I was recently interviewed by Áine Toner, Features Editor of the Belfast Telegraph about my recently published memoir. Here is the text of the interview:
Danny Morrison’s latest publication, an update to his 2002 release All The Dead Voices, celebrates the lives of ordinary people living in often extraordinary circumstances. It’s a memoir dominated by emotion: letters from his father to his mother while working in England during times of high unemployment in Northern Ireland; sorrow for loss of life; an impassioned teenage crush.
Some revisits are difficult 20 years on, but there’s also a residual sense of guilt.
“My father was a very private person. My father was also very pro-British. The Morrison side of my family on my paternal side, they were Protestants, and my mother’s side were the Whites. My uncle had been a fairly prominent IRA man in the 1940s, although I got my politics from the street.
“The relationship [between Morrison and his father] could be difficult because he didn’t share my politics, and he was a very religious person. If there’s such a thing as an afterlife, then I think he would be very annoyed and angry at that [publishing his letters], that I let others look into his personal feelings. But as an author, I think that the information is valuable.”
At once highly charged and highly emotional, his interactions since 2002 have underlined the fact that “we’ve all feet of clay, we’re all human”. However, there remain moments where coyness is necessitated.
“The British state here in Ireland would still go after people and charge people if people were to admit to illegal activity in the past.
“At one stage I thought, around 2000, 2001, that we were getting to the stage where people could start telling the truth more about the past, which also might be beneficial to victims’ families. But the way the state has pursued people has made it extremely difficult for us to deal with legacy.”
Learning from the past is vital, says Morrison, discussing his involvement in a cross-community group comprising former RUC men, former British soldiers and former loyalists. It’s a space where no one is asked to surrender positions or detail their reasons for involvement.
“We’d go for walks together, talk about the past,” he says.
“None of us have to surrender our principles, but it’s very, very important in terms of ensuring that what happened never happens again. That’s the message that we would share with each other.”
He discusses a meeting two decades previously — mentioned in the memoir — when meeting a number of ex-RUC men in Clonard Monastery.
“A member of the RUC was having a cup of tea, dipping his biscuit, and he says, ‘you know, I wanted to plug you. I was just looking to get you on a march or a funeral where I could hurt you’. When he said that, immediately I reverted to, ‘Fuck you’.
“Then he started to tell me a story about his friend who was killed by the IRA, and it was so heart rending. It was his school friend and they’d grown up together, and his wife couldn’t see the body, it was so badly disfigured in an explosion. “In two seconds… at one stage I was in this mood of vengefulness, and then the next minute, total empathy and understanding.”
Had the Troubles not occurred, he presumed he’d have been a journalist, then a writer.
“Whatever qualities I had as a communicator, I put them into the republican struggle, into articulating and defending it,” he says.
He was interned twice in the early 1970s and in 1978, was charged with IRA membership and conspiracy to pervert the course of public justice. Morrison was granted bail and the charges were later withdrawn. His conviction for false imprisonment and conspiracy to murder was overturned in 2008 after having served five years of an eight-year sentence from 1990-1995. He is no longer a member of Sinn Féin but remains a party supporter — “I’m a republican supporter, but I wouldn’t be an activist”.
He’s also been secretary of the Bobby Sands Trust for decades, having been Sands’s external spokesperson during the hunger strikes. Other roles include planning the literary events for Féile an Phobail and the editorship of Greenisland Press.
“I’m shortly going to be 73, and I have enough work on my plate,” he says.
His much quoted ‘ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other’ comment, made at the party’s Ard Fheis in October 1981, calling for the party to embrace electoral politics wasn’t planned.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t copyright it or take a patent out,” he says. “[It was] at a specific time whenever we in the Sinn Féin leadership were trying to persuade the bulk of people to support an electoral strategy.
“I got up to make that speech to persuade people. It just came to me… it wasn’t part of any strategy. I think it was very important that we did go down that road.
“Eventually you see the results today where Sinn Féin’s the largest party in the North and Michelle O’Neill is the First Minister.
“In the last opinion poll taken in the South [two weeks ago at the time of speaking], Sinn Féin is the largest party there. Personally, I think a lot of this dates back to the hunger strike and to the decision by Fermanagh and South Tyrone people to vote for Bobby Sands. I think that changed history.”
He burst into tears in his prison cell when learning of the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and, over 30 years later, says it’s a pity the conflict ever began.
“…and thinking back to the people who had lost their lives, all the families who had suffered, and hopefully we could now draw a line in the past and get on with our lives.
“Now, it wasn’t as easy as that. It ran into many difficulties,” he says, adding that he was “pretty much a hate figure” to some for the statements he previously delivered and defended.
“Even when the Good Friday Agreement was up, even when the first Executive was up, David Trimble and Seamus Mallon had been elected First and Deputy First Minister, and then David Trimble prevented the election of any more of the Executive, because he was demanding that the IRA very visibly and forthrightly decommission their weapons.
“We had a very rough period for many, many years. Even now, all those years after the ceasefires, after the Good Friday Agreement, I think that the Stormont power-share and Executive, from my point of view, is still an experiment. I think it is in trouble.”
The DUP is under pressure from the TUV electorally, he says, adopting positions reminiscent of events preceding Martin McGuinness’s 2017 resignation from the Executive.
“Then the whole RHI scandal, and the refusal of Arlene Foster to step aside for a short while, just allowing a short inquiry to come to terms with the issues behind RHI.
“What we have now is we’ve got opposition to Irish language in the Grand Central Station, opposition to funding of Casement Park. I just think that the experiment is in trouble.
“I may be wrong. I know republicans have invested a huge amount of energy, personnel, and political capital in the survival of the Stormont Executive, in order to build relationships with unionists, and in order to be able to turn around and say, listen, we think there’s an alternative here.”
That alternative is a new Ireland, in which we’ll all have a stake and be equal, Morrison says.
“It makes sense, especially since the disaster of Brexit, where we could all be together in the European Union again.
“I think that appeals to a lot of young unionist people, by the way, who are much more extrovert in their approach to life and in their approach to politics.
“Also demographically, the unionist population tends to be older than the nationalist population, and I think in school, at school age, the majority of children come from Catholic/nationalist backgrounds.
“In many respects, it’s in the unionist’s interest, to, at this stage, while they’ve still got large numbers, negotiate from a position of strength, and end up with a better situation for themselves than maybe in five or 10 years’ time.”
Last month, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said on BBC podcast Borderland that a border poll is “inevitable”, adding that while the cost was far from the most important issue around a united Ireland, there would be “an economic challenge”.
Does Morrison think we’ll ever see a united Ireland?
“Well, it’s a direction of travel. Originally when I was young, I may have wanted it for romantic reasons, Easter Sunday, 1916 rebellion, GPO, and all of that. But a united Ireland has to make social, economic, and political sense. That’s the only way you’re going to win the argument, and I think that all the boxes are being slowly ticked in those three areas.”
On a different episode of the same podcast, Michelle Gildernew and former DUP MP Ian Paisley examined the case for a border poll and how a united Ireland would look. Ms Gildernew, a former Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development, at one stage described the six counties of Northern Ireland as a “shithole”.
When asked about her comments, Morrison states that there’s no “contradiction to want it to work for a number of reasons”, even if that includes the “dissolution of the place”.
“It is a failed political entity. She was right in what she said. It is a failed political entity, because the criteria for the setting up of the state was about nine counties weren’t going to be in Home Rule, and they were going to threaten civil war unless they reached that position.
“Whenever King George opened the Parliament first, his statement was very generous and called upon unionists to respect their nationalist neighbours. The first thing they did was did away with proportional representation and then introduce gerrymandering in a lot of council areas.
“That has all changed. To go back to Michelle Gildernew, yes, it is a failed political state. It took an awful lot; we had to swallow an awful lot to go into Stormont. Remember, it is the symbol of our second-class citizenship. It’s where all the power, orange power, came from. It’s where the RUC powers came from.
“Discrimination, immigration, even though we made up a third of the population in the North, we made up two thirds of those who emigrated. Through those policies of discrimination and harassment, the unionists continually shed the nationalist numbers and kept the place for themselves. That has all changed.
“That’s why I’m saying it is an experiment. But it appears to me that the DUP don’t want to buy into the experiment. They want to buy into fundamentalism, and if that is the case, then the dissolution of the state will happen quicker.”
Despite no longer being politically active, he remains politically minded, we suggest.
“That’s an interesting comment. Because I’d be sitting in my slippers with my cup of coffee, watching the news, and hearing some member of Sinn Féin or even some member of the SDLP being cross-examined by an interviewer on television.
“I would be shouting out what answers they should be giving back to them. I’d say, for ‘God’s sake, that’s not your role anymore’, but I’m still tempted to poke my nose in from that point of view.”
In mid-September, Sinn Féin endorsed Catherine Connolly for President. Connolly secured 63% of the vote and will be inaugurated on November 11. Did the party miss a trick in not having its own presidential candidate?
“Not necessarily. I was annoyed at the dithering. If they’d made their mind up two weeks beforehand, they should have declared it,” says Morrison.
“Having said that, I was selling my book at the event where she [Connolly] was brought on stage by Mary Lou and Michelle, and Mary Lou turned around and said, ‘this is a game-changer’.”
Ahead of the election, Ms McDonald had ruled herself out of the running, saying she needed to ‘lead from the front’ while in opposition.
“Mary Lou has a job of becoming the Taoiseach. If she had [had] a run for that and lost, she was finished as leader,” says Morrison when asked. “It’s far better putting somebody in who’s independent but like-minded.”
Politics aside, the future will see the author hopefully complete a west Belfast set novel, Band on the Run. It details a 60-something man who decides to fulfil his dream of forming a pop band.
“I told Roddy Doyle, because this book’s been lying there for years, who says it’s The Commitments [which Roddy wrote] for pensioners. Which it is.
“I must go back and finish it. There’ll only be another memoir, or additions to a memoir, if I live a long time. You try to get as much down as possible; you try to explain your own life.
“Everything’s a learning curve for me, even the writing process.
“I look back and I can see, at 19 years of age, writing in a diary [that] most of it was awful. But among the sentences, there’s a few wee nuggets there, where I was experimenting. Looking back now, I’m quite proud of that.
“[Writing] gives insights into your own motivations, and you can see your own little cruelties, and humanity. It just helps; it makes life easier.”