- Danny Morrison - https://www.dannymorrison.com -

Karl & Groucho, et al

Writer and poet Eoghan ‘Gino’ Mac Cormaic* reviews a new book of poetry by north Belfast man Scott McKendry which is published today.

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By way of introduction to Scott McKendry’s first full poetry collection Gub, the author offers a dictionary-style definition of the eponymous title. Gub is a mouth or can be a person who insults without good reason. But as a verb it can mean to hit someone (on the mouth) or defeat overwhelmingly. Cognates of gob include gab and gob. The poet wisely declined to include GUBU, perhaps Ireland’s best known gub word but could have included gobán saor, the famous mythical smith since this work is, indeed, the work of a smith, a wordsmith.

Having read through the collection (to the background barking of a neighbour’s dog) I thought it might help my understanding of the poems if I first attempted to understand the poet.

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McKendry is Belfast born and bred, a native of an area of the city not famous for its writers and one which he himself has described in the bleakest of terms when detailing his early years in an Irish Times article a couple of years ago. Notorious as the base of Johnny Adair in the post-Good Friday loyalist implosion (and accompanying murder spree against Catholics) Scott McKendry’s writings stand apart from that, are politically uninfluenced by that, but occasionally deride that ever-present backcloth.

Other themes run through the poems: geese, family, childhood friends and, as mentioned, mockery of the local loyalist activity. In the poem ‘Fiesta’ the poet and two others ‘were settled on the settee when the doorbell sung . . .’ He hears the words, ‘Well chums. We’re commandeering the car, get the keys.’, emanating from ‘a botched job of a stitched up hole in a rolled-down knit cap-cum-balaclava’ The television is on, showing the film Sea of Love, and as one hijacker remains to guard them he nonchalantly asks, ‘Is it a good one?’

The poet’s reply is cutting: ‘Seemed dead on till youse cunts came.’

In ‘Five Little Terrorist Boys’ McKendry recalls his boyhood: he armed with his painted table leg and nails akimbo; Dinsmore with a whale harpoon; Thibault with an imaginary MP40 machine gun and the Twins McLaird with nunchucks like ninja turtles. The army complete, all that’s needed is ‘to choose a cause from a list wrote up by Twin/a motto (something hotly obscure) and a three to four letter acronym.’

Scott McKendry knows his punchlines.

‘Greasepaint’ recalls the school mate called, inexplicably, Carl Marks, when the teacher ‘couldn’t accept that Carl’s name/was just a happen so.’ The year above the boys had a Paul McCartney. Carl eventually went on eBay to buy all four volumes of Capital and a tube of black greasepaint. The solution to his problematic name clearly lay somewhere between Karl and Groucho Marx.

Other memories are drawn down. The poverty of the area and his milieu can be understood in the poem, ‘In every Prole Home a Rapture’, or in ‘Denmark Street’, but even in these poems humour can peek through—like the tale of two boys tasked with painting the kerbstones red, white and blue who start from opposite ends of the street to meet in the middle to fight over a white kerb. Family poems can be tender, like ‘A Song for Gaud’ where he speaks to his little niece with a peace process, probably as the setting:

I wish I could have been reared in this future too, kiddo,
where, although the ignorami
are feelin’ the cold,
democracy could be born by caesarean section . . .

So back to the Gobán Saor. McKendry is hailed by critics as the most exciting poet to come out of the north in years. He is without doubt a wordsmith. I don’t claim to understand all the subtleties or reference points in his poetry but that too is okay. Some might be for his own benefit. And we know what GUBU means, and some of that too is scattered through his verse: the Grotesque three-toed sloths, the Unbelievable adventure of childhood, the Bizarre (and try reading some poems in eejit language) . . .  but Unprecedented, no.

In all working-class areas there are stories to be told. Isn’t it fortunate that McKendry has chosen now to tell his.

Gub by Scott McKendry, published by Corsair/Hachette, £10.99

*Eoghan Mac Cormaic is a writer who lives in Galway. Among his published books are: Pluid; On The Blanket; Macallaí Cillín; the pen behind the wire; Gaeil agus Géibheann. His new book, Captive Columns–An underground prison press, 1865-2000, is due for publication in May 2024

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Far Above The World – Book Review

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It is not that easy to depict in fiction the mind of a child: the innocence, the naivety, the vulnerability, the ignorance, sensitivity, the misperceptions, the misreading of the adult world.

Yet, Michael Flavin* has achieved that objective quite brilliantly, beautifully and sadly in One Small Step. His novel smacks of authenticity, this first-person narrative in the voice of ten-year-old Danny Cronin growing up in Birmingham’s Irish community at the time of the 1974 IRA pub bombings which killed twenty-one people.

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His community lives with an omnipresent and profound irony: fleeing poverty and unemployment, or escaping the conflict back home in Derry or Belfast, but relying for their welfare and well-being on the very state ultimately, historically and morally responsible for their plight. Being grateful and resentful at the same time gives rise to a split personality but is countered by the strength and consolation of remaining close-knit outsiders, pining for home, clinging to their Irishness, their Catholic religion, and their rebel songs about Ireland’s long fight for freedom.

Danny has been to the Digbeth Irish centre and observes the respect the crowd gives to one singer, James McDaid: ‘He sings some nights and there’s shushing because people want to listen. He sings slowly like it’s a hymn, but he doesn’t sing about God. He sings about Ireland instead … Jamesie had bright blue eyes. His tie was pulled down like he was late for school . . . smiling and singing was what he did.’

Shortly afterwards McDaid is killed in a premature explosion while planting a bomb at a telephone exchange in Coventry. As his body is about to be flown out of Birmingham airport there are explosions in two pubs in the city centre. These are described graphically and are horrific. A number of men travelling to McDaid’s funeral in Belfast are arrested within hours of the blasts. The police are ecstatic that they have caught ‘the bombers’ and brutalise their prisoners, forcing them to make false confessions. (Known as the Birmingham Six it would be seventeen years before these innocent men were released.)

Danny’s parents also know some of the people arrested. The Irish community is in shock, in turmoil, and knows it will have to bear the backlash. Raids and arrests follow and scores of people are deported from Britain.

Older people here in Ireland, republican supporters, will know those feelings of demoralisation and, indeed, shame, that accompanied disastrous IRA bombings in which innocent people lost their lives. Imagine how many times magnified that was for the isolated Irish in Britain after the Birmingham Bombs and other IRA killings. Homes and businesses were attacked, windows smashed. They were demonised; there were calls for their expulsion, for the reintroduction of hanging. Irish workers were assaulted on the shop floor, friendships irrevocably fractured. Kids at school were beaten up and subjected to racist abuse.

In the midst of this atmosphere of terror and fear arrives Eamonn, an unwanted guest at the Cronin home, who insinuates himself into the family. My one criticism is that his character is a bit of an O’Casey-like stereotype—a drunk, a braggart and a bully, with questionable principle and one principal objective in mind. It is he—this cypher for Irish patriotism—who devastates poor Danny’s life and happiness.

Danny dotes on his mother who rations her affection, being distracted by her unhappy, unsatisfactory existence. Danny wants to be an astronaut when he grows up, and, inspired by books like Destination Mars on space travel, he writes unread stories for his mother—and, later, a plaintive poem. This parallel text adds immensely to the pathos of the narrative: ingeniously, how a child’s imagination sublimates into fiction his troubled life and sadness as a coping mechanism. It is also, at times, extremely funny.

The increasingly empty family home descends into slovenry. Danny is left to look after himself, noticing the grime on the collar of his unwashed school shirt. Towards the end of the novel he becomes hardened, embittered, disillusioned and sceptical, yet he is still a child—but capable of escape into the heavens, towards the stars.

This is a brilliant debut novel by Michael Flavin whose day job is as a lecturer in Kings’s College, London, but he is certainly a gifted writer and I look forward to his next novel.

Absolutely recommended reading!

Danny Morrison, December 2023

* https://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Small-Step-Michael-Flavin/dp/1839194685/ [4]

 

Marwan Barghouti – A Palestinian Hero

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This feature was published twenty years ago in my book, Rebel Columns, which was issued by Beyond The Pale. Marwan has been in jail for the past twenty-one years.

Marwan Barghouti – A Palestian Hero

In a dangerous or threatening situation one or two individuals within any group will remain cool and rise above the rest who seem paralysed and incapable of action. Such individuals will exercise a focused judgement, will make decisions that may save or partly redeem a bad situation, will, in other words, show leadership (which is kin to showing courage) and in the process will become – often in opposition to their own humility – true heroes.

Similarly, throughout history, when a people finds itself in subjugation, oppressed and dispossessed – that is, facing a permanent threat which has dispirited and demoralised them – the righteousness of their cause amounts to nought in the absence of leadership, organisation and strategy.

Today, in the 21st century, right before our eyes, the Palestinian people are being destroyed by one of the cruellest and most cynical regimes in the Middle East, Israel, a state that is bankrolled by the US government. In flagrant breach of UN Resolution 242, first issued in 1967 and reaffirmed many times in the subsequent 36 years, Israel refuses to withdraw from the territories it occupied following the Six Day War. It continues to conquer, to build settlements – indeed, to build a Warsaw Wall through the West Bank, ghettoising the Palestinians and rendering impossible any viable Palestinian state.

It does this despite the fact that through superior violence and murder it has won from mainstream Palestinian groups recognition of the state of Israel. And in reaction it has spawned the phenomena of the suicide bombers.

I watch CNN fairly regularly. I was hooked on it especially during the debacle of the Florida count in the US presidential election in 2000. CNN has incredible resources, journalists or stringers in every capital of the world and breaks news with breathtaking speed. Millions in the US watch the channel and perhaps have their political opinions influenced by what they receive.

What I noticed – and this might not be the fault of CNN but rather a regrettable feature of the quality of Palestinian representatives and/or circumstance – is that in the aftermath of a particularly violent incident or dramatic development, the Israeli spokesperson is usually in a studio. He is suave, his English is impeccable (and often delivered in a North American accent) and he is questioned courteously.

On the other hand, the Palestinian spokesperson is often interviewed on a street corner or a makeshift studio. There is distortion or atmospherics on the feed, he usually speaks in broken English (unless, of course, it is Hanan Ashrawi) and is placed on the defensive by being pressed to distance himself from Palestinian violence.

A few years ago I noticed one Palestinian spokesperson in particular who stood out in stature above many others, including Yasser Arafat and the prime minister, Abu Mazen.

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That man is Marwan Barghouthi. He is articulate, confident and popular among his people.

I remember seeing him being interviewed in early August 2001 when there was a tremendous explosion on the street. A missile fired from an Israeli helicopter hit his office or his car, killing another Fatah member. Of course, since then the Israelis have murdered and assassinated several hundred alleged militants – collaterally killing children, women and men who shouldn’t be out in the sun in broad daylight.

Someone who interviewed El-Barghouthi told me that after his arrest in 1982 he was on hunger strike and said that he drew inspiration from Bobby Sands and his comrades and could cite that Bobby died on May 5th 1981. In prison he mastered Hebrew from his jailors and can speak it far more eloquently than many Israelis.

He was born in 1959 to a West Bank farmer. At the age of 16 he joined Fatah and earned a master’s degree in international relations at Bir Zeit university. He is married with four children. During the first intifada of 1987 he was deported by Israel. He supported the peace talks with Israel in the early 1990s, returned to the West Bank in 1994 and ran programmes for Israeli and Palestinian youth. He became secretary of the Fatah movement and was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority and has spoken out against corruption within the Authority.

However, in April 2002 Israeli forces in Ramallah arrested him. He was interrogated for several months for 18 hours at a time. For three months he was allowed to sleep for only two hours at a time and then only in a chair with his hands tied. He was denied food and water, has been regularly placed in solitary confinement and denied access to his lawyers. He was charged with directing the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which is linked to Fatah and which has been responsible for many of the suicide bomb attacks, mainly against innocent Israeli citizens. He was condemned even before his trial. The Israeli Attorney-General said he was “an engineer of all acts of killings and a thug.”

From his prison cell he played a crucial role in Palestinian dialogue and encouraged Hamas and Islamic Jihad to call a truce last June (which later broke down).

He has been tipped to replace Arafat as chair of the Palestinian Authority and Israel fears his leadership. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres remarked that if that happened, “this will not be a positive development for Israel.”

El-Barghouthi’s trial ended last Monday and judgement is expected in November. He refused to recognise the court in Tel Aviv and said that Israel’s grip on the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be in the dock instead. He accused Israel of violating 30 international treaties, including the Geneva Convention and of committing war crimes against humanity.

The alleged evidence against him was confessions from 21 Palestinians, none of who appeared in court. Israel is notorious for its abuse of prisoners and has been condemned of torture by many human rights groups. During earlier court appearances his attempts to speak were interrupted but finally he managed to say: “We are a people like all other people. We want freedom and a state just like the Israelis. Israel must decide: either it allows for a Palestinian state alongside it, or it becomes a state for two peoples.”

One of the three judges interrupted him and said: “We are not historians nor government representatives. If it were in our hands we would issue an injunction ordering peace!”

To cheers from European Parliament observers El-Barghouthi replied: “Why don’t you just get up and say ‘I am against the occupation’!”

He said: “I am against killing innocents. But I am proud of the resistance to Israeli occupation. To die is better than living under occupation.”

Marwan Barghouthi – a true hero to the Palestinian cause. Their Nelson Mandela.

 

NATIVE SHORE

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Finished this novel in the early hours and just wanted to congratulate the author, journalist and playwright Phil Mac Giolla Bháin, for the way he melded and contrasts aspects of the republican struggle for a united Ireland with Scotland’s attempt to secure independence, and the subversion of that objective by spooks and securocrats.

This entertaining, ingenious thriller, and a cautionary tale not beyond the bounds of the impossible, is multi-layered, replete with a cast of fully-realised characters in recognisable settings, with plot lines that make Native Shore a real page-turner.

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Scotland, under a feisty SNP First Minister Jeannette Laird, is nearing the tipping point of realising independence through the ballot box for the first time since 1707. But there then begins a series of anonymous but informed online attempts to discredit and undermine Laird using details of her past youthful sexual encounters. When the Scottish National Party seeks a second independence referendum the request is imperiously rejected by Westminster and some consider but resile from going down the ‘Catalonian route’. Then, out of the blue there is a raid for arms followed by a number of killings claimed by the purported Scottish National Liberation Army, the SNLA, reorganised and impatient with the pace of change.

However, rather than galvanise pro-independence sentiment the actions destablise Holyrood, the seat of the assembly, and intensify the sectarian divide, particularly in Glasgow (along the traditional fault-lines epitomised by the perennial confrontation between Celtic and Rangers). This all gives Westminster the pretext to suspend the Assembly, impose direct rule and deploy the British army on the streets.

The crisis tests the mettle of the besieged First Minister who draws on the memory of her late father, ‘Ming’ Laird, a former WWII SOE operative who worked with the French maquis.

Into this maelstrom is drawn ex-IRA intelligence officer, Gerry O’Donnell, who is on a break from Donegal, ‘honeymooning’ with his Colombian wife in the Highlands when the crisis unfolds. O’Donnell also featured as the main character in Mac Giolla Bháin’s 2018 novel The Squad.

He quickly assesses the situation and concludes that the SNLA represents a false flag operation, organised, as of old, by the same British Intelligence service whose machinations in Ireland he had played a prominent role in defeating. Using his old skillsets, he gets involved out of solidarity with the right of a small nation to be free and teams up, to his own surprise, with a former branch man who is being set-up as a patsy by the authorities, not unlike the scenario that befell the late John Stalker.

Times have changed and in place of IRA active service personnel O’Donnell mobilises a Fifth Estate of cyber warriors, involving several nationals, to defeat and expose the Brits.

There’s a rule in life (nothing to do with the much-slandered, eponymous ‘Murphy’) that if anything can go wrong it will go wrong at the worst possible time, and the hubristic MI5 and its ruthless agents are outed by—well—their hubris and the fact that they are not as clever as they think.

Despite its 400 pages the drama never flags due to Mac Giolla Bháin’s skilful plotting, the switching from scene-to-scene at key moments which increases the tension and hooks you to the story.

This novel would make for a great Netflix series and not only for its Borgen­-esque depiction of Holyrood political intrigue with aspects of betrayal, collusion and collaboration competing with integrity and bravery, but for its portrayal of turpitude at the heart of imperial power in London whose ‘moral’ standard is that any unconscionable action, however bloody and despicable, is justified in Defence of the Realm.

Poetry Book Reissued

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I was honoured and proud to be involved in the publication of Eoghan (Gino) Mac Cormaic’s poetry book, the pen behind the wire. I’d previously worked with Gino in editing his book about the H-Block prison protest, On The Blanket [7]. So, it’s great that the poetry book has sold so well that it has just been reprinted and will be available for sale (and autographing!) at next Sunday’s National Hunger Strike march in Cork city.

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Gino wrote many of these poems during the blanket protest. They were smuggled out and kept safe by his mother. Republican prisoners have produced a huge body of prison literature, including memoirs, short stories and poems—Bobby Sands’s writings have never been out of print in the forty-two years since his death; Síle Darragh’s ironically-titled book John Lennon’s Dead [9], about the women in Armagh Jail, sells steadily since it was first published in 2011 and was recently updated. Other former prisoners, like Laurence McKeown, have written stage plays and screenplays.

[10]Gino’s poems struck me as remarkable for their imagery and ingenuity and fresh ways of viewing things. The book has a number of sections: Life In The Wings; An Eye On The World Outside; and Beyond The Walls. As a bonus it also has a final section of QR Codes leading to audio recordings of over thirty of the poems by the author’s friends and comrades, including Christy Moore, Rita Ann Higgins, Vincent Higgins, Toiréasa Ferris, Gerry Adams and Pat Sheehan (the longest prisoner on hunger strike when it ended on 3 October, 1981) and now a Sinn Féin MLA for West Belfast.

The book was officially launched during Prisoners Day in the Felons Club during Féile an Phobail when I interviewed Gino. Among the poems he discussed was one dedicated to Paul ‘Beaver’ Nugent from the Falls area. Although a non-political and serving a relatively short sentence, the twenty-two-year-old was on the wing of a republican H-Block, befriended by the men. He was well-liked but suffered horribly from depression and ended up taking his own life.

Many of the poems are funny (On My First Bike, for example) but one I liked particularly was Grooks after the style of Piet Hein, a Danish polymath whose short poems were known as ‘gruks’ or ‘grooks’. When the Nazis occupied Denmark Hein joined the Resistance.

[11]This is a great collection and, incredibly, is but a small trawl of the writings Gino smuggled out of prison. He is also working on other projects, including a book on jail journals produced by Irish republicans since the mid-nineteenth century, many of an ephemeral nature, but aimed at either as a way of promoting Irish or as an outlet for Irish writing, poetry, prose, political writing etc. Watch this space.

Finally, here is an example of the recordings that are available via the pen behind the wire – Christy Moore reciting Easter 1982.

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Féile na bhFlaitheartach

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The bilingual Féile na bhFlaitheartach 2023, which celebrates the story-telling of Liam O’Flaherty, takes place on Inis Mór, Aran, on the weekend of the 26/27 August.

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 The Liam & Tom O’Flaherty Society is celebrating its eleventh bilingual summer festival, and this year will focus on the short stories of Liam O’Flaherty as well as the lives of other important historical figures with deep roots in the Aran Islands. See below for details.

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I COULD READ THE SKY

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Tim O’Grady and Steve Pyke’s photographic novel, I Could Read the Sky, first publsihed in 1997, has just been reissued in a brilliant new edition, along with an audiobook which combines O’Grady’s reading with a score created by fiddler Martin Hayes (who in a concert adapted from the novel in 1998 was accompanied by the late Dennis Cahill).

The novel, which has become a classic, is about an Irishman exiled in London, told through words and Pyke’s haunting photographs (with many which were not included in the first edition). It was also adapted for cinema by Nichola Bruce and featured writer and poet Dermot Healy, who died in 2014, in the lead role.

I reviewed the novel and also the 1998 concert in London for the Irish Examiner. This weekend the Examiner reviewed the new edition as did the Irish Times in a double-page spread written by Joe O’Connor.

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This is what I wrote in 1998.

I Could Read The Sky
– The Emigrant’s Song

Poverty. The leaving of the native soil. The scattering. The strangeness of England. The unsettledness of the soul. The dream of coming home one day ‘in a new suit filled with banknotes.’ Never coming home. Remaining sane only through memory and the music of Ireland. The days become weeks, the months years, the decades a lifetime. Never coming home. Memory and the music of Ireland.

Tim O’Grady, an Irish-American and writer, spoke to the old emigrants of the forties, fifties and sixties. He was moved by their stories and he eventually mediated their experiences through the poignant recollections of an old widower, lying in his bed in a flat in Kentish Town. O’Grady’s book I Could Read the Sky has just been re-published by Harvill in paperback. For several months O’Grady was working on the idea of how to fuse prose and photographs and music. His ideas came to fruition in an amazing concert in London’s Shepherds Bush Empire last Sunday night and the audience responded with standing ovations and tears of sadness and pride.

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Sinead O’Connor learnt two songs in Irish for the occasion, duetting with Iarla O Lionaird. Martin Hayes flew in from Seattle, Dennis Cahill from Chicago. Steve Pyke’s haunting black and white photographs of the old country’s stark and childless landscapes showed how it was. O’Grady, in the voice of the old man, thinks back to the trades he knew back home:

‘I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. Build a wall. Go three rounds with Joe in the ring Da put up in the barn. I could dance sets. Read the sky. Make a barrel for mackerel. Mend roads. Make a boat. Stuff a saddle. Put a wheel on a cart. Strike a deal. Make a field… Shoot straight… Set potatoes. Plough and harrow… Make a coffin. Take drink… I knew the song to sing to a cow when milking. I could play twenty-seven tunes on my accordion.’

And he thinks about what he couldn’t do in England:

‘Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch… Remember the routes of buses. Wear a collar in comfort… Acknowledge the Queen… Save money… Drink coffee… Follow cricket… Speak with men wearing collars… Understand their jokes. Face the dentist. Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering.’

I travelled over to London especially for the concert. I never had to emigrate – which was very handy, given that I was excluded from England up until recent years and am still barred from Canada and the USA. But to have had to seek employment in the country historically responsible in various degrees for your economic woes must have been quite humiliating. Yet out of the experience a paradoxical love/hate relationship with the host country developed. Today’s London Irish come across as ebullient, successful and openly celebrant of their roots and culture. They have colonised and helped civilise the English!

The musical overtones to O’Grady’s lyrical novel he acknowledges as being inspired by the fiddle-playing of Feakle’s Martin Hayes, who himself was an illegal emigrant in the USA until he got his Green Card. This now-famous but humble 36-year-old, who hails from a musical family, plays with an impish smile, his hair a mass of black ringlets ceilidhing to the beat of his frenetic playing. His accompanist, Dennis Cahill from Chicago, a grand nephew of the 1917 hunger-striker Thomas Ashe, plays an acoustic guitar which alternately whispers to, disagrees with, screams at, and flirts with Hayes’ fiddle. Their act is astonishing.

Cork’s acclaimed sean nos singer Iarla O Lionaird opened the evening’s event by turning the former opera house into a cathedral with that voice of his that lingers mid-way between heaven and earth. When he sang ‘I am weary from being alone’ the audience was completely hushed. He had dedicated it to Sinead O’Connor, that doe-eyed, little faun, whose explicit sincerity makes her vulnerable to the ways of this world. Her version of ‘Raglan Road’ caused me to tremble, almost weep.

Later, when we met, and I got her to stop calling me ‘Mister Morrison’, I gave her as a present a short story I wrote about a prison orderly called Brendan Short. Shorty was serving six months for stealing a couple of pairs of jeans. We were locked up twenty-three hours a day and he used to serenade us as he mopped the landing. One of his favourite songs was Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2U’. I explained that much to her and she was genuinely pleased, though I didn’t have the nerve to tell her the ending, that someone beat Shorty to death a few weeks after his release and left his body in a deserted alleyway in West Belfast. Maybe Shorty would have had a life had he left Belfast, had he emigrated to London.

I Could Read The Sky – A Life in Music, A Life in Words was planned as a one-off, but someone should persuade the organisers to bring the event to Ireland. It was one of those rare evenings when you come away not feeling any sense of despair but with a sense of completion, that tribute has been paid, and that the men and women whose story this book tells, have not just been laid to rest, but have been resurrected.

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Shorty & Sinead

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I told Sinead O’Connor this story in 1997 in London–and she teared up. I had written it in 1992 in H-3, Long Kesh, for An Phoblacht/Republican News. The next day she gave me a miniature Madonna and Child statuette.

SHORTY

We had an Irish juke-box in Crumlin Road Jail. He was twenty-four-years-of-age, came from Ballymurphy, and was called Brendan Short. But everyone—including city-centre shopkeepers and court clerks at the petty sessions—knew him as Shorty.

He was so slightly built that there was almost nothing to him. He had unkempt black hair, was hollow-cheeked and had pleading eyes which gave him the worried aspect of the hounded. He didn’t say much but, Lord, he could turn stale air into the sweetest music and would pour his whole soul into whatever he was performing.

I heard him before I met him. I had been shifted in a routine move from A-Wing, where two loyalists had attacked Gerry Adams’ brother, Seany, with a knife, in fresh skirmishes over the long-running demand for segregation. When you were called for a visit or to see the governor the warders on the ground floor (the ones) would shout your name up to the next landing (the twos) or the next (the threes) and you would be unlocked. It could be a dangerous journey down if the loyalists were out on the landing getting tea from the boilers. You could get scalded very easily—or stabbed. When I heard, ‘Threes! Send down Morrison for the doctor!’ I imagined a hundred loyalists declare, ‘Oom, time for a cuppa.’

I was transferred to a cell on the twos of C-Wing. My new cell mate was Roy ‘Finn’ McCool from Derry. That night the first tufts of winter snow came flurrying into the dismal exercise yard, making it glow brightly.

‘Danny Morrison? Are you over in C-Wing now? Danny Morrison?’

The friendly voice came from a cell in the block opposite ours—B-Wing, where non-political remand prisoners were held, though at first I thought it was a loyalist on C-Wing trying to lure me out with a response so that they could once again tell me how hilarious was my arrest.

‘Danny! This one’s for you:

‘“Snow is falling, bap, bap, bap
All around, bap, bap, bap…”’

And that was Shorty singing Merry Christmas Everyone even better than Shakin’ Stevens. The next song he sang, ‘for all youse over there in for the ‘RA’ (Shorty was awaiting trial for ‘taking possession’ of some toys) was Four Green Fields, which seemed to now have a hundred verses. For his voice to carry he had to crouch in the sloping cavity in the recess of his window, a very uncomfortable position to maintain, especially in freezing weather. But neither the cold nor the threats from loyalists could make him shut up and he regaled us with an endless stream of songs.

Shorty had a mate—a countryman it seemed from his accent—who was a few cells away on the same landing. Like the political prisoners ordinary remands were also locked up most of the day and Shorty’s mate spent long spells gazing out the window.

‘Shorty!’

‘What?’

‘Shorty, get up to your window.’

‘I’m up, I’m up…’

‘Shorty, see the clouds. Would you say it was gonna rain?’

‘Is that what you got me out of bed for!’

‘Okay, Shorty, I’ll speak to you later.’

Later.

‘Shorty? Shorty! Get up to your window.’

‘I’m up, I’m up…’

‘Shorty! Get up to your window!’

‘I’m up at the fuckin’ window!’

‘Do you see the rainbow?’

‘What!

‘The rainbow… What do you think is at the end of it?’

‘I dunno… Judy Garland, maybe.’

Another day.

‘Shorty! Shorty? Get up to your window.’

‘What’s happenin’! What’s happenin’! I’m up! I’m up!’

‘See the pigeons! See the pigeons in the yard. They’re eating the bread but leaving the heels! See that. I wish I was a pigeon.’

‘No you don’t. A big cat would only come along and eat you.’

On night after midnight Shorty even got up to be shown a distant chimney on fire and was asked if he thought it did any harm to the brickwork. Shorty always got up to the window because of the satisfaction of intercourse (however banal or bizarre the conversation) and because of the importance of contact. Because of friendship. Me? I would have pretended to be asleep half the time.

A few weeks later the singing in B-Wing died, there were no more calls for Shorty to get up to the window. On Easter Monday Rinty McVeigh’s co-accused, John Norney, said his dinner was crap (all the dinners were crap), lifted a snooker ball and put it through the TV. We all joined in and spent the next two hours systematically destroying the canteen but called a truce when we saw the riot squad. The following week we were all shifted to A-Wing. And it was in A-Wing one lunchtime a few months later that we heard that familiar voice:

‘It’s been seven hours and fifteen days
Since you took your love away.
I go out every night and sleep all day
Since you took your love away…

Shorty was back!

This time he had got sentenced to nine months for stealing six pairs of jeans in Ballynahinch or somewhere down there. I’m sure he paid dearly before the judge for his Ballymurphy address. And this was the first time that I met him. He was now an orderly and he boxed us off with bed sheets that weren’t torn or stained and towels that didn’t resemble tissues. Serving breakfast, he would wink at you from behind the grill in the dining hall and surreptitiously give out two Weetabix instead of the regulation one. The warder would watch him like a hawk and couldn’t understand at the end why the Weetabix numbers didn’t tally.

Shorty said to me a few weeks before his release date, ‘I want to join Sinn Fein when I get out. Do you think they would have me?’ He thought he saw me hesitate but if I had it was because I felt proud that he had decided to find a useful role within his beleaguered community, our brilliant big family, and not on the fringes wearying it. He quickly added, dead seriously, ‘I’ll not be hooding anymore. I’ll not be back in jail, you’ll see.’ And I told him I was proud of him. But I also felt humbled by his humility and self-reproach because the term ‘hood’ is so derogatory and belittling. I told him there would be no problem, he would be most welcome.

When Shorty was washing the dishes he would again be singing and this would spark off our own concert. Over the Tannoy would come for the fourth or fifth time the exasperated voice of a warder shouting, ‘Lock up! A-Wing dining hall, lock up now!’ But we would be into only the first verse of croaking Unchained Melody and weren’t ready to pull the sinks off the wall until the very end. Men in prison are mad.

The day before Shorty was released he sang for us at lunchtime a sentimental
republican song called The Sniper’s Promise, the chorus of which goes:

Oh Mama, Mama, Mama, comfort me,
For I know these awful things have got to be.
But when the war of freedom has been won,
I promise you I’ll put away my gun.

Maudlin, yes. But so what. That day we all felt as if we had sprung from the same womb.

We called Shorty out from behind the grill and surprised him with a republican scroll which one of our artists had drawn and which all the IRA prisoners had autographed. I presented it to him as a token of our appreciation, we posed together as somebody let on to take a photograph and there were calls of ‘Speech! Speech!’ But he was overcome, choking with emotion, shook his head and said, ‘I’ll never forget the men behind the wire.’ So we cheered for ourselves and called for another song. It was called, I think, Two Sweethearts and the words went something along the lines of, ‘One is my mother, God Bless her, I love her. And the other is my Sweetheart…’

He rendered us speechless.

He met his death just a few weeks after being released, his badly-beaten body lying all night in freezing-cold weather behind shops on the outskirts of West Belfast. Whether he had been killed elsewhere before being dumped there isn’t clear. His killer or killers—acquaintances or strangers–have remained tight-lipped and were never caught up with. Some say they were glue-sniffers or maybe drunks.

Perhaps they didn’t even remember their killing of a harmless being who gave others so much joy and pleasure.

Shorty.

[22]

      

A ‘Magisterial Study’

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Cahir O’Doherty, Arts Editor, Features and Travel Writer for The Irish Voice, Irish America magazine and IrishCentral.com reviews Patrick Anderson’s book, Rewriting The Troubles: War and Propaganda, Ireland and Algeria. This review first appeared in The Irish Voice [23]on 5 June, 2023.

IT’S EXTRAORDINARY how consistent the experience of colonialism can be across cultures. From Ireland to Algeria, colonized people can point to key moments and military ploys that have broadly echoed each other in ways we are still only appreciating. 

The official British narrative about the Troubles is that there was a religious conflict going on in Ireland.

In this telling, the rise of an Irish Republican insurgency can be dismissed as a sectarian movement with its roots in chauvinism. [24] 

But if the source of the conflict was instead the long legacy of British colonialism, as historian Patrick Anderson argues in Rewriting The Troubles, War And Propaganda, Ireland And Algeria then the focus should really be on London. 

“I want to look at what the British have brought about,” he tells IrishCentral.

“Because it’s not spontaneous, it’s not the work of Irish religious zealots who are in it for some atavistic reason.”

“People don’t just decide to take on one of the best trained and equipped armies in the world for something like that. You don’t get kids from West Belfast and North Belfast to do that so easily. Something major has to make them do it.”

Anderson continues: “When all is said and done, we have to ask ourselves what was this conflict all about? And the British are increasingly finding it difficult to keep up their lie, which is that they were impartial actors in the middle,” he says. 

“I mean victims’ families have had to drag them to supranational courts in order to prove collusion, and then you have to get Americans to come over and help too, you have to get US Senate Committees looking at them. So it’s been increasingly hard for them to maintain their story. What should come out of it in particular, the big one, is the collusion denial. It completely shatters the whole British narrative. Once that is shattered, then they are seen as a participant in the conflict, not the referee.”

In this magisterial study, Anderson examines the parallels between the Plantation of Ulster and the French settlement of Algeria. Politicians in Paris have described Algeria as France’s Ireland, Anderson reminds us. The Algerians themselves studied and took inspiration from Michael Collins and the IRA’s campaign to drive out the British in the 1920s.

[25]

But the parallels run deeper and Anderson skilfully compares the two remarkably similar conflicts, paying particular emphasis to the responses of London and Paris to their violent colonial legacies in both countries and to the way that British propaganda continually cited a military restraint they didn’t actually practice, in stark contrast to what they called French ruthlessness.

Managing reports about English colonial exploits in Ireland is a centuries-old practice and Anderson is almost impressed by the efficiency with which it has been practiced, from the time of Giraldus Cambrensis through Edmund Spender to the news reports during the Troubles, when the British press (and quite a few journalists in Dublin) often ignored evidence of collusion and torture and acted instead like the British Army’s stenographers. 

Meanwhile, Unionism, having once embraced and celebrated its planter background, has in more recent years sought to distance itself from its own colonial origins as colonialism itself becomes a marker of invasion and exploitation. 

“There is a strange reluctance to talk about the colonial origin of the Troubles now. Unionism for the longest time revelled in the idea of good planter stock and Ian Paisley always talked about his own good settler stock from Ballymena. But since the Second World War, people don’t want to be seen as colonizers and around the world.” 

Settler colonialism is a much bigger question now Anderson avers. “It’s seen in Ireland, Algeria, New Zealand, Australia, all over. It’s when the people who were originally settlers and loyalists but do not want to answer to the mother country anymore. But they’re still dependent on the mother country’s military.”

“So they have to behave themselves, he continues. “With Ulster unionism or the French in Algeria, they want to break away and do their own thing, but they’re still dependent on the mother country. So as England is changing and becoming more democratic their – let’s call them great-grandchildren or offspring that they once sent over – are becoming increasingly hard to deal with.”

To paraphrase Faulkner, the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even the past. As this ground-breaking study reminds us, what unites us as former colonies has inspired resistance and a more sincere way to describe and understand – and climb out of – the disaster of colonialism and conflict that followed in the north. 

Rewriting The Troubles can be ordered here – An Fhuiseog [26]

Whatshisname?

Posted By danny On In Latest | Comments Disabled

Joe Dwyer, the political organiser of Sinn Féin in Britain, reviews the latest volume of diaries by the former Labour Party politician who campaigned on behalf of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four:

LAST WEEK saw the release of Chris Mullin’s latest volume of diaries. The former British Labour Party MP for Sunderland South is in high spirits promoting the book. At the close of the previous volume, Decline and Fall: Diaries 2005-2010, the author finds himself apprehensive for what lies ahead in a life outside of Westminster politics.

But ‘retirement’ (for want of a better word) has proven well-suited to a man of Mullin’s ability and character. As his one-time political mentor Tony Benn once articulated, leaving Parliament affords ‘more time for politics’. And so it is for Mullin, who is happy to report that ‘the political meeting is not dead. It has merely transferred to the literary festival.’

This fourth volume of diaries stretches from September 2010 to September 2022—tracing everything from the fall of New Labour to the death of the English Queen. It spans a momentous and tumultuous period of British politics, which Mullin charts at a brisk pace. Despite being a weighty tome, the diaries are quick to digest. Mullin avoids getting bogged down in daily minutiae or personal navel gazing. More observer than chronicler, he proffers his opinion freely without fear of later being disproven, as notably demonstrated by the final Brexit referendum result.

[27]

There is an almost semi-detachment to his pronouncements, undeniably a consequence of his newfound status as an ‘ex-politician’. Gone is the angst, strain, and occasional crotchetiness that featured in previous diary entries, notably those that covered his stints in government office. This latest volume displays a long lens approach that can only be gained through years of political experience and survival.

The book is arguably at its strongest during the heady highs-and-lows of the Brexit process. With the passage of time, it is easy to lose track of just how turbulent and uncertain things looked. The reader is able to retrace the rise and fall of Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, and ultimately—the book’s antagonist, if there is one—Boris Johnson.

While Mullin is by no stretch a ‘Corbynista’ and remains critical of Corbyn’s leadership throughout much of the dairy, even he cannot help but marvel at the sight of Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party. As he records: ‘In my heart I still believe Jeremy can’t possibly lead us to victory, but I have to admit to butterflies in my stomach as the moment approached and a tear welling up when the margin of his victory became apparent. A truly astonishing result. We live in extraordinary times. If only my old friend Tony Benn had been alive at this hour.’

Mullin consistently rails against the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn, whether on the airwaves, or in the newspapers, or from his former-parliamentary colleagues. Towards the end of the volume, just as Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer withdraws the party whip from Corbyn, Mullin makes the startling admission that, ‘For the first time in more than fifty years, having stuck with the Labour Party through thick and thin, I begin to wonder if I still belong in it.’

To this day, Chris Mullin remains one of a handful of British politicians favourably remembered in Ireland. His dogged tenacity and journalistic integrity, from the mid-1980s onwards, proved indispensable to getting the case of the Birmingham Six referred, not once, but twice to the Court of Appeal (in 1988 and 1991 respectively). For his efforts he was pilloried and lampooned in the British press. Branded a ‘Loony Left MP’ by The Sun and an ‘unwitting dupe of the IRA’ by The Daily Star.

Curiously, Ireland appears sparingly across the course of his four volumes of diaries. Despite being a close friend of both Tony Benn and Joan Maynard, two Labour MPs who openly advocated Irish unity, Mullin always remained muted on Irish affairs. Or rather, Britain’s role in Irish affairs.

When one reads his diaries, however, it is evident that Mullin is quintessentially an English politician (and that is not intended as a criticism). It is revealing that the 2014 Scottish independence referendum only intrudes into his diary when a September poll indicates that ‘Yes’ could win. Similarly, Sinn Féin emerging as the largest party in the 2022 Assembly Election passes entirely unmentioned.

Such oversights can be forgiven, however. As Mullin once confided to Mo Mowlam, when asked to deliver a briefing on Ireland, ‘One of the ways in which I preserve my limited credibility is by not talking about things I don’t know about.’

[28]His interest in the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four stemmed from his concern for the integrity of British justice (at best he’s certainly an idealist). As recorded in his political memoir Hinterland, he still finds it curious that his seminal work on the Birmingham Six, Error of Judgement, is most often found on the ‘Irish Interest’ shelf in bookshops. In this respect, the notion of an English politician who keeps being reluctantly pulled into the orbit of Irish affairs certainly does make for a welcome change.

With political discourse in Britain at an all-time low, Didn’t You Use To Be Chris Mullin? is a timely reminder of a different class of British politician that by-and-large no longer exists. Unquestionably a Labour Party loyalist, Mullin nonetheless ploughed his own furrow. Whatever the future holds for Mr Mullin, he will always receive the warm appreciation of the Irish people, in particular the Irish in Britain. He will receive such warmth despite his protestations that he doesn’t know the slightest thing about Ireland!

Didn’t You Use To Be Chris Mullin? Diaries 2010-2022 by Chris Mullin is published by Biteback Publishing Ltd, £20