He was forced to flee with my mother, and me inside her, back to Northern Ireland.

My father died relatively young in the late 1970s, after spending large parts of the rest of his life suffering from physical and psychiatric illness. He has left me with an enduring belief in democratic socialism as the most humane – if not, up to now, the most economically effective – means of governing human society; an empathy with victims of injustice; and a huge admiration for the courage of those who take difficult and dangerous moral stands.

If my father was born to insecurity and rootlessness, I had the great privilege to be born into a family of solid, God-fearing, fair-minded Northern Presbyterians. I sometimes say, only half-jokingly, that the best and luckiest thing that ever happened to me was the near-accident of my birth in Ireland. Or when I’m not feeling so kind about my Ballymena birthplace, I put it differently. I say I was conceived in Prague and born in Ballymena – a journey from the sublime to the ridiculous.

But actually that is not true. The privilege of my Irish birthplace – you’ll notice that privilege is a word that crops up a lot in this talk – has given me a deep security, rooted in a lifelong love of a place and its people that was never allowed to my father. It has put me in what I believe is the privileged position of being both an insider and an outsider in this country: an insider because of my birth, my residence, my family, my choice to try to live as an active and committed citizen of this Republic; an outsider because of my name, my accent, my religion, and my role as a journalist for the first part of my working career, and a developer of cross-border cooperation between the Republic and Northern Ireland for the second part.

And then there is my Unitarian aspect. I am no theologian, so maybe the rather diffuse and often ill-defined theology of Unitarianism suits me. I am a Unitarian and a Christian for the simple reason that these two sets of belief help me, a child of the latter half of the 20^th century and a slightly bewildered citizen of the first half of the 21^st, in my search for some deeper spiritual meaning amid the increasing complexity, superficiality and injustice of so much of contemporary life. That deeper spiritual meaning has been personified and taught by holy and heroic people since the beginning of time through the concept of a God who creates all things. I believe in that great, beautiful, although incomprehensible coherence in the universe – therefore I think I must believe in God.

Like most Unitarians, I believe in Jesus Christ as one of those inspirational, God-given figures in human history – by far the greatest one in my culture – rather than as the ‘son of God’. Therefore, like most Unitarians, I hold to the belief in Christ as a great and godly man whose teachings are to be followed, rather than one element in the trinitarian Godhead to be worshipped. Christ is a divinely inspired exemplar and inspiration. Had I been born in another culture it might have been Mohammed or the Buddha. From this comes the Unitarian emphasis on tolerance – all systems of belief in a God who preaches love and justice as the highest goods on this earth are worthy of equal respect and reverence.

I am conscious that I haven’t taken Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’ and am therefore in danger of becoming trapped in the temptation of my time, the perpetual search. To quote the Irish Catholic theologian Micheal Paul Gallagher: “In this century [he means the 20^th century], we seem to know so much that we can decide with confidence about so little – hence our frequent vagueness about concrete truth and concrete commitments. It can seem more honest to remain in a threshold stance, wondering but waiting.”

One thing I do know, however. Whatever the form of the search, I believe this search for some more unselfish, loving, Christian – in its broadest sense – way of life on this earth is essential to human survival and sanity. Tim Winton, the brilliant Australian – and Christian – novelist puts it like this: “At the end of the day the only definition of any importance for me is love and justice. If it doesn’t fit into that, I’m not interested. People are capable of amazing things. I don’t see people as irredeemably corrupt or doomed to viciousness. Not even the great 20^th century cul-de-sac of Marxism could make me think that there isn’t any point in people trying to share wealth and power and demand justice in personal and legislative ways.”

When I look around at the contemporary world – the huge inequalities, the unending suffering of poor people in war-torn countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, the refusal to face up to potentially catastrophic climate change, the deep dishonesty and megalomania of so many political leaders – I am often tempted to give up on any belief in a benevolent deity. During the pandemic I re-read the great French existentialist novelist Albert Camus’s classic The Plague. One of his themes is the nobility of “common decency” that doctors, nurses, health, sanitary, retail and other workers show in terrible times like those. It’s a kind of ‘common person’s heroism’ although Camus (who was himself a hero of the French resistance during the Second World War) did not believe in heroism. The ‘heroes’ of this classic novel are ordinary people, full of doubt, trying to do their best against overwhelming odds: Rambert, a journalist who gives up his plan to escape the plague locked-down town to re-join his wife in order to join one of the sanitary teams; Grand, an awkward, low-level but big-hearted municipal clerk who is secretly trying – and failing – to finish a novel; and Doctor Rieux, utterly exhausted and near despairing, who tells his priest friend Paneloux after they both witness the horrific death of a small child (Paneloux has urged him to “love what we cannot understand”, i.e. God): “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”

Camus, who witnessed all sorts of horrors, continued to believe that deep down most people were good. He believed that to single out heroism for particular praise implied that “such actions stand out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule”. The narrator in The Plague [i.e. Camus] does not share that view. “The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding [I think he is talking about Communism here]. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.” I’m not quite sure what he’s saying in this last phrase. It may be something to do with Camus’s ‘existentialism’: his belief that no religious or political dogma can be allowed to stand in the way of the requirement for all human beings clear-sightedly to make their own moral decisions in a turbulent and godless world.

I find that as a left-of-centre person, I fit well into the freethinking, tolerant group of people who make up the Dublin Unitarian congregation. I like the identification with liberal Presbyterians and Unitarians – people like Henry Joy and Mary Ann McCracken, William Drennan, Archibald Hamilton Rowan and Samuel Neilson – who were prominent in the United Irishmen’s struggle for an independent, democratic Irish republic. I recommend the excellent book by my fellow church attender and former senior trade unionist, Fergus Whelan, on 18th century Dublin Unitarianism and revolution, Dissent into Treason.

I have also found Unitarianism’s idea of ‘progressive revelation’ a helpful one in my personal search for the strength to make moral and spiritual decisions in my life. To quote the long-serving early 20^th century minister of this church, Ernest Savell Hicks: “Liberal thinkers in religion are not self-conceited enough to believe that they have arrived at final and ultimate truth in any department of life. They believe in a continuous and progressive revelation, and in a continuous and progressive aptitude – a sharpening of our spiritual wits, if one may be allowed the expression – whereby the soul and mind gradually become more delicately adjusted to receive the messages of God.”

I like that. I hope my spiritual wits are still sharp enough to receive messages both from my fellow human beings and from God, if he or she exists. If they’re not, then I’m not much use either as a journalistic observer of society – which I still am in many ways – or as a human being.

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

Irish media’s poor coverage of Northern Ireland not helping understanding in the Republic

Posted on Thursday, 25 May, 2023 by andypollak

Earlier this week I addressed the Belfast dialogue group Compass Points on the coverage of Northern Ireland by the media in the Republic. This is a slightly edited version of my remarks.

The first thing I should say is that what follows are the views of a former Irish Times journalist, a man in his seventies; a long-time resident of Dublin (although born in County Antrim), who was a Northern Ireland reporter for the BBC and that newspaper in the late 1970s and 1980s; who went back to Belfast in the early 1990s as coordinator of the independent Opsahl Commission, and from 1999-2013 set up and ran the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh. So mine is a particular and maybe outdated view, and probably one not informed enough by contemporary social and online media. But for what it’s worth, here it is.

The key thing to understand about the Southern media’s coverage of the North is that it is serving a constituency which is largely uninterested in and indifferent to Northern Ireland. The former Director-General of RTE, Bob Collins (who also knows the North well as a former chief commissioner of the NI Equality Commission), used to say that there was interest in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, when the main evening news bulletin carried graphic daily footage of killings and bombings in Belfast, Derry and elsewhere, but since the Northern violence largely finished at the end of the 1990s, that interest declined and eventually all but disappeared. That is still the situation today.

I always say that in more than 50 years of living off and on in Dublin, I can’t recall a single well-informed conversation with the journalists, academics, teachers, civil servants, cultural and voluntary sector workers who make up my friendship group about what reunification with the difficult and divided North might mean for the politics, economics and culture of the complacent – and in recent years rather successful – society that is the Republic of Ireland. And all these people are avid newspaper readers and TV news and current affairs watchers.

I’m going to focus today on the two media outlets I know best, the Irish Times and RTE. Perusing the other two main national dailies, the Irish Independent and the Irish Examiner, in recent weeks in preparation for this talk, I found almost nothing about Northern Ireland. The Sunday Independent is unusual (apart from its anti-Sinn Fein tone): because of the joint ownership of that paper and the Belfast Telegraph, it carries a weekly column from the excellent Northern journalist Sam McBride.

The Irish Times and RTE do each keep two full-time journalists in Belfast (all, incidentally, from a nationalist background). These are good journalists and I have no criticism of them when it comes to reporting the politics – and it is overwhelmingly the politics they report – of Northern Ireland. I should also say that the coverage of Brexit and its impact on Ireland, North and South, by RTE’s Brussels correspondent Tony Connelly (a Northerner), has been world class. Both the Irish Times and RTE also cover the North’s elections well (although I rely on BBC NI for the granular detail) .

What I am critical of is two things: firstly, there are few if any articles or broadcasts on all the other elements that make up a living, functioning society: the economy and business, health, education, the environment, culture and the arts, local government, community development, the lives of ordinary people, and so on. It is almost as though Northern Ireland isn’t a real society, which significant numbers of Southerners (and not only republicans) probably think anyway. The region is largely seen through the narrow prism of its sectarian politics, and in particular the antics of its two big beasts, the DUP and Sinn Fein. Occasionally the Irish Times carries pieces about past atrocities, most of them at the hands of the security forces.

Secondly, there is little serious analysis and explanation of what is happening in the strange place that is the North. [I should add here that Northern Ireland really is ‘strange’ – i.e. foreign – to most people in the South: a recent tourism survey showed that 50% of the population of the Republic – two and a half million people – had never ever visited the North]. As somebody who is genuinely interested in Northern affairs of all kinds, I have to rely on some of the excellent journalists there are in Belfast for the deeper coverage and analysis that is otherwise lacking: people like Sam McBride, Suzanne Breen, Alex Kane and Allison Morris.

I’m showing my age now, but this is a far cry from when I was in the Irish Times Belfast office in the 1980s. Then – under brilliant Northern editors like David McKittrick and Ed Moloney (and Conor O’Clery before them) – Ireland’s ‘paper of record’ led the world on the big breaking stories: the IRA’s various spectacular atrocities, the Maze Prison hunger strike, the Kincora Boys Home scandal, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and so on. We had a ‘Northern Notebook’ every Saturday to analyse the week’s events; and an ‘Inside Belfast’ column every Tuesday to write about subjects other than politics and violence. Until shortly before I arrived there had even been a Northern business editor to cover the economy (economic stories are now left largely to the Press Association news agency). I have a vivid memory of Belfast Telegraph reporters hanging around our office in Great Victoria Street, waiting for the latest instalment in the Kincora Boys Home saga.

Upstairs in the RTE office, there was a similar deep seriousness about the coverage of Northern Ireland, with superb journalists like Tommie Gorman, Cathal Mac Coille and Póilín Ní Chiaráin. We all knew that our editors and bosses – men like Douglas Gageby, Conor Brady and Bob Collins – believed fervently that Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’ was an enormously important story which their readers, viewers and listeners absolutely had to pay attention to.

The former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, as a young politician in the 1960s, used to urge RTE to include more unionists in its discussion programmes. That is still not happening except in the most tokenistic way. We don’t understand the North (and particularly the unionist North) because – other than the obvious political leaders – we don’t hear from Northerners. For example, I think I have heard Alliance leader Naomi Long once on RTE in the past 12 months, and have yet to read a decent interview with or profile of her in any Southern paper. I can’t remember the last time I heard a broadcast or read an article about a Northern business or trade union or farmers’ or women’s movement leader. A recent profile of new GAA president Jarlath Burns as a pioneering school principal in south Armagh was only commissioned by the Irish Times after I suggested it.

Of course, in the final three decades of the last century Northern Ireland was often a news-leading world story, as well as a vital Irish one. Today the North’s interminable deadlock is simply boring, and there is no major violence to shock the media-consuming public. Now, with newspapers in particular being under constant threat from social media, much of what serves as analysis and debate is a kind of culture war where an individual commentator’s beliefs – ‘echo chamber’ style – trump the good journalist’s search for truth through gathering facts and evidence. Even I, a lifelong newspaper man, find myself perusing the Slugger O’Toole website (with its multitude of rubbishy ‘threads’, interspersed with some thought-provoking ones) nearly as often as I check with the Irish Times and RTE.

Why would anyone read the Irish Times to find out what is going on in Northern Ireland in any depth these days? Somebody like me, with a continuing deep interest in the place, can get a subscription to the online edition of the Belfast Telegraph to keep up with events there. This is particularly the case when I want to know what is happening in the unionist and loyalist communities, which remain terra incognita to both the Southern media and the people they are supposed to serve.

Unfortunately this leads to an uninformed and indifferent public in the South remaining uninformed and indifferent. Last month the editor of the News Letter, Ben Lowry, unapologetically told a Dublin audience that his pro-unionist paper had scant interest in events south of the border. If they were being honest, the editors of the three national papers in the South would be admitting the same thing: they are nationalist papers serving a readership with little or no interest in the North.

At least the the Irish Times has a weekly opinion columnist with a unionist bent. However, as a relatively knowledgeable Northerner, I often find Newton Emerson’s columns very unsatisfactory. As a satirist-turned-commentator, he doesn’t appear to understand the basic journalistic requirement to back up his statements by referring to confirmatory sources. Thus a good journalist will cite a “government source” or a “source close to Politician A or government department B” when making a claim. Emerson never quotes or cites anyone. As a result I never know whether I am reading something that is actually happening in Northern Ireland or only something that is happening in Emerson’s brain. Once again, it is a very far cry from the columns of the peerless Mary Holland, occasionally flanked by Vincent Browne or Nuala O’Faolain, that I used to rely on in the 1980s and 1990s.

Rory Montgomery, the former top Irish civil servant who was a key player in both the Good Friday Agreement negotiations and the diplomatic manoeuvring following the Brexit disaster, shares my unhappiness with the mixture of delusional thinking and sheer apathy that passes for opinion about Northern Ireland in the South. Agreeing with a recent blog of mine about Sinn Fein rewriting recent Irish history if and when they get into power in the Republic, he wrote: “Far too many people in the South, and elsewhere, are susceptible to cynical republican mythologising. This is not incompatible with, and indeed is only possible, because of enormous levels of ignorance and indifference.” He finds that many members of the younger generation, which is “implacable in its excoriation of manifestations of racism and sexism (with no statute of limitations) seem not to care about, or at best to relativise, the greater sin of murder.” The Sinn Fein narrative of the Northern conflict as “a noble and justified struggle for human rights quietly advances,” writes another astute observer, Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy.

All this means that the Southern electorate are extraordinarily ill-informed about the North (and particularly about unionism). The Irish Times did run an excellent series of opinion polls and focus groups on unity and related issues last December and January, which only served to show how little Southerners were prepared to change their comfortable society and traditional symbols in order to accommodate Northerners (and particularly large numbers of alienated and abandoned unionists). It is difficult to overstate how ill-prepared the Southern electorate is for the extremely difficult public debate that will have to start soon here about the huge changes that will be needed to bring about a peaceful and harmonious united Ireland. And the Southern media’s return (for the most part) to its pre-1969 indifference to Northern Ireland is not helping that debate one bit.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 5 Comments

Talking to a cosmopolitan, community-focussed nationalist who is full of good ideas

Posted on Thursday, 4 May, 2023 by andypollak

Conor Patterson emphasises that he is not a politician, political commentator or member of a political party – he is a businessman with a passion for community development in his home town of Newry, in Northern Ireland and on the island of Ireland.

To use an old-fashioned and probably politically incorrect phrase, he is a working class boy “made good”. Patterson’s father was a welder (sometimes with his own small company, but often unemployed), his mother a telephonist, originally from Dundalk. A bright boy, he passed the 11 Plus and went to the local Christian Brothers Abbey Grammar School. He says he owes a lot to his mother in particular. In the late 1970s the streets of Newry, with weekly rioting against the British Army, were an exciting and sometimes dangerous place for teenage boys. His mother was determined that her children should see a different world. When he was 17 she organised for the family to go on a camping holiday in Brittany. As far as their neighbours in the Barcroft estate were concerned, they “could have been going to Mongolia.”

In the following year, in the summer of the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike, Patterson joined a group of friends on an archaeological dig in northern France. It was a “life changer” to be camping with young people of various nationalities and to have the sense of status that came with being an international volunteer. He went to Coventry Polytechnic to do a degree in planning and then to Trinity College Dublin for a masters in economics.

After a short period back in Coventry lecturing at the polytechnic (now a university), he joined Grampian Council in Aberdeen as a planner. This was the era of powerful regional councils in England and Scotland having wide-ranging responsibilities over social services, housing, roads, policing and economic development – the sort of functions that years later would be devolved to the Northern Ireland Executive. He was soon promoted to the key job of managing EU programmes for the council, in which he had an annual budget of £40 million. It was a formative experience that made him into an internationalist, a champion of European economic cooperation and integration.

Following the 1994 IRA ceasefire, he and his wife – also from Newry – decided they wanted to come home. He got a job running the South Armagh Area-Based Strategy, a new intervention to bring economic and social development to that marginalised and formerly violence-ridden district, which brought together 15 partners ranging from the local community association to government departments, district councils and the International Fund for Ireland. He says it was “an early introduction to the complexity of the public sector in Northern Ireland.”

In 1996 he was successful in his application for the post of chief executive of the Newry and Mourne Cooperative and Enterprise Agency (NMEA), which runs the WIN (‘Work in Newry’) business park, the first community-owned workspace project in Ireland. Over the past 27 years he has turned this into an extraordinary success story – although he is quick to pay tribute to the people in the NMEA who came before him, notably its first manager, Frank Dolaghan, its long-time chair, John McMahon and its current chair, Peter McEvoy. There are now 82 business units employing 500 people on its Newry site, and a further 400 employed at four enterprise centres in the Newry and Mourne area under its management. The most remarkable of these is probably at Flurrybridge, on the border in South Armagh, which now employs nearly 300 people and generates £12 million every year for the local economy. In largely unionist Kilkeel, Binnian business park is another successful centre.

It is difficult to over-estimate the transformation of Newry, in which the NMEA and its WIN business park have been key players. When the WIN site was purchased in 1975 with £60,000 collected from local people (including five pounds from Patterson’s mother), Newry, with an unemployment rate touching 30% and experiencing daily Troubles-related violence, was one of the most deprived towns in the UK. Now, with that rate dramatically down to 2%, it is one of the most dynamic towns in Ireland, with major companies in areas like veterinary pharmaceuticals, engineering, robotics and financial services, as well as being a hub for large British retailers setting up stores to cash in on its lucrative cross-border market.

The WIN model was adopted by the International Fund for Ireland to fund economic development partnerships in local council areas all over Northern Ireland. Patterson believes these council-led partnerships, directly involving the community and business sectors, but largely dismantled by the NI Executive in 2008, represented an important element in the upsurge of community involvement and local enterprise between the late 1980s and early 2000s, and thus a key grassroots development in the years of the peace process.

While running the NMEA, he completed a PhD on ‘the role of social capital in economic development in Northern Ireland’. One of his most interesting findings was that the areas where local economic development was a significant ‘change factor’ were predominantly nationalist – where, for example, credit unions were a key feature. He remembers discussing this with Newry unionist MLA (and former NI Executive minister) Danny Kennedy, who told him Protestants were very private people, and that the idea of their peers discussing their business and deciding whether they were worthy of a loan, was ‘anathema’ to them.

Until 2016 Patterson was just an energetic local business leader with an interest in community development and mediation (he had worked closely with the late Brendan McAllister, founding director of Mediation NI).What politicised and radicalised him was Brexit. He remembers being roundly dismissed by the DUP’s Sammy Wilson on the BBC’s Nolan radio show a few days before that vote, when he said that a hard Irish border would be the inevitable outcome of a vote to leave the EU, with a devastating impact on border towns like Newry. He was Newry Chamber of Commerce’s representative on the Northern Ireland Remain campaign, and became that campaign’s border spokesperson. He believes Brexit radicalised many Catholic middle-class people like himself, pointing to how the South Down Westminster constituency, a much sought after place to live, had gone from being represented by Enoch Powell, succeeded by two SDLP MPs, to having a Sinn Fein majority. He is now the health spokesman for the nationalist lobby group, Ireland’s Future.

Asked to define his nationalism, Patterson uses the rather old-fashioned term “anti-partitionist”. “I believe partition has been bad for Ireland, north and south, and particularly bad for Newry. I’ve seen that myself, I’ve seen the frictions and disharmonies that have affected our ability to develop normal relationships within Northern Ireland and on this island”. He gives the examples of the local Daisy Hill hospital, often threatened with serious service reductions, which only has half a hinterland (and the brand-new hospital in Enniskillen, which cannot provide emergency medical surgery because it doesn’t have enough patients); and Dundalk Institute of Technology, which cannot be designated a Technological University in the Republic because it can’t reach the required student numbers (and has few students from the adjoining jurisdiction a few miles up the road).

He stresses that he is not a “cultural exceptionalist – I don’t think that people who identify as Irish or British or as another national or cultural group are exceptional just because they were born in a particular place. I respect people because they are fellow human beings grappling with life’s challenges.”

In a recent paper read to the Belfast dialogue group, Compass Points, Patterson expanded on these reflections. “I want to end partition because I want to end the enforced separation of people living on this small island where there are no topographical barriers to separate one group from another…I want to end the constraining or the sheer preventing of collaborations in business and the delivery of services and collective working more generally, and the effect of that on personal and social patterns of behaviour.”

He advocates “a new 21st century framework of governance with subsidiarity as its guiding principle, in which decision-making is devolved as close to citizens as possible. This would be a model which envisages multiple tiers of sovereignty, one overlaying another, from the community level up through local government, to regional structures and national competences, through to the international collaborative structures which will have an increasing role to play – in disease management, protection from economic exploitation, climate change, ecosystem protection and resource renewal.

“In this model sovereignties would be layered across the island, unencumbered by an externally imposed, sub-optimal partition boundary, because so doing would bring measurable benefits to people here. This model would also mean that, where it made sense, the sovereignty for some functions or resources would be shared with parts of or all of Britain and others internationally…This would be a multilateral model. There would be a west/east dimension, and there would, for practical, administrative reasons, be a continuing Northern Ireland region dimension.

“But there will have to be a much more significant north-south level of governance, because it makes sense for business and for the delivery of public services. Failing to do that in the last 100 years has stymied the economy of the six counties that make up this region. It has made the public sector bigger by far than it should be – because this tiny jurisdiction has had to retain all the paraphernalia of a state rather than a regional tier of government – and it has made the private sector weaker and smaller than it should be (and that has stymied innovation). The effect is that the productivity of the region is carried on the shoulders of a smaller number of wealth creators per capita than elsewhere in Ireland or Britain.

“The future I want to look to is one in which a constraining border has been removed and there is a new collaborative settlement between peoples, traditions and cultures. I say to those who define themselves as British that this model doesn’t envisage an end to links with Britain. I wouldn’t suppress your Britishness. It envisages communities of common purpose not just spanning this island but also spanning the Irish Sea, including at the sub-regional level, for example between Antrim and Dumfries and Galloway, between Newry and Mourne and the area of Lancashire around Heysham (linked by shipping services with the port of Warrenpoint), between Dun Laoghaire and Anglesey, and so on.

“More fundamentally, I want to ask those who are uneasy about change in the role culture plays in society, and any perceived dilution of British culture in Ireland, to think instead about change in the world of technology and business, change in how young people interact with the world, change in the natural world (climate change, loss of species and habitats), change in lifestyle expectations, change in what is demanded of public services, change in how humans communicate, in how we secure and process information, change in how we move between places across this globe.

“Think about these things in the context of this island, these islands, this region of the world. Is it realistic or ethical – might it even be counter-productive – to ignore these strong and powerful change currents? Might it be better to seek to understand the direction in which those currents are flowing, how they interact and how they might affect the wider ecosystem in which we live – rather than try to stop the tide?

“Consider the integration of business on this island to maximise its international competitiveness – do you want to halt that? Consider the interactions between people on this island for whom those interactions make sense – whether it is working or socialising or sport or shopping – do you want to increase the frictions to make those more difficult? What about the ability of people to access effectively public services closest to them and best suited to their needs (for example in healthcare or education) – do you want to make that easier or more difficult?”

Patterson advocates a “utilitarian approach – i.e. the configuration which maximises the benefits for society and the natural environment which hosts our society.” He believes that strong cultures, like the British and Jewish cultures, for example, can thrive irrespective of (or beyond) national boundaries. He asks if isolation, nay-saying and denial are the best ways to ensure that British culture thrives on the island of Ireland.

He believes the three strands of the Good Friday Agreement can be built upon to develop a multiplicity of other strands, and that different local areas in Northern Ireland can have different ‘flavours’ (with protections for minorities built in) depending on their cultural Britishness or Irishness. “My proposition is to vest the bulk of meaningful power in the structures of local government and local civil society institutions. In Switzerland most power is in the hands of the cantons and municipalities. Three, arguably four, different cultural and language groupings live together in peace and harmony in that country because a framework enables it. We tried to do this in a meaningful way here up to 2008 through District and then Local Strategy Partnerships. I contend that those structures played a significant part in embedding the peace and building the transformation. I believe their work threatened interests which were invested in maintaining the status quo, dysfunctional and damaging though it had been, and that’s why the local partnerships were closed down. For me, it is not coincidental that when the ability to shape local change was taken out of the hands of citizens, that’s when progress slowed down, stuttered and eventually stopped.”

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | 1 Comment

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