Splintered Sunrise

Tomás Mac Giolla: I ain’t dead yet

2007-04-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of WorldbyStorm over on Cedar Lounge, my attention has been drawn to the extensive interview with long-time Workers Party leader Tomás Mac Giolla in the latest Magoo magazine. And very sprightly Tomás seems too – I’m slightly surprised to hear that he’s still alive, but surprised in a good way. Like WbS, I’m rather more sympathetic to Tomás now than I would have been in the past, although probably for different reasons.

Apropos of Tomás’s comments on Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and the discussion on CLR about the Official/Provo split, it strikes me that there is something to WbS’s point about the defence of old old positions. As opposed to the de Rossas or Grizzlys who abandon old positions without putting anything in their place save the pursuit of power within the current system. That’s a charge that can’t be laid against either Mac Giolla or Ó Brádaigh. Certainly, one of Ruairí’s great selling points is that nobody is ever in any doubt about where he stands. And while I can well imagine the WP simply fading away, RSF won’t, simply because the market for traditional republicanism may be small but it’s steady and will always be there this side of unity.

Here’s an interesting point, though, about 1969/70. I’ve written a bit about that split and how it impacted on republicanism North and South, and that’s a theme I’ll be developing further. But I think it’s important to note that the split was not simply a question of Defenderist militarism versus electoral vanguardism, although that was the major dividing line in the Six. Nor was it a question of socialism versus conservatism – to be sure, on the Provo side there were some howling reactionaries, but the ideologues – and I’m thinking primarily of Dáithí Ó Conaill and the Ó Brádaigh brothers – were seriously interested in progressive politics, had no problem describing themselves as socialists (while being suspicious of too close a connection to the Communist Party) and had been key figures in the programme debates of the mid to late 1960s.

The point was that there wasn’t a problem with the adoption of socialism, as long as the basic republican orientation, denying the legitimacy of partitionist assemblies first and foremost, was not compromised. The bitterness of the 1970s, at least on the Provisional side, sprung to a great extent from the belief that the Officials had tried to convert the militant republican movement into something it wasn’t and couldn’t be. As Ruairí often says, much of the bad blood wouldn’t have existed if the Officials had simply left Sinn Féin, as so many others had done, to set up a new constitutional republican party, a sort of more socialist version of Clann na Poblachta.

But again this issue is complicated, and I don’t entirely agree with Ruairí on it. From his point of view, the abandonment of abstentionism and the basic republican beliefs that abstentionism flowed from, of and by itself meant a shift into constitutionalism. I’m not sure about that, not only because I’m not a theological abstentionist, but also because I’m not convinced that the Sticks actually set out to go constitutional, although constitutional they undoubtedly became. I’m willing to be charitable and allow that Mac Giolla, Goulding and Garland (Costello too I suppose, although he was always sui generis) were really serious about converting the republican movement into a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party, and had some success in so doing. The WP then, or at least the SFWP of the 1970s, was probably the best chance the Irish left has ever had of building a revolutionary party with real social weight. It certainly throws into sharp relief the claims of the Anglocentric far-left groupings about their historic advances.

How this potential wasn’t achieved is a fascinating story in itself, and one that other people are probably better placed to tell than me. (Not that I wouldn’t have a go…) The main pitfall I suppose was the WP’s chronic split personality, never having resolved the issue of whether it was a constitutional socialist party or a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party. That’s a contradiction the CPI has learnt to live with by clever application of the dialectic, but of course the WP had yet more complicating factors.

Still, nice to see old Tomás still motoring along, and sticking the boot into de Rossa and Rabbitte with admirable vim.

Finally, I realise that due to workload my blogging hasn’t been as frequent these last lot of weeks as it might have been. I am endeavouring to keep the thing regular, if not daily then a couple of posts a week anyway. Thanks for your patience.

He bounces on the ground

2007-04-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

How does this balloon get so much work? I ask merely for information. At time of writing, Stephen Nolan has a daily show on Radio Ulster, a network show on Five Live and a TV show. At the current rate of expansion, Nolan will soon have a bigger presence on BBCNI than the Hole In The Wall Gang.

Strangely enough, despite his limitations – he’s hopelessly out of his depth when it comes to politics – the rotund DJ does illustrate something about the level of discourse in the North. Billed as a shock jock, Norn Iron’s equivalent of Stern or Imus I presume, the only times Nolan deviates from conventional wisdom is when his heroic ability to miss the point kicks in. There is no break from the sycophancy that surrounds our political class – you have to go to The Folks On The Hill for that. Steve makes up for this, however, by affecting a permanently raised voice which is meant to give the impression of anger.

I happened to catch a little of Nolan Live on BBCNI last week. The topic for discussion was anti-social behaviour, arising from the small riot in Bangor a few days before. The local media have been pretty unanimous in avoiding the pertinent point, which is that the drunken youth involved had gone to Bangor for a big Orange hooley. The Orange brethren have escaped totally unscathed. Did Nolan break with the consensus? No, he did not. Instead, he vox-popped some kids from, er, Poleglass, who I am fairly confident in saying were not in Bangor following the Orangemen. What made the interview even more hilarious was that the Poleglass youth had obviously been prepped by some community worker.

The interview went something like this:

Nolan: “Oi! What have youse anti-social youth got to say for yourselves?”

Poleglass youth: “We need more youth centres. Gissa grant.”

Sin é.

And that’s without going into our shock jock’s shockingly sycophantic tête-à-tête with Big Ian…

You would think one dose of Nolan in one week would be enough for anyone. But last night I was innocently flicking through the wireless when I happened to catch the chubby chatterbox on Five Live. The topic of conversation was the gallant sailors of the Royal Navy who had gone on a pleasure cruise, iPods in pockets, only to be picked up by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who subjected them to cruel and unusual punishments such as, well, forcing them to play ping-pong and calling them Mr Bean. Then the Iranians showed a flair for PR that made Britain look like a banana republic.

This is ripe ground for anyone with a sense of the absurd. Gorgeous George, filling in for Gaunty on talkSPORT last week, was especially funny. How did Nolan perform?

Punter: “These sailors. What a bunch of big jessies, eh?”

Nolan: “They were in fear of their lives! They could have been killed!”

Punter: “Didn’t you see them playing ping-pong?”

Nolan (approaching apoplexy): “That was edited footage! It was PROPAGANDA!!!”

Then we drifted off into a discussion of Prince William’s engagement, something that interests me not in the slightest. I got as far as

Punter: “I think the girl is well out of it, she’s already wasted four years on this twerp.”

Nolan: “They might have been in love you know!”

before having to change channels. Lord give me strength. If you have the endurance, Angry Steve can actually be unintentionally hilarious, but I find he works best in small doses.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead

2007-04-14T03:39:00.000-07:00

Just a brief stopgap post today, and I assure you a longer piece will be along shortly as time and energy permit. I just wanted to say I was deeply saddened to hear about the death of Kurt Vonnegut, whose novels I used to devour on a regular basis. He was a standing example of what was good about American culture, and American socialists aren’t so thick on the ground that the loss of an articulate radical is easily missed.

I expect there will now be something of a run on sales of Slaughterhouse Five, and rightly so. But do yourself a favour and dig a little deeper. Check out Mother Night or Cat’s Cradle. Maybe even Bluebeard. But certainly don’t miss Mother Night.

Rud eile: From What Next?, this sterling defence of James Connolly by Rayner Lysaght may be of interest to regular readers.

Stormont MLAs say no to useless talking shop

2007-04-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

One small story from the Teddy Bear’s Head that I almost missed – with the restoration of Stormont imminent, the British government is dead keen on restoring the Civic Forum. “What’s the Civic Forum?” I hear the broad masses cry. This is a 60-member consultative body, appointed by the First and Deputy First Ministers, which makes the Free State Seanad look like a legislative powerhouse. Its job is to provide a space where peace process “stakeholders” can have a say on Executive policy.

So, who gets to be on the Forum? Well, in the first instance there are failed Assembly candidates, either influential old-timers who need appeasing or rising stars who are highly esteemed by their parties, but less so by the great unwashed. (In the latter category, one might want to look out for the SDLP’s Sharon “Lovely Girl” Haughey or the DUP’s Christopher “Milky Bar Kid” Stalford.) In addition, the community sector, alias the peace industry, is in there. The loyalist paramilitaries are in there, under the “community” rubric. The NIC-ICTU bureaucracy is in there. And there should be a few academics, to lend tone to the proceedings. In the Big Tent of the Peace Process, all are welcome.

(Parenthetically, the powers that be are missing a trick if they don’t appoint the left. Eamonn McCann and Peter Hadden would scarcely turn down an opportunity to speechify at public expense, and they have as good a claim to be in the Civic Forum as some of those who might be appointed.)

This has, believe it or not, come up against some resistance from Stormont MLAs, particularly the parsimonious DUP. Our representatives seem to have cottoned on that 108 MLAs, a dozen ministers and nearly 600 councillors are enough to be getting along with in a population of 1.7 million, and begrudge shelling out the £2m or so that would allow 60 of the Province’s great and good to be consulted on the Executive’s actions.

But isn’t this terribly stingy? Given that most of the North’s workforce is on the public payroll, what’s the real harm in bunging the great and good a few quid in expenses? And if the Civic Forum could find a way to keep Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney in the political sphere, it would be doing our entertainment industry – whoops, public life – a world of good.

Real life ever more closely resembles a Colin Bateman novel

2007-04-06T04:50:00.000-07:00

One of the advantages of covering the peace process is that quite often it manages to be GUBU in about five dimensions at once. Such is the case with this week’s most startling event, the big conference called to consider how the £1.2m public subvention to the UDA is going to be spent. Chaired by business honcho Sir George Quigley and attended by chief constable Sir Hugh Orde and the Catholic bishops as well as loyalist paramilitaries, a solemn discussion was held on how giving a big whack of public money to drug dealers, pimps and extortionists was going to turn them into facilitators for the peace process. Since most of the paramilitaries are part of the peace industry already, how this is going to work beats me.

This was preceded by a meeting of foreign ambassadors in Dublin, which had been summoned by Bertie to talk about how the international community could help the UDA go legit. This raises the prospect of yet more windfalls for Uncle Andy and Big Mervyn – unless the foreign governments have an ounce of sense about them.

Nice quote though from Orde. Asked whether the UDA had given up criminality, he said that the evidence was “mixed”. In other words, no. Nobody seems too concerned about that, just as nobody seems too keen to raise the issue of loyalist decommissioning.

Meanwhile, although the full ministerial line-up of the new Executive is not yet clear, the carve-up of departments between the parties makes for interesting reading. Basically, the Provos have been lumbered with water charges (Conor Murphy) and the 11+ (Catriona Ruane), while the DUP get to hold the purse-strings. This Machiavellian strategy has Robbo’s name written all over it.

Funniest of all, though, is the DUP getting culture. I knew Big Ian had a wicked sense of humour, but this is sailing perilously close to taking the piss. My first reaction is that this is yet another nail in the coffin for the Acht Gaeilge. My second reaction is that the gay community is going to have trouble scoring grants. And the deity only knows what the DUP would want to promote under the rubric of culture. This is, after all, the party that famously banned ELO from playing Ballymena on the grounds that Jeff Lynne’s combo was satanic.

Of course, it is always possible that DUP ministers will adhere rigidly to their Section 75 obligations, and might even have the odd progressive idea. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

What's Left? A note on sources

2007-04-04T04:32:00.000-07:00

On returning from my short break, it is a matter of extreme pleasure to your humble scribe to get a nice plug from the estimable Mick Fealty over on Slugger. This has meant my site traffic going through the roof over the last day or so, so I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome new readers. I hope you enjoy the commentary here and decide to stick around.

The obvious story to go with is the restoration of the Executive, but this is going to run and run, and the major theme of this blog – the GUBU nature of Northern politics – will I’m sure get ample fuel from the new devolved dispensation. So I’m going to fulfil a long-standing promise to regular readers, and begin looking at Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? Nick’s book being the disjointed ramble it is, and owing to the fact that it’s difficult to read more than three pages at a go, this will be a serialised review.

The most obvious place to start is on Nick’s sources. A good deal of Nick’s authority comes from his reputation as an investigative journalist, which leads the casual reader to assume that Nick is basing his polemic on reliable information. Of course, a journo is only as good as his sources – as the late Paul Foot used to say, while the journalist may get the byline he is pretty much reliant on his network of informants. Nick, as someone identified with the left, tended to get a lot of his stories from lefty informants. For example, his exposés on education owed not a little to information provided by SWP teachers. Apart from Nick’s gifts as a stylist, this is one of the major reasons for the bite that his early demolitions of Blairism possessed.

A major aspect of Nick’s evolution since 2002 is that he no longer talks to the sort of people who fed him his stories. He has relied ever more heavily on a relatively small circle of friends and colleagues who all think alike, who are preoccupied with foreign policy (always Nick’s weak point) and who, whatever their feelings about the man himself, have done rather well under the Blair regime. It is no surprise, then, that What’s Left? relies to an unconscionable extent on the writings of Nick’s pals, as well as on cutting and pasting from congenial blogs and websites.

Nick is pretty open about this in his rogues’ gallery of acknowledgements, but this is something you notice throughout the book. One of the least attractive features of the Decent Left is their incestuous tendency to cite each other as authorities, and this gives What’s Left? something of the quality of a Normblog post stretched out to enormous length. This wouldn’t be quite so bad if Nick was relying on genuinely distinguished authorities, but…

Nick’s writing on the Balkans derives almost entirely from Marko Attila Hoare, the Nigel Irritable of the Decent Left and a swivel-eyed Serbophobe. The sections on postmodernism (which Nick clearly doesn’t understand) and Chomsky (ditto) are lifted almost verbatim from the relevant chapters of Francis Wheen’s Mumbo-Jumbo. Nick’s authority on Trotskyism is veteran icepick-wielder Paul Anderson. Nick’s big mate Oliver Kampf not only contributes the stuff on George Lansbury but also, as a full-spectrum idiot, seems to have chipped in with dubious factoids on virtually every subject Nick covers.

A critique of Nick will therefore enable, nay require, an examination of his dodgy sources, which he has regurgitated and embellished with scant regard for any independent research or checking of facts. Nick has a breathless style that may carry you along with his logical leaps, if you assume that the premises those leaps are based on are fairly sound. But they aren’t.

Update 5.4.07: Eagle-eyed readers will note that the image on this post has been changed. The original image was the result of my enthusiasm for a rather puerile punchline running away with me. I have reconsidered on receiving representations from readers who felt my humour was in poor taste, could be construed as misogynistic, and anyway I should have known better than to try and get away with boob jokes on a socialist blog.

Interlude: Consimilis calefacio

2007-03-26T04:14:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the move to moderated comments, which I hope will only be temporary and shouldn’t slow things down too much. It’s a pain in the arse I know, but no more so than my cyber-stalker from the Socialist Party, who is hell-bent on getting me to confess to affiliations I don’t have and “facts” he’s just made up. I suppose I should feel flattered to have attracted the attention of a heresy hunter, but to be honest I’m more irritated.

At any rate, to cushion the blow, we will be resuming our popular series on the revolutionary programme. I should, I realise, explain why we’re taking Éire Nua as the source for this discussion. This is partly for biographical reasons, because I’m familiar with the attempts to marry the programme to revolutionary practice, and partly because, whatever criticisms I may have developed in the interim, I still have some affinity for the old orange pamphlet. (This is why I can’t easily discuss the very interesting programmatic history of the Officials. I agreed with the first page of the Irish Industrial Revolution, but it seemed to go downhill after that.)

In the summer of ’71 I hove down to Leitrim, singing songs nobody knew and stories left undone. To metropolitan Dubs, Leitrim is Ireland’s answer to the seventh circle of hell, but if your roots are in South Derry it holds no terrors. Actually, heading out west was dead useful, as I was just in time to play a small part in the Dáil Chonnacht movement. No only did that mean spending some time with the wonderful Mayo and Conamara republicans, who really are a different breed, but getting a real taste of revolutionary political agitation. Those young people who think revolutionary politics is all about roads and hospitals don’t know they’re born.

Regional differences come into play here. As I’ve explained before, in the 1969/70 split the Officials had almost total domination of Dublin and the east coast, while the Provos were based mostly in the rural South and West. The North was in play for a while, depending on who could get guns to which areas. This tended to reinforce the stereotype that on one side were radical political sophisticates and on the other were conservative Catholic gunmen with no concept of politics beyond what you would hear on a Wolfe Tones LP.

There was of course some truth to this, particularly in the North where many, many Provos were essentially apolitical Defenders, and where the needs of Defenderism reinforced the apolitical trend. Above all, in the North the supremacy of the army was absolute. You could be in Sinn Féin, and lots of people were regardless of the party’s illegality, but the party was basically a front-cum-support network for the army. You had little standing if you weren’t a military man, and political nous was a poor substitute for a reputation as an operator. (As Grizzly himself has reason to know. If you can find anyone who was on an operation with the Dear Leader, I’ll buy you a pint.) In the South things were different, and the stereotype was much less applicable. The party had a life of its own, and you could play a useful role as a political agitator. This is the contradiction at the heart of republicanism, being a popular democratic movement and at the same time a military conspiracy.

Anyway, the programme. Even 50 years after the War of Independence, you could still find a pretty substantial population of irreconcilables who had never given allegiance to the Saorstát, and never would. These weren’t by and large “men of no property”, but men and women of little property, small farmers, schoolteachers and the like. If you had gone to the big Dáil Chonnacht meetings around the province, you would not have noticed an overabundance of rough-and-ready Ballyfermot types, but rather an awful lot of corduroy slacks and tweed sports coats. This was really the republican base outside of the Pale.

And the thing was that we had a programme that was perfectly attuned to the needs of that base. The Sticks called it Poujadism, or green fascism; we called it Comhar na gComharsan and linked it back to Pearse’s Sovereign People and the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil. The nationalisation of natural monopolies, workers’ control of industry, rural cooperatives and radical federalism might have seemed like an eclectic mix, although, with the exception of federalism, practically everything in Éire Nua had been part of the common discourse of the united Sinn Féin in the mid-to-late 1960s (we dumped the tincture of Communist Party Stalinism and kept the rest).

How this programmatic discourse melded with the larger revolutionary project is a subject I’ll be explaining in more detail. This involves quite a bit of thought about political methodology, and about problematic issues in both republican and socialist ideology, not to mention the difficult overlap between the two. I hope readers will get something useful out of this.

Rud eile: In mentioning the Defenderist nature of the Northern Provos, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Northern Sticks were also rather different from their Southern comrades. Anyone who’s been in the WP will bear that out.

Uncle Andy wins the Lotto

2007-03-23T05:18:00.000-07:00

So, apart from the main parties giving off that Gordo’s £1bn financial package for the North is much less than they expected, there has been some comment about the £1.2m grant our beautifully groomed proconsul has announced to help the UDA move away from violence, sectarianism and criminality. This £1.2m, payable over three years, has been flagged up by the proconsul as just the down payment, and there is much more to come if the UDA behaves itself.

The £1.2m is little enough, compared to the big whack of public largesse the UDA has been in receipt of for years now, so much so that the Good Friday process has pretty much seen armed loyalism’s grassroots put on the payroll of the peace industry, without much accompanying reduction in the UDA’s nefarious activities. What is interesting is the blatancy of Hain’s move. This money is not being dressed up as “community development”, but openly handed over to the UDA, via its front organisation the UPRG. What we, the punters, are supposed to get from this is also a little opaque. The money will be ploughed into six areas, which may or may not coincide with the UDA’s six brigade areas. And this investment of £1.2m will create a grand total of twelve jobs.

Here’s a thought. Why not forget about auditing procedures, and just hand over suitcases of cash to the UDA Inner Council? Oh, hold on.

And all this is supposed to be part of a series of “confidence-building measures” for the Protestant working class. If the Brits wanted to build confidence in Rathcoole, maybe they would be helping the working-class community there to get the UDA off their backs, instead of subsidising paramilitary rule.

Another thought occurs to me. As no doubt the UPRG will testify, £1.2m is a tidy little sum to get a small political party off the ground. (I would have thought it falls foul of the law on political party funding, not to mention Section 75, but that’s just a lay opinion.) Couldn’t People Before Profit score themselves a grant? It’s obvious that the left have been remiss all these years in not setting up armed wings.

More on this theme on the Socialist Unity Blog.

The Kingstown pimpernel

2007-03-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

If you live in Dún Laoghaire, you will in all probability be familiar with this character here. In fact, there isn’t a black-and-white poster goes up in Dún Laoghaire that doesn’t feature Richard Boyd Barrett in some capacity. Richie Boy has of course been a fixture of Irish left politics for quite some time now, longer than you would think from his Peter Pan-like countenance. But I’ve only just discovered his own dedicated website.

And a quite attractively presented website it is too. We, the visiting proletariat, are given a brief biography of Richie Boy and an overview of the divers “Down with this sort of thing” campaigns he heads up. There is the Irish Anti-War Movement, of which our boy is the main spokesman and which is undoubtedly his major claim to fame. There is the People Before Profit Alliance, for which he is the Dún Laoghaire candidate in the upcoming general election. There is the anti-developer campaign Save Our Seafront, which leads me to ponder whether the Kingstown seafront might actually benefit from a little redevelopment.

What you will not find, and eagle-eyed observers of the Irish left will be not at all surprised by this, is an introduction to the Socialist Workers Party. I may be wrong, but I’ve looked over the whole website and can’t say I have seen a single mention of the SWP anywhere. This is despite the fact that Richie Boy has been a member of said organisation for something like 18 years, has spent most of that time on its leading committee as long-suffering sidekick to Swiss Kieran, writes regularly for the Socialist Worker (usually under the rubric of “voices from the movement”, the same device that allows Kevin Wingfield to appear every issue as a spokesman for Ballymun Against Issue of the Week), was a headline speaker at Marxism little more than a week ago and, the last time I spoke to him – which admittedly wasn’t yesterday – was a full-time operative of the SWP.

Before the more excitable Indymedia types start screaming about Cointelpro, I hasten to add that this isn’t some unwarranted exposure. Just about everyone who knows Richard knows he is a high-up member of the SWP. Indeed, he owes his celebrity to the SWP. Richard, you see, is a most pleasant and outgoing chap who makes friends easily. This perfectly complements Swiss Kieran, who is a powerful thinker and impressive speaker, but who is, let’s face it, a little dour and abrasive. This also makes Richard a perfect frontman, a role he has played with aplomb for a good long while now.

The SWP have a somewhat aggravating organisational tic when setting up one of their “united fronts”. The comrades don’t do coalitions; they hold a public meeting and invite people to “join the movement”. They don’t like structures, but on occasion will simulate inclusivity by appointing themselves and two or three non-party figureheads to be a leading committee. Thus it was that, after 9/11, Richard found himself appearing all over the media as spokesman for the fortuitously named “Irish Anti-War Movement”. What the anti-war punters thought about being spoken for by the SWP is an interesting question, but a moot one. Like most of the SWP’s fronts, the IAWM is largely bluff, but a bluff is only a bluff if somebody calls it.

What is striking, for somebody whose whole political CV is based around his leading role in the SWP, is the coyness in mentioning that organisation. Possibly the rationale for this, as with the SWP’s double fronts in the Stormont election, lies deep in the tangled prose of the organisation’s perspectives on a “New Left”, to which I will return anon. But a certain amount of the coyness probably stems from a pragmatic recognition that the SWP name is box-office poison. So, instead of trying to reflect on why that might be so and how the problem could be rectified, we are presented with an elaborate series of fronts, reminiscent of the bad old days when Militant pretended not to exist and held its events under a motley array of cover names. It certainly doesn’t bespeak much confidence in the prospects of “Ireland’s Bolshevik Party”.

Big Ian to hit Tinseltown

2007-03-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

On the recurring theme of the GUBU nature of Northern politics, I couldn’t resist this story from the Beeb. It seems the Paisley family has commissioned a biopic of Big Ian, with Gary Mitchell as screenwriter and Ian Óg as executive producer. There is even the unlikely idea that Ballymena’s other famous son, Liam Neeson, might play the lead.

What can you possibly say about this? I’m sure there would be a market for such a picture in Norn Iron, although foreign sales might prove elusive – unless those Southern Baptists who turned out in such numbers for The Passion of the Christ get their act together. And Papa Doc’s eventful life has the makings of a good story – see for example Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak’s Paisley, badly dated now but still indispensable, and Dennis Cooke’s excellent Persecuting Zeal. Neither of these books, however, is much in favour in the Paisley camp, and the hagiography the Dochtúir Mór’s family will be looking for would probably have less drama.

I’m slightly puzzled by Gary Mitchell being asked to write the screenplay. Gary is a good writer, and has produced plenty of stuff sympathetic to loyalism, but I wonder if he’s a good fit for a Paisleyite hagiography. Gary’s writing style is very much Cathy Come Home kitchen sink, and he does have a tendency to do unromantic warts-and-all writing, which is what got him into trouble with the UDA in Rathcoole when they decided to go into dramatic criticism. Maybe the Paisleys misspoke, and they really meant Garry Bushell.

If the thing ever gets off the ground, be assured that your humble scribe will be in the queue ready to do an Ebert on Big Ian’s life story.

By the way, this reminds me – a few years back, when Grizzly was at his peak form of partying with Martin Sheen and Bianca Jagger, there was some speculation floating around that Hollywood might be interested in his life story – or at least that classic work of fiction Before the Dawn, possibly the least revealing memoir ever written. Of late this seems to have fallen off the radar. Memo to the film industry – if there are some gaps in the fantasy market, you could do worse than the life of Ballymurphy’s Nelson Mandela.

Glittering vista of devolution takes shape

2007-03-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

So, with the elections out of the way, attention now turns to the formation of an Executive. This is due to happen next Monday, and Big Ian is currently involved in a game of chicken with our beautifully groomed proconsul as to whether the 26 March deadline will be met. Paisley says the date isn’t set in stone. Hain says it is, and what’s more the date is enshrined in law.

Actually it matters very little either way. Hain knows that the law can be changed in ten minutes via an Order in Council, and Big Ian will want to push the process past 26 March just to prove that he’s calling the shots. But there likely will be an Executive set up at some point – whether it lasts is another matter.

What, then, will be the shape of the Executive? I’m not talking about personnel here, but about what, if anything, it will do. Some clues are hidden in what the Brits gave the DUP at St Andrew’s, in a significant rewriting of the Good Friday Agreement. Under the GFA, for instance, both “communities” in the Assembly had to vote for the slate of First and Deputy First Minister. That has now changed, so the DUP won’t have to vote for Martin McGuinness. In other words, they won’t have to vote confidence in the very government they will be leading. And this is before you take into account Robbo’s pledge to have a battle a day in the Executive – presumably, if nationalist ministers don’t oblige, the DUP will invent a battle.

The other significant concession at St Andrew’s was that the actions of ministers would be subject to the approval of the Assembly, as opposed to the virtual autonomy ministers had under the GFA. Taken together with the provision for weighted voting, this means the DUP – with 36 of the 108 seats, but the majority of unionist MLAs – can not only veto legislation, but also non-legislative actions of ministers. It doesn’t take a genius to foresee that the DUP would vote against any proposal of a Provo minister, even one they agree with, just out of badness. In other words, we will have the content if not the form of majority rule.

This leads on to the question of what the Executive will do. The proconsul has been holding before the punters a glittering vista of a devolved administration abolishing water charges, putting a hold on the rates revaluation and doing all sorts of wonderful things with the big financial package Gordo is offering us. On closer scrutiny, the water charge and rates revaluation would only be mitigated, not stopped altogether, and on Gordo’s past form, it’s a fair bet that much of the money he announces will be money he’s already announced.

There are incentives, though, for the DUP to get into an Executive, which have less to do with what devolution might achieve and more to do with what it might prevent. First on their list is the Acht Gaeilge. It doesn’t matter that the Brits have already significantly watered down the proposed Language Act – even a symbolic official recognition of Irish is enough to enrage the Prodocracy. But, if devolution is restored, the Acht Gaeilge goes to the Assembly, where the DUP will veto it.

Likewise post-primary selection. Readers will recall that when Martin McGuinness was education minister, just as he was being dragged out the door he signed a directive abolishing the 11+. Ever since, direct rule ministers have faffed about the issue, failing to put into place an alternative system. Now, this school year just going will be the last to have the 11+, so what will a devolved Assembly do? Sammy the Streaker has laid it out starkly – unless the two nationalist parties knuckle under and reverse their opposition to selection, the Assembly will block any proposed non-selective system, thus throwing the secondary sector into chaos and allowing individual grammar schools to set their own selection criteria. This will actually be much worse than the 11+, which is at least a structured system.

So we must ask, what are nationalist ministers, in particular the Provos, going to do in this situation? As I see it, they have two options. One is to join the Executive on the DUP’s terms – at least until Big Ian figures out a way to kick them out – while bumming and blowing about how, by doing so, they are calling the DUP’s bluff. This is what one might term the Andytown News approach. The other option – which could be combined with the first – is to lobby the Brits to impose progressive measures over the head of the devolved administration, because they sure as hell won’t get any through Stormont.

Either way, the argument that a restoration of Stormont will solve all our problems looks thinner by the day.

The Old Firm election, part 3

2007-03-16T05:21:00.000-07:00

Whereat we cast a beady eye on the dissident republicans and go under the SEA with Captain Eamo

In this final post on the Stormont election results, I want to take a look at the two forces aspiring to offer an alternative – the republicans and the left – and assess the likelihood of them being able to do so. I should state in advance that my conclusions will not be terribly optimistic. But to begin with, I should point out that there are two constituencies, which are distinct even though they overlap to some extent. This is the traditional republican constituency, which is mostly rural though with some urban support, and what might be termed a left republican, republican socialist or Connollyite constituency, which is almost exclusively urban. The election results partially illuminate these audiences.

The actual votes for dissidence are not all that much out of line with what I was expecting. They might have surprised outside observers relying on press reports (and, despite the effective media blackout on RSF, there was a remarkable boosting of mad Catholic reactionary Gerry McGeough by journalists who you wouldn’t expect to be sympathetic). Indeed, although disgruntlement with the Provos will be obvious to anyone even slightly acquainted with the republican base, there are good reasons why the dissidents were never going to do very well. Firstly, the Provo cadre – and this is where disillusionment is keenest – was never held together by ideology, but by military discipline. This explains why demoralisation and abstention are a more common reaction than dissidence. Bear in mind too that, as far as the majority of Northern Catholics are concerned, the details of the peace process are of little interest. What is important is that the war is over and, thanks to Gordon Brown’s voodoo economics, there is more or less full employment. Combined with the Provos’ massive apparatus, this gives some context for PSF’s continuing popularity and the lack of a large audience for critiques of the GFA process.

Then you have to consider the subjective factor. The dissidents had no organisation, no resources, no really attractive or well-known candidates and no record of doing the work on the ground that pays such dividends for the Provos. (Davy Hyland, who is personally very popular in Newry and whose appetite for hard work is legendary, is the exception here.) Lots of potential supporters weren’t on the register, having taken themselves off to avoid being impersonated. There was also the question of what political alternative the dissidents were putting forward. RSF stand for traditional republicanism, and traditional republicanism wasn’t all that brilliant that we would want to rerun the tape. Gerry McGeough stands for traditional republicanism, plus fascism and the Virgin Mary. As for Hyland, Paul McGlinchey and Martin Cunningham, it’s not terribly clear what they stand for. So you had candidacies that could only really appeal to people who were already fairly hardline republicans, and even among hardline republicans RSF, in particular, are far from being universally popular.

So the results for independent republicanism then become explicable. RSF’s six candidates polled a remarkably uniform 400 or so, as did McGlinchey in North Antrim and Cunningham in South Down; 800 deluded souls in Fermanagh voted for Catholic Reaction; Hyland got a little over 2000 in Newry/Armagh and Peggy O’Hara a little under 2000 in Derry. Mrs O’Hara’s campaign had some peculiar features that I’ll come back to presently. I hasten to point out that I’m not making excuses for poor results, simply setting them in context. So, taken together with the Hearts and Minds poll last November, we might say that the dissident vote this time out represents a baseline rather than a maximum, but it does shine a light on the sort of audience that is out there. And we can have some kind of feel for the audience that might be available to a more attractive project than actually existing dissidence.

The Hyland vote is easily explicable in parish pump terms. The vote for Mrs O’Hara, who is not to my knowledge in the IRSP but is certainly identified with them, is interesting in that it was the nearest thing we had to a left republican campaign (although trad republicans in Derry also supported her) and because of what it says about political developments up there. Basically, there is a relatively big audience for dissidence in Derry because Derry has had nationalist government for decades and had a peace process ten years before the rest of us. Things have been maturing slightly quicker there. That’s why so many of the names on the Letter of 500 came from Derry. But the sentiment of opposition is also quite confused. We could see that in the policing debate, where the dissidents organised a big rally in Derry, and then invited Eamonn McCann and Tony McIntyre to do the speaking. Predictably, neither of these balloons had much to say, though, predictably, that didn’t stop them talking at length. The hope would have to be that some people in Derry do some thinking and draw some conclusions.

I have a faint hope that some opposition might arise from disgruntled republicans. I have no such hope in the far left, but it’s worth glancing at their performances anyway. It’s disappointing to note that the Workers Party seem to have slowed their inexorable decline. To be honest, the Sticks don’t serve any socialist purpose any more and their disappearance would at least clear away some undergrowth.

From the Sticks we turn to the most morose people in Irish politics, the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland (Kautskyism-Taaffeism-Peter Hadden Thought). They will be slightly cheered up by their vote having finally broken through the 200 mark, with Jim Barbour in South Belfast going up from 167 to 248 and Tommy Black in East Belfast rising from 176 to 225. These gains of 81 and 49 respectively are a clear vindication of SP strategy – not! This is despite flogging water charges into the ground over the past three or four years, with Peter Hadden having recently declared that the proletariat were being electrified by the We Won’t Pay Campaign (a mass movement of the SP in coalition with itself). Yet again bread and butter fail to deliver the goods. It’s true that water charges were much discussed during the election, but most of the punters seem to believe that Big Ian will abolish them.

Joking aside, the main problem with the SP’s perspective is their weird belief that you can build a base for socialism in places like the Beersbridge Road, if only you disavow anti-imperialism and strip out from your programme anything that might scare the Prods. The SP have been doing this for decades – so much so that their last manifesto only had one item on it. And they still can’t get votes in these areas! It would be interesting to see which boxes the tiny SP vote actually did come from – I suspect much of it actually comes from the Markets and Short Strand, and is an offshoot of the once substantial WP vote in those areas. The thing is that, for well over 30 years, the only places in the North where socialism could find any audience have been working-class Catholic areas, where there has been some radical and anti-imperialist consciousness. That means West Belfast and Derry, to a lesser extent North Belfast and Newry, and some small pockets elsewhere. In other words, the left republican constituency mentioned above. The SP’s schematic dogmatism doesn’t allow them to consider this; the SWP are dimly aware of it on some pragmatic level, although it contradicts their formal politics.

The SWP, as anyone who attended their Marxism event at the weekend will testify, are cock-a-hoop at the votes for Captain Eamo in Derry and the wee lad in West Belfast, running under their two different fronts. How their treasurer feels about having shelled out something like five grand for less than 3000 votes is undisclosed, but on the evidence of Marxism it would seem that Yo politics are alive and well. Actually, although Eamo’s vote has held up remarkably well – Mrs O’Hara’s intervention only slightly dented it – I am more and more convinced that this is an essentially personal vote and not evidence that 2000 people in Derry believe the Soviet Union was state capitalist. Rather, I suspect much of it comes from luvvie elements, of whom there are many in Derry. After all, if fellow journo Brian Rowan can score 1200 first preferences in North Down on a platform of anti-politics, it surely isn’t surprising that TV celebrity McCann, one of the best-known faces in the North, could get 2000 votes for a platform of right-on clichés.

Somewhat more to the point is the vote for the wee lad, who scored nearly 800 in West Belfast. This clearly wasn’t a personal vote, as nobody had ever heard of the candidate. (The Provos had a number of candidates I’ve never heard of, but then they have a machine.) It wasn’t a vote for SWP politics, as it wasn’t an SWP campaign. It surely to God wasn’t a popular endorsement of young Seán’s Ali G manifesto. The only explanation I can put forward is that he managed to get some votes from the left republican constituency, on the grounds that he looked a bit lefty and a bit anti-imperialist (only in Iraq, true, but in West Belfast that would be taken as a dig at the Brits). These are the same sort of people who would vote for an IRSP or Socialist Democracy candidate – indeed, the Irps or SD might have done better, as they would have run an explicitly anti-Stormont campaign.

I can’t see the SWP getting anything out of this in the long term. The Irps or SD, having acquired this audience, would go out and try to organise an opposition. The SWP can’t, not only because they don’t have the organisation, but, more importantly, because they don’t have the politics. What could they do with these people – sell them tickets to Marxism? The only consolation for the SWP is that they don’t think in the long term anyway. A short morale boost will suit them fine.

The republican opposition, for all their enormous faults, are at least serious people, while the left as usual give the impression of being totally unserious about anything except short-term sectarian advantage. Even so, for the critic of the Grizzlyite peace strategy, there is little here to take comfort from. The most that can be said is, perhaps the ferment in Derry will throw up something worthwhile.

The Old Firm election, part 2

2007-03-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

Provos make out like bandits as SDLP continues its slow death

Moving on to the nationalist side of the fence, there is no question but that this election has been a triumph for the Provos. If the DUP election machine is impressively slick, the PSF machine is space-age. Incredible vote management delivering five out of six in West Belfast; all three Mid-Ulster candidates returned on the first count; Paul “Butch” Butler winning an unlikely seat in Lagan Valley on the back of an enormous turnout from Lagmore. The deployment of the Provos’ small army of election workers in the latter stages – notably an invasion of South Belfast by Shinners from the West – was wondrous to behold. Even their own activists were stunned by some of the results, such as Mitchel the Draft Dodger topping the poll in South Antrim, young Dáithí McKay only a whisker behind Papa Doc in North Antrim, and coming close to a second seat in Upper Bann.

By contrast, the results make grim reading for the South Down and Londonderry Party. The Stoops are now below a quota in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, East Derry, North Antrim, South Antrim, North and West Belfast and Upper Bann. In some constituencies – notably West Tyrone and South Antrim – they have been wracked by internecine warfare that lost them their seat in the former and nearly did so in the latter. In their former fiefdom of South Down the Provos are sitting on their shoulders like vultures. Only in Foyle and South Belfast do they retain anything like a credible claim to be the leading nationalist party.

The SDLP is not quite ready to expire yet. Despite the fact that there is little more to the party than meets the eye – its lack of organisation has been cruelly shown up yet again – there remains a certain sociological base that can keep the party going for years to come. But the prognosis is grim. Anyone familiar with the SDLP will know that for decades it gained support by being a) the leading Catholic party, b) the party favoured by the bishops, and c) the non-violent party. Only b) really applies any more, and to an increasingly limited extent as the Provos have got more respectable. Meanwhile, the party on the ground consists as always of little fiefs – some doctor, solicitor or head teacher who did something in the civil rights movement, has lived off that reputation ever since, and can get elected to the council in his own right but won’t organise a branch for fear of building up a successor. The party may end up literally dying out in some areas before long.

And that’s without mentioning the lunatic electoral strategy of the Attwood brothers, whose approach is to brag about the SDLP’s success in civilising the barbarians, and then expects those same barbarians to vote SDLP. It is more likely that affronted barbarians would vote Provo just to spite them.

So the Provos have consolidated their leadership of nationalism. But hidden beneath the overall advance of some 2% in the PSF vote, there are some interesting dynamics going on. One is that there is some erosion of PSF support in the party’s traditional working-class base. Some of these people are going over to dissidence, but much larger numbers to abstention. (Actually, my hunch is that those who voted dissident last week were more likely abstainers than direct Provo defectors.) But these losses are more than made up for by to human waves of new voters – firstly, former SDLP supporters, and secondly young voters who have no memory of pre-peace process politics and who vote, when they do vote, monolithically for the Provos.

This sets up a political circle which may be vicious or virtuous depending on your point of view. The Provos will find it exceedingly hard to win back traditional supporters who have lost confidence in them. A return to strident republican politics, even if the leadership wanted it, would tend to alienate the typical Sinn Féin Nua supporter who wants a more aggressive version of the SDLP. Furthermore, the Provos’ shift on policing has ramifications that go beyond the ideological republican’s opposition to a colonial police force or to Belfast Defenderism. One of the main ways the Provos used to reassure a restive base was to go on a spree of punishment beatings, maybe nutting a couple of drug dealers for good measure. They can’t do that any more.

Therefore the Provo strategy – and this makes perfect electoral sense – is to decommission the SDLP post haste. This is desperately bad news for an SDLP that doesn’t know what its function is supposed to be any more. But, as the Provos transform inexorably into a slightly constitutional party – not a million miles from being a less elderly and jaded SDLP – there is an obvious question. The tensions within Northern nationalism are such that a single, monolithic nationalist party is no more possible than a single, monolithic unionist party. If PSF are becoming the new SDLP, where will the new Sinn Féin arise from? That’s of course assuming we would even want a new Sinn Féin, an outcome that I personally would be less than thrilled with. However, there is a smallish but potentially significant space opening up in the old Provo base, and it will be fascinating to watch how different tendencies try to build out of it.

The Old Firm election, part 1

2007-03-10T03:09:00.000-08:00

Big Ian triumphant as the OUP crumbles in a pincer movement and the Cream Bun is toast

Hold onto your hats, because we’re going to be covering the North’s federal election in three parts. First, we’ll look at the unionist result; second, at the nationalist/republican result; finally, we’ll number-crunch the republican and left votes to get some sense of where an opposition might come from.

Why do I call this the Old Firm election? Well, if you’re a kid in Glasgow, you’re hardly going to support Partick Thistle, are you? Likewise, it had already been determined in advance that there were only two main parties, and since the preferred outcome was a DUP-PSF coalition – the idiot savant in Downing Street having divined that this was the best chance of stability – there was a mighty incentive to the electorate to confirm recent trends and put those two parties in the driving seat. Which they duly did.

In broad terms, the DUP beat the OUP by better than two to one in votes (30.1% to 14.9%) and exactly two to one in seats (36 to 18). Take your eyes off the 27.5% swing in Jeffrey Boy’s Lagan Valley fiefdom – rather look at plummeting OUP votes in East Derry, South Antrim, Strangford and East Antrim among many sometime party strongholds. OUP candidates who used to breeze in on the first count, notably Sir Reg himself, were left waiting on transfers. It seems too, vide the Alliance revival exemplified by Naomi Long’s barnstorming performance in East Belfast, that the OUP is caught in a pincer movement. Not only has its right wing decamped en masse to Papa Doc, but the moderates (natural Alliance supporters in other words) who had previously lent their votes to the OUP on the grounds that it was pro-agreement, have been less than impressed by Empey’s strategy of trying to out-Paisley Paisley.

The OUP will survive in the medium term, as a home for those who don’t like the DUP’s bible-bashing and find Alliance just a bit too Awfully Awfully, and also because it retains a few people like Danny Kennedy who have a profile as decent public representatives. But having lost its raison d’être as the leading unionist party, it’s difficult to see a way out.

The dissident unionists likewise found out that you can’t out-Paisley Paisley. Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney, whose egocentric bid to win six seats had provided rare entertainment, ended up losing out in North Down to veteran councillor Brian Wilson, an Alliance man manqué who fell out with his party years ago, kept on being elected as an independent, and now represents the Greens. Paul “Sports Massage” Berry only held a quarter of his vote and is now bowing out of politics; amiable Strangford DUP MLA George Ennis, who had defected to the Bobite heresy, not only lost his seat but suffered the humiliation of polling less than the Provos in a constituency which is something of a unionist Heart of Darkness. No, the only potential opposition the Big Man has to worry about is that in his own party.

So unionism has effectively united behind Big Ian, but without losing its contradictions. It isn’t entirely accurate to say that the Donaldsonites have gone from being the right wing of the OUP to the left wing of the DUP, but nor is it totally inaccurate. People like Arlene Foster, Jimmy Spratt, Peter Weir and Jeffrey Boy himself would be unimaginable in the DUP of ten years ago. However, the party cadre – more so than its voting base – retains many people of the Singing Willie variety who will slap the Lundy name on Big Ian as soon as he oversteps the line. The major division is between those Duppies who don’t want to share power at all on theological grounds, and those who will try and hold out for some kind of modified majority rule.

This could be seen in Paisley’s own reaction to the result, once you stripped away the biblical efflorescence. “I want two things,” arsa an Dochtúir Mór. “I want a big massive financial package from Gordo, and I want an ejector seat so I can kick the Shinners out of the Executive whenever I damn well feel like it.” The ejector seat is necessary to placate the base, even if the Big Man is willing to deal. The trouble is that the baseline Catholic demand in the North is for equality, and even those unionists willing to share power don’t want to do it on the basis of equality. Polling evidence tends to show that the DUP is pretty representative of Protestant opinion on this issue. The question is, how far will the Provos bend to meet them?

Rud eile: One notable thing about the Alliance performance was the election of Anna Lo in South Belfast, providing some much-needed representation for the beleaguered Chinese community. Anna thus becomes the first ethnic minority person ever to be elected in the North, and the first Chinese person to be elected to a parliamentary assembly in these islands. That aside, it was dead smart of Alliance to build on South Belfast’s existing liberal vote by appealing to the large Chinese population in the area. If Gerry McGeough had been cuter, maybe he could have linked up with the League of Polish Families.

Polling day reflections

2007-03-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

Just a few haphazard thoughts on the election, and on last weekend’s PSF Ard Fheis. Firstly, and I’ll get onto the southern situation in due course, was the Ard Fheis pledge on coalition – which may or may not be academic according to the Leinster House arithmetic. There are of course a lot of yahoos running around the Irish left screaming “No Coalition” as if these magic words will cover up a dearth of ideas, but Grizzly faces a bit of a problem here. The PSF leadership would dearly love to be in government in both states, but much of the southern cadre suffers an allergic reaction to the very concept of coalition with Fianna Fáil. Thusly the Ard Fheis pronounced itself against the idea of coalition with… the Desocrats! As if!

I am also slightly bemused by the euro. Not the currency per se, but if I recall correctly the Provos opposed the Free State’s adoption of the euro, on the quite sensible grounds that the Maastricht convergence criteria would rule out radical economic policies. Yet now we hear the call for an all-Ireland currency, as if the punt still existed. Is this a radical policy of the same ilk as the call for an all-Ireland 12% corporation tax, or an all-Ireland police force – made radical by placing the formula “all-Ireland” before it?

Now, the Stormont election. The counts on tomorrow and Friday will give us some idea of how things will pan out, so I won’t even hazard a prediction. But I do want to have a brief look at the two groups posing as an alternative, the republicans and the left.

The letter from 500 ex-prisoners that appeared in yesterday’s Irish News calling for a vote for independent republican candidates had a couple of interesting features. I noticed that the largest lot of signatories came from Derry, with significant numbers from Armagh and Tyrone but not many from Belfast. Besides, most of the Belfast people I recognised on the list were not Provos but Irps, who you wouldn’t expect to be onside anyway. Another weakness was that the unity of the letter was achieved purely on the basis of opposing the RUC/PSNI, with no signs of a positive alternative. Nonetheless, and although the instigators seem to have been the usual suspects, I draw some comfort from the scale, showing that there are a relatively significant number of republicans who believe we need a republican movement and that the Provos aren’t it. Given the almost total lack of support for a return to armed struggle, there is obviously some kind of an audience for political alternatives.

But, as it happens, I didn’t vote republican and didn’t argue with anybody else to do so. The republican candidates, of course, fall into three categories. There is Gerry McGeough, whose brand of Maria Duce politics is a bit rich for my taste. There are folks like Davy Hyland and Paul McGlinchey, who have only been out of the Provos five minutes and, whatever lines in the sand they may have drawn over policing, haven’t yet shown much sign of being a real opposition. Then you have RSF, who actually are an opposition and have a positive programme of their own. The trouble with RSF is that, despite being good principled republicans, they are also rigid doctrinaires (though Ruairí is much more flexible than he’s given credit for) and a tactical sensibility that I would describe as erratic and a less charitable soul as bonkers.

Nonetheless, although I don’t expect the republican opposition to get many votes, it might not be a bad thing if they did. If they started to look like a credible opposition, then there would be some pressure on them to behave like one.

This does not apply to the far left. I have little confidence in the ability of the left to recognise the real world, never mind reflect and draw serious conclusions. Any votes for these bozos will only encourage them. It is likely, for instance, that the Socialist Party’s campaigning around water charges will bring them some extra votes (their tiny vote base couldn’t possibly shrink further). So, if Tommy Black can raise his vote from 130 to something like 300, which is entirely possible, although that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans the SP will claim it as a vindication of their politics and a sign that things are moving in their direction. And the least said about the SWP’s Ali G politics, the better.

The DUP goes cross-community

2007-03-07T10:10:00.000-08:00

In reviewing the West Belfast election addresses, I left out Diane Dodds of the DUP, on the grounds that I hadn’t seen hers. This is a stroke of good luck, because in fact Diane has had two addresses out. The one, for the Shankill Road whence nearly all of her first preferences come, is the usual stentorian Paisleyism. But Diane has also issued a separate and different address geared towards the nationalist areas that make up the bulk of the West Belfast constituency.

This makes some sense. Remember that last time out, Diane only won her seat with a margin of 97 votes over PSF’s Sue Ramsey. Therefore a few lower preferences, adding up to fractions of votes in the later stages of the PR count, could make all the difference.

So, how is Diane appealing to her Catholic constituents? By pitching herself as the family values candidate. Notably, she makes a big deal of being the only West Belfast MLA to vote against gay equality. This is the DUP’s idea of cross-community politics – appealing to the Gerry McGeough vote. At least it shows that Big Ian’s lot have no problem in principle with reactionary Catholic ultras.

West Belfast candidates address broad masses

2007-03-05T11:25:00.000-08:00

This past wee while has been extraordinarily boring as far as the Norn Iron election is concerned, but as polling day is only two days off I feel it is incumbent on the Sunrise to return to the story. I won’t be making any predictions – that’s a mug’s game. Although many of the results are indeed predictable at this point, there are a few constituencies up in the air – South Belfast for one, and North Down is of course a law unto itself. So it makes more sense to wait for the results of the PR count and do an analysis of the small print.

So we shall take a run through the manifestos. I have in front of me most of the election addresses dropped in West Belfast. I am missing the DUP and the South Down and Londonderry Party, which is no great loss – those interested can find the Big Doc’s detailed manifesto here [pdf] and the Stoops’ printed Mogadon here [pdf]. And for some psychedelic fun, check out Rainbow George’s Make Politicians History site.

But on to the literature at hand. One of the things one notices is that “delivery” is the big word amongst the parties. The SDLP want to “deliver real progress”; the Provos claim “others promise, we deliver”. So the Provos’ leaflet – which, by the way, features no less than four pictures of Grizzly (the other candidates, Fra McCann, Paul Maskey, Jennifer McCann and Shell Dockley, are clustered around him like Santa’s little helpers) – is divid up into three sections. Under “Delivering in the Peace Process”, we have bullet points about a “strategy for Irish Unity and Independence” (by administering Stormont), a “new beginning to policing” (well, we’ll see about that) and northern representation in the Free State Assembly, which Bertie has talked about but can hardly be claimed as an accomplishment just yet. Under “Delivering in the Executive”, we do not have any reference to Provo ministers’ addiction to PFI. What we have is their one genuine achievement – Marty’s abolition of the 11+ – alongside claims to bear the entire credit for the peace dividend and various stances the Provos have taken – anti-racism and opposition to water charges – that hardly relate to anything their ministers did. The third part, “Delivering Locally”, is strictly West Belfast parish pump stuff – again, there are worthy causes there, but the actual Provo strategy of “Gissa Grant” would not be apparent to the casual reader.

We turn now to Dan McGuinness of the Alliance Party. Although I am pleased to see Dan going to the trouble of directing messages in Polish and Chinese to the electorate, this is unlikely to help his chances. Aside from introducing the candidate, the substance of the leaflet is given over to the usual Alliance encomia about “partnership” and “sharing” and other apple-pie virtues that Alliance stands for. Dan promises to offer an alternative to tribal politics, although he’s not the only one.

Also claiming to be that alternative is the eternally optimistic John Lowry of the Workers Party. John also witters on about tribal politics, and argues the working class should really stop living in a fool’s paradise and focus on the really important issues of water charges, PFI and the house price bubble. I fully agree with him that these are important issues, though John seems to forget that the sole point of the election is to restore Stormont. Actually he doesn’t – he does call at the end of his address for the restoration of the Assembly and Executive, but how the Assembly is supposed to do all these wonderful progressive things is left unclear. The WP also make a big deal, somewhat incongruously, of opposing imperialism – in Iraq!

Ah dear, what can we say about young Seán Mitchell of the SWP – sorry, People Before Profit? Don’t pay water charges; No to imperialism (in Iraq); Don’t diss the yoof… as usual with the SWP, a liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks and Yos would more accurately capture the tone. Most striking is Seán’s contribution to the policing debate which goes under the rubric of “Poverty is the Issue Not Policing”. The debate around whether or not to endorse the New RUC is hereby reduced to a question of insufficient community development. Bread and youth clubs, one might say. I would love to vote for this, if it wasn’t totally disconnected from what the issues are for the working class, as opposed to what the far left would like the working class to be concerned with.

Next we turn to the address from Geraldine Taylor of Republican Sinn Féin. I am disappointed to see that Geraldine is running on the identikit RSF manifesto adopted by all six of their candidates – as a disciplined party, that is only to be expected, but they could have made some concession to the peculiarities of West Belfast. It appears that RSF are only interested in appealing to people who are already hardline republicans – and even in that constituency, a manifesto based on appeals to the 1916 Proclamation and Éire Nua is only going to have limited purchase. RSF, in many ways the most substantial of the “dissident” formations, seem to have serious trouble behaving as anything other than an introverted sect. I might have expected different from Geraldine, based on the work she has been doing on the issue of anti-social behaviour around Poleglass for many years. To put it bluntly, her appeal would be greatly enhanced if the entirely necessary slogan of “Smash Stormont” was coupled with “Smash the Hoods”.

Finally, for the student of political exotica we have Louis West. Louis is the Official Unionist candidate for West Belfast, in comparison to which Steve McClaren looks like he was born under a lucky star. Strangely, Louis also seems to be rather down on tribal politics, enjoining us to vote for a moderate Assembly on the grounds that “Normal politics will be better than a constant them-and-us battle over ancient squabbles”. If you think this is a rather odd appeal from the representative of Official Unionism, you have hit the target, rung the bell and may collect a cigar or cocoa-nut according to taste. Louis proclaims that the key issues for him are the rates revaluation, water charges and affordable social housing. One is surely entitled to ask, what then divides the OUP from the Stickies and People Before Profit? Or, to put it another way, how are the representatives of the left more radical than those of Trimble Unionism?

Traynor, Kamm and cognitive dissonance

2007-03-01T04:54:00.000-08:00

The judgement of the International Court of Justice in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro is interesting in a number of respects, not least in how it knocks holes in the arguments of the cruise missile left and puts question marks over the approved history of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. It also dents the increasing tendency for the activist school of law to get mixed up in international affairs.

The case, alleging that the Serbian government of the late Slobodan Milošević was responsible for waging a campaign of genocide against non-Serbs, was brought by the Izetbegović government in Sarajevo in the early stages of the Bosnian war. This, it should be noted, was long before the Srebrenica massacre, which was added to the case later. Thus, the ICJ has thrown out the original case – except for a few riders relating to Srebrenica – and implicitly recognised that the very real atrocities which took place in Bosnia, although definitely war crimes deserving of punishment, were not the replay of the Holocaust alleged by the media coverage of the time; and that the myth of the evil genius in Belgrade directing everything was just that.

The Srebrenica riders are there, of course. These represent the basic legal genuflection necessary to the ICTY (the US-NATO Inquisition in The Hague, no relation to the ICJ down the road). Although the ICTY is of dubious legal standing and has a tendency to make up the rules as it goes along, the ICJ was not asked to review its operations. The riders flow from the conviction of General Radislav Krstić on charges of genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre. This verdict falls within the letter of the Genocide Convention, and I will say no more about it except that the ICTY is adopting a rather broad definition of genocide which could lead to all sorts of other atrocities being considered genocide – I prefer a narrow definition, on the grounds that throwing around concepts like “genocide” or “fascism” promiscuously removes their power.

Under the ICTY system, the Krstić verdict is the bottom layer of a house of cards. The charge of genocide is extended to Ratko Mladić, on the assumption that Krstić must have been acting under orders; likewise to then Republika Srpska president Karadžić, according to the doctrine of “command responsibility” which the ICTY applies only to crimes committed by Serbs; and an unsuccessful attempt was made to pin it on Milošević, on the general principle that the leader of the officially designated Evil Nation must have been responsible. Thus the ICJ condemns Belgrade for failing to use its influence to prevent Srebrenica (although that is itself a notable retraction from the assumption that Belgrade had direct control over the Republika Srpska army) and for failing to hand over Mladić to the ICTY (assuming Mladić is in Serbia, and not say Bosnia or Montenegro). But this is thin gruel for the Milošević = Hitler school of thought.

There are a lot of people for whom this verdict will be unwelcome. The neocon-Wahhabi alliance who were the main outside protagonists will be annoyed, but they have other fish to fry now and will go on their merry way. More severely put out will be the Bosnian Muslim leadership, who had hoped to get an official designation of Serbian collective guilt and impose a Versailles-style settlement that would have propped up their failed statelet with reparations imposed on Serbia’s already ruined economy. But then, they don’t run Bosnia anyway.

What is interesting in this is the effect the verdict has on the liberal hawks, whether the hardcore neocons of the soi-disant Decent Left or the more woolly Guardian tendency. For both Bosnia has a huge significance – either justifying Iraq in the former case, or in the latter by contrasting the Iraqi disaster with the Good Intervention led by the Holy Clintons. It is also worth noting, as Conor Foley points out, that the liberal hawks like to ignore the UN Charter, Nuremberg judgements and the entire corpus of international law according to which “humanitarian intervention” is extremely illegal. Rather, they prefer to give imaginative interpretations of the Genocide Convention and extrapolate from that a “duty to protect” the citizens of enemy states from their own governments, whether or not those citizens actually want to be invaded.

So it was predictable that the Grauniad’s long-time Balkan correspondent Ian Traynor should turn in a report headlined “Serbia condemned for Srebrenica despite acquittal on genocide charge” while referring in a subheading to a “damning verdict”. Traynor skates lightly over the bulk of the verdict, while focussing almost entirely on the Srebrenica clauses. He also bellyaches about how ethnic cleansing carried out by Bosnian Serbs in 1992 was not condemned as genocide. (Traynor makes no mention of atrocities carried out against Serbs, which is par for the course for him.) As if to underline that Traynor is no loose cannon, a leader in the same day’s paper alleged that “an entire nation has been held to judicial account for genocide”.

This sort of thing is what might be expected from the Grauniad. Let’s recap what happened in the September 2006 Bosnian elections. In the Republika Srpska the nationalists – Karadžić’s SDS and the Radicals – were heavily defeated by the Independent Social Democrats, under the leadership of Milorad Dodik, long the pet moderate of the “international community”, which is how he got to be prime minister in 1998 when his party only held two seats out of 83 in the People’s Assembly. Dodik’s election platform was to uphold the Dayton Accords and make the governmental structures work. In Croat districts the Tudjmanite HDZ was not defeated by the Social Democrats, but was run relatively close. Meanwhile the Muslim community was divided between mad chauvinists and even madder chauvinists, who competed with each other on a platform of who was most enthusiastic about ripping up the federal Dayton constitution and establishing a Muslim-dominated unitary state – exactly the demand that got them into the 1992-95 war in the first place.

How did Traynor report this election? With an article entitled “Serb move may trigger new war”, based on a remark by Dodik that, if Kosovo was entitled to a referendum on independence, so too was Republika Srpska. For Traynor’s fertile imagination, this signalled that “Serbia may be plotting to annex large tracts of Bosnia”, although Dodik had said no such thing. This is to be explained not by any deliberate dishonesty on Traynor’s part – I can’t read his mind – but by his attempts to make sense of inconvenient facts within a rigid ideological framework. If Traynor regards the anti-nationalist Dodik as a “hardline nationalist”, this is only to be expected from one who regards virtually all Serbs, except for Sonja Biserko and her little clique of Imperial caddies, as “hardline nationalists”.

Turning to the more hawkish wing, I notice this load of gobbledegook from the egregious Oliver Kamm. Our boy huffs and puffs a bit about the Guardian’s coverage; argues that it doesn’t matter that the evidence was not legally sufficient to convict Serbia, because he (Kamm) was convinced by the circumstantial evidence; and maunders about the judgement of history. Generally, one could say that Kamm is not writing about the judgement the ICJ actually delivered, but about the judgement it would have delivered if the panel of judges had included great minds of our time such as Norm Geras, Dave Aaronovitch, Francis Wheen, Marko Attila Hoare, Martin Bell and, er, Oliver Kamm.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Kamm that he manages to drag this round to a discussion of his bête noire Chomsky, and specifically yet another defence of Emma Brockes’ notorious hoax interview in the Guardian. (At this point, I actually feel really sorry for Emma. With the Grauniad brass who set up the Chomsky hatchet-job having piled all the blame onto her, it will take years for her to live the episode down. Her task is made no easier by Kamm and Cohen offering unsolicited defences of an article she doesn’t defend herself.) In that case, despite both the Readers’ Editor and External Ombudsman giving short shrift to the Francis Kammovitch letter in Brockes’ defence, Kamm blustered about deficiencies in the Graun’s appellate procedures. The chief of these being that Kamm et al were not allowed indefinite appeals until such time as they got the right result. Even Alex Ferguson might look askance at that.

If Kamm’s article doesn’t appear to make much sense, there is a reason for that which, despite Kamm’s style giving this impression, has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence on the part of the reader. Roger Ebert says that the first rule of movie criticism is: A film is not about what it is about, but how it is about it. Applied to literature, the Iliad is not about the Trojan War, but about the wrath of Achilles. Kamm is no Homer, but the same rule applies. When Kamm writes about the Middle East, the Balkans, George Lansbury or Reinhold Niebuhr, these articles are not about what they appear to be about – their real subject is what a clever clogs Oliver Kamm is. This goes in spades for Kamm’s slightly disturbing cyber-stalking of Chomsky, which for some reason puts me in mind of a teenage boy obsessed with his older brother’s penis.

PS. I also notice in the Grauniad a letter from an old mucker of mine, Prof Martin Shaw, taking issue with the ICJ’s “perverse” judgement. Martin’s logic seems to be that Slobo must have been guilty of genocide because he (Martin) has said so in a book, and so have several other people he respects. Well, I’m certainly convinced by that. This is an obvious trick the eminent judges missed in their 10-month deliberations. After all, if the judges had had the benefit of reading Martin Shaw or Branka Magaš, there would be no question of reasonable doubt.

Update 6.3.07: For more on the ICJ judgement and its reception, this typically excellent article by Nebojša Malić is well worth a look.

Kuk im on, dem tone

2007-02-27T11:48:00.000-08:00

I don’t know whether Norman Geras or Eve Garrard speak Yiddish. My guess would have to be not, as neither of them has much of a sense of irony. For proof, simply take a look at this document over on Normblog. Norm and Eve, writing in a cod-philosophical style for reasons that escape me, are replying to the recent (and entirely welcome) formation of Independent Jewish Voices.

The article is entitled “Just because you’re Jewish, it doesn’t mean you’re right”, and opens with the statement that “There are people who seem to think that if a certain kind of view is held by a Jew, this gives it special authority… The fact that someone happens to think something as a Jew, or to hold the same opinion as a Jew, is neither here nor there in establishing its cogency.” Are Norm and Eve criticising the attempts by their Engagenik buddies to suppress criticism of Israel, or their assumption that goyim (except for reliable “friends of Israel”) have no moral authority to speak on the Middle East, because criticism of the Israeli state is a sure sign of anti-Semitism? No, they are not. As is par for the course with the Euston crowd, their strictures do not apply to themselves.

What the article seems to be about – and the tautologies and logical leaps don’t make it easy to follow – is that Norm and Eve are worried that the IJV people, because they are Jewish and vocally so, will be taken seriously when they have a dig at Israeli policy. This involves a lot of meandering around hypothetical questions of whether it is possible for a fierce defender of Israel to have a clearer view than a fierce critic (Norm and Eve do not say so, but they strongly imply the fierce Zionist to have a priori a clearer view); the issue of whether critics of Israel are succumbing to goyishe social pressures (although Norm and Eve disclaim the term “self-hating Jew”, here it is in essence); that critics of Israel are obsessed with striking a high moral tone (concern with Jewish morality takes second place to tribal solidarity); and that nobody can legitimately criticise Israel without giving pre-eminence to Israel’s security concerns.

While Norm and Eve put some effort into psychoanalysing the IJVniks, they skirt around the main point. That is, Israel claims to represent the entire Jewish people, and bodies such as the Board of Deputies – a self-perpetuating oligarchy – are usually assumed by the goyim to represent British Jewry in toto, although at least 90% of British Jews couldn’t tell you how the Board of Deputies is elected. It would make sense, then, for Jews who object to Israeli policies to say, “Not in my name”. This is precisely what annoys Norm and Eve, hence their designation of the IJVniks as “Self-Appointed Jews”, their apparent euphemism for “self-hating”.

For a serious look at what Norm and Eve really mean, it is worth returning to the Open Letter to Jews for Justice for Palestinians co-signed by Norm, Eve and Shalom Lappin last August. This is more revealing in that its language is less diplomatic, JFJFP being a less respectable body. The most striking thing is that Norm, Eve and Shalom rip into their antagonists for claiming that Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians violates traditional Jewish values. Of course, it depends which brand of traditional Jewish values you mean. One might expect Norm, for instance, to identify with the universalist humanism of Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg.

But no – our scientific materialists, who I am certain rarely darken the doors of a shul, cite as a moral and political authority the fucking Talmud! Specifically, they harp on some dictum of Hillel’s from Pirke Ovos about Jews who “separate themselves from the community”. Vos nokh? Is Norm growing a beard? Is Eve shaving her head and putting on a sheytl? Where do these jokers, who have no serious connection to the religious or cultural life of the Jewish community, get off telling other Jews that they have separated themselves from the community?

The answer of course is the Israeli state, the ersatz religion of many Jews who have abandoned Judaism. According to this standard, by siding with those oppressed by fellow Jews, a Jew does not fulfil a basic moral obligation but, in breaking tribal solidarity, “separates herself from the community”. Thus we have the full implication of Norm and Eve’s “Self-Appointed Jew” – those Jews who deviate a millimetre from what the Engagenik milieu determine to be legitimate criticism of Israel – and that’s a very narrow spectrum indeed – forfeit their right to be called Jews. Meanwhile, atheists of Jewish background can assert their membership of the “community” by obeisance to the Zionist golden calf.

Watching Nick

2007-02-26T11:33:00.000-08:00

Well, I have held my nose and procured Nick’s little book. From first impressions, it’s even worse than I feared. This is sad in a way, because a lot of Nick’s latter-day comrades are people I would expect no better from. Nick, on the other hand, has quite an illustrious history and used to be downright brilliant on domestic politics – Cruel Britannia was probably the best analysis of Blair’s Britain, and Pretty Straight Guys was a good read too, although the incongruous chapter on Iraq, which gave all the signs of having been added at the last moment, pointed the way to his current position. Foreign policy was always Nick’s weak point, so it was probably inevitable that his downfall would come from that quarter.

So, what are we to make of What’s Left? Well, as I say, there are people from whom nothing better could have been expected. Kamm’s book was utter bilge, but then we all knew what Kamm was like. To find Nick, sometime one of my favourite journalists, writing something like What’s Left? is deeply depressing, and it gives me no pleasure to say that he has been digging ever more frenziedly since publication, probably encouraged by good notices. It seems to me that Nick is completely losing his grip, and one thing we don’t need is a lefty Britney Spears (or, perhaps more accurately, David Icke) on our hands.

The best way to approach this book is in chunks. Nick’s previous books were after all collections of his journalism, and What’s Left? carries this on by being a series of disjointed little essays – and the essays are bad enough singly without Nick’s desperate attempts to make them fit an overarching thesis. So, when Norn Iron commitments allow, I will be blogging a review of Nick in instalments. Since the good folks over at Aaro Watch are finding the book too depressing to cover in much depth, the Sunrise will step into the breach.

Reviewing What’s Left? will also give us an opportunity to look at the phenomenon of the Decent Left as a whole. Since most of the book, those bits not recycled by Nick from his old columns or springing out of his fertile imagination, is lifted from his mates’ books and articles, and sympathetic blogs and websites, some examination of Nick’s sources will be in order. Just look at the rogues’ gallery in the acknowledgments at the back for a veritable Who’s Who of Decentism.

So, readers may expect to be regaled with occasional looks at Nick. Feedback will as always be welcome; and, unlike Nick’s composition of his dire screed, the reviewing process will involve some homework and concern for factuality.

PS. This rather intemperate review by my old friend Ian Birchall in Socialist Worker may be of interest. Not that I am likely to be more temperate, but Ian does have the advantage of concision.

The phoenix rises from the ashes, clutching a piece of bread and butter

2007-02-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

The other night I was flicking channels and happened to come across the party election broadcast by the Workers Party. I will say this for the WP, after the almost unbearable paddywhackery of the Sinn Féin Nua broadcast, theirs was pleasingly low-key. Mostly it consisted of the WP’s most prominent Northern honcho, John Lowry of Twinbrook, speaking direct to camera about various issues of the day.

What Lowry actually said was an unexceptionable run through of various worthy positions the WP has taken. There was nothing there to frighten the horses (especially since Lowry isn’t what you would call a riveting speaker in the Eoghan Harris mould) and the message might even have been attractive to some naïve person who doesn’t know much about the kind of organisation the WP is. There was some stuff about non-payment of water charges, opposition to privatisation and building an anti-sectarian socialist alternative. Which would all be fair enough, if one had any faith in capacity of the Workers Party to build such an alternative.

Rather jarringly, Lowry dropped into the middle of his oration a call for the restoration of the Assembly and Executive, and pledged the Sticks to building the anti-sectarian left alternative within Stormont, in the vanishingly unlikely event of them getting elected. How they proposed to use the structures of Stormont to do this was opaque to say the least.

And yet – this may have been pie-in-the-sky stuff, but Lowry the unreconstructed Stickie has a slightly firmer grasp of reality than the main representatives of Trotskyism in the North. The SWP’s standard-bearer in West Belfast, Andytown teenager Seán Mitchell, has two posters up. One says, “Vote for me and stop water charges! Yo!” while the other says “Vote for me and stop the Bush/Blair agenda! Yo!” (Of course I’m paraphrasing here, but I have got the essential gist. As always with the SWP, the exclamation marks and Yo should be taken as implicit.) This I suppose is the minimum/maximum programme in action.

Such ambition is not for the SWP’s deadly enemies in the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland, who not only eschew Yo politics but keep their maximum programme strictly for internal consumption and polemics with others on the far left. The SPNI’s literature concentrates on the water issue to the exclusion of virtually all else. SPNI proprietor Peter Hadden, the Oblomov of Northern politics, has divined in water charges the magical talisman that will finally slay the sectarian dragon and unite the proletariat behind the SPNI, and Peter’s trusty serfs have been beavering away in accordance with this perspective.

There is something missing here. The Sticks at least mention it, even if they don’t understand it. The Trots ignore it. I refer of course to the restoration of Stormont.

To a superficial thinker, of whom there are many on the far left, this will not appear as a problem. “Oho,” says our superficial thinker, “but the bourgeois sectarian politicians are trying to mislead the workers by making this election a sectarian headcount. We’re trying to bring working-class issues to the fore.” If the superficial thinker is a pretentious wanker, he might even say this is counter-hegemonic.

It’s a seductive argument on the face of it, and the fact that the left lacks the forces to impose its agenda is no reason for not trying. But our superficial thinker misses the point. The point of the election is to restore Stormont, and ideally to cobble together a Paisleyite-Provo coalition government. That is its function. The fact that the election will be a sectarian headcount is not the fault of Machiavellian politicians – it’s built into the process.

Our scientific materialists might do well to take note of empirical reality once in a while. That is, unless their thinking is, as I suspect, not materialist at all but a deviated spawn of mediaeval scholastic thought. And that might explain a thing or two about the economist mindset.

Trawling the net, 21.02.07

2007-02-21T04:45:00.000-08:00

Just a brief stopgap post today, flagging up things that should be in my pending tray but are having to wait behind the flurry of local news. I may or may not get back to them later, but here are some useful links in the meantime.

Courtesy of the estimable Louis Proyect, we have a critique of the Euston Manifesto by Paul Flewers of New Interventions. Obviously there is a huge amount that could be said about the Decent Left, but Paul deals with Euston much more calmly and concisely than I could manage.

Like I suspect most of its readers, I read the Weekly Worker for the gossip, not the political analysis. When they try to write for themselves, the Conrad Party of Great Britain can often be a bit ropy – this steaming pile of Matgamnite horseshit is a case in point. But I was impressed by this very good piece by Anne McShane, on Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs and how the SWP have taken it up as an excuse for their retreat into rightist puritanism.

Finally, this argument on the British left blogs about whether socialists should be in the Labour Party. The latest round can be found here, here, here, here, here and here. And probably a few other places that I haven’t happened across.

Béalbochtachas Próvach

2007-02-20T07:12:00.000-08:00

Never let it be said that Northern nationalists have lost their knack for street politics. Although they have been fairly quiescent of late, Northern nationalists have a long and not easily forgotten history of voicing their discontents, on occasion inscribing pithy slogans on placards and gathering together in numbers to give off. Thus we see a mass rally being organised for West Belfast next Saturday.

So what is the subject of the rally? Are the proletariat protesting against the restoration of Stormont and the prospect of Big Ian becoming prime minister? No, as far as can be seen most people cling to the vain hope that some deal will be done. Are they, as the left hope, all riled up over water charges? No, although nobody actually wants to pay the charge the non-payment rallies have not been growing – rather the reverse. In fact, the masses are due to rally in support of the promised Irish Language Act.

This is rather revealing of how the peace process works. At the St Andrew’s talks, in exchange for agreeing to whatever Big Ian demanded, the Provos were fobbed off with various small commitments from the Brits, the most visible of which was the promise of legislation to give Irish some sort of official recognition – the details remain vague. There’s nothing wrong with that. It should be a basic democratic position that Irish should get no less official support than Welsh does. And it’s basically a feelgood measure – it gives nationalists the illusion of having their identity recognised without undermining the basis of the Northern statelet. (“Parity of esteem” is the Humespeak term, now widely adopted by all sorts of people.)

But that isn’t how unionists have seen things. Any official recognition of the Fenians, no matter how innocuous, is guaranteed to get unionist backs up. The OUP have got stuck into the DUP for letting this dangerous proposal see the light of day. The Orange Order have taken the headstaggers and included the Language Act as part of their long list of grievances. The DUP, whose position in the past has oscillated between “English Only” and the odd semi-serious attempt to demand parity of esteem for Braid Scotch, have belatedly woken up to the fact that this small gesture to the Fenians is going down like a lead balloon with the Prods. And, while the Brits seemed to have made an ironclad commitment to the legislation, suddenly the proposal finds itself back on the table and gradually sliding off the table. Such is the dynamic of the peace process.

This in turn has started to sink into the nationalist psyche, and a march and rally are necessary to demand something that was supposed to have been a done deal. It’s also interesting that there are two overlapping constituencies involved here. There are in West Belfast many serious and devoted Gaeilgeoirí who are genuinely annoyed about the Brits’ vacillations. But there is also the luvvie wing of Sinn Féin Nua, many of whom know no Irish except “Ba mhaith liom deontas”, but whose beady little eyes lit up like Scrooge McDuck’s at the prospect of a well-funded Gaelic subsection of the grantocracy. Parity of esteem is one thing, but the prospect of those juicy grant cheques vanishing concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Am I being unduly cynical? Possibly. After all, the Language Act is a worthy cause no matter the motivation of the march organisers. It wouldn’t make much practical difference, but Gaeilgeoirí with some experience of activism behind them appreciate the value of even a small victory. But it’s worth noting nonetheless that imperialism can give and take away with equal facility. It’s the old old story – the only rights you have are the ones you can win for yourself.

Election fever hits Wild West

2007-02-19T04:32:00.000-08:00

Or rather, it doesn’t. One has so far failed to detect a wild upsurge of electoral enthusiasm from the broad masses of West Belfast. Nonetheless, the parties are well into the swing of things, and Grizzly’s mug beams down in Big Brother style from every lamppost.

In fact, if Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney is running in six constituencies, one might say that Grizzly is running in all eighteen. This time more than ever, the Provos are running a determinedly presidential campaign. So, although they are standing a five-person ticket in West Belfast – they should have four safe seats out of six, and last time out weren’t far off a fifth quota – the other four may as well be anonymous. Of course, Sinn Féin Nua do have a slight problem in that their other proven vote-getter, Twinbrook’s Michael Ferguson, is inconveniently deceased. Plus, putting Sue “Shell Dockley” Ramsey on a poster might actually lose them votes.

The main problem the Provos are facing in the West is apathy. Those who bother to vote still vote more or less monolithically for Gerry and his crew, but turnout has been plunging in recent years. Such has been the problem that, when it turned out a few months back that thousands of West Belfast residents had dropped off the electoral register, the Provos flew into a panic and launched a registration campaign that extended to free registration forms being given away with copies of the Andytown News. Now the registered electorate is back up to healthy levels, but the “Who gives a toss?” tendency is growing markedly.

Republican Belfast has been much easier for the Gerryites to control than those restless areas out in the sticks, and mooted republican challenges haven’t gained much momentum. Early moves to draft Brendan Hughes as a candidate ran up against Brendan’s poor health, so the only republican challenger in Belfast is RSF’s Geraldine Taylor, who has a certain profile in her native Poleglass. Geraldine is a tough old lady and necessarily so for somebody who annoys the Provos to the extent she does. But I suspect if Geraldine does manage to pull in some votes – and the odds are against her – it will be less because of her dogmatic republicanism and more because of her hard line against the hoods. Everyone in West Belfast knows that the place is a den of criminality, and this is unlikely to be improved by Gerry’s endorsement of the RUC. In fact, the Provos joining policing structures would just make the West an even closer approximation of Sicily. West Belfast people are fairly pragmatic folk, and there is a substantial body of opinion in favour of beating the shit out of the hoods.

This will not help the South Down and Londonderry Party, who are struggling to hold onto their single seat although, with heroic optimism, they are putting up two candidates and will have to rely on super-efficient transfers. The SDLP’s major pitch is that they were right to endorse the cops in 2001 rather than 2007, and the voters should be thanking them for blazing the trail the Provos are now following. Alex Attwood should ask himself whether that pitch has worked in the recent past. Trouble is, the classic Provo mix of crony capitalism and low-level vigilantism was remarkably popular for a long time, and, while there used to be votes to be had in being the anti-violence party, vying with non-violent Provos on the grounds of being fanatically in favour of the rule of law puts the SDLP on a hiding to nothing.

On the other side, the DUP’s Diane Dodds will monopolise the Shankill vote and be in strong contention to retain her seat. The OUP are running some anonymous numpty and the PUP, despite Hughie Smyth’s years of service at City Hall, aren’t running at all.

Which leaves the odds and sods. I’ve written about the SWP – sorry, People Before Profit’s Seán Mitchell already, and I’ll return to the far left presently. But there is some morbid interest to be had in the Workers Party’s masochistic participation. Every election, you think the WP’s once substantial vote can’t sink any lower, and every time you’re proved wrong. Is it physically possible for the long-suffering John Lowry to get fewer votes than last time? Will we actually see him dip into negative figures?

The swami of unionism

2007-02-16T10:18:00.000-08:00

Amidst all the excitement of the Stormont elections, one barely noticed footnote has been the appointment of Professor Paul Bew of Queens to the House of Lords. Lord Bew of Trenchcoat can thus swank about in an ermine robe and sit next to his latter-day patron, Lord Trimble of Garvaghy. He can enjoy the company of great thinkers of our time like, well, I suppose Jeffrey Archer and Conrad Black. And this is a fitting way for Bew to end his political trajectory.

These days Bew is best known as one of Ulster unionism’s small and hardy band of intellectual boosters. He was of course a long-time member of Trimble’s kitchen cabinet. Today he is a bigwig at the neoconservative Henry “Scoop” Jackson Society, a body whose patrons are a motley assortment of Cold War loons and whose journalistic farmhands include towering intellects like the oleaginous Kissingerite Oliver Kamm and the howling Croat nationalist Marko Attila Hoare. This marks him out as an honorary member of Nick Cohen’s Decent Left. But ‘twas not always thus. For most of his career, Bew was an early Althusserian Stalinist, and had some claims to be one of Ireland’s leading Marxist intellectuals.

It has to be said, though, that this was Marxism of a very peculiar kind. Bew was a member of the Workers Party, a group that managed to marry Irish Republicanism with Stalinism and replicate the least attractive features of both. Indeed, Bew adorned the WP’s ard chomhairle for many a year. His Marxism was therefore geared towards the practical needs of his sect. In doing so, it reached a level of sophistry wondrous to behold.

The best example can be found by simply turning to the seminal book The State in Northern Ireland, 1921-72: Political Forces and Social Classes (1979), by Swami Bew and his disciples Gibbon and Patterson. Don’t bother with the book as a whole – what you need to know is in the introduction. Therein Bew, Gibbon and Patterson declare that they have produced the first Marxist analysis of Norn Iron – all that has gone before is not Marxism but “Connollyism”. The three stooges dispense with this unscientific doctrine and restore Marxist orthodoxy by stripping out all that bollocks about imperialism (Leninist or otherwise). Instead, the Orange Bantustan was declared to be a normal bourgeois state, where sectarianism was a mere excrescence. In fact, there was a class struggle between “reactionary” and “progressive” wings of unionism, and the job of socialists was to support the progressive wing in its project of reform. Totally absent was any reference to the nationalist working class, except insofar as this imaginary progressive unionism had to be defended against the “Provo fascists”. Bew simply followed the logic of his ideology by becoming an advisor to David Trimble, the leader of unionism’s progressive wing.

But even before Bew made the break to unionism, this gobbledegook became part of the official theory of the Workers Party, and served to mislead the many thousands of workers influenced by that group down the years. It also influenced whole generations of politics students at Queens, where Bew acted as mentor to leading intellectuals like Austen Morgan (hagiographer of Connolly’s opponent Walker), professional red-baiter Anthony McIntyre and, er, Ian Óg Paisley. And goodness knows how many young socialists had their radicalism knocked out of them by exposure to this provincial variant of Stalinism.

So now Bew, alleged “expert on the Troubles”, scourge of any socialist who claimed imperialism had any relation to modern Ireland, has joined the appointed house of British imperialism’s legislature. In his rightward gallop, he now figures as an analogue to the late Gerry Fitt, only without the working-class background and instincts. And his former disciples must be green with envy that they haven’t been elevated alongside him. Having done just as much damage as Bew, surely they deserve a pleasant little sinecure on the red benches.

The double-headed monster of opportunism

2007-02-16T02:04:00.000-08:00

Still on the theme of the candidate lists for Stormont, there is a tale almost as odd as that of Bob McCartney’s ability to be in six places at once. (Eat your heart out, Padre Pio!) That is the intervention of the Socialist Workers Party. Readers with even a fleeting experience of the SWP will be aware of their addiction to setting up front groups, so much so that it’s a bit of a surprise these days when they do anything under their own name. But this time around, in deploying two fronts simultaneously, they are really spoiling us.

Since Eamonn McCann has been polling respectable if not earth-shattering results in the city-state of Derry, it was inevitable that he would run this time in Foyle. Eamonn’s candidacy is in the name of his established vehicle, the Socialist Environmental Alliance. One might, then, have expected that any other candidates would run as SEA, as with the SWP’s unsuccessful foray into the Belfast Corporation elections a few years back.

But no! Let me introduce you to 19-year-old Seán Mitchell, who is standing for election in West Belfast. Seán, a most articulate and likeable young fellow, is an active member of the SWP. He is not however a candidate of the Socialist Environmental Alliance. He is the candidate of the People Before Profit Alliance.

Huh?

The PBPA (or PB4P for the Indymedia trendies) is of course the electoral front being mobilised by the 26-county majority of the SWP for the upcoming elections to the Free State Assembly. Why then is it being extended to the North, when the SWP already has a perfectly serviceable 6-county electoral front? I spent quite a long time in the old SWM, and consider myself reasonably well-versed in the Zen of Kieranism, but this has even me scratching my head. Maybe there was a plan to extend People Before Profit across the North, but Derry parochialism vetoed the move. Or maybe it’s simply another example of the unthinking left. Just when you think these bozos can’t get any dafter, they prove you wrong.

It takes me back to the early 90s, when the Socialist Party bore mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device Militant Labour. There was quite a grand launch in Belfast for Militant Labour, which had been formed, so we were told, from the fusion of Militant, the Labour & Trade Union Group, the Young Socialists and Youth Against Sectarianism. In other words, a group that had spent 20 years pretending not to exist and three of its fronts. The proletariat, who I assume were supposed to be impressed by this blatant sock puppetry, greeted the historic fusion with an enormous yawn.

Such, I fear, is likely to be the fate of People Before Profit on its first electoral outing. Eamonn will probably do all right, but young Seán is almost certain to make no impact at all. The most he can hope for is to get more votes than John Lowry, but that isn’t exactly the same as striking a chord with the masses.

The mystery of the multilocating cream bun

2007-02-14T04:31:00.000-08:00

The Electoral Office has announced the line-up of candidates for the Stormont poll, and the most immediately striking fact is that Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney, leader of the UK Unionist Party, is running in six of the eighteen constituencies. Not the UKUP in six constituencies – the party is running in thirteen, in six of which the Cream Bun will be the standard-bearer. Under the Good Friday Agreement, it is not quite clear what will happen if Bob gets elected more than once – would he have to give one of his seats to a substitute, or would he have more than one vote in the Assembly? Nobody seems to know. This may seem par-for-the-course egomania from the man whose political vehicle used to appear on ballot papers as the “United Kingdom Unionist Robert McCartney Party”. Or possibly one may speculate that Chairman Bob has invented human cloning. But it’s the latest unpredictable move in Bob’s long and colourful political career.

I remember, back in the late 80s and early 90s, when Bob broke with the Official Unionists and began proclaiming a “new unionism”. This “new unionism” (it sometimes went by the name of “civic unionism”) would be stripped of the old conservatism of the OUP – this was when Smiler Molyneaux was running the show – and have no truck with the DUP’s religious fundamentalism. Rather, it would look to the dynamic, multicultural society across the water. Bob hammered the message home in endless articles in the Telegraph, the News Letter and Fortnight, and lots of bien pensants took him seriously. So much so that a certain type of cerebral unionist viewed Bob as the prince over the water.

It may seem strange now, but when Bob first got into Westminster, then set up the UKUP, he drew much of his kitchen cabinet – notably his aide-de-camp Jeff Dudgeon – from the far left, and specifically from the milieu influenced by the British and Irish Communist Organisation, who Bob had worked with in the Campaign for Equal Citizenship (although he later fell out with Brendan Clifford, and the BICO has since returned to a republican position). The BICO connection would also explain Bob’s close links with the small neo-unionist coterie in the British Labour Party which at the time was going under the banner of Democracy Now. This included Kate Hoey (still an MP on the extreme right of the party), Leo McKinstry (who has since left the party, ate all the pies, and become a why-oh-why pundit for the Daily Express) and Gary Kent (a key point-man in the Labour Friends of Iraq/Unite Against Terror/Euston Manifesto nexus). And these links would explain why Bob chose to declare himself a soulmate of Mr Tony Blair, and told the startled proletariat of Cultra that he would take the Labour whip in the Commons.

Nothing came of that, and, although Bob made lots of “modern” and “civic” noises – and, mind-bogglingly, managed to recruit the Cruiser – the essential logic of unionism still came through. Even when the UKUP was in its first flush of success, a careful examination of its candidate lists would have revealed a surfeit of headbangers who at various points had been slung out of the OUP, the DUP or both. Eccentrics like Dudgeon and the Cruiser, while they lasted, played an ornamental role rather than setting the tone. And so it worked out that, while the PUP/UVF provided Trimble with muscle, Chairman Bob provided the DUP with a brain. Punters in North Down who thought they were getting a moderate realised that what they in fact had was a Paisleyite minus the Bible.

Apart from that, Bob’s tactlessness and poor man-management skills have told against him. He lost himself a wheen of votes on publicly describing the nice people of Holywood as “rent-a-mob”. Holywood people, who will still gripe about having a Belfast telephone code, did not take kindly to being insulted by this buachaill cúinne and turned out en masse to put Lady Sylvia Hermon into Westminster. Dudgeon lost the faith and defected to Trimble; the Cruiser retired back to the warm bosom of the South Dublin neo-democratic chattering class. Most famously, five of the six UKUP Assembly members – that is, everyone bar Bob – walked out to set up the Norn Iron Unionist Party. It must have given Bob some satisfaction that his treacherous comrades all lost their seats at the last Stormont election – scant consolation, since he was out of Westminster, only scraping back to Stormont, and his main political achievement has been to gift the DUP a base they never had in North Down.

This then poses a problem for Bob, as in the upcoming election he seeks to challenge the DUP from the right. The trouble is, most of the people he might seek to recruit to his dissident unionist slate have long experience of working with him, and are none too keen to work with him again. Bob has obviously hit on the brilliant scheme of circumventing his lack of allies by simply running himself multiple times. Why be a general without an army when you can be your own army?

Hot air from the Eustie Boys

2007-02-12T11:25:00.000-08:00

If you haven’t already seen it, I urge you to read this article by Stuart over at Indecent Left. This is, by far, the best review I’ve yet seen of Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? – it really obviates the need for me to write one, although I probably will by and by. Nick is too tempting a target to miss, and from the look of it his book has enough howlers, tendentious assertions and jarring logical jumps to keep a critical reader busy for months.

While on the subject of the Euston Manifesto crowd, I note this precious little piece from Norman Geras favourably quoting his pal Oliver Kamm on the question of whether blogging is good for democracy. Norm and Ollie conclude that it is indeed a good thing to let a thousand flowers bloom, but unfortunately “blogging debate… includes a lot that isn't conducive to deliberation, in a good meaning of that word, or to open-minded consideration of the views of others”. Norm argues that what is needed is “to improve the culture of Internet discussion”.

I need hardly point out that Norm and Ollie promote open discussion by running blogs that don’t allow comments. Physician, heal thyself, I think is the phrase.

Update 21.02.07: For another cracking review of Cohen, check this out.

Architects of the Resurrection ride again

2007-02-12T04:32:00.000-08:00

A wee while back I did a review of the republican press. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that I left one journal out, and deliberately so. That’s because it isn’t strictly speaking a republican journal – in fact, it’s exceedingly difficult to categorise. I am of course referring to the Hibernian, the monthly magazine edited by Gerry McGeough, which I find compulsive reading for all the wrong reasons.

A glance over the back issues of the Hibernian, which are conveniently available online, will confirm that this is hair-raising stuff. The magazine manages to be wildly eclectic while at the same time having a consistent worldview. A lot of this is related to the personality of McGeough, who is a fascinating character. He’s a long-standing and very tough republican, and one of the most articulate critics of the Grizzlyite peace strategy, while at the same time being an extreme Catholic traditionalist, of the sort that Seán Sabhat might have recognised.

So to read the Hibernian is almost to be transported back to 1942 and the heyday of Ailtirí na hAiséirighe. There is trenchant commentary on the peace process, combined with historical articles on past republican struggles and martyrs, plus a rather worrying – due to its sectarian overtones – fixation on native struggles against the Plantation. One also finds the usual clericalist bugbears of abortion and homosexuality. It’s interesting that the February issue describes the Sexual Orientation Regulations as an anti-Catholic measure, while the Orange Order, as noted below, thinks them an anti-Protestant measure. The only charitable thing I can say about this stuff is, anyone who can call SDLP and PSF Assembly members “rapscallions” can’t be all bad.

But it gets odder still. The Hibernian goes big on Masonic conspiracies – the latest issue has a lengthy piece on the Bavarian Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group. This feeds into the regular denunciations of the “Liberal/Masonic Agenda”. You will find acres of stuff on the arcane socio-political philosophy of Fr Denis Fahey, which would appear to provide the Hibernian’s programmatic basis. The February Hibernian also has quite an interesting essay on TV as a mind control device, so I’m hoping that future issues will carry some bizarre pseudo-science as a regular feature.

What’s interesting here is that we have the development of a kind of ultra-Catholic nationalism, without any encouragement whatsoever from the hierarchy – on the contrary, the magazine is full of digs at the “useless” bishops, as well as puffs for the dangerous idea of reintroducing the Latin Mass. The genesis of this is a source of bafflement to me. Maybe McGeough shares the same literary interests as Mel Gibson. Or maybe he’s listened to some of Kieran Allen’s speeches on “Catholic nationalism”, and decided it sounds like a good idea.

The other interesting point is McGeough’s candidacy for Fermanagh/South Tyrone at the upcoming Stormont elections. Word from the area is that he might poll quite well. I would guess, or at least I would hope, that this has more to do with his stance on policing than a public approval of his more esoteric interests. The key question is, will he run a republican campaign or will he rant and rave about the nefarious influence of the Jewmen and Freemasons? If his speech at the dissident conference in Derry is any guide, probably a bit of both.

So there you have it – the most articulate standard-bearer for dissidence is a howling Ultramontanist reactionary. I am depressed.

Iris teaches us a lesson

2007-02-10T04:16:00.000-08:00

You often hear these days about the modernisers and pragmatists in the DUP. Chief among these are the husband-and-wife team of Cllr Peter Robinson MP MLA, the party’s deputy leader, and Cllr Iris Robinson MP MLA. Like most of the DUP “pragmatists”, how they got this reputation boggles my mind, although it doesn’t take much to be relatively pragmatic in comparison to Papa Doc.

Although he has been a Westminster MP since 1979, Robbo has never really taken to the Big House – his real love is his little fiefdom of Castlereagh Council. What he would like Castlereagh to be known for is having year on year the lowest rates in the North, a result of the money-spinning Dundonald Ice Bowl combined with services pared to the bone. What it’s actually better known for is being a kind of loyalist North Korea. Council meetings are marked mainly by non-DUP members squirming as Peter and Iris coo at each other across the chamber. The recent trend for Robinson children to get onto the council only promises to make this worse. And then there’s Peter’s egocentric crusade to get every street, public building and edifice in Castlereagh named after himself.

In recent years the Robinsons have been portrayed by the media as being on the “pragmatic” wing of the DUP. This seems to come less from their actual politics – they have faithfully served Big Ian for decades and have given no sign of changing their minds on anything – than their style. The Belfast-based Robbo faction is much less likely to Bible-bash than rural Duppies like “Singing” Willie McCrea. Plus, there are the makeovers, suggesting that Trinny and Susannah might have had a quiet word with them.

Peter has had laser eye surgery, removing the steely glint of his specs. He’s also replaced his traditional cowlick with fashionably tousled hair, and developed a taste for loud ties. Can designer stubble be far behind? Iris, meanwhile, has ditched her wee hard woman look in favour of cultivating a softer image, and has been styled and coiffured to within an inch of her life. She has been sexed up to the point where she now, I suppose, counts as the resident milf in a notably glamour-starved party – so much so that I would only be mildly surprised to hear she was doing Playboy.

Given Iris’s carefully cultivated soft-focus image, it seems to have come as a shock to come people that she would stick the boot into integrated education, following direct rule education minister Maria Eagle’s refusal to consider funding Rowallane College, a new integrated school in her constituency. It has certainly annoyed the Rowallane parents, who, like many parents in similar circumstances, have invested a lot in giving their kids a non-sectarian education. Plus, Norn Iron is full of dopey do-gooders, many of them in the Alliance Party, who believe integrated schools are the key to the Province’s future. How could Iris be so uncharitable to these perfectly harmless institutions?

Anybody who is shocked by this obviously hasn’t paid much attention to the utterances of the DUP’s education spokesman, Sammy “The Streaker” Wilson. Sammy has consistently and articulately defended the traditional DUP position of support for the status quo, or better still the status quo ante. That means retaining the 11+, defending the grammar schools, keeping “vocationally” oriented secondary schools for the great Prod unwashed, and allowing Catholics to have separate development. And it remains important symbolically that the state sector should stay “Protestant”, as Iris herself has been saying for ages. Integrated schools, which rock the boat in a very mild way, annoy the hell out of political unionism, the OUP as well as the DUP.

In fact, anybody with a progressive bone in their body should be arguing for a unified and secular education system in the North. Since the days of the old Stormont, this has been one of those issues where unionism can find common ground with the almost equally unlovely forces of Catholic reaction. Doing down both would be a cause worth fighting for, and if it exposes the very real sectarianism of “modernising” unionism, so much the better.

Shadow of the spooks

2007-02-08T07:20:00.000-08:00

I know this has taken a while, but it’s difficult to know what I can add to the acres of discussion about the O’Loan report – the Police Ombudsman’s report into Mount Vernon is available here (pdf) and readers might also be interested in this article by Liam Ó Ruairc of the IRSP. Although I’m not in total agreement with Liam – among other things, I’m dubious about his description of Henry McDonald as a “reputable journalist” – he gives a good overview of the situation.

The first thing to say is to pay tribute to the courage and tenacity of Raymond McCord, without whose determination to see justice done for his son the investigation probably wouldn’t have happened. Also this represents good work by Mrs O’Loan herself, in the face of persistent and long-term obstruction by a force in which RUC officers still rule the roost, and where the prevailing culture is that the cops are under no obligation whatsoever to be accountable to anyone for anything.

What’s disappointing about the O’Loan report – at least the published part – is that it doesn’t fundamentally tell us anything we didn’t already know. Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knew that the peelers were running gangs of loyalist killers for decades. What the O’Loan report does, though, is lay out enough evidence to make the strategy impossible to deny – not that that has stopped unionists from trying.

What transpires is that, during the dozen years that Mark Haddock was a police informer, he was involved in at least 16 murders, 10 attempted murders and scores of other crimes that we know about. And over these years the cops gave him £80,000. Now bear in mind the Mount Vernon death squad was one small section of the UVF – an investigation into Robin Jackson and Billy Wright’s activities in Portadown would almost certainly reveal the same scenario on a bigger scale. What this means, in effect, is that for decades on end the Brits had a small army of Fred Wests and Dr Shipmans running around, doing their dirty work on the state payroll. And in fact the state actively covered up for them, as O’Loan details when describing the phoney interviews and destroyed evidence. This of course is totally consistent with Jonty Brown’s description of the Special Branch modus operandi.

Now let’s look at the “security” justifications. This comes into play because former RUC Special Branch boss Chris Albiston, latterly head of the colonial police in Kosovo, stated in the Telegraph that mere laypeople (and implicitly, especially not uppity Catholic women) couldn’t judge operational decisions. But the main justification for running informers is to protect the public from worse crimes that might be committed – allowing informers to commit mass murder is hardly consistent with that. Again, the relationship between handler and informer means that any informer can be called in at any time and ordered to turn Queen’s evidence, but that seems never to have occurred to Special Branch. Not to mention that the Mount Vernon UVF was so riddled with informers that it could have been closed down at will.

The affair also points up the key difference between republicans and loyalists. It is true that informers in the Provos, some at a very high level – and who really thinks Scap and Donaldson are the end of that story? – were left in place for a long time and allowed to get away with all sorts of murky deeds. But the Provos were ostensibly a revolutionary movement aiming at the overthrow of the northern colony, which is why informing was a capital offence. The loyalist gangs, on the other hand, saw themselves as a “gloves-off” extension of the state forces, and it is clear that the feeling was mutual.

Probably more interesting is the political reaction. Unionism has reacted in the predictable way – Jeffrey Boy Donaldson referred to a handful of bad apples, and that view was echoed by the DUP’s Policing Board representatives under the leadership (I use the term lightly) of Ian Óg Paisley. The OUP, meanwhile, in the persons of Lord Ken Maginnis and Dirty Dave Burnside, has been even deeper in denial, protesting about the apparent “witch-hunt” against Special Branch. This is of a piece with the OUP’s recent and not entirely unsuccessful efforts to outflank the DUP on the far right.

Nationalism, meanwhile, has proclaimed that “that was then, this is now”. The SDLP of course is covering it ass, pretending that its membership of the Policing Board since 2001 has forced radical changes. The Provos, on a parallel track, have argued that the O’Loan report demonstrates why they should join policing structures in order to, um, force radical changes.

Here’s why I think this approach lacks credibility. The sealed part of the O’Loan report is probably much more interesting than the published part. Most commentators’ guess is that this part deals with the role of MI5 and its influence over Special Branch. People with any kind of attention span will have noticed that MI5 is due to take over anti-subversion responsibilities in the “Province” later in the year. To this end, it is building a whopping great new headquarters outside Belfast, which should itself cast doubt on the Gerryites’ boasting that British withdrawal is on the cards. Not to mention that MI5’s Norn Iron operation is stuffed full of, you’ve guessed it, former RUC Special Branch officers.

That was then, this is now? More like plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Democratic centralist fetishism

2007-02-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

One of the debates running through the Irish left in recent years has been on the question of “democratic centralism”, which is alleged to be a system of organisation derived from the writings of VI Lenin. Actually I think Lenin’s approach to the matter is very poorly understood, but let’s run with this a while.

There are on the Irish far left several organisations claiming to be Leninist and adhering to democratic centralism. Most leftists who aren’t in these groups are deeply anti-Leninist, not usually because they have a worked-out critique of Lenin’s political thought but rather because they don’t think much of the organisations that claim to adhere to it. A good example is the vociferously “anti-Leninist” Irish Socialist Network. Most of the ISN’s members have a background in the Workers Party, and they have a few younger activists who come from the SWP. Well might one protest that those groups are not democratic centralist but simply centralist – the experience of ISN members leads them, quite understandably, to react against loud proclamations on the virtues of “democratic centralism”.

I have my doubts about the ISN – especially about their great claims to having no leadership – but there’s something to their position. Groups like the SWP and the Socialist Party do have a tendency to treat “democratic centralism” as a magical fetish, and anyone who has been on the rough end of those groups’ regimes will know how much democracy is involved. My view is that if you strip down democratic centralism to its essential elements – you take a decision democratically, the majority rules, you carry out the decision in a unified way and minorities are given room to loyally collaborate – it has a lot going for it. Certainly there is nothing intrinsically evil about it. And you’ll notice that the form of organisation doesn’t necessarily correspond to a revolutionary Marxist party – you could just as easily run a cricket club on the basis of democratic centralism.

Nor, and this is important, does the idea contain any intrinsic political virtue. This may come as a shock to, say, SWP members who are immensely proud of their “Leninist” regime and believe that it guards them against political sin. But Fianna Fáil is organised on the basis of democratic centralism, and it has no fixed political principles at all. What’s more, despite a pronounced cult of the Infallible Leader, FF is a good deal more democratic than the SWP.

Consider this. If you want to be on the FF National Executive, all you need to do is get some party body to nominate you, and then do the rounds of the cumainn and comhairlí ceanntair trying to drum up some votes. It isn’t easy to get elected, but it’s easy enough to get nominated, and once nominated, you have as fair a crack of the whip as anyone.

By way of contrast, how does the SWP elect its Political Committee? What happens is that at the annual conference – usually right at the end of proceedings – the outgoing PC will nominate a “slate” of 10 or 12 names to be the new PC. Most of those names don’t change from year to year, but there are normally a couple of new faces to give the impression of fresh blood.

It’s important to realise that the slate, once proposed, can’t be amended. If you, the conference delegate, would like to remove Kevin Wingfield and substitute Paul O’Brien, you can’t propose that. You have to vote for or against the slate as a whole. Or else you can put forward an alternative slate, meaning you have to twist people’s arms to see if they’ll put themselves forward against the existing leadership. Given the SWP’s absurdly draconian restrictions on members associating with each other, which make it impossible to organise opposition outside the conference, actually getting an opposition together over the 48 hours of the conference itself is beyond any but the most energetic factionalist, and almost certainly more trouble than it’s worth. Not to mention that any member suspected of being an oppositionist will quickly find herself an ex-member.

This anti-democratic procedure explains how a group of “leaders” with scarce any experience in leading anything but their own small sect get to hold seats on the PC on a more or less permanent basis, sometimes for decades on end. There is no fresh blood except for a select few promoted by the permanent leadership, who invariably become clones. There is no fresh thinking except that coming from the papal curia in London, which itself is “elected” on the same basis, and with the same results. I know most of the Irish SWP leadership reasonably well, and while there is undoubtedly talent there, there is nothing that justifies anyone holding a leadership position for 25 or 30 years unbroken. In a proper political party, many if not most of these people would have been out on their ear years ago.

SWP members who are interested in the health of their organisation – and they do exist – might be well advised to ponder whether the slate system, which is also used for such purposes as electing conference and NC delegates, is really all it’s cracked up to be. They might also consider the question of term limits or compulsory rotation for leading members. A spell at the grassroots might do some people good, especially Kieran.

Blunt force trauma

2007-02-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

Shortly the massed ranks of the DUP’s Assembly candidates will gather to have their candidacies formally ratified by the party and to receive the benediction of their Supreme Spiritual Leader, Pope Ian. But what will surely be played as a triumphant event has been a little overshadowed by well-sourced reports about the “contract” prospective DUP candidates are having to sign, which looks more like a contract on the candidates. It certainly sheds some light on the mafia-style tactics Papa Doc uses to rule the misnamed Democratic Unionist Party with a rod of iron.

The fines are a case in point. It has been reported that fines up to £20,000 may be imposed on MLAs who vote against the party whip. Various Duppies have protested that fines are a well-established part of their party’s disciplinary system. This is true – one often hears of DUP representatives having to fork up fifty or a hundred quid for missing a meeting without a good excuse. But, even bearing in mind the generous salary package for a Stormont MLA, twenty grand seems a bit steep.

Then there are the pre-signed resignation letters. This is the silver bullet – any MLA who seriously incurs Big Ian’s displeasure can simply be divested of their Assembly seat. Apparently the tactic has been used on at least two previous occasions, and at least in part explains the DUP’s impressive disciplinary record. I have a sneaking feeling this scheme may have been borrowed from Ross Perot – in his book Better Than Sex, the late Hunter Thompson relates how in the 1992 presidential election he wanted to be a Perot delegate to the Electoral College, though he didn’t plan on voting for Perot. The little weasel sent HST an undated resignation letter to sign before he could be considered as a delegate.

The background to this is the emergence of candidates trying to challenge the DUP from the right, analogous to the dissident republican challenge to Grizzly. Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney is the leading light here, although his habit of losing friends and alienating people tends to militate against a united slate. Nonetheless, challenges to the DUP there will undoubtedly be.

I suppose the DUP could be considered a victim of its own success. During the late 90s the party’s electoral gains came at the expense of the flotsam and jetsam of independents and micro-parties abounding in unionism at the time, the wreck of the McCartneyite Hesperus. Then a few years back it cleaned up as the Donaldsonite wing of the OUP defected wholesale. This, as it happens, has simply relocated the OUP’s internal contradictions into the DUP. And now the other wing of the influx is turning around to bite Ian’s bum. Who says there’s no such thing as poetic justice?

Update 10.02.07: The twenty grand fine seems to have been a bit of an embarrassment for the DUP. MLAs now face a fine of a mere £2000 for breaking the party whip.

Shock Orange claim: Gays endanger union

2007-02-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

Last Friday night, Orange Order bigwig Drew Nelson gave an oration to the broad masses of Newtownards on how, to use loyalism’s favourite phrase of the moment, Norn Iron was becoming a “cold house” for Prods. In other words, the Fenians are getting everything and we are now the oppressed people. (Not, of course, that the Fenians were oppressed in the first place, and, even if they were, it’s no more than they deserved.)

Unfortunately, the News Letter’s website isn’t the most navigable, so I haven’t yet been able to find a link to the big spread the Voice of Bigotry did on Saturday morning on the theme of how God’s Wee Ulster was being steadily de-Orangeised. Bro Nelson’s main complaint, among many, was that the DUP had failed to secure as part of the St Andrew’s talks the Loyal Orders’ statutory right to have coat-trailing marches in areas where they weren’t wanted. And that really is what the Orangemen mean by the “right to march” – anybody with the misfortune to live in a Protestant area will be well aware that Orange marches are far from being an endangered species.

Bro Nelson, though, had a few other strings to his bow. There was an entirely predictable gripe about the promised Irish Language Act, which the Prodocracy seem to think will be the end of civilisation, while conversely the luvvie wing of Sinn Féin Nua are almost orgasmic with expectation. I do wish people would have a look at what the Welsh Language Act has (or hasn’t) achieved before getting their knickers in a twist about legislation which could well be a good deal weaker.

One notable thing was that Bro Nelson got fairly stuck into the new Sexual Orientation Regulations. Unionism is on a bit of a homophobic binge over this harmless bit of legislation, which for some perplexing reason it sees as specifically “anti-Protestant”. In the debate on the regulations in the Transitional Assembly it was noticeable how the 39-39 tied vote broke down. In favour of equality were the SDLP, the Provos, Alliance and the late David Ervine. Opposed were the DUP, the OUP and, with supreme bathos, Paul “Sports Massage” Berry. Not a single representative of mainstream unionism was prepared to accept that the gay community had a right to equal treatment. This was carried over into the House of Lords debate, where the assault on the regulations was led by the DUP’s Maurice Morrow (surely proof that Mr Tony will dish them out to anybody).

There has been some discussion on this blog about whether unionism is necessarily sectarian. This poses the interesting question – is unionism capable of comprehending the concept of equality? You see, it is possible to imagine an ideal non-sectarian unionism. The “civic unionism” touted around the op-ed pages by the Cadogan Group and Cream Bun McCartney, with its copious references to the “modern” and “multicultural” UK state in opposition to the “backward” Banana Republic, is of this ilk. But when you take a look at actually existing unionism, the picture is a lot less pretty. Bro Nelson’s view that equal rights for gays is anti-Protestant seems of a piece with Cllr Ruth Patterson’s statement after the anti-Chinese pogrom in South Belfast that the Chinese were compromising the “Protestant character” of the area.

I also look forward to seeing what Steven King and Jeff Dudgeon have to say on the matter. After all, it’s not for nothing that these boys have propagandised so fervently for “civic unionism”. Speak up! All those closeted gays in the Orange need all the moral support they can get.

The death agony of Blairism

2007-02-03T03:13:00.000-08:00

I don’t intend to make a habit of bigging up the Daily Mail, but I think readers may well enjoy this excellent article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Blair’s faith-based premiership. On this evidence, I would guess that Geoffrey’s forthcoming book, Yo Blair!, will be quite the read, and certainly a lot more fun than Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? Of which you can read much informed comment over at Aaro Watch.

Many thanks to the White Queen for helping to plug a bit of a gap. I promise, the O’Loan report is coming soon.

But your new shoes are worn at the heels

2007-02-02T05:34:00.000-08:00

I’m extremely gratified that my old friend Splinter has chosen to broaden out the Sunrise by inviting in guest contributors. At least, he says it’s a broadening and an attempt to bring in different perspectives – I suspect there may be some slacking going on. Anyway, I’m indebted for the platform and will endeavour to live up to the high standards of this blog.

I am an occasional reader of the Socialist Democracy website, having found that, despite a rather dour style, the Grumpy Old Men of Irish Trotskyism do produce consistently useful material. One thing that caught my eye recently was this article by Andrew Johnson on the Moriarty Report into Charlie Haughey’s corruption. It’s actually not a bad article, giving a decent recap of the essential points and trying to put the whole corruption issue in some sort of historical context. This makes a welcome change from the history-by-character-assassination practiced by yahoos like Stephen Collins, who would have you believe Charlie was the root of all evil in Irish politics.

The article, however, and this is what I don’t like about the left press, is marred by quite a bit of schematic dogmatism. This seems to be the SD house style – they don’t make many concessions to the reader who isn’t immaculately versed in their politics, and there is a tendency to conclude with their entire programme. What I would particularly take issue with is Johnson’s historical account of “the rise of corruption”, which is written in a telegraphic manner that fails to take into account some of the nuances of 26-county politics. Perhaps that can be forgiven in somebody writing from the vantage point of Belfast, but for the southern reader it’s a little jarring.

For instance, Johnson makes big play of the “de-republicanising” of Fianna Fáil in response to the explosion in the North in 1969. But FF didn’t simply ditch the First Aim of its Córú and proceed in a political vacuum. Rather, the old policy, laid down in the New Departure of 1926 which established FF as the constitutional republican party, was replaced by a new policy, enunciated by Jack Lynch in 1970 and endorsed at the 1971 Ard Fheis. This new policy, which Lynch passed off in typically opportunistic fashion as the old policy retooled for new conditions, was in fact the old Cumann na nGaedheal policy from the 1920s.

Johnson is also more than a little hazy on the divisions within Fianna Fáil in those years. It is true that, in the 1960s popular imagination, Charlie was the exemplar of Homo Mohairicus, but things were more complicated and much more interesting than that. Neil Blaney was often characterised in those days as a Mohair Suit Man, but Neil may have been, along with my mentor Kevin Boland, one of the last honest men in Fianna Fáil and a good traditional republican. Conversely, if there was one man in the FF leadership who took the lead in ditching the party’s time-honoured ideology, it was the ostentatiously old-fashioned George Colley. The events surrounding the Arms Non-Crisis are usually and correctly held to be a precursor to the 1985 split (and it was no coincidence that the “retired” Jack Lynch became the Desocrats’ éminence grise), so a more in-depth analysis would not go amiss. The politics of Ireland in recent decades has been ill served by radical historiography, and may provide more fertile grounds for research than yet another paper on 1798 in Roscommon.

I have genuinely mixed feelings about Charlie. Of course he was a shocking old reprobate and I wouldn’t want to defend his crookery for a second. But there was no doubting his extraordinary ability and I’m in no doubt that the tofu-eating South Dublin neo-democrats (© Splinter) hated him not for his failings but for his better points, most notably his populism and his residual (in fact largely rhetorical) republicanism. This I think is why so much of the spiteful commentary on his decline and fall leaves a bad taste. Charlie probably deserved a spell behind bars, but he didn’t deserve to have his epitaph written by those who never did the nation any service at all.

Preas na Poblachta

2007-01-31T11:11:00.000-08:00

As part of this blog’s self-appointed brief is to look at debates among Irish radicals, I thought an overview of the republican press would be in order. This will help us orient ourselves a little and may be of interest to readers outside the republican milieu. At some later point I’ll probably take a look at the Irish left press to balance things out.

It’s important to realise that things have changed in recent years in terms of the republican media. It used to be, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, that you just had to pick up Republican News every week and you’d get an overview of what the Provos were saying. There was no other journal of significance, indeed hardly any political tendency of any significance. In the days before the peace process, when republicans didn’t have much access to the mainstream media, a weekly read of what was effectively the Voice of Grizzly was invaluable for knowing what the boys were up to.

Not so these days. Readers outside Belfast may not realise this, but it’s much more important to read the Andersonstown News, which, together with its local satellites, fulfils a very specific function. Now, I know that the Andytown News is not formally a Provo paper. That’s the beauty of it. Máirtín Ó Muilleoir and his little media empire are able to fly kites over sensitive issues, thus giving Gerry some plausible deniability while at the same time campaigning among the base for the route Gerry wants to take. It could therefore best be described as the Ghost of Grizzlyism Future. It has, for example, been pushing for the best part of a year for endorsement of policing, which, given that Máirtín wouldn’t wipe his bum without permission, gives the lie to Gerry’s claim that he only made up his mind two months ago. I don’t like the Andytown News – it tends to remind me of the Sunday Sport without the tits – but it’s worth a look for that reason alone.

Republican News, on the other hand, I tend to read on and off – you don’t see it that much in the North. It too has a specific function, being aimed at the PSF cadre, and in particular the southern cadre. That explains why it is usually quite militant in its language, having a more strongly republican and leftist coloration. That would reflect the Provos’ southern base better – while the Andytown News perfectly fits the consciousness of the cynical ward-heelers in Belfast, the PSF membership in Dublin contains not a few people who think of themselves as radicals, even revolutionaries. I often think that being a radical in Sinn Féin Nua must cause a body a severe case of cognitive dissonance, but you can see what Republican News does for these people. It reassures people who thought they were joining a radical movement that they are indeed in one. Therefore, if the Andytown News forges ahead, Republican News tends to lag behind what the leadership are actually doing.

Actually, I prefer Republican Sinn Féin’s Saoirse, and, as I hear it now has a bigger circulation than Republican News, so too seemingly do quite a few others. I’m not a supporter of RSF, and it’s a very long time since I would have been a republican in the sense that RSF comrades would understand it, but I find Saoirse comfortingly familiar. There is never any doubt you’re reading a republican paper, and, if you ignore the improved graphics, you could almost be reading a copy of An Phoblacht circa 1975. You won’t read stimulating new ideas here – not that you’ll find them in Republican News either – but that’s not the point. This is good old-fashioned principled republicanism, just like the politics we used to know, to warm the cockles.

Now we turn to the Starry Plough – which only appears sporadically and can be hard to track down – and I’m sorry to say that, after thirty-plus years to get it right, the IRSP still haven’t mastered the art of producing a readable paper. It has varied down the years, though, and more recently there has been noticeably less of the Shining Path and Kim Il Sung stuff the Irps were so keen on in the 90s. Strange to say, you can actually find reasonably intelligent articles in the Starry Plough, though I have serious doubts, based on the entire history of the Irps, of their ability to translate a good paper position into operative politics.

It is at least a better read than the Sovereign Nation, organ of the Real Republicans. This paper’s content can best be summed up as follows: Down with Gerry! Armed struggle – yo! Punishment beatings – yo! Apart from the occasional nod to “sovereignty” in the Wilsonian sense, you will be hard pushed to find any political content. This is militarism pure and simple, and it’s more than a little wearying.

Finally, it’s worth taking a look at two more open publications. Fourthwrite, which emerged from the “republican recomposition” discussions following the 1994 ceasefire, has wide recognition and a stable circulation, and manages to provide an arena where opponents of the Gerryite strategy can debate. The magazine is patchy – generally there will be a couple of excellent articles, a couple of really awful ones, and a couple that leave you scratching your head – but is essential reading nonetheless. Fourthwrite’s strength, I would say, is its weakness – while its openness is to be commended, its lack of a well-defined line means it has trouble really taking the lead in a “recomposition” project, with contributions varying between strident opposition to the Good Friday process and willingness to remain within the Big Tent, and a consequent lack of focus.

The same could be said of Forum, publication of the Dundalk-based New Republican Forum group. Forum has a less attractive style than Fourthwrite, but makes up for it with rather heavier articles. Like Fourthwrite, the politics are basically republican, vaguely leftist, undogmatic and showing a welcome willingness to think about alternative strategies. There is indeed some political thinking going on amongst republicans, it’s just that you have to dig a little to find it.

Take it down from the mast

2007-01-29T07:16:00.000-08:00

So, the Provos’ Extraordinary Ard Fheis has voted by over 80% to endorse the ard chomhairle’s blockbuster motion on policing. This marks a further qualitative stage in the transformation of the Provisionals into Fianna Fáil Mark II. It’s hard to say whether this is the point of no return – so many Rubicons have been passed that it’s difficult to believe that anybody still gives credence to the Provos’ claims to be any sort of radical force. But what does the Ard Fheis decision mean?

First off, regular readers will be aware that I’m not in favour of accepting policing. The reasons for this are very simple. I’m not claiming that the current PSNI is exactly the same as the old RUC, although the changes made to policing practice are not half as significant as the PR would have it. Basically, any northern police force cannot but be a pillar of imperialism, and cannot but be a sectarian force. RSF correctly pointed out that the old RIC had lots of Catholic officers, but that didn’t stop it being a British force pledged to uphold British rule. I would add to that the point that non-sectarian policing in the North is impossible for the same reason that you can’t have non-sectarian unionism; that since partition, the Northern state has been based on the maintenance of sectarian privilege, and the armed wing of the Northern state must by its very nature enforce that state of affairs.

Now, the main argument put for joining the policing structures is that you can influence policing in a positive direction, making real, far-reaching changes instead of just taking a few rough edges off the old RUC. That is essentially the argument put by the SDLP in 2001, and Grizzly only differed in setting the bar slightly higher in terms of reform. This is quite persuasive, if you think the Northern state is reformable. Leaving aside the ludicrous Ard Fheis claims that supporting policing would undermine partition, that really is the key point. For decades republicans, and the majority of socialists, have taken the view that the North was irreformable. Against that was the Humeite view that sectarianism was a mere excrescence on Northern politics, and it was possible to have a Six-County state where genuine democracy and equality could exist. That is the view that the vast majority of Ard Fheis delegates have embraced.

I won’t waste too much time on the speeches from the ardán: since the latter-day Provos have developed a political culture whereby lying is held to be the height of sophistication, there is only so much you can take. I have a theory that when Elvis shot the TV, Mitchel McLaughlin was on. But to briefly recap the lowlights, Grizzly did his usual language-mangling turn, replete with all sorts of references to issues that push republican buttons but are of dubious relevance to the actual debate; copious backslapping of his intelligent and well-informed audience; and lots of gobbledegook about this concept of “civic policing” he has been pushing recently. Gerry Kelly was Grizzly without the folksiness, and I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse; the god-awful Mary Lou McDonald offered up further evidence that she never really left Fianna Fáil; and Marty McGuinness gave his well-honed “Is mise an Ghluaiseacht” speech.

And of course the delegates lapped up this tripe. Even the few dissenters loudly pledged their support for party unity. There was no walkout, which was disappointing but hardly surprising. In fact, not even the margin of victory was surprising, for a number of reasons. Most obvious of these is the arm-twisting that went on at cumann level in the run-up to the Ard Fheis. More importantly, there aren’t many ideological republicans left in Sinn Féin Nua: many have left, others are keeping a low profile, and there are many many people in the Provos who have basically stopped being republicans in anything but a Platonic sense, if they were ever republicans in the first place. There is a whole generation of party members, especially in the South, which believes itself to be radical (and that can cause the Gerryites some problems, as over a possible coalition at Leinster House) but has had zero education in principled politics. And finally, the leadership remained united – there was simply nobody of any stature willing to challenge Gerry, nor is there likely to be in the foreseeable future.

And this leaves us with the question I keep getting posed – what’s the alternative? A glib response would be to say that I wouldn’t have got myself into this position to start with – it’s difficult for me to put what PSF supporters would see as credible alternatives, because we aren’t arguing from the same premises. A better question to ask might be, what force could pose as an alternative pole of attraction? No easy answers to that one, but it at least allows us to look at the dynamics of the republican base, and the strengths and weaknesses of the tendencies that might aspire to be an alternative.

PS. I spy in today's News Letter an opinion piece by Malachi O'Doherty urging Big Ian to stand firm and not be taken in by Gerry's honeyed words. At least, that's what I think it says underneath the tangled syntax. Thus does Norn Iron's leading progressive intellectual find himself to the right of Peter Robinson.

Shilpa Shetty zindabad!

2007-01-29T06:01:00.000-08:00

I had been avoiding writing anything about Celebrity Big Brother, but I couldn’t resist glamming up the Sunrise with a brief note about the gorgeous desi rani’s deserved victory. Deserved not only due to reaction against the racist bullying, but generally because of Shilpa’s grace under pressure, ready humour and of course that fabulous Mumbaiyya accent.

A good night all around, with the three foreigners and the gay Welshman coming out tops. Jermaine “Yoda” Jackson, with his serene disposition and his Zen koan dialogue, was an absolutely great contestant – and for once I think Davina was onto something, the Jermaine Jackson Little Book of Calm surely can’t be far off. And it’s always nice to see H from Steps on the telly – if there’s any justice, this chirpy little fellow will get plenty of work out of the experience.

And an honourable bronze placing for my hero Dirk Benedict, who won over the audience with his bone-dry wit. I’m pleased to see his autobiography Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy racing up the Amazon bestseller listings. If you haven’t read this extraordinary book, I strongly urge you to go out and procure a copy right now.

For more on the class aspects of the Jade fiasco, this excellent post by SouthpawPunch is well worth your time.

And no, this is not today’s main post. The Provos will get a good kicking later.

That was the week that was, 27.01.07

2007-01-27T04:04:00.000-08:00

From time to time, it will be the pleasure of the Sunrise to bring you brief snippets from Norn Iron, stories that probably don’t merit a post in their own right but, taken together, give you some idea of what’s going on in God’s Wee Ulster. Today we will cast our jaundiced eye over the local press, which has understandably been preoccupied with policing, the conjunction of the O’Loan report and the Provo Ard Fheis being too good to ignore.

The News Letter, the voice of bigotry, was as usual almost unbearable unless you’re in the mood for unionist paranoia. The universal line was to forget about collusion or having serial killers on the state payroll – the important thing was to remember the sacrifices of the gallant Royal Ulster Constabulary GC, and protect its hallowed memory from the facts – sorry, slurs – contained in a report authored by an uppity Catholic woman. Say what you like about the News Letter, at least it’s comfortingly predictable.

I’ve never really taken to the Irish News since it discovered “lifestyle” – the old Vatican Times format had a certain olde-worlde charm to it – but it still remains compulsive reading. Not only for fully reporting stories that the News Letter and Telegraph tend to bury, but also for its inimitable letters page and its array of columnists. The latter have been in good form this week, with the focus firmly on O’Loan.

Susan McKay was wonderful as always, and Newton Emerson quite excellent. In fact, the Thursday Irish News has quite a surreal cast to it, with the humorist Newt writing hard-hitting and thoughtful pieces, while Grizzly’s messenger boy Jim Gibney is often unintentionally hilarious. Though Jim is a skilled enough practitioner of Gerryspeak to give Bangers Morrison a run for his money, even he is finding the policing debate tough going, and this week’s offering – a convoluted claim that the Provos had been right not to join the Policing Board in 2001 but were right to do so in 2007 because of the massive concessions their brilliant negotiators had won – was really pisspoor. Even better, though, was Wednesday’s offering from Brian Feeney, the Humeite hatchet-man turned Gerryite hatchet-man. Brian wrote a blistering piece about how the O’Loan report exposed the rottenness of the Northern state – which makes it all the more curious that his column the previous week had excoriated any republicans who didn’t want to join the cops.

Popping over to the op-ed pages of the Belfast Telegraph, things look pretty bad. There was a typically hateful and ignorant rant from imperialist lickspittle Kevin Myers. Keep at it, Kevin, the knighthood can’t be far off. Plus a more than usually idiotic piece from Lindy McDowell, who asked us to consider the thousands of lives saved by informers. Either Lindy didn’t read O’Loan or she was deliberately blowing smoke – in any case, I fail to see how the cops using the Mount Vernon UVF as proxy killers actually saved lives. Either way, we have a fine example of unionist “see no evil” politics.

Tele columnist Eamonn McCann found himself in the news this week, not only opening the Free Derry Museum, but addressing the proletariat of Derry along with Anthony McIntyre (now there’s a bad sign) on the subject of policing. Eamonn’s tack was the usual SWP pseudo-radicalism of claiming the cops are the same all over the world – which is how the Socialist Worker lead editorial on policing could maunder about strike-breaking in South Africa without once using the word “sectarianism”. The funny thing is that the Concerned Republicans are dying to get Eamonn to be the anti-policing candidate in Foyle – Eamonn, however, is adamant that he’ll be the anti-water charges candidate.

With all this going on, you might have expected Eamonn’s column in Thursday’s Telegraph to be on policing. But no – Eamonn laid into the Provos over, er, the National Graves Association’s plan to restored the decapitated statue of Seán Russell. Eamonn huffed and puffed about this atrocity on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, and just to make things a bit racier, included a thinly-veiled incitement to vandalise the statue again were it ever to be restored. But even Eamonn seems to have sensed this was a bit thin, so he padded the column out with a denunciation of the Medjugorje hoax and the Catholic Church’s historic links to Croatian fascism. No wonder the Prodocracy love Eamonn.

A small story you may have missed – Norn Iron’s voluntary sector, under the umbrella of the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action, called for the restoration of Stormont. Maybe it’s worth explaining that we don’t have a voluntary sector here in the sense that it exists in Britain or the South – what we have in the North is a funded community sector floating on a sea of peace grants. This corrupt setup, employing 30,000 people, is what Newton Emerson calls the “peace industry”, and it’s the biggest employer in the North, bigger even than the civil service. So the headlines should have read, “Peace industry calls for continuation of peace process”.

Also this week, I note from the court reports that nationalist councillors have failed in their bid to get Stroke City’s name officially changed to Derry. Yeah, we’re really on the road to the Republic.

Dawn Purvis was elected leader of the PUP and appointed to the Transitional Assembly in succession to the late David Ervine. She instantly got off to a flying start by refusing to meet Raymond McCord, just as her predecessor had done. Dawn also issued a statement about how the community of Mount Vernon were being victimised. Well yes, they are, by the UVF, but I suspect what Dawn meant is that the UVF are being victimised. Dawn Purvis, by the way, is a member of the Policing Board.

Finally, in view of Lord Maginnis’s fine Deep Southern performance on the news this week, we will be running a readers’ poll. Surely “Ken” is too modest a name for a man like this. So I invite readers’ comments on whether he should be named:

a) Stonewall
b) Scoop
c) Bullrun, or
d) Roscoe.

Cast your votes now!

The limits of rhetoric

2007-01-25T07:20:00.000-08:00

I happened to catch Grizzly’s oration to the broad masses at Clonard last night – you may have seen it on the telly. This is the latest and biggest of the mass meetings the Provos have been holding all over the shop in order to reassure their base ahead of the Ard Fheis vote to embrace the peelers. Even though the meetings have been carefully staged, the publication of the O’Loan report – I’m reading it now and will write something presently – hasn’t helped the apparatchiks, and widespread discontent at the base has been evident.

Gerry, though, was at his smoke-blowing best. I’ve had occasion on this blog to write about the various Machiavellian manoeuvres and rhetorical tricks that our boy uses to hoodwink the base, and they’re on full throttle at the minute. Most prominent at Clonard was the backslapping ploy. Gerry made a point of remarking how intelligent and sharp and politically engaged the West Belfast community was, and that’s the giveaway. When Gerry protests loudly that nobody can pull the wool over West Belfast’s eyes, it almost – but not quite – distracts you from the knitting.

It took me back to some of the spin-mongering tactics that Gerry used between the late 70s and mid-80s to outflank his opponents within the Provos. If you want to know the military gossip, you won’t get it here, so go and read Ed Moloney. In any case, control of the army is straightforward – the North dominated the army, Belfast dominated the North, the Ballymurphy mafia dominated Belfast, and the Murph was Gerry’s personal fiefdom. With that setup, all you need to do is invoke military discipline – and a lot of volunteers weren’t terribly political in the first place. No, Gerry’s big problem was with Sinn Féin, which was allegedly democratic and as strong in membership terms in the South as the North. This is an important distinction, because while in the North (pre-H-Block at least) SF was little more than a support network for the army, in the South it consisted of political activists who had a well-defined programme – the various iterations of Éire Nua – and were building around that programme.

So to turn what was a relatively serious political party into a cynical personality cult, it was necessary to undermine the programme and sideline those closely identified with it. Thus it was that, almost from the moment the Cage 11 boys made their pitch for the leadership, one could hear wild talk of a new generation of young, hungry radicals, influenced by Marxism forbye, challenging the old, tired, out-of-touch rural conservatives (not only Dáithí and Ruairí, I should point out, but almost the entire elected leadership of Sinn Féin). This spin was promoted heavily by Eamonn McCann, but lots of other people who should have known better fell for it. The reaction from the old guard, who the spin was intended to infuriate, is what caused Gerry to make his famous statement that there was no Marxist influence in the republican movement. For once Gerry came passably close to the truth. I do seem to remember Bangers Morrison describing himself as a Marxist-Leninist, but I strongly suspect that Danny was extracting the urine. Same goes for Tom Hartley’s infatuation with Fanon – few people read his essays, and I’m not sure even Tom took them that seriously. No, Gerry was right, the new ideology was not Marxism – it was Grizzlyism.

The point about the “left turn”, which so many people still seem to think was real, was that it was a means to an end, the end being the grabbing of power. I don’t know, and I really don’t care, whether Gerry and his satraps were still sincere republicans at that point. But they played silly buggers with politics for the sake of their own advancement, and playing silly buggers with politics always carries the danger of turning you into an unprincipled cynic. Most of the leftist posing of that period (opposition to standing for election, for example) was simply that. Ruairí is fond of saying that a militant slogan is no substitute for a worked-out programme, and whether or not you agree with Ruairí’s programme the argument still holds good. Having got rid of their established programme without putting anything substantial in its place, the Provos were left with an ideological vacuum, and as we know nature abhors a vacuum. Nonetheless, the ultra-radical posturing served its short-term Machiavellian purpose, and that was all that mattered to the Gerryites.

A similar point could be made about the infamous “grey document”, introduced by Gerry into a discussion on the updating of the programme. Written by a Provophile British Trotskyist, this little squib was a mess of wild ultraleftism completely unsuited to Irish conditions. The most notorious provision of the document was for nationalisation of the land, with farmers only having “custodial ownership”. This went down like the proverbial lead balloon with republicans in places like Donegal and Conamara, who had been having some success agitating among small farmers in impoverished rural areas. More than that, it cut at the very base of the southern Shinners, many of whom actually were small proprietors. But then, Gerry never intended the “grey document” as a real contribution to the republican programme. Having served its purpose of outraging the “conservative” southerners and burnishing the Gerryites’ radical reputation, the mad ultraleft proposals were quietly buried.

Then there was the Women’s Department. It was nearly impossible to argue against a Women’s Department, especially after the role played by prisoners’ families during H-Block – but then that was the point. To a big extent, the Sinn Féin Women’s Department served as a playpen for feminists, many of them former members of Peoples Democracy, who could bum and blow to their hearts’ content about women making their mark on republican politics and refusing to accept their traditional tea-making role any more. Its other functions were to wind up traditional republicans, who believed they had joined a revolutionary movement and not a consciousness-raising group, and to provide a loyal cadre of Gerryite hatchet-women. While Provo political correctness ensured that lots of women, some of them hilariously inept, got to fill prominent positions, none of them achieved any real influence, let alone transforming republican politics. (The same goes in more general terms for the PD defectors, who quickly found out who was boss.)

One of the great examples of this sort of legerdemain was of course the abstention debate in 1986. I don’t propose to go into the gerrymandering of the Ard Fheis, or the unconstitutionality of what was done at it, or even the pack of lies fed to delegates by McGuinness, Doherty, Maskey and the rest of the stooges. What’s more interesting, for the purposes of this discussion, is how the debate was cast in rhetorical terms. A shining vista was held out of “revolutionary TDs” holding the balance of power in Leinster House and lending invaluable support to the armed struggle. From today’s vantage point, it’s enough to make a cat laugh. But do you see what they were doing? Accepting the institutions of the Banana Republic was supposed to be the radical, even “revolutionary”, position, while revolutionary opposition to the southern state was “conservative”. I’m not an abstentionist, but even I knew at the time what a load of cobblers this was. Gerry’s “revolutionary” position was reformist to the core.

The point being that you can get away with this sort of thing for a long while – as John McAnulty says of David Ervine, it is indeed possible to fool most of the people most of the time. And if your rhetorical tricks are good ones, you can keep on using them to good effect for decades. But there comes a time when concrete reality rudely interrupts and the good old smoke and mirrors don’t work any more. My sense is that, at least for a significant number of people, the policing issue is that time.

Fortnight, voice of the neocons

2007-01-23T10:59:00.000-08:00

If there’s one thing that annoys my brain on a regular basis, it’s Fortnight magazine. Actually, it’s been annoying lots of people for donkey’s years. How this journal has got away with pissing down our backs for so long is a source of wonderment.

Let me explain. Fortnight is really a magazine of two halves. The arty-farty Pseuds Corner half, full of poetry and reviews of Belfast’s architecture, caters to Norn Iron’s thin layer of luvvies, who use the magazine to backslap each other. Nobody actually reads that half apart from the luvvies themselves. What the punters read is the political half.

Now, the thing about the political half of Fortnight is that in days of yore, when I started reading it, the mag used to be the voice of liberal unionism and was worth a look for that reason. These days, under the stewardship of Malachi O’Doherty, it’s a very strange creature indeed, the nearest thing Ireland has to a neoconservative journal. And this is despite Fortnight having grand pretensions to being pluralistic and tolerant and letting a thousand flowers bloom. This is perhaps best illustrated by looking at a few of the charmed circle who write for Fortnight regularly and set its tone.

First we have Malachi himself. Malachi has a well-worn argument for how the North can be saved from the apocalyptic forces of Provodom, and the rather less apocalyptic forces of Paisleyism. That is, the unionist middle class should get up off their arse and wrest back political leadership from the plebs. In essence, we should go back to 1966 and have a Captain Terence O’Neill figure in charge, somebody with a bit of class who can lead the great unwashed by the nose, and accept the South Down and Londonderry Party as a respectable junior partner. And Malachi is supposed to be a great progressive thinker.

Then we have the odious Henry McDonald, a man best known for his splenetic attacks on the anti-war movement and the “Provo fascists”. Henry is a signatory to the neocon Euston Manifesto, which he endorsed with the statement “I signed because I know there is a rational, tolerant left out there in Britain and hopefully also Ireland. A left beyond the 21st century version of the Hitler/Stalin pact, the alliance of the silly and the sinister, the toxic fusion of medieval reactionary bigots and totalitarian epigones. And I signed it because I saw this before - in the opportunistic alliance between ultra leftists in Britain and terrorists in Ireland whose armed campaign almost pushed my country to the edge of sectarian civil war.” I quote this in full simply to point out that Henry cut his political teeth in the Workers Party of Ireland, an ultra-Stalinist organisation which maintained an active armed wing for the whole time he was in it, and moreover an outfit that thought Saddam Hussein was the bee’s knees.

Another exemplar of progressive thought often to be found in Fortnight is Dr Anthony McIntyre, proprietor of the Blanket gossip site. Tony, for those who don’t know him, resigned from the Provos when they signed the Good Friday Agreement, and has spent much of his time since demanding that the Provos should declare their formal surrender rather than keep on pretending they have achieved anything. Tony is also an inveterate red-baiter, who never misses an opportunity to shoehorn a denunciation of the “Trots” into the most incongruous articles, and has laboured mightily over the past year to promote the anti-Muslim Danish cartoons and Irshad Manji’s dopey manifesto declaring the defence of the yuppie racists in Denmark to be the Greatest Intellectual Struggle of Our Times. Tony has also of late struck up a cosy relationship with the neoconservative Henry “Scoop” Jackson Society, where he finds himself in the company of well-known radicals like the vainglorious Chomsky-hating derivatives trader Oliver Kamm and the frothing Croat nationalist Marko Attila Hoare.

These neocon farmhands are of only morbid interest in themselves. But they do demonstrate that the main qualification for being a Fortnight bigwig is to be an ex-socialist or ex-republican willing to pen scurrilous attacks on those who still are republicans or socialists. What is, in fact, a pretty nasty neocon rag still manages, amazingly, to pass itself off as a forum for Norn Iron’s leading forward-thinking intellectuals. Personally, I find the Phoenix magazine, which has no political line and no intellectual pretensions, to be a much more stimulating read. I guess Fortnight’s continued existence is proof that nobody ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of the chattering classes.

Stuck inside of Dublin with the Dungiven blues again

2007-01-22T04:32:00.000-08:00

Today’s topic was determined on the flip of a coin, either Jean Baudrillard or a trip down Leftist Memory Lane. So any readers hoping for some French philosophy of a Monday have my sincerest apologies – instead, we’re going to put the Scorpions on the stereo, dig out the Rubik’s Cube and the old copies of Power Man & Iron Fist, and party like it’s 1982.

Nearly 25 years ago a major ideological shift took place in the Socialist Workers Movement, one that virtually nobody in today’s SWP will be aware of. This was of course the “neo-colony” debate, although debate may be putting things a little too strongly. It was decided, on the basis of a hefty document from Kieran Allen (The Nature of the Southern State), that the Free State was not in fact a semi-colonial, “imperialised” state but rather an advanced European capitalism much like any other.

The debate was unusual in that, if memory serves, the initiative did not come from Britain. One irritating thing about the SWM was that our conference could decide what it liked, but big shifts in policy would normally arrive with the Pooka, as Cliff would have a brainstorm in the run-up to the British SWP conference in November and this would then be translated into Irish terms. Now, Kieran was always basically a Cliff man – Cliff had elevated him to the leadership, after all – so it can be safely assumed that the Poms were consulted before the change was taken to the Irish membership. I wasn’t in the inner circle, so I can’t be certain of this, but I would lay money on it. Nonetheless, the drive for the change came from Ireland, though Cliff’s methodology was much in evidence.

Cliff used to have a rationale for arriving at new theoretical positions, which was based on working back from a bad position to its supposed theoretical roots, and then formulating a new theory which would safeguard his organisation against the bad position. A lot of the supporting argumentation for the state capitalist theory of Russia took the form of arguing that the Healy movement’s pro-Stalinist position during the Korean War derived from their holding a degenerated workers state position, and the adoption of state capitalism would allegedly protect us from this terrible deviation. (See also the Harman-Mandel debate in the 1980s, when Chris Harman, a very intelligent man, was forced to systematically falsify the history of the Fourth International.) Kieran’s document on the Southern state was really an application of the same method.

What exercised Kieran was the Provos’ embrace of electoral politics and a (largely rhetorical) leftism, and the magnetic pull that was having on the far left. Already we had seen Peoples Democracy, a much stronger organisation, go into a state of virtual collapse as the majority of its militants went over to Sinn Féin. We were also leaking members, albeit on a smaller scale – partly because we had fewer people to lose, mainly because PD’s concentration in the North and much more intimate links to the Provo base rendered them more vulnerable. The dominant view in the SWM was that we had to guard ourselves against the danger of defections to the Shinners, and it was that pragmatic view that informed the ideological shift.

Kieran’s basic argument was that PD had got what was coming to them because they had “tailed” republicanism – a pretty tendentious view given their and our comparative records over H-Block. But then, for reasons best known to himself, he chose to aim his fire at our theory of the Southern state, which had been pretty well established since the SWM’s formation in 1971. Of course, the preceding SWM position was not dealt with directly, as Kieran’s polemics were mostly aimed towards the extravagances of republican politics, such as the Provos’ argument that the Southern ruling class were direct puppets of Britain, or some of the absurdities developed by the Sticks under the baleful influence of Eoghan Harris. The positive argument for the new position was simply a few tables showing that various characteristics of capitalism applied to Ireland, while failing to hide the fact that this was a very peculiar sort of capitalism.

But, as you might expect, the debate centred not on the empirical evidence or lack thereof, but on the supposed consequences of neo-colonial theory. It was argued that, if we accepted the South as a neo-colonial state, we would inevitably be driven towards Stalinist-style popular front politics, towards unity with Irish capital and specifically with Fianna Fáil. This ignored the fact that in the previous eleven years we had never felt the urge to unite with Irish capital – nor for that matter had Peoples Democracy, the IWG or the LWR, all of which had substantially similar positions.

At the time I didn’t challenge this, nor did I seriously question the new position until after the SWM had dispensed with my services some years later. I was much more concerned with our line on the North, and the general view was that not only would this not weaken our position on the North, it would actually strengthen it, as we would have no illusions in the possibility of there being a “patriotic bourgeoisie”. Actually, as it happens, there were consequences flowing from the new line that we weren’t really aware of at the time, and that did serve to weaken our politics in the longer term.

The basic consequence was that the national question was confined to the North. Without really noticing it, we moved away from a perspective of a nationwide struggle for national liberation and socialism, and towards a view that in the South there was a class struggle pure and simple, with only a platonic connection to the North. That became the consistent line. It also strengthened economistic tendencies in the Northern SWM, although less consistently as reality had a tendency to impose itself. Opposition to imperialism, which was the outcome of an all-Ireland perspective, came to be reframed simply as opposition to sectarianism, which I think is the logical outcome of a perspective confined to the North. Not that we ever went over to the West British Marxism of Militant – even the most strident economists balked at Militant’s conclusions – but we gradually developed premises that weren’t a million miles from theirs.

And the moral of this story? I suppose that you have to try and base your politics on empirical reality, and think through your conclusions before you jump. And if you believe that adopting a particular dogma can ward off political sin like a cross repels a vampire, you’re likely to find the unintended consequences of that hastily adopted dogma turning round and biting you in the ass.

Not George Washington

2007-01-19T05:47:00.000-08:00

If you got yesterday’s Irish News (subscription required) two items will have caught your eye. On the front page, Grizzly was offering to meet dissident republicans to discuss their concerns and attempt to win them round to support for the peace process. Inside the paper was the text of the resolution the Provo leadership are circulating for support ahead of the Extraordinary Ard Fheis. Taken together, the two provide a small illustration of the Gerryite modus operandi.

To take the second item first, it was striking that the leadership couldn’t put a simple yes/no question on endorsing policing. Instead there is a huge blockbuster resolution containing a condensed version of the entire Provo programme, reiterating support for a united Ireland, the equality agenda, justice for victims of collusion etc ad nauseam. The reason for a rhetorical ploy like this is simple. A yes/no vote on the issue of policing would have posed all kinds of trouble for the Gerryites. Obviously there are the increasing signs of dissidence in the sticks; also, even though Belfast and Derry City are easier to keep a lid on, getting support for the New RUC past the Bloody Sunday families or Relatives For Justice, not unimportant parts of the base, might have taken some doing. The advantage of the blockbuster resolution is that you can either support the leadership or reject the programme as a whole. It’s a bind, and deliberately so.

Another obvious trap is Gerry’s offer to meet the dissidents. He’s pulled this trick a few times in the past, and it’s a good one. If they refuse Gerry’s reasonable offer, the dissidents risk looking so rabid and fanatical as to deter any wavering Provo supporters from going near them. On the other hand, if they agree to talks behind closed doors, such is Gerry’s history of mendacity that they’re even more fucked. The smart play in this situation, the jiu-jitsu move, would be to say that, while they have no desire to sit down around a table with Gerry, they are perfectly happy to meet him in public and debate the peace process in front of an audience. They may or may not win people over, but at least the Sleekit One would be out in the open where you could see him.

There are a couple of other classic Gerry strokes we might expect to see in the next month or two. One will be the wheeling out of hunger strikers, dead volunteers’ families and various heroic figures from republican history – at least the airbrushed version where Brendan Hughes was never on hunger strike and Billy McKee didn’t defend St Matthew’s. It’s a pity that the late Joe Cahill is no longer available to give one of his “I stood at the foot of the gallows for Ireland” speeches, but there must be a fair few of those on tape.

The other Gerry manoeuvre to watch for, especially now that several Stormont candidacies are going begging, will be a high-profile role for selected military men. These will be figures who are totally loyal to the Gerry agenda, but whose military careers will give the impression that our boy has a bunch of fearsome hardliners breathing down his neck. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly have both played the role to perfection in the past, so don’t be surprised if Brian Keenan starts popping up giving speeches all over the place. It’s a stroke that would be characteristic of Jack Lynch circa 1969, letting the optics suggest unbending republicanism while in fact doing the opposite.

If you’re a chess player you’ll know that with time you acquire the ability to predict your opponent’s next few moves. Gerry is a great Machiavellian operator, but he only has a certain number of strokes and after a while you get to see them coming a mile off. It’s a constant source of wonder to me that so many people keep being suckered by the same gambits time after time.

And the skies are not cloudy, part 3

2007-01-18T06:00:00.000-08:00

Today we return to our discussion of what a revolutionary programme for Ireland might entail, and we are going to deal with the place of economism in Irish Marxism. Don’t run off shrieking just yet – it isn’t as hard as it sounds, and I promise to keep the jargon down to a minimum.

The outstanding practitioners of economism today are the two major far-left groupings, the SWP and the Socialist Party. We’ll concentrate here on the SP, not to wind up my regular readers from that group – though that’s a bonus – but because the SWP’s politics constitute a moving target and so don’t lend themselves to this kind of discussion. The SP, on the other hand, are the dogmatists of economism and, to their credit, once they arrive at a position they tend to stick to it like glue. They have the merit of being consistent, even if they’re consistently wrong.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the theoretical premises and historical development of the SP’s position on the national question. Marc Mulholland has done that quite ably, and, while I have my differences with Marc, his account will do to be going on with. Nor will I go into a big long ramble about what economism means outside Ireland.

What economism means, in the Irish context, is the studied refusal to consider the relevance of the “I” word; a writing out of Britain’s role; the proposition that the Banana Republic is a normal European country, comparable to say Norway or Holland; in the North, the denial of any material basis to sectarianism; the belief that spontaneous economic struggles will lead to the defeat of sectarianism; the advancement of “workers’ unity” as the all-purpose slogan for any situation; and the often unconscious tendency to privilege loyalist workers.

The best example of this approach is the SP’s last major publication on the North, Peter Hadden’s Towards Division Not Peace. Amongst other criticisms I could make, the pamphlet is characterised by magical thinking, which postulates that whatever we say is so becomes so. Therefore, since the British conceded the original NICRA demands, plus the Fair Employment Act and some other bells and whistles, it follows that discrimination no longer exists in any serious form. Many nationalist grievances are imaginary, and furthermore nationalists should keep quiet about them, because harping on these minor grievances only militates against the workers’ unity that is held to be constantly imminent – in fact, to even raise a grievance about sectarianism is, well, sectarian. This also explains, by a complicated logical process, the Millies’ enduring belief in the talismanic power of bread and butter.

Let me explain. If sectarianism doesn’t have a material basis, it can only then be described as a form of false consciousness. And this is in fact what the SP do – in their Weltanschauung, the workers are continually and spontaneously uniting around bread-and-butter demands, only for Machiavellian “sectarian politicians” to drive them apart again. So we move from the realm of materialism to psychological categories, in a way reminiscent of that old GLC anti-racist poster. (“Are you a racist? You’d be a nicer person if you weren’t.”) When workers unite in spontaneous economic struggles, so the theory goes, they see the potential power of a united class and the stupidity of sectarian divisions. This is what the SP call “the potential of class issues to transcend sectarianism”. The process is seen as virtually automatic – to the extent that it isn’t, all that is needed is the presence of the SP to point out to workers their objective interests.

There is a grain of truth in this, but only a grain. The reality of the North is that sectarianism finds it quite easy to intrude into the bread-and-butter sphere. I wouldn’t normally quote Gerry Adams as an authority, but he is fond of telling a story about his youthful activism in 1960s Ballymurphy, when local Catholics united with Protestants from New Barnsley to fight for a pedestrian crossing on a bit of road where a child had been killed. Eventually the crossing was won, but not before a Paisleyite rabble-rouser had broken up the united campaign. Gerry draws the obvious conclusion – if the working class found it so hard to unite for a pedestrian crossing, wouldn’t they find it much harder to unite for anything substantial?

Not to say that economic campaigns can’t possibly lead anywhere beyond their immediate demands, but one has to start out by recognising the difficulty of it and being prepared to confront the tough issues head-on. Allies who are easily swayed by taig-baiting will not be reliable allies. The SP, on the other hand, draw the opposite conclusion. Because economic struggle by itself undermines sectarianism, the need is for maximum class unity at all times, and one must at all costs avoid saying anything that might annoy the Prods. This explains why, any time loyalist bigotry rears its ugly head, the SP rush out statements condemning ALL sectarianism and none in particular.

What we end up with, therefore, and ironically from people who set out to avoid the Stalinist stages theory, is a stages theory turned on its head. Instead of uniting Ireland first and then fighting for socialism, the idea is that we achieve socialism – separately, North and South – then we talk about the national question. This is how the SP reconcile their formal position of a “united socialist Ireland” in the sweet by and by with their fervent unionism in the here and now. There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.

Or to put it another way, we have a reverse Leninism, where, instead of the advanced workers taking the lead, the most politically backward workers have a veto. Where Dev was supposed to have said “Labour Must Wait”, the SP say “Wait For Labour”. Anything that isn’t a simon-pure united workers’ movement is dismissed as reactionary, and we are condemned to sitting on our arse waiting for a radical movement that lives up to the SP’s impossible standards. Which is pretty much what Militant did throughout the Troubles, when they ignored very real struggles and instead exaggerated the political significance of every little sectional strike.

Next in this thread, we’ll look at the stages theory versus permanent revolution as a strategy for Marxists.

Run Rabbitte run

2007-01-17T02:31:00.000-08:00

Irish Labour is facing the upcoming election without any serious hope of making progress, and how that has come to pass is a story in itself. A couple of years back, Labour was riding high in the polls, and, not for the first time, looked to have a serious chance of displacing the Blueshirts as the major opposition party in the Free State – if only the party leadership could press home its advantage. That “if only” is important. Pat Rabbitte, in comparison to other party leaders, gets terrific notices – he’s very highly regarded by the Leinster House lobby correspondents, and has a reputation as a great orator amongst the drunks and insomniacs who watch Oireachtas Report. But the party’s apparent strength has turned out to be its real weakness – in return for a mess of pottage called the Mullingar Accord, Pat has committed Labour to a strategy of clinging like grim death to the rotting corpse of Fine Gael. Recent polling shows Labour flatlining at around 11%, which represents no improvement at all on the last election.

The arithmetic is simple. To the limited extent that Labour has prospered in recent years, it has done so by eating into the traditional Fine Gael electorate – in particular, colonising territory in Dublin historically occupied by FG’s nearly defunct liberal wing. If Labour is to advance further – maybe not in terms of seats in this election, but lining up constituencies for future gains – it can only realistically do so by putting the squeeze on the Blueshirts. But one of the unstated provisions of Mullingar is that Labour should turn its back on developing winnable seats and concentrate in these areas on providing transfers for FG candidates. This point is not lost on activists in a number of constituencies who have put a lot of effort into rebuilding Labour’s organisation and profile, in the hope of delivering TDs in the not too distant future, only to be told that the only purpose of their candidates is to run sweeper for Enda.

Not only this, but Labour has a fight on its hands to even hold its own. The best bet at the minute is that the party will come out of the election with more or less the same number of TDs that it currently holds, give or take one or two, but even a small swing could be catastrophic. At the last election, no less than seven of Labour’s 21 seats were won with narrow margins over Fine Gael, and would thus be vulnerable to even a minor revival in the FG vote, or to Sinn Féin Nua continuing to nibble at Labour’s working-class base, or to the Greens squeezing Labour in the middle-class trendy vote – all of which would be consistent with current polling. It follows from all this, as night follows day, that the best strategy for Labour in purely electoral terms is to kick the shit out of Fine Gael. It should be, like, obvious. But then, Pat Rabbitte is a man who spent the best years of his life on the ard chomhairle of the Workers Party, while being completely unaware that the Official IRA existed.

For the last couple of decades the second largest party in the state has had no clear idea of what it stands for. Now, to give him credit, Electric Enda has a few ideas, and those ideas are pretty rightwing. On health, he has introduced the concept of the deserving sick. On education, FG proposals have sent the teacher unions screaming into the warm embrace of Minister Mary Hanafin. And then there have been Enda’s forays into law and order, where he has vainly attempted to outdo Interior Minister McDowell in the Dirty Harry stakes. And what has Pat said about this? Has he attempted to put manners on his putative coalition partner? No he has not. The practical outcome of Mullingar seems to be that Enda can say whatever pops into his head, while Pat can say frig all.

Nor can Labour make a serious pitch for the protest vote this time out. The ongoing Shell to Sea campaign in Mayo provides the clearest evidence of this. Footage of gardaí baton-charging old age pensioners should be a godsend for any opposition party worth its salt – and Labour’s weakness on the ground in Mayo is not really the point, Ireland is a small country and the national leadership could and should have spoken out. But the Corrib pipeline is in Enda’s constituency, Enda supports the project, and therefore Pat can’t say anything of substance. The upshot is that somebody will make electoral hay from Rossport – it may be local independents, the Provos or even the Éamon Ó Cuív faction of Fianna Fáil – but it surely to God won’t be Labour.

These facts have impressed themselves on Rabbitte’s critics within the party, of whom there are many. Nor has grumbling been confined to notorious malcontents like Declan Bree or Henry Haughton. There are lots of Old Labourites who would be keen to wrest back control of their party from the Sticks, and are discreetly sharpening knives even now. (Not to say, of course, that all the criticism is principled in nature. There are those in the parliamentary party who worry that Pat’s visceral hostility to Fianna Fáil is ruling out a coalition option.) One hears regular reports of anti-Mullingar sentiment in Labour Youth. Most importantly, I think, is the stance of the “rebuilders” who have been putting in heroic amounts of spadework in the constituencies. There are quite a few ambitious young councillors who don’t stand a chance of getting in the Dáil this time around, but might well be contenders in future elections. They are less than gruntled at the suggestion that their main task is to elect Blueshirts.

The most coherent alternative to Mullingar is that put forward by ATGWU regional secretary Mick O’Reilly. This is based on the idea that Labour could struggle for power in its own right – first, by attempting to maximise its own representation, then by projecting itself as the main force in a progressive alliance which would encompass Sinn Féin Nua and leftwing independents (possibly also the Greens), and which would, on current figures, be stronger in the Dáil than Fine Gael. This alliance would refuse to enter into any right-led coalition (although Mick acknowledges that this would mean the unprecedented situation of a party actually sticking to its electoral commitments). It would then fight for political hegemony in the southern state, instead of passively accepting its lot in life as junior partner to either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil.

Mick’s perspective is a seductive one, and its appeal to those activists in the Labour Party who are trying to rebuild in local areas is easy to see. It would certainly be a vast improvement on the course followed by Rabbitte and the hard-right Stickie faction who currently control the party. But is Pat interested in a grandiose scheme to try and put Labour in a dominant position in the state? No he is not. He seems perfectly happy with his lot in life. He’s firmly ensconced in the party leadership (at least this side of the election). Labour may not be a great prize, but it’s a hell of a sight better than Democratic Left. Apparently his only remaining ambition is to be Electric Enda’s tánaiste. And, on current evidence, he won’t even achieve that. What a comedown from his days as a stentorian Stalinist.

The ballad of Paul Berry

2007-01-16T02:17:00.000-08:00

Today we will take a brief break from Éire Nua (sighs of relief all round) for a special appeal. I invite you to consider the plight of this poor sap here, who has been having a hard time of it lately. This is Cllr Paul Berry MLA, representative of Newry/Armagh at Stormont and late of the Democratic Unionist Party.

Not so long ago, the baby-faced gospel singer (and when I say gospel, I mean Willie McCrea rather than Aretha) was one of the golden boys of the DUP. A big hit with the Paisleyite matrons, a pin-up for the teenagers, the youngest MLA in Stormont, a bright future ahead of him in the wacky world of the DUP. Then it all went pear-shaped, as Jim McDowell’s Sunday World scandal sheet revealed that Berry had had a close encounter with a male masseur of the gay persuasion. This episode caused grave consternation in the homosexual community, where questions were asked about what a respectable gay was doing letting his name be linked to a practitioner of a disreputable lifestyle like Democratic Unionism.

Seriously, though, the affair posed a bit of a problem for the fiercely homophobic DUP, which insists for religious reasons that its many gay members stay firmly closeted. Berry claimed he had only had an innocent sports massage, and I believe him, but the fundamentalists couldn’t tolerate the merest hint of suspicion falling on one of their own. Although Berry put up a valiant fight to remain in the DUP, even taking a court case to try and halt disciplinary proceeding, the party eventually succeeded in giving him the bum’s rush.

Since his enforced departure from the DUP, Berry had been keeping quiet. But now he has resurfaced, in high Jeff about the St Andrew’s Agreement, and is planning to run as an independent for Stormont. Probably he has been emboldened by Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney, who has been hurling brickbats at Big Ian up and down the province, and is trying to catalyse a slate of, erm, I suppose you would have to call them dissident unionists, who will be trying to outflank the DUP from the right. As ever when Chairman Bob is involved, this promises fun aplenty.

Will young Paul win against the odds, and give us an underdog story to warm the cockles? Not a fucking chance. But I’ll enjoy watching him try.

And the skies are not cloudy, part 2

2007-01-15T04:14:00.000-08:00

So today we will continue our exploration of what a programme for revolutionary change in Ireland might look like, taking the 1970s Éire Nua as a jumping-off point. Actually we will row back a bit from Éire Nua as such in the next couple of posts and deal with some underlying methodological issues which need sorting out. For the benefit of my irritable chum from the Socialist Party, who is dying to get me writing about water charges, I should give an advance warning that this post will contain a few sweeping statements which will be counter-intuitive for most Irish socialists. Maybe he should prepare to amp up his critique from “slurs” to “outrageous slurs”.

First off, I want to argue that an approach to politics which is cast purely in terms of “left versus right”, or even “Labour versus Tories”, is totally inadequate for a serious investigation of Irish politics. Political categories which may be perfectly reasonable for analysing politics in England (although less so for Wales or Scotland) fail to translate meaningfully to either the North or the Dominion of ‘Éire’, despite some pretty sophisticated efforts to make them do so.

Leaving the North aside for the moment, in the South the major ideological division is, very broadly speaking, between Republicanism and Dublin 4. These are of course shorthand terms which need further definition. “Republicanism” in this broad sense is not identical to the active republican movement, with which it has a complicated relationship. Rather it refers to the de Valera consensus established in the 30s and 40s, representing the degeneration, although not the total reversal, of the Revolution. I should emphasise that although neither Fianna Fáil nor Sinn Féin Nua are republican in any operative sense, they are popularly regarded as such by the general public (consider workers’ identification with Social Democracy as an analogue). D4, again in the broadest sense, represents the recrudescence of openly counter-Revolutionary politics, combined with an aping of historic British and Protestant-colonial mores, and a generalised hostility to “Irishness” as such. The odd points of the D4 programme with which I might have some sympathy, its (very mild) anti-clericalism and (extremely limited) sexual liberalism, are subsumed in the whole and therefore their progressive import is nullified. This is the ideological tendency which dominates the broadcast and print media in the Free State, much of the state’s institutional infrastructure and the majority of Oireachtas members in all parties bar Fianna Fáil and the Provos.

(Parenthetically, it is worth observing that British Marxism, in virtually all its tendencies, is heavily influenced by liberalism, and this has been carried over into the London-centric left groups in Ireland. Members of those groups would of course vigorously reject that identification. My point however is not that these socialists share the conscious positions of the tofu-eating South Dublin neo-democrats – they don’t – but rather that they inhabit the same cognitive universe.)

So any socialist programme for Ireland has to begin by recognising that tasks remain from the unfinished National-Democratic Revolution, and rather than hoping for a simon-pure socialist revolution, socialists should be trying to harness democratic struggles to the struggle for socialism, of which they form an inseparable part. I don’t have the time at the minute to go into a theoretical exposition of permanent revolution, transitional politics or the united front – all of which are aspects of a common political method – but the intimate connection between the democratic revolution and the socialist revolution should be axiomatic. Indeed it’s perfectly obvious to a halfway thoughtful republican who has no knowledge of Trotsky’s writings. It takes the dogma of economism to insist otherwise.

There are concrete issues flowing from this, both in terms of the sectarian colony in the North and in terms of the deformation of the Saorstát and its specific dependence on Britain, which should be the red meat of any kind of radical politics in Ireland. In my next post I’ll deal with how Irish Marxism has handled the question of democratic demands.

And the skies are not cloudy, part 1

2007-01-13T04:38:00.000-08:00

Readers of a certain age will probably recall the wee pamphlet pictured here. Yes, it’s Éire Nua, just when you thought it was safe to read a socialist blog. You’d tried so hard to forget it, hadn’t you? You thought that this was something that only Ó Brádaighite dogmatists cared about, and if those guys wanted to discuss theology in a smoke-filled room you could pretend it didn’t exist. But, begging your indulgence, I intend to reflect a bit here on the question of federalism and decentralisation, and how this might fit into the elaboration of a revolutionary programme in today’s Ireland. This will be a multi-part post, so please bear with me.

We should begin with the historical roots of the federalist policy. First you have to consider that in the republican split of 1969-70, the Sticks were totally dominant in Dublin and in satellite towns like Bray and Drogheda, while the Provos drew their strength from the West, the South and the border counties (the situation in the Six took a lot longer to be clarified). There is a standard view that this was a tidy split along lines of urban/rural, left/right, radical/conservative. This view is strengthened by ex-Stick elements now integrated into Dublin 4, who adopted the classic D4 sneer about “Rural Ireland” (anywhere more than half an hour out of Dublin). But things were more complicated – the Sticks’ rapid evolution into a rightwing Stalinist sect is a cautionary tale in its own right, while the early Provos, at least in the 26, were by no means as apolitical as usually assumed.

So we have in 1971 the publication of Éire Nua I, which was basically a social and economic programme the united Sinn Féin leadership had been working on before the split. It was a mildly socialist programme without the extravagancies of hyper-Stalinism that the Goulding-Garland faction later developed. The next year this was followed by the bit of the programme everybody knows, properly Éire Nua II, which was the bit about federalism. That was the part of the policy that was jettisoned by the Gerryites between 1979-82 on the grounds that it was a sop to the dílseoirí. I’ll get onto the northern issue in a future post, but for starters we’ll consider how decentralisation tied in with social and economic radicalism as part of an overarching revolutionary project.

Because, and make no mistake, in the early to mid-70s the situation in the North, and the ever-present possibility of it destabilising the South, did provide a revolutionary opening. In the so-called “no-go areas” in the North, there were moves, albeit very rudimentary ones, towards setting up alternative popular structures of government. The idea of linking these up via Dáil Uladh to form a revolutionary government – in essence dual power – was far from outlandish. The shadow assemblies sponsored by Provisional Sinn Féin in the other three provinces were conceived of as part of the same 32-county revolutionary process. And if the Leinster and Munster projects were little more than Provo fronts with no real life of their own, it was demonstrated that there was a potentially serious reservoir of support for Dáil Chonnacht.

The reason for this is not only that republicanism was relatively strong on Connacht, but the social conditions there could sustain a rural radicalism that included but wasn’t limited to republicanism. This flows into the reason why federalism was appealing to people in the West who weren’t necessarily republicans. The problems associated with the West – underdevelopment, depopulation, remoteness from the centres of power, the lack of a voice for the Irish-speaking minority – have been historically connected to the unevenness of Irish economic development, and in particular the overdevelopment of Greater Dublin. These problems are further accentuated by the neutered – virtually powerless – local government structures inherited by the Saorstát from the old British system. (We also have a clue here as to why radicalism in the West would express itself in a republican form, while the Dublin-based Sticks would move ever further away from republicanism.)

So you can see that a genuine popular movement in the West – the Cearta Sibhialta movement in Conamara springs to mind – would find itself open to republican proposals for radical decentralisation. Leaping forward to the present day, and even without talking in terms of socialist revolution, there is a reasonable possibility that a Dáil Chonnacht would have handled the Rossport fiasco better than the Dublin kleptocracy. To make sure of that, of course, you would require a serious overhaul of the Irish social and economic system. I will get onto those aspects of a decentralising programme presently.

I am the one you warned me of

2007-01-12T08:43:00.000-08:00

I notice that my rather facetious comments on the far left’s intervention in the upcoming Stormont election have provoked an irate response from a partisan of the Socialist Party. If you look in the comments below, you will find that I have responded politely to his substantive points. I am of course gratified that at least one Irish leftist is reading this blog, but I sense a dark cloud on the horizon. That dark cloud is the SP’s fulltimer for the internet, the famously humourless Brian Cahill, bombarding me with splenetic comments any time I say anything slightly uncomplimentary about his sect. Therefore I feel it is incumbent on me to spell out from which vantage point I will be dealing with the Irish left. Please allow me to introduce myself…

I was born a long time ago. I write about the left from bitter experience and close observation over many years. I knew the Socialist Party when it was still the RSL, and a brief glance at the timeless contents of The Socialist assures me that my criticisms of it only need updating to the extent that that organisation’s idiosyncrasies have deepened over the years. I have studied the Socialist Workers Movement from the inside, and am better placed than most to examine its Melrose Place cum Darkness At Noon internal life, as well as its public positions. I have seen things that Brian Cahill can’t possibly imagine.

This blog does not represent the viewpoint of any organisation. It represents only the thoughts of a fairly experienced socialist militant. Bearing in mind my extensive familiarity with the existing (and some no longer existing) left groups, it is unlikely that I will go out of my way to be kind to any of them. If members of the Socialist Party or the SWP take umbrage at some of my remarks, tough. If they think I’m being unfair to them, boo hoo. Vu shteyt’s geshribn that I should be fair? My approach will be, credit where credit is due and a smack in the gub where a smack in the gub is due.

If anyone is expecting this to be a flame-fest pure and simple, though, they will be disappointed. I write about the left because I am of the left. I have every intention of writing about the bigger issues of the day, and have indeed begun to do so. And my writing on the left won’t be restricted to exposés of gormlessness – although examples aren’t hard to come by – but will include more sober reflections on the far left experience, as well as some constructive ideas as to how things can be taken forward.

Nobody of course is under any obligation to pay attention to anything I say, still less agree with me. My modest hope is that some readers might find some of my posts thought-provoking, reflect on them, and use them to inform their own ideas. In this spirit I will endeavour to have a civil argument with anyone who wants to argue in a serious way, although I am under no obligation to tolerate the purely abusive and will not do so. I would like an active and interested readership, and hope that this blog can provide a forum for developing debate.

The dissident run at Stormont

2007-01-11T03:12:00.000-08:00

Having just written about Grizzly’s Amazing Disappearing Assembly Party, the obvious corollary is to take a brief look at the dissident slate, under the rubric of “Concerned Republicans”, unveiled in Toome last weekend. This is an offshoot of the dissident roadshow on policing, which has been getting sizeable audiences in a number of areas despite its progenitors – the Irps and the Real Republicans – being political tendencies that aren’t terribly popular or, it has to be said, coherent. But, given the substantial audience for dissidence implied by turnout at the roadshow and by the recent BBC Hearts And Minds poll, the proposal to run candidates against the Provos in thirteen of the eighteen constituencies gives us the best chance yet to look at both the potential and the weaknesses of the republican opposition.

There are serious practical difficulties in the face of any dissident slate – even leaving aside the likelihood of Provo dirty tricks and intimidation, many dissident supporters aren’t even on the electoral register, having taken their names off so as to avoid being impersonated. Furthermore, Republican Sinn Féin – the most substantial dissident tendency by some distance – has not only taken a stance of boycott for itself, but would not endorse any candidates who aren’t abstentionist. I think, though I’m not sure, that the Real Republicans are abstentionist towards Stormont, although the Irps and the recent ex-Provos aren’t. Given the improbability of any dissidents actually being elected, that argument may seem a little theological, but hey, that’s RSF for you.

I am also slightly disquieted by one or two of the candidates who are emerging. In particular I would mention Gerry McGeough, the voice of Catholic reaction, in Fermanagh/South Tyrone. McGeough may have a sterling record as a republican, but his rancid ultra-right Ailtirí na hAséirghe politics do constitute something of a liability for any progressive political project. I am even less impressed by the suggestion being mooted that the dissidents might endorse Eamonn McCann in Foyle. I would urge them to take a hard look at Eamonn’s programme before making a decision, and consider whether there would be the faintest possibility of them endorsing an SWP/SEA candidate other than Eamonn.

I don’t expect the dissident slate to do much business at the polls, although a reasonably substantial vote would at least lay down a marker as to the size of the audience for an alternative to the GFA/St Andrew’s process. The question is, what to do next? I think the obvious step would be to start on a process of political clarification. It would mean a serious and ongoing discussion of political alternatives to the peace process, without preconditions and without firm stances on issues like abstentionism and armed struggle being laid down in advance. Practically then, a series of open meetings in various parts of the country, along the lines of the policing roadshow perhaps, plus a forum where ideas could be thrashed out – maybe Fourthwrite would be suitable, or maybe a dedicated print or online forum – and extensive informal discussions to supplement the public side. The aim should be to develop some kind of political programme and practical plan of action that could make national liberation and socialism relevant in the current context.

I’m not putting forward any detailed ideas for what that programme or action plan might look like. But I am absolutely certain that a negative opposition to Gerry’s multiple capitulations, while it will get a hearing, is not sufficient to build on. Opponents of the GFA process are going to have to decide at some point what they stand for, put forward an attractive alternative, and try to win support for it.

The death of David Ervine

2007-01-09T07:20:00.000-08:00

Since the headlines have been dominated by the sudden death of PUP leader David Ervine from a massive heart attack, I may as well add my two cents. Without wanting to be unkind, I feel the posthumous hagiographies have left something out.

When the PUP emerged blinking into the light after the 1994 loyalist ceasefire, pundits were quick to hail them as a breath of fresh air, a contrast to the stale and calcified old unionism of Big Ian and Old Lemonsucker Molyneaux. Here you had a bunch of working-class codgers who talked about the working class and about bread-and-butter issues. (Actually they talked about the Protestant working class, but that was glossed over.) Members of the UVF were invited onto the evening news to solemnly pontificate about the peace process, while Provo councillors couldn’t talk about refuse collection without being hectored about decommissioning. Some people on the gormless left even took seriously the PUP’s claim to be socialist – I’m thinking in particular about Militant, who assisted in the writing of the PUP programme.

At this point it is usual to wring one’s hands about the wasted potential of the fringe loyalist parties. But their failure was written into their DNA. The PUP has policies on lots of issues, often good progressive policies, but, after all, it exists primarily to represent the interests of the UVF death squads. And the UVF is an armed organisation which exists for the sole purpose of defending sectarian privilege. So it was predictable that the PUP/UVF didn’t bring a radical new voice to the peace process, its main function was to provide muscle for Trimble and insulate him against DUP attacks. Ervine’s decision last year to join the Official Unionist assembly party was the logical outcome of this process. In the meantime, the PUP’s “socialism” was reduced to claiming that Catholics were getting too many goodies and the Prods should be cut in for a bigger share. Nor were things helped by the British administration’s policy of throwing money at armed loyalism in the hope of keeping the death squads quiet.

The irony is that David Ervine was probably the best chance loyalism had to develop any meaningful politics. The tributes to Ervine the man are not misplaced – here was someone who was intelligent, articulate and had indeed made a remarkable personal journey. The question is, if someone with the qualities of David Ervine couldn’t break from the shackles of reactionary loyalism, doesn’t that prove something about the irreformable nature of loyalism? If even Ervine couldn’t do it, it is highly doubtful anyone can.

Grizzly's candidacy headaches

2007-01-08T04:55:00.000-08:00

Last week when writing about the Provos’ new stance on policing, I mentioned the trouble Grizzly was having holding on to his assembly party. Things have progressed in the interim, and at least a quarter of Sinn Féin Nua’s Stormont team will not be running again, at least not under the party banner.

Now, it’s true that Gerry can’t be blamed for the loss of the hugely popular Michael Ferguson of Twinbrook, who inconsiderately went and died of cancer a while back. And three others have surfaced, issued proclamations of loyalty and then gone to ground. Tommy O’Reilly says he wants to pursue his political ambitions on the big stage of, er, Fermanagh council, while North Belfast’s Kathy Stanton, a rising star in the recent past, wants to spend more time with her young family. Another rising star, Philip McGuigan of North Antrim, has just announced that he will be standing down from Stormont, though he will remain on Ballymoney council, and given the obligatory vote of confidence to Gerry.

If this doesn’t look unfortunate, deselecting two out of three MLAs in Newry/Armagh begins to look careless. Pat O’Rawe has been quiet, but her colleague Davy Hyland – who was deselected in his absence and informed by text message – is hopping mad, and has said so vocally over the last lot of days. Davy has resigned his party membership and stuck the boot into Gerry over policing. Some Gerryite apparatchiks are claiming he didn’t raise any disagreements before, but the Provo politburo’s habit of lying to its own supporters surely invalidates that complaint even if it’s true. Now Mid-Ulster MLA Geraldine Dougan has entered the fray, threatening to resign her party membership if the upcoming Ard Fheis endorses the Continuity RUC. Both Dougan and Hyland are openly canvassing solo runs at the election.

It is significant, I think, that none of these people have shown hints of dissidence in the past – rather, they are middle-of-the-road Northern republicans. Gerry should know by now that you can’t fool all the people all the time, and policing is a lightning-rod issue that it’s almost impossible to dissemble on. It also strikes at the Defenderist roots of the Northern Provos and raises hackles among people who couldn’t care less about abstentionism or the Second Dáil.

Gerry’s trouble probably won’t end here. There have been consistent reports recently of discontent among the Provo rank and file, both in the party and what remains of the army, although Belfast and Derry City are almost ostentatiously loyal. Most of the rumbling is coming from areas like East Tyrone and South Derry, places with a history of independence and long – and bruising – experience of the Lower Falls Mafia’s organisational practices. Republicans will be aware of the fate of the Antrim cumann, where a whole layer of activists were got rid of and a bunch of heavies from Belfast sent up there to take over. South Antrim’s inability to turn up a local candidate – with first North Belfast’s Martin Meehan and now Derry’s Mitchel McLaughlin being parachuted in – is directly related to this MO. Rural resentment at the Belfast politburo could easily find an expression over policing.

Hopefully it will. The Provo leadership has benefited a great deal from appeals to unity, invocation of military discipline and just outright fear. If people like Geraldine Dougan and Davy Hyland make good on their threats to stand as independents – no matter what the limitations of their programmes may be – it would at least represent some crumbling of the monolith, and that would be all to the good. It would of course leave a lot of questions unanswered about alternatives, and I’ll return to that presently.

Leftist peace process?

2007-01-06T03:33:00.000-08:00

Sectarian polarisation in the Six Counties may be as bad as ever, but we can at least offer would-be optimists a small example of détente among the North’s tiny far left.

The upcoming Stormont election has galvanised Eamonn McCann, the Irish SWP’s best-known public figure. Over the past few years Eamonn, via his vehicle the Socialist Environmental Alliance, has stood in several elections and pulled in a respectable if hardly earth-shattering personal vote in his home city of Derry. But Eamonn is not content with Derry, he has been mooting a left slate across all 18 constituencies. The limited resources of the SWP – a mini-branch in Belfast and frig all anywhere else – will clearly not do, and allies are needed. Therefore Eamonn has issued an appeal to the SWP’s deadliest enemies, the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland (P. Hadden prop.).

Up until now, the SPNI has reacted to such calls with lofty disdain. Partly this is due to historically different stances on the North – although both groups support the peace process, the SWP has a history of sucking up to the Provos, while the Millies have established themselves as the Marxist wing of Ulster unionism. So the last time Eamonn made a pitch for an alliance, SPNI spokesman Ciarán Mulholland responded with a long-winded article denouncing the SWP/SEA’s “left republican” programme. This immediately called to mind Jack Dee’s Happy Hour (“it isn’t happy and it doesn’t last an hour”). Likewise, Eamonn’s programme was neither left nor republican. The SPNI then added insult to injury by publishing election “analyses” that boosted their own tiny vote, pretended the apolitical Dr Kieran Deeney of Omagh was some kind of radical, and ignored Eamonn.

The excuse for a new lash-up is the imminent introduction of water charges in the North. The SWP and the SPNI have both been banging the drum for non-payment, although, despite total agreement, they still can’t bear to be part of the same campaign. But, in the light of the water charge issue, and bearing in mind the precedents of Tommy Sheridan and Joe Higgins, the SPNI have hatched a Cunning Plan. It goes something like this:

1. Peter Hadden won’t pay his water bill.
2. Peter will be sent to jail.
3. The broad masses will rally around Peter and elect him to Stormont.

The SWP also have a Cunning Plan. Can you tell what it is yet?

Like one of Baldrick’s Cunning Plans, the far left perspective is so shot through with holes it’s hard to know where to start. In the first place, if the election takes place on schedule, it will happen before the water bills start arriving. Secondly, a government resort to the Small Claims Court or the Enforcement of Judgements Office makes it unlikely anybody will be going to jail. Thirdly, proconsul Hain has been cute enough to introduce the charge in stages. In the first year, only a third will be payable, making £30 for the poorest households. Who, except for an ideologically motivated far-left activist, would risk jail for the sake of £30?

Most importantly, this election, like all elections in the Six, will be a referendum on the peace process. Both left groups, who are planning a single-issue campaign, reckon they can ignore this and turn it into a referendum on water charges simply by declaring it to be so. As if!

And will the unity call succeed? The most likely scenario is that the SPNI(PHP) will tell the SWP to feck off, as they usually do. There is however a faint possibility that they might agree to a paper alliance, as long as the SWP stay 70 miles away in Derry and the Haddenites don’t actually have to talk to them or work with them.

And where do I stand on this? Idly by is where I stand. I don’t take either of these sects remotely seriously, nor do virtually the entire population. I’m much more interested in the possibility of a dissident republican slate than a far left slate. In fact, I would go so far as to say that 500 votes in Derry for Gary Donnelly is worth 2000 for Eamonn McCann. I say that not to boost Gary or do down Eamonn – in terms of formal politics, I’m much closer to Eamonn – but simply to state that a dissident run would challenge the Provos. A single-issue run by the far left, either united or separately, won’t represent a challenge to anyone.

Dead Clever? Dead funny

2007-01-04T08:32:00.000-08:00

ITV drama doesn’t usually grab my attention, but previews of Dead Clever promised something too bad to miss. Actually, I was pleasantly surprised. Remember War Of The Roses? The Michael Douglas film loved by people who love to hate Michael Douglas? Well, this three-cornered drama, centred around Julie (Corrie’s Suranne Jones) with her gormless husband Ian (Dean Lennox Kelly) and best friend Sarah (Cold Feet’s Helen Baxendale – playing the Danny DeVito narrator role), could best be described as War Of The Roses scripted by the creators of TV’s Bad Girls and performed in thick Yorkshire accents. It’s one of the most deliciously bonkers TV shows I’ve seen in ages.

The drama begins – chronologically, there are flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks in the early parts – with Ian, an obvious no-goodnik, getting himself a job at Julie’s mum’s pub. We are also introduced to Julie and Sarah as 16-year-old schoolgirls – but still played by the same actresses! Now, Jones and Baxendale are both talented actresses, but Jones is pushing thirty and Baxendale, if memory serves, is a year or two older. Putting them in gymslips and getting them to try to pass for jailbait is presumably a deliberate absurdity, tying in with the show’s exaggerated style – an alternative motivation hardly bears thinking about. Julie pairs off with Ian, fall pregnant, and has a shotgun wedding followed by a miscarriage. Fast forward ten years…

Julie seems to be doing well – she owns a car dealership and has bought Ian a pub – in contrast to her slatternly sister, an unmarried mother with a strong streak of Vicky Pollard. But this is all show, and her business is failing. On top of this, Julie discovers that Ian has been shagging her sister, and for quite some time too, as her primary-school-age nephew turns out to be Ian’s son. (We later discover Ian has also shagged Julie’s mum, just for added Bad Girls effect.) There is a three-cornered catfight, then Julie returns home, where she mopes until Ian enters in a drunken stupor. When Ian awakes in the morning, there is no sign of Julie – but there are bloodstains and a bloody knife. Ian, who can’t remember anything that happened, is arrested and sent down for murdering Julie and disposing of her body. Sarah is living in London, where she works as a book editor, but has read about the case and is in court for the verdict of 15 years.

We then jump to ten years later. Sarah, now married with kids, walks into a pub in Devon. Guess who’s behind the bar? Sarah and Julie are reunited, and looking exactly the same. (One suspects a sliding scale of time here in the “ten years earlier” and “ten years later” captions, the same way that in Marvel comics the Fantastic Four, who date from 1961, were always formed a generic “ten years ago”.) Julie explains that she had contemplated suicide that night, beginning to slash her wrists – hence the blood – then thought of killing Ian as he slept, but ended up just running away to start a new life. She hadn’t meant for Ian to get a stiff jail sentence, but reckons he had it coming.

It gets even better. Julie is writing to Ian under an assumed name, and can tell Sarah that he’s convinced himself he did it. Not only that, but she happens to have written her story down in a novel style. Sarah reads it, loves it, and takes it to her publishers. The publishers love the book, but, Sarah informs Julie, they feel the ending could be stronger, providing the protagonists with some closure. Making an entirely reasonable leap of logic, Julie then fucks with Ian’s head some more by going to visit him wearing a ludicrously transparent disguise. With the ending beefed up, the book is published, Julie becomes a bestselling author, while Ian plots revenge.

That, somewhat simplified, is the first half of Dead Clever. Later it gets even more convoluted and far-fetched. But that’s fine – black comedy is very difficult to pull off, and the main requirement is an absolute commitment to the outcome. A very promising story can be spoiled if the producers chicken out in the last five minutes (just watch Heathers again if you’re not convinced). Dead Clever doesn’t do that, it has the courage to follow its premise through to its logical conclusion. Added bonuses are some very funny writing and performances that, if not uniformly good, at least hit the larger-than-life target. In particular I would single out Suranne Jones, who takes her established femme fatale act into the realms of the sociopath with great aplomb.

If I would make any criticism of Dead Clever, it is perhaps that it could have been a little more extreme. Apart from the Grosse Pointe Blank finale, the amount of death and destruction was relatively modest. The T&A quotient was also low for a post-watershed drama. There was a brief flash of A from Lennox Kelly, for the delectation of the female audience; the T department was covered by the well-endowed Jones – even though fully dressed throughout, her mountainous bosom still tends to dominate the screen. I’m not, I hasten to add, arguing that two hours of wholesale carnage punctuated by Jones taking her top off would have been good drama – just that a similar outrageous effect could have been achieved with a bit more outrageous content and a bit less stylistic wackiness.

All in all, an unexpected New Year treat. Much in the vein of films like The Long Kiss Goodnight or Swordfish, Dead Clever was utter cobblers. But it was hugely entertaining cobblers, and I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself for enjoying it.

Provos to join the peelers

2007-01-03T08:16:00.000-08:00

If you’ve been following the news, you’ll have heard Grizzly’s remarks at the 50th anniversary Seán Sabhat commemoration down in Fermanagh, which have been hailed as the clearest signal so far that Sinn Féin Nua will be joining the Policing Board following the upcoming Extraordinary Ard Fheis. From the horse’s mouth, as it were. And while I am reluctant to take at face value any words coming out of Gerry’s mouth, the context of his speech indicates that this is in fact the case.

First you have to consider the setting. The Provos have been holding a huge number of these commemorations in the past few months, a good indication that they’re trying to reassure the punters that they are still republicans. Several members of the leadership have also been kite-flying, though Gerry has kept close-lipped. This won’t surprise anyone familiar with Gerry’s modus operandi, which is to stay silent until he’s clear which way the wind is blowing. He would certainly never have gone for an Ard Fheis unless he could be sure of the result in advance. Finally, backslapping of the crowd is always a sure sign that something is going on. When Gerry tells the broad masses they are the most politically astute people in Europe and can’t possibly be fooled, you know an enormous bamboozle is taking place. As Fionnuala O Connor has remarked, the Provo strategy has been to retreat with a swagger and proclaim victory; they have been helped enormously by unionist paranoia and supremacism.

The policing move is of course a requirement of the St Andrews “agreement”, which was arrived at like this: Big Ian told the two governments what he wanted, the governments said, All right Ian, and nobody agreed to anything. But basically, the whole procedure tallied with the Provos’ current politics, their major demand being for Big Ian to go into coalition with them and put their bums on ministerial seats at Stormont. The whole thing accounts for An Phoblacht these days having something of the aspect of the Weekly World News, minus the intentional humour. We read strident demands that that the British make the DUP live up to their obligations and prevent them running away from the peace process. Translated, this means the Brits should make Big Ian prime minister whether he likes it or not.

Will Gerry get away with it? He probably will, if only for lack of an alternative, but not without some difficulty. He has already lost several MLAs, who have either jumped or been pushed, while the dissident roadshow on policing, comprising the IRSP, the 32-County Sovereignty Movement and various independents, continues to draw audiences significant enough that the Provos have felt the need to turn up and argue their case. But the opposition is still desperately weak politically. The deselected MLAs are keeping very quiet, and the dissidents have mainly confined their political stance to lobbying the Provos, in the hope that Gerry will suddenly discover what principled politics are. Unless there is a walkout at the Ard Fheis, it is likely that Gerry will be able to go on bamboozling for the foreseeable future.

TV humbug

2007-01-02T04:35:00.000-08:00

I know it’s an easy moan, but the festive TV was genuinely awful this year. Is it just old age? Are we becoming harder to please? Or are the networks just not trying? I don’t pretend to know, but here’s a quick skim through the highlights and lowlights anyway.

This year’s X-Factor was the worst yet, and, though the show’s only three years old, it already feels tired and stale. The compulsive bits were as always the early rounds with the horrible auditions; once we get into the studio, blanditude carries the day. This time round, four fucking months of X-Factor could only produce a yawnsome finale featuring a Mariah Carey soundalike beating out an Eddie Munster lookalike with a mad hard-on for swing. And then the judges – Simon Cowell only has so many putdowns, and after a while you get to the point where you can nearly play Cowell Bingo. Besides, what do these guys know anyway? I suppose the show at least fulfils its function of providing the Christmas Number 1, for those people who care about such things.

By contrast, Strictly Come Dancing – and I know it’s pro-celebrity rather than an amateur contest – gets better every year. The format actually does give you a journey, with the celebs having to learn new routines every week, stretch themselves and improve their skills. The judges are bona fide experts whose opinions are worth paying attention to – to be sure, there’s a theatricality with the panel dividing into soft cops (avuncular Len Goodman and ebullient Bruno Tonioli) and hard cops (deadpan Craig Revel Horwood and terrifying Arlene Phillips), but these guys know what they’re talking about. And every year you get somebody really good. This year’s highlights included Spice Girl Emma Bunton, proving she can do more than strike a pose and point; teenage EastEnders actress Louisa Lytton, bouncing across the stage like a sparky wee bundle of energy; and dour cricketer Mark Ramprakash, a swivel-hipped revelation who thoroughly deserved his win.

EastEnders is never a barrel of laughs, but the Christmas edition is invariably an orgy of misery, and this year didn’t disappoint, with Pauline Fowler’s big exit centre stage. The soap runs best on schadenfreude, as if to say to the audience: Your life may suck, but at least you’re happier than these fuckers.

And so on to Crimbo Doctor Who. This was a completely generic Who story: big monster attacks Earth, Doctor defeats big monster. Plus some Time Lord gobbledegook to underline that this was a very bad monster. Good fun though. I had been dubious about Catherine Tate’s guest starring turn, but, apart from looking quite fetching in that wedding dress, she put in the sort of performance that makes me want to see her do more dramatic roles. Her acting is broad, but next to David Tennant – who went relatively easy on the shouting and eye-rolling – you would hardly notice. Plus, we have proved there is life after Billie.

Finally, thank God for the Germans, who still know how to do festive. On German TV you could enjoy folksy variety shows, André Rieu concerts, and, best of all, settle down on New Year’s Eve to watch the immortal Freddie Frinton in Dinner For One. Same procedure as every year. Magic.

Why we loved Linda

2006-12-30T03:46:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading I Think the Nurses Are Stealing My Clothes, a compilation of the best comedy work of the late and sorely missed Linda Smith. Edited by Linda’s long-term partner Warren Lakin and old friend Ian Parsons, it collects highlights of her stand-up routines going back to the mid-80s, together with her most memorable radio and TV appearances, interspersed with tributes from her friends. It really is a wonderful book to dip into.

I never met Linda Smith, but I suspect like a lot of people, after hearing her on the radio a few times you felt you knew her. She had a terrific likeability and accessibility that caused audiences to warm to her immediately, as well as a great comic voice that fairly leaps off the page here. And, although she came up with the generation of 1980s political comedy, she had her own distinctive style that actually reminds me a lot of another comic genius, Dave Allen. This is probably best explained by contrast – today an awful lot of comedy, even in the mainstream media, seems to be based on the idea that effing and blinding is funny in itself, or that you can get an infinite amount of laughs out of knob jokes. Like Dave Allen, Linda wasn’t averse to the odd bit of swearing or smut, but those become minor parts of your act when you actually have something to say.

And this was the thing about Linda – she did have something to say, and she said it in a way that was uniquely Linda. Although she was definitely a woman of the far left, and her political edge is much to the fore in this book (her wonderfully vicious bitch-slapping of Neil Kinnock is here, and if there’s any justice David Blunkett will never live down her “He’s Satan’s bearded folk singer. How can someone who looks so much like a jolly fisherman be such a miserable bastard?”) but she wasn’t a ranter. Her observational humour was as likely to take in English literature or Test Match Special as politics. And even when she stuck the boot in, she would do it in such a nice, disarming way that you couldn’t really take offence. This is probably why the Radio 4 audience took her to their hearts as they did.

I think there are a couple of reasons why Linda stood out as a political comedian. In the first place, she was a genuine working-class intellectual, coming from Erith (which the maps say is in Kent but at ground level looks like Magnitogorsk) and living for years in unglamorous Sheffield. This background gave her observations an edge that was denied to those comedians who were middle-class kids slumming it; it also meant she didn’t romanticise the English working class. She struck a fine balance between idealism and cynicism.

She also, like most leftwing comedians, was sensible enough not to join a leftwing group. She was therefore free of those left vices – dogmatism, a concern with orthodoxy, political correctness, internecine feuds with other left groups and backstabbing within the group – that, apart from being just plain unpleasant, would be deadly to any comic sense. Imagine if you will a comedian who was a fervent member of the Militant Tendency. Hard, isn’t it? Mark Steel I suppose is the exception who proves the rule, managing to combine membership of the SWP with being a very funny man. But even Mark tends to shy away from mining the rich seam of comedy in his own organisation.

But I think the key point in Linda’s success, and why she is so fondly remembered, is the personality that shone through her work. The tributes in this book invariably focus on her tremendous warmth and kindness – unlike an awful lot of socialists, she not only hadn’t forgot why she was a socialist, but she practised what she preached and embodied those characteristics that I think a better society would encourage in the population at large. Combine those human qualities with a fantastic ability to communicate, and it’s easy to see why Linda was a beacon for any of us who have ever had to say, “I’m a socialist, but I’m not weird, honest.”

Lloyd George knew my father

2006-12-24T06:32:00.000-08:00

I read in this morning’s papers that Mr Tony Blair has arranged an honorary knighthood for his great friend, musician and egomaniac Bono. This is supposed to be in recognition of Bono’s courageous struggles against global poverty and injustice.

Ahem. That would be the same Bono who hectors the Irish populace on how their country should be run, while refusing to pay taxes in Ireland? The Bono who paid a small fortune in legal fees to retrieve a pair of trousers, and who famously booked an adjoining seat on a plane journey so his hat could travel in comfort?

I realise I’m on thin ice here – U2 fans are notoriously humourless, especially on the subject of their main man’s pretensions to stand for something. But Bono seems like an intelligent bloke – does he not realise the gap between his words and actions just makes him look a teeny bit absurd? Or, like many celebrities, is he surrounded by people who can’t say no to him?

But it is at least fitting that this honour has been bestowed by another very very silly man, Mr Tony. The prime minister is just back from his tour promoting democracy in the Middle East, where he supported the Fatah putsch in Palestine, glad-handed tribal Gulf sheikhs and Egypt’s grisly president-for-life, and offered his backing to the coalition of Maronite Phalangists and Islamic obscurantists who have run Lebanon since the phoney “Cedar Revolution”. In the midst of all this, he called on “moderates” in the region (presumably those people he had been issuing endorsements to) to ally against the, er, elected government of Iran.

Yup, these two jokers certainly deserve each other’s company.

Stoner bigs up Captain Eamo

2006-12-21T07:13:00.000-08:00

Latest in the "you couldn't make it up" category:

Back on 24th November, the state opening of our wee toy parliament at Stormont was disrupted by mad loyalist killer Michael Stone, who managed to get into the actual building, toting a bag full of crude weaponry, without a cop in sight.

Now Stoner is arguing, in a five-page letter to the press, that his stunt was actually done in the name of performance art. Our man says, "As an artist I viewed the political event at Stormont as an opportunity to exhibit a work in performance art." This might be aimed at the trendy saps in Dublin who were keen to acclaim Stoner's painting as evidence of loyalism's deep aesthetic soul.

More interesting is the list of inspirations Stoner claims. This includes Big Ian (plausible enough), Pablo Picasso (huh?) and, best of all, Eamonn McCann. Eamonn's stunt at the Raytheon plant in Derry apparently fired Stoner's imagination.

One would hope that Captain Eamo would have the decency to show some embarrassment about this episode. And that goes for the SWP heads who claimed the Raytheon action wasn't a stunt but a mass action, too.

Charlie as Banquo's ghost

2006-12-21T05:41:00.000-08:00

Have I read the Moriarty Report? No I haven’t, the bastard weighs in at 704 pages. But I have read the executive summary and skimmed some of the sections, which makes me at least as well qualified to comment as most of the pundits in the O’Reilly press.

We all knew, and had done for years, that Charlie was up to his oxters in corruption. All Moriarty could really do was give the facts and figures. Of the £9.1 million figure Moriarty gives, few people can be surprised it reached that amount – some may be surprised Charlie’s rapacity wasn’t even greater. Of course, what with the secrecy and the offshore accounts, we might never know the full extent of what he was up to.

Charlie was a deeply complex character who defied easy analysis. He was also fortunate in his enemies, many of whom hated him for the wrong reasons. Des Fennell rightly says that an awful lot of the D4 discourse on Charlie is really snobbery dressed up as moral indignation. That’s not to say, however, that moral indignation doesn’t have its place, and Charlie filling his boots throughout the hairshirt 80s is enough to provoke the most phlegmatic amongst us.

What’s more interesting is Bertie’s reaction. Consider this:

A mere few months ago Charlie gets the state funeral he had thoughtfully arranged for himself. Bertie presides, a fitting tribute to his mentor.

Today, Bertie is perfectly happy to denounce the corruption of the now safely dead Boss. In the meantime, Bertie has himself had a bit of trouble in the brown envelopes department.

What’s wrong with this picture?

We have Fianna Fáil distancing themselves from the man who dominated their party for the best part of thirty years. We have Electric Enda trying to make capital, although Moriarty’s second report – into Michael Lowry – is likely to make uncomfortable reading for the Blueshirts. We have Rabbitte clinging to Fine Gael like grim death. And we have the Socialist Workers Party jumping up and down, waving their little placards calling on the gardaí to arrest elected representatives. Dear God.

Kings of the wild frontier

2006-12-20T07:06:00.000-08:00

The Irish electoral system, with the single transferable vote in multi-seat constituencies, is not only fiendishly complicated but also, by allowing TDs to be elected by tiny margins, reinforces parish pump politics and intra-party rivalries. I think it was Churchill who came up with the old crack about the opposition being in front of you, but the enemy on your own benches. Any observer of the Irish scene can tell you that Churchill didn’t know the half of it.

We are currently in a pre-election period, where candidate selection and jostling for position are the order of the day. This is an opportunity to look at the game within the game – often more interesting than the game itself. And it’s no surprise that the most fun is to be had watching Fianna Fáil, not only the biggest party in the state but also possessing a capacity for fratricidal feuds that wouldn’t disgrace The Sopranos. FF HQ is, as usual at this point, greatly exercised by constituency organisations that aren’t on message for the centralised and professional campaign Bertie Ahern wants to run. The most intransigent of these constituencies are on the West Coast, Ireland’s equivalent of the tribal areas in Pakistan’s North West Frontier, where well-entrenched local warlords scoff at the emissaries from Dublin trying to exercise some discipline over them.

Wildest of these fiefdoms is Donegal North East, where Niall Blaney’s Provisional Fianna Fáil wound up its 36 years of independent existence this summer in favour of an Historic Merger with the parent party. This left FF with three seats out of three in the constituency, Blaney joining colourful former minister Dr Jim McDaid and HQ favourite Cecilia Keaveney. At the time, Bertie made a big deal of this, and Dublin-based commentators took the Blaney move to be another of Bertie’s famously Machiavellian strokes.

Now bear in mind that the DNE constituency consists of three distinct areas, each of which traditionally provides a TD: Letterkenny town (McDaid), the Inishowen peninsula (Keaveney) and Milford (Blaney). In Donegal, local ties can be just as powerful as party allegiances. So welcoming the Blaneyites back into the fold would seem, on the face of it, to have covered all the bases. But, as Bertie should know, sometimes you can be too clever for your own good.

This is where it starts to get interesting. Although Blaney still has a powerful organisation, it is in long-term decline and he figured the best way to ensure his re-election was to be an official Fianna Fáil candidate. Apparently he was given to understand that, as McDaid had signalled his willingness to retire, there would be a two-person FF ticket – that is, Keaveney and Blaney.

At the same time, McDaid was apparently under the impression that he would be succeeded on the FF ticket by another Letterkenny candidate. At least, that’s what Letterkenny FFers thought – they were certain they would have a candidacy, whether or not that was McDaid. The upshot was that, after the Historic Merger, McDaid announced that he was reconsidering his retirement plans. He has also stubbornly resisted all blandishments to stand down. It’s hard to see what, short of a plum European sinecure, could shift him.

Now FF are in the electorally suicidal position of having three candidates in a three-seat constituency. Party HQ would dearly love to have a two-person ticket, preferably by imposing it centrally and arranging for either McDaid or Blaney to be quietly assassinated. This would avoid the inconvenience of a selection convention, which would inevitably result in open warfare between Letterkenny members and Blaneyites. However, the one thing every FF member in rural Ireland agrees on is their hatred of centrally imposed tickets, and cancelling the convention may be more trouble than it is worth. Moreover, there would be nothing to stop the shaftee – possibly McDaid but more likely Blaney – walking out of the party and going on a solo run.

Now put this in the context of the government being generally unpopular in Donegal, and the opposition parties making a strong showing. Fine Gael’s Senator Joe McHugh is odds on to take a seat; Sinn Féin Nua’s Cllr Pádraig Mac Lochlainn is also coming up on the rails, and is in a good position to appeal to disaffected Blaneyites. The result of this is that the three big FF honchos in the constituency are in a no-holds-barred scrap for two seats at most, and possibly one – and it isn’t likely, but nor is it beyond the realms of possibility that an independent candidacy from McDaid could leave the dominant party in the state with no seats at all in a traditional stronghold.

It isn’t at all clear at this stage how this situation will pan out. But Donegal will certainly be providing Bertie with some headaches in the months ahead, not to say rare entertainment for the bloody political infighting that only rural Ireland can provide. When you hear the banjo music, run like hell.

Getting started

2006-12-19T08:43:00.000-08:00

Hello and welcome. This blog is basically designed for me to sound off about whatever takes my fancy, so you're going to have the virtue of unpredictability.

Expect to see posting on far-left politics, Ireland, the Balkans, history, pop culture and lots of other stuff that I can't predict at this point. I hope to provoke, enrage, enlighten and amuse. See ya!