Whiterock Road Library last night. It was great listening to three writers and a critic discuss Belfast city and its environs as depicted in their books and those of others. ‘One City, One Book 2013’ is a series of readings, discussions, interviews and talks running throughout May organised by the Arts Council. Damian Smyth, Head of Literature at the Arts Council, introduced the event and handed over to C.L. Dallat, the Ballycastle-born poet, musician and critic, who chaired the panel discussion.

Of the three writers – David Park, Colin Bateman and Lucy Caldwell – I am most familiar with the work of Park and have reviewed several of his novels, the last being The Truth Commissioner which I wrote about in 2009 in the scholarly journal of AEDEI, the Spanish Association for Irish Studies.

Whiterock Library is a great venue and the staff put on quite a spread for those who had travelled through such temperamental weather.

10^th May. Was interviewed by Ken Sweeney, entertainment editor of the Herald, rejecting, in my opinion, the claim in a BBC documentary ‘Dave Allen: God’s Own Comedian’ that he received death threats from the IRA at the height of the Troubles. I recalled that when I was in Long Kesh in the early 1970s we prisoners thought he was brilliant – he was subversive, anti-clerical and anti-establishment. I told Ken Sweeney that I was such a fan of Allen that I mentioned him in the prologue to my 2002 memoir, All The Dead Voices. It is so easy for any crank or someone with a grudge to make an anonymous threatening call which decades later is then treated as fact.

[L-R] David Park, C.L. Dallat, Lucy Caldwell & Colin Bateman

On Thursday night I did a reading and book signing in Eason’s in Donegal Place. The staff in the shop, especially Jonathan and Allison, were wonderful. Got a real buzz out of the Q & A. People from Carrickmore, Glenavy and Downpatrick came along. Earlier, I was invited on to Frank Mitchell’s show on U105 to talk about my book and instead was subjected to an inquisition about Gerry Adams, the  IRA, IRA operations etc etc. He never asked me about the book or the process of writing it or what influenced me. In fact, it was a waste of time doing the interview.

Incidentally, Jude Collins on his blog comments on the Q & A. And the other writer he mentions, David Park, will be reading at the Whiterock Road library this coming Monday at 6pm, along with Lucy Caldwell and Colin Bateman.

7th May. My interview with Peter Taylor on republican dissidents was broadcast tonight on BBC Radio 4. There were two other documentaries on television – an excellent one by Chris Moore on UTV about collusion and ‘Spotlight’ on BBC about Thatcher and Ireland for which I turned down an offer to be interviewed.

5th May. Stopped off in Dublin on our way back from a wedding in Abbeyleix. It was like a summer’s day, young people lying on the grass at Stephen’s Green, children throwing bits of bread for the pigeons and the ducks. Reminded me of that Bagatelle song whose lyrics go: “And the young people walking on Grafton Street, and everyone looking so well, I was singing a song I heard somewhere, called “rock’n’roll never forgets”.

Went into Swenys, the Dublin pharmacy featured in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and had a yarn with the proprietor PJ Murphy who invited me to a reading of Finnegan’s Wake that night but I had to head home. Thinking of Bobby Sands and his comrades throughout the day.

1st May. Finished reading Call Mother a Lonely Field by Liam Carson, a beautiful little memoir which leaves a nice taste on the palate of memory long afterwards. Liam shall be doing a reading during our summer Féile – he’ll be speaking in An Chultúrlann, in the gallery, on the afternoon of Saturday 3rd August.

29th April. Received an email over the weekend from Gerry Moriarty, northern editor of the Irish Times, asking me a number of questions about the 1981 hunger strike and in particular the period around July when the British government rejected a compromise. When I got the paper today the story was reduced to an ‘argument’ between Richard O’Rawe and ‘Danny Morrison’.

Finished reading Hermann Hesse – Pilgrim of Crisis by Ralph Freedman.

23rd April. Interviewed by Corinne Purtill, UK correspondent for Global Post, a US news agency, about life in Belfast fifteen years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

22nd April. Interviewed by Donal MacIntyre for  a four-part series for TV3, ‘Print and Be Damned’ about the history of Irish newspapers. My interview was about newspaper coverage of the north, particularly from a southern perspective.

21st April. Interviewed by Stephen Nolan on BBC Five Live about the historical legacy of the conflict and my views on a Truth Commission.

18th April. Interviewed by Dr. Niall Ó Dochartaigh from the University of Ireland Galway about Sinn Féin policy and the republican approach to negotiation.

Interviewed by Judith Hill for UTV Live Tonight about prison memories and the ongoing discussion around the preservation of parts of Long Kesh/H-Blocks.

Eason’s Donegall Place, 6.30pm, Thursday 9^th May, I shall be reading from my new novel and signing copies. You are all welcome! See poster for full details.

This quotation is from the prologue – Drumbridge, 1946

The attacker shivered and waited in the shadows at the rear of the Diamond Bar for what seemed like an eternity. A patron stumbled out into the cold air, croaking the song he left behind, as he made his way to the toilet in the courtyard. Another drunk left the bar and lurched towards the gate to go home, but wavered and was lured back by the fug and the thought of more free drink.

If Jeff wasn’t alone when he came out, he would be tracked from a distance and for opportunity, this night or another soon − as time was pressing and he would shortly be leaving Ireland for good.

A spirited rendering of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, led by Jeff’s younger cousin Sammy, could be heard coming from the hive of the bar.

Another ten minutes passed.

When the door opened a coffin of light fell across the yard.

It was Jeff, at last.

As he zigzagged across the dimly-lit yard he was having problems prising free the buttons of his fly and appeared not to be in as jovial a mood as the company he had just left.

The attacker readied himself, took a deep breath, ran out from the shadows and from behind plunged the knife deep into the side of his victim, who gasped in anguish and buckled as if from the impact of a bullet.

The attacker appeared to hesitate, but had the presence of mind to withdraw his knife, then turned and ran towards the Shambles, as Jeff collapsed in a pool of blood.

Being expelled from St Dominic’s Grammar in 1959 over an innocent adolescent ‘carrying-on’ with some boys that summer in the Donegal Gaeltacht, undoubtedly had a profound effect on 16-year-old Patricia Craig from St James’, off the Falls Road. Her ‘co-accused’, so to speak, Rita O’Hare, from the Glen Road, was also dismissed.

Rita went on the become the Sinn Féin National Director of Publicity and the party’s current representative in Washington, whereas Patricia became an eminent and astute writer and critic whose works have been hugely influential on the perception of the literary canon of the North.

A few years ago Patricia wrote about her youth,  Asking For Trouble – The Story of an Escapade with Disproportionate Consequences. Now she has turned her hand to a very ambitious and detailed research project, investigating her antecedents, and comes up with surprising and rich results.

In A Twisted Root – Ancestral Entanglements in Ireland she is able to trace her family connections back to the Plantation in the form of Katherine Rose who came to Lisburn, through to a forebearer William Blacker who founded the Orange Order, and her great-uncles who fought in the IRA in the 1920s. Patricia’s mother was a Catholic, her father a Protestant. Which, interestingly, was also the case with Rita O’Hare.

The book demonstrates how in a place like ours, we are all related in one way or another, given those ancestors who converted from one religion to another or who changed political allegiance. (Not sure who in the Morrisons, my Scottish Presbyterian ancestors, jumped ‘ship’ and left me with no Lodge but a cumainn! I owe you nothing. And I owe you everything.)

She argues that this heterogeneity “makes a nonsense of the monolithic certainties on which the entire structure of our centuries-old conflict is based”. In a way she is right: the pure Gael does not exist. (Nor the pure English or Scottish race.).

But the past, and particularly the wrongs of the past, where they explain the conditions of injustice and inequality under which one’s community has had to live, or lives, are not fallacies but potent drivers of action. If wrongs are not redressed through reform, they will be redressed through rebellion, with each rebellion creating an inescapable culture and patriot narrative which will resonate for generations.

So, in sympathetically explaining the Plantation, for example, Patricia leans towards what she calls ‘scrupulous historians’ (what an oxymoron) as opposed to ‘old-style nationalist historians’, whereas truth, in my opinion, is to be found somewhere between, if it is to be found at all.

Although it does seem incredulous that she is able to produce a distant relative here and there who, Forrest Gump-like, witnesses many of the defining events throughout our history, I would not like to contradict her because she marshals convincing supportive evidence (a bit overwhelmingly and with some licence here and there) for these often convoluted connections.

The pace and interest and accessibility quickens when we reach contemporary times and it is easier to take issue with her!

Having written several memoirs I know of the problems one can encounter with one’s family and living relatives. The closer one comes to the present the greater the danger of offending someone and yet the writer struggles between depicting the truth as she sees it or a tactful travesty of the truth. Charles McQuaid in The New Yorker once wrote: ‘If you want to be a writer, somewhere along the line you’re going to have to hurt somebody. And when that time comes, you go ahead and do it.’

I suppose, it all depends on how tactful or tactless one is.

In many ways a paean to her mother and father, A Twisted Root, is a valuable and provocative contribution to our ways of seeing.

“All of us in the north of Ireland, Protestant, Catholic or what-have-you, are a compound of the same good and bad elements from brave hearts to stiff necks,” says the West Belfast woman who has come a long way from snogging boys in a Donegal haystack, back in 1959, as gaeilge.

Published by The Blackstaff Press – £12.99

This review was published in the Andersonstown News, 18th April, 2013

]]> http://www.dannymorrison.com/?feed=rss2&p=2580 0 http://www.dannymorrison.com/?p=2566 http://www.dannymorrison.com/?p=2566#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:36:30 +0000 danny http://www.dannymorrison.com/?p=2566

Was interviewed by William Crawley last weekend on BBC Radio Ulster’s Sunday Sequence about my new novel Rudi – In The Shadow of Knulp, and how and when I became an atheist, though my main character Rudi is a man who relies on and ‘talks’ to God! Link here (might take a few moments to download) – Interview

13^th April. Interviewed by young Dublin student Oisín McCann who for his Leaving Certificate is writing a profile of veteran republican and Sinn Féin’s current Washington representative, Rita O’Hare.

10^th April. Interviewed by Peter Taylor for forthcoming BBC Radio 4 documentary on republican dissidents. At lunchtime, interviewed with Lord Trimble on BBC Radio 4’s World At One about the death of Mrs Thatcher.

9^th April. Interviewed on BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster about the death of Mrs Thatcher and her policies on Ireland.

8^th April. Interviewed on RTE Radio 1’s News at One and, later, on UTV Live Tonight about the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who died earlier in the day.

3^rd April. Was interviewed by Ciaran Galway, a final year undergraduate student at Queen’s University Belfast whose dissertation is about the role of the Catholic Church in the 1981 hunger strike and surrounding events.

Cherry Orchard was first built as a fever hospital in 1953 and consisted of eleven separate single story blocks of wards – though is has since been rebuilt and is now a nursing home

Today, for some reason, I am remembering an old friend whose death I learnt about three years after it occurred, not that I would have been able anyway to have attended his funeral, seeing that I was in jail. James Nolan is now dead twenty years. I first referred to James in my prison letters which were published in a collection in1999, Then The Walls Came Down. Here is the piece I later wrote in tribute to him:

One day in the early 1960s James Nolan was working outside Monaghan on the tracks of the Great Northern Railway. He was in his mid-twenties, and was married with three young daughters. It began raining and he took shelter under a disused water tank, opened his lunch box and began eating his sandwiches.

Afterwards, he finished his day’s work and went home.

The next day he was running a temperature and felt aches and pains and couldn’t go to work. His wife called the doctor. He examined him, diagnosed that he had a bad dose of the ’flu and gave him a penicillin injection. Almost immediately James’ body went into spasms and the doctor realised that something was seriously wrong. He was rushed to a specialist hospital, Cherry Orchard in Dublin. But it was too late.

The consultant probed James about what he had been doing recently and concluded that a drop of water contaminated with the polio virus had probably fell from the tank into his sandwich as he was eating. The family doctor had unwittingly spread the polio rapidly through his body when he gave him the injection. He was paralysed from the neck down and had to be placed in an iron lung – a frightening, tomb-like metal capsule. Because he required special treatment and because of the limited resources in those days James would have to stay in this ward, in this hospital, fifty miles from his wife and children, for the rest of his life.

It was a blow that could have felled the strongest of persons. His muscles eventually wasted but fortunately, and with the help of private donations, a special air-pump was bought. He had a tracheotomy and a plastic tube ran from this machine which pumped air into his lungs, making an awful piston-like sound every three seconds and could be heard in the corridor. Because he had no power he couldn’t cough and every half-hour to prevent him from drowning in his own fluids a nurse had to put a tube down his throat and suck out the mucus which you and I normally clear with a subconscious harrumph.

And so he lay in the same bed, looking out a casement window which had a limited view of a green field which lay sparse and grey for the six months of an Irish winter and which came to life in the summer when travellers’ kids raced their ponies up and down. He was in that bed when Kennedy was assassinated, when the Beatles were first heard of, when the civil rights marches began here in 1968, during internment, when the Yanks withdrew from Vietnam, and when hunger strikers died in the H-Blocks.

I was in the next ward to him, or rather, a room, because with hepatitis I had to be isolated from the other patients. But when I improved I was allowed to mix and hearing that he liked to play chess I sat with him in the afternoons and at nights. When I first said hello he whispered – even though no one else was in his ward – “I know who brought you in. It was David O’Connell. I recognised him.” I smiled. He said. “Lift up my pillow.” I lifted it up. “See what it is,” he said. It was ‘Prison Poems’ by Bobby Sands. “That’s the way I think,” he said.

We became good friends and he was great company, always laughing even though his eyes were permanently glassy and you thought he was going to burst into tears. His family were grown up and his wife still made the long trek to visit him but he relied on an old man from Ballyfermot who three nights a week smuggled in a noggin of Powers which James sipped through a straw. On his wall was a picture-board with his proud collection of postcards from across the world that people had sent him. From places that he would never see. He prayed several times a day and looked forward to receiving the Eucharist. He was so full of humility that you had to keep reflecting on your own dismal standards and values.

The televisions in Cherry Orchard were small, black and white sets, except for James which was a colour TV and which he had bought. It was the day of  Di and Charles’ wedding and many nurses and doctors gathered at the bottom of James’ bed, assuming it would be okay to watch the live broadcast in full colour. Not a bit of it! James announced that they should all be ashamed of themselves and that as long as men were dying on hunger strike nobody would be watching a royal wedding on his TV!

I got out in early August and promised James I would be back to see him and did so about twice a year. On one occasion Gerry Adams came with me and you would have thought James had won the Irish Sweepstakes’. Anytime I went abroad I would send him a postcard and when I went to jail I wrote him a letter saying that there would be no postcards for a while. I wrote him letters for over five years and just before my release asked a friend in Dublin to phone Cherry Orchard to find out how he was keeping, because, of course, James wasn’t physically capable of replying.

At first the receptionist didn’t understand who my friend was inquiring about, but asked her to hang on, and then came back a few minutes later to say that James Nolan had passed away three years earlier.

I received the news as if he had just died, with a sense of shock and sadness. But I smiled as I remembered the TV incident and James’s freedom of spirit and its expression in a small act of solidarity with people imprisoned like him, that July all those years ago.

Wrote a feature on the death of Margaret Thatcher which was published in today’s ‘Irish Examiner’.

WHEN Mark Thatcher went missing in the Sahara while taking part in an international motor race in Jan 1982, his ashen-faced mother, upset and distressed, appeared on television close to breaking down.

She prayed to God that Mark wouldn’t die, that he would be rescued.

Six months earlier Rosaleen Sands appeared on television, interviewed in the car park of Long Kesh, and prayed for her son Bobby, and asked Margaret Thatcher to compromise and resolve the hunger strike. We all know how Thatcher answered, and the mountain of suffering that nationalists in the North experienced under her premiership.

Ironically, this is the day, 32 years ago, that Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Thatcher’s mantra to republicans before that was, “‘how can I talk to you, you don’t have a mandate”. But when Bobby got elected (with almost 10,000 more votes than Thatcher got in her constituency), the British prime minister rushed through an amendment to the Representation of the People Act to prevent any other prisoner being elected in his place.

When Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and I were elected to the assembly in 1982, Thatcher issued exclusion orders against us, banning us from entering Britain on pain of a five-year prison sentence. My ban lasted 13 years. In 1988 she introduced the Broadcasting Act banning Sinn Féin elected representatives from being interviewed on radio and television. Yes, she was the Queen of Democracy for sure.

Mother-of-three Nora McCabe shot dead by the RUC

I remember the 10 men who died on hunger strike but also women and children her forces killed with impunity and immunity; people like 14-year-old Julie Livingstone, shot dead by the British army the day Francis Hughes died in jail; 11-year-old Carol Ann Kelly, shot dead a week later while getting milk for a neighbour; and on the morning of Joe McDonnell’s death in jail, my childhood friend Nora McCabe, a mother of three, shot dead seconds after going to buy a packet of cigarettes to calm her nerves.

These are just some of the names. The list runs to hundreds when we add to it those killed by loyalist groups that were rearmed and reorganised by British military intelligence, which reported to Thatcher until her resignation.

Thatcher sanctioned the use of supergrass trials which completely undermined the justice system. She authorised the shoot-to-kill policy and her colleagues subsequently undermined the attempt by Deputy Chief Constable John Stalker to get to the truth. She authorised the attacks on republican funerals and created an atmosphere of hatred and bitterness which ultimately led to the attempt on her life by the IRA in the Brighton bombing in 1984.

Of course, she also destroyed proud working-class communities in Britain with her social and economic policies. And over lunch one Sunday she ordered the sinking of the Argentinian Belgrano during the Falklands War even though it was outside the 200-mile exclusion zone and was sailing away from the area of conflict. More than 323 sailors died, many of them teenage cadets.

When Carol Thatcher, Margaret’s journalist daughter, travelled to the Falklands and Argentina to make a documentary on the 25th anniversary, one woman whose son died on the Belgrano said to her: “I never saw him again because your mother killed him.”

In 1986 she and US president Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya, which took the lives of over 130 civilians.

Some have argued that Thatcher stood up to the unionists when she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Nov 1985 and should be given credit. But her motives were two-fold: She expected extradition to be made easier and increased security collaboration in the fight against republicanism. She was, indeed, also responding to the warnings from then taoiseach Garret FitzGerald that something needed to be done to halt the electoral rise of Sinn Féin.

In reality, it was the suffering and determination of the Northern nationalist community which forced change.

When Thatcher became prime minister in 1979 we know that on her desk was a secret assessment of the IRA by Brigadier James Glover, commander of land forces in the North. He said the IRA would continue with its war until there was an acceptable political settlement.

He rejected the official propaganda line which was the basis for the treatment of the men in the H-Blocks and the women in Armagh jail. He said that IRA volunteers were not criminals but were talented and dedicated.

Thatcher put my community through hell and her policies unnecessarily protracted the conflict. When it came to a political agreement on Good Friday 1998, the prisoners in the H-Blocks were given early release (an “amnesty”) which was recognition that the British knew they were political prisoners all along.

I was in jail (again as a result of her dirty war and use of agents provocateurs) when she resigned in 1990. One newspaper told this story: “‘The bad news,’ said a voice over the public-address system in a north London railway station, ‘is that a signal failure means another delay. The good news is that Thatcher’s resigned! Hip, Hip, Hooray!’ Most of the commuters cheered.”

I once might have cheered her passing. But now I am indifferent — though I will never forget what she did, and all those who died on her watch.

]]> http://www.dannymorrison.com/?feed=rss2&p=2538 1 http://www.dannymorrison.com/?p=2529 http://www.dannymorrison.com/?p=2529#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:10:09 +0000 danny http://www.dannymorrison.com/?p=2529 Fifteen years ago I covered for The Guardian and the Irish Examiner the negotiations which led to the signing on Good Friday of the Belfast Agreement. This is the feature I wrote (though slightly amended in The Guardian).

Letitia Fitzpatrick from Ulster Television says to me, “I am so thirsty. Would you?”

“Okay”, I say. “Once more I’ll trudge off and get you coffee.” It is 11.55 pm, Stormont, Government Buildings, and at midnight, if the parties to Senator George Mitchell’s talks haven’t agreed and gone home, they’ll all turn into pumpkins. Just at midnight I arrive back into the press conference hut with the coffee. Behind me the aroma has seemingly attracted several suspicious-looking men in suits, some more in denim jackets, and, to my left, women with non-Catholic perms. Then I hear the booming voice of Ian Paisley and realise that I am at my first DUP press conference and have no flak jacket.

“I have here in my hand,” he begins, “a delegate’s badge which gives me the right to attend all meetings of the Forum on one side, and the right to attend all meetings of the Talks, on the other hand.”

“Why didn’t you use it for two years!” shouts a man to my left.

“The people wanted you in here to fight for them. You wouldn’t do it! You hadn’t got the balls!” shouts a man to my right.

Oh dear, I think. I’m with the UVF.

“You’re not pressmen,” declares a most perspicacious Mr Paisley. “You belong to parties that are opposed to my party, so just shut up!”

“Your days of telling people to shut up are gone!”

“Yeh! You don’t even care about the people. You don’t give a shit, with your big fucking house!”

Uh-oh. I’m now in the middle of the UDA.

“You are all fascists! Adams’ lovers!” shouts Ginger Spice at me and them, and which is partially true. At any moment I am awaiting them to zero in on the common enemy – me, the Armalite-and-Ballot-Box-Kid – but the division between them is palpable. And where now is Paisley to go, because his muscle, the people who accuse him of rolling the snowballs for them to throw, back in 1972, back in the DUP/UDA strike of 1977, are no longer with him, but have their own representatives here in the talks. Unionism in change is dynamic: Unionism is interesting.

Earlier in the evening we were told by Tony Blair’s coiffeur, Alistair Campbell, described affectionately, I think, by one British newspaper as the Spindoctor-General, that the deadline of midnight is having a powerful effect of focusing the parties on concluding. He is received by journalists from London with just a teeny-weany bit too much sycophancy for my liking. Two hours later and no one from the government is telling us what is happening, though we have had Sinn Fein’s Mitchell McLaughlin come out and declare bleakly that there is no agreement because unionists are blocking the agreement.

Time passes. The press people get bored. A woman runs in. “There’s a rumour that Sinn Fein are walking out!”

“Who started that?”

“God knows. But it’s a good one.”

An hour later a journalist from Dublin says, “Heard anything?”

“No. What about you?”

“Can’t say, but just wanted to check if anybody had a better rumour than me.”

Some people are reading, others are snoring. I asked Letitia to name her favourite film, favourite book, favourite song and favourite poem, and at the prompt of the latter she launches into Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’:

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter…

It was an eerie rendition, given our circumstances.

In one of the press huts I met with Frank Millar, London Correspondent of the Irish Times. Years ago we couldn’t speak to each other because he was the general secretary of the Ulster Unionist Party and I was the National Director of Publicity for Sinn Fein. But now that we were covering the talks for newspapers we had a cover for talking. People have to talk – it is the way forward.

As the night progressed the rumours that Sinn Fein was feeling shafted by the SDLP and the Dublin government increased to the point where I was predicting that Sinn Fein could not go along with the re-negotiated Mitchell paper, which also proposed an Assembly (probably based at Stormont).  Sinn Fein, an abstentionist party in the North, is implacably opposed to a return to Stormont, because of its connotations of sectarian, ‘majority’ rule, its de facto recognition of partition. Yet, Sinn Fein had contributed to the Mitchell paper and made amendments to it, proposals to which it has to remain faithful if it is to be consistent. The biggest difference between Stormont and the new Assembly is the crux issue of consent: the combined strength of Sinn Fein and the SDLP gives the nationalist community a powerful veto. Can Sinn Fein adapt to this fairly scary, new challenge and, if so, can Sinn Fein persuade its supporters that there is a case for entering a parliament in the North?

Driving up to Stormont on Thursday was a strange experience. But, confession to make, it wasn’t my first time there. I took my seat a long time ago. The summer of 1962, to be precise. My father took my two older sisters and myself on one of those bus tours around the city that included a visit to the Stormont Parliament, which was a wholly uncharacteristic act for nationalists back in those days. During the fifty years of one-party unionist rule at Stormont, nationalists initiated one single piece of legislation – an Act for the Preservation of Wild Fowl! I sat in the speaker’s chair. All I can remember is the smell of leather and pine.

In 1979, when editor of An Phoblacht/Republican News, much to the horror of the NIO press officer, David Gilliland, I got past several RUC security checkpoints and into Stormont Castle, thanks to Peter Fearon of the Press Association, a wild and lovable man. He brought me into a press conference where the late Humphrey Atkins, the Secretary of State, was announcing a new initiative, a round-table conference. A month earlier the British government launched the Lancaster House talks between Robert Mugabe’s outlawed Patriotic Front and Ian Smith’s National Party. I asked Atkins what was the difference between the Patriotic Front and the IRA, and shouldn’t the government be talking to the Republican Movement to end the conflict. He replied, “Don’t be ridiculous!”

I wasn’t allowed to ask another question but an American reporter repeated my question. Atkins hesitated, stuttered and said, “I…I…I don’t know what the difference is,” after which the press conference erupted in laughter. For helping me Peter Fearon didn’t remain too long at the PA! He moved to New York, where he still lives and works, and found infamy. Tom Wolfe in ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ based the character of the English journalist, Peter Fallow on Mister Fearon.

It’s fine going to Stormont for a stunt, but would one’s attendance there, as a republican, copperfasten partition, undermine one’s republicanism or, could it, through example and reconciliation, undermine the sectarianism and opposition to Irish unity of one’s erstwhile opponents? Who knows?

By 4 am those of us still alive are watching James Cagney in ‘Public Enemy’ followed by a programme ironically titled, ‘Living With Violence.’ This vigil reminds me of barricade duty back in 1969, when you wished that the loyalists would hurry up and attack so that you could get it over with and go to bed. Bored out of his mind, one hack begins singing, to a Dr Hook air, the words, “If I said I had a Cross-Border body would you hold it against me…” Several other appalling plagiarisms follow.

There is a new rumour that Sinn Fein is preparing to walk out. Then, at 7.10 am Mitchell McLaughlin arrives to read out a short statement but not to answer questions. In confident tones he declares that Sinn Fein has, during negotiations, clawed back a considerable amount of ground which it believed had been lost earlier. Suddenly, the atmosphere changes. There is no rush of Ulster Unionist MPs out to contradict him. The impossible begins to seem possible. Everyone is in great form. There is a buzz. This could genuinely be a new beginning. Of course, there are still problems. Of course, there are issues outstanding, and we can forget about it all if Orange feet get marching down Garvaghy Road this July.

In late afternoon the document has still not been finalised. There are rumours of dissent within the Ulster Unionist Party.

But as I drive out of Stormont, past the statue of Lord Edward Carson, down Prince of Wales Avenue, I feel that something fundamental has shifted. My view of East Belfast is always from the west of the city, my home. Stormont lies in the Castlereagh Hills, foreign. On this evening, I look from this Avenue across to Black Mountain above West Belfast, distinct and familiar, and realise that it is not that far away, after all.

Also reading was Cónal Creedon (Cork), a very funny writer who appeared at Féile an Phobail five years ago; Tony Macaulay (from the Shankill area of Belfast) whom I did a reading with recently in the Falls Library; and Jamie O’Connell (a young writer from Cork) who recently published his debut collection of short stories.

I met up with lots of writers and poets, including Sean McCarthy whose excellent novel Citizen Dwyer, I mentioned some time ago, and Conor McManus who told me about his short story,
Fishing In Leitrim, which has just been published in Crannóg, the literary magazine which publishes poetry and short fiction.

From left-to-right: Tony Macaulay; Jamie O’Connell; Seamus Hosey; Cónal Creedon; and mise

This feature, now in English, can be read here.

It deals with the decisions a translator must make when faced with variations on a particular text, how it was first produced and appeared and whether to question or honour the elisions the author made in the light of difficulties to do with his personal circumstances rather than revisions made to perfect the final work. It is a fascinating piece.