Compare and contrast

Here's what loyalists did for 8 days following the democratically-elected Belfast City Council decision to fly the Union Flag only on certain days of the year rather than every day:

And here's what happened when the British Government admitted that its secret services, the Army and the police organised the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane by gunmen in their employ, then covered it up afterwards.

OK, this is an illustrative picture rather than reportage, because it's hard to find a picture of people not rioting but remaining dignified in response to state-sanctioned murder. But the difference between the two groups' actions is instructive. I don't think the individuals involved are any more or less civilised for coming from one or the other communities in the six counties: but clearly a subgroup of one is prepared to meet democratic change with violence whereas the other has committed to peace in the face of the most outrageous provocation.

What was really disappointing was the Progressive Unionist Party's approach. They're the political wing of a loyalist armed organisation but – like the Official IRA in the 1970s – seemed to be developing a socialist class analysis of the situation. But over the past few days they've been calling for 'Protestant unity': further entrenching the sectarian divide at the expense of proper progressive politics. 

I didn't know the Orkneys had a football team

In the window of the bookies' next door to my flat.

Muscular Christianity?

What with the hysteria over an Islamic cultural centre in New York and the constant video on rolling news of Islamic clerics encouraging jihad, we should stop for a moment and consider that other faiths aren't entirely free from heavily-armed clerics: plenty of rabbis have committed acts of terrorism or encouraged them - Meir Kahane springs to mind.

More important, in terms of numbers, are the Christians who've taken up arms, mostly against each other. In medieval times, a Bishop was expected to accompany his King onto the battlefield, and the struggles against 'heresy' often saw the clergy wielding the red-hot pokers and sharp implements. The English Civil War certainly saw a large number of preachers and pastors emerging from - or merging with - the Army of the Commonwealth. Militant Jesuits kept the True Faith alive in Protestant Britain and Ireland before liberation. Elsewhere, we've seen armed liberation priests in South America (stamped on by the Church but very successful politically).

So perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised at the news that a Catholic priest, James Chesney, was the IRA's Director of Operations in South Derry in the early 70s - a story which was covered up by the police, the UK government and the Catholic Church until today. The Catholic Church didn't support Irish freedom but became a fan of independent Ireland when the new state handed over control of all schools and most hospitals, with brilliant results, as you know.

Chesney, however, seems to have joined the IRA, as many young men did, in 1972 as a result of the apartheid style treatment of the Catholic community and in particular the slaughter of Bloody Sunday. Where he went wrong was to entirely lose his moral compass, as many did in those dark and morally confused times. Rather than leading his people in a self-defence against an oppressive state and their sectarian terrorist allies, he planned unforgivable atrocities, particularly the Claudy bombing, in which a child was killed amongst nine fatalities - none of them military or police officers.

We're a long way from the image of a spiritual leader invoking the doctrine of 'just war' or the ideologically committed warrior-priest. Instead, a man sworn to peace and understanding became a cold-blooded murderer, immersing himself in the technicalities of explosives and timers. He was no Republican hero, nor defender of the people. Just a killer.

What happened to him? The Church, under pressure from a UK government which didn't want to arrest him, moved him across the border, where he died at the age of 46 in 1980. I'd love to have heard his last confession…

Only in (Northern) Ireland…

… would you find the Police Service raiding the Policing Board, the organisation that's meant to, er, oversee the behaviour of the police.

The Glorious 12th?

Are you aware of the 12th July in Northern Ireland?

It's nominally a Protestant celebration of Dutch King William of Orange's victory over deposed British King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 - the event which ended Irish hopes of independence and Catholic freedom of worship for over 200 years. Protestants tend to downplay the Pope's support for Protestant King Billy (ordinary peasants of either faith or none were beneath the cares of these gentlemen: the war was a local manifestation of ongoing European struggles).

The official celebrations are run by various Orange Orders (open only to male Protestants), who parade - often through Catholic republican areas - with banners and bands, singing songs about loyalty to the British crown and to Protestant values. Technically, they're all teetotal, but these events are often but not always characterised by anti-Catholic songs, drunkenness, celebration of loyalist terrorist groups and riots. Catholics sometimes protest, and those who can leave the country for the week. On the 11th, Protestant areas have bonfires with effigies of the Pope and other perceived opponents burning on the top.

There's a move afoot to make the event more of a cultural celebration of Orange values than a display of triumphalism, but it's not working. As evidence, here's a picture of two teenage girls celebrating their cultural inheritance.

In case you're wondering, KAT = Kill All Taigs (= Irish Catholics) and FAP = Fuck All Papists (Catholics). Here's one Protestant's account of the day.

Norn Iron: it hasn't gone away, you know.

Next up is a natty young man with a very directional goatee.

Hold on a second: it's Chris, disguised by his new facial furniture. He's speaking on the challenge of dissident Republicans in northern Ireland - an inchoate set of groups with divergent aims who are not hugely well-understood, I don't think. They're split along ideological, regional, historical, strategic and personal lines, and they're massively penetrated by the security forces on both sides of the border. It's fascinating in so many ways, and it's unfolding - the CIRA appears to have split again just this month (and here).

He and Eamonn are experts on this, as I got to know when I helped them on a Northern Ireland politics conference they hosted. It took months for my liver to recover and the flashbacks still haven't stopped.

The war is over

You can all relax. The streets are once more safe. The Official IRA has decommissioned its weapons.

That'll be the OIRA that's been on ceasefire since 1972 then - the one that basically gave up as soon as the Troubles began (hence the graffiti reading 'IRA = I Ran Away'). The IRA everyone's been scared of all this time is the Provisional IRA, which was always more Catholic and conservative than its socialist/Marxist parent group. The OIRA (essentially a load of ageing theorists based in Dublin a long way from the action) declared a ceasefire because they decided that traditional leftwing activism would bring about a united Ireland rather than violence. I can't say that either tactic has worked, though violence followed by dramatic renunciations of violence clearly do qualify you for a British government salary and big car.

I'm largely with the OIRA: a Marxist republican with little taste for violence. That said, nobody defended the nationalist community in the early 70s until PIRA stood up. They became mindless killers pretty quickly, but the immediate cause was just.

Yet another historic day in Northern Ireland

I'm getting quite bored by the rhetoric of breakthroughs and new dawns.

In case you haven't followed the latest developments with bated breath, the unionists didn't want to take control of policing and justice in Northern Ireland from the British government because they have to share government with uppity nationalists.

Finally, after the prime ministers of two proper countries spending 10 exhausting days mollycoddling these utterly parochial groups, some sort of vague agreement has been reached. The nationalists wanted an Irish language act (which I doubt will happen) and the unionists wanted the Parades Commission abolished. Parades are central to triumphalist Unionist culture: they dress up, get drunk (though the Orange Order is technically teetotal) and march through Catholic areas to remind the natives who won the war in 1690. The Parades Commission occasionally diverted marches to keep the peace, and thus was hated.

So here we are again, another grubby little fudge which will no doubt involve more state cash for 'community leaders' and a temporary repression of sectarian instincts - until the Tories get in. They've been trying to build a pan-Unionist, all-Protestant front to fix the elections, thus ruining any claim a Conservative government might have to disinterested neutrality when brokering negotiations.

If you're bored reading this, you should be. I know I am.

Iris Robinson: the truth finally emerges

1. She's involved in a sex scandal with a young boy.
2. The government covered it up.

Clearly, she's an Irish Catholic priest.

Case closed.

Iris Robinson's crimes against English

One of the things that's annoyed me about Iris Robinson (apart from the bigotry and corruption) is her contempt for a decent language. The fundamentalist sect she leads is the Light 'n' Life Free Methodist connexion (I gather that actual Methodists aren't too keen on bigotry).

Why Iris? What's wrong with Light AND Life? Why must you make your church sound like a coffee sweetener? Emma's brilliant suggestion is that your church is so Old Testament that you had to take out the words AD!

Perhaps there's a linguistic aspect to her fundamentalism too. When you're a loyalist fundamentalist whose main political belief is hating Irish Catholics, having a name only one letter removed from Irish must be uncomfortable. She's got a lot to prove…

Mrs Robinson! Mrs Robinson!

I don't know how often you think of Northern Ireland, or what your perception of it is. Perhaps you remember it as a place of violent sectarianism, as a relic of Empire, as the lost piece in the 32-county jigsaw, or as a place like any other.

It isn't. It's a deeply strange place, damaged by centuries of imperialism, conflict, religious antagonism and discrimination. Amongst its oddities is the dominance of fundamentalist Protestantism of a kind which died out in Britain after the civil war (1660) except in tiny pockets. Northern Ireland's Catholics are pretty reactionary, but its Protestants are authentic Old Testament hellfire-and-damnation types - and unionist politics is inextricably linked to these sects.

The current First Minister of Northern Ireland is Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by Ian Paisley, who also founded the Free Presbyterian church because the existing ones weren't hardline enough for him. Hardline unionism, loyalism and fundamentalist religious beliefs are bound up in Mr. Robinson, and his wife, Iris, who is simultaneously an MP in the British parliament, a member of the Northern Ireland assembly, and a local councillor. Lucratively, the couple earn over £500,000 from the state through managing to hold down all these full-time jobs, and by paying family members to assist them.

So far, so normal (they say they're British, so why shouldn't they behave like British politicians). But now Mr. Robinson has had to stand aside while an investigation is carried out. In a perfect political storm, it's emerged that Iris (the woman who described homosexuality as worse than child rape: '“There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children.”) had a 19 year-old lover, for whom she secretly procured loans from businessmen she helped through her day jobs, arranging a kickback of £5000 for herself. When her husband found out, she tried to kill herself. It's a wonderful story: sex, money, corruption in high places, drama…

I'm torn here. Normally, I'd revel in the misery of a bigoted loyalist politician, and they certainly deserve it. Clearly, criminal acts have been committed, by her and possibly by her husband, who didn't inform the authorities of what he'd found out. But - fundamentalism has a strict moral code in which forgiveness is alien. I feel genuinely sorry for someone driven to suicide, however awful they are. I've seen enough of the misery that exists behind the closed doors of a family home not to wish this kind of torment on anyone. I can understand the depths of pain reached when people break their self-imposed moral codes: it's worse because they're so rigid (me: I'm an ex-Catholic. I already feel guilty about everything, so one more sin isn't going to make any difference).

Damn. Having morals spoils all the fun.

Unfortunate headline of the week

First Shots Fired in General Election Fight.

OK, it's only unfortunate because of its source: this comes from the Belfast Telegraph, which should really be more careful with its clichés. It's not too long since this would have been literally true.

Top of the Popes

It's the Vole's birthday in July: my dear sister, mindful of my devout Catholicism (ahem), asks whether I'd like to choose from this catalogue. Most of these would earn you a shallow grave in most parts of Northern Ireland (pronounced locally as Norn Iron), but this one would get you there much quicker, particularly in Celtic colours.

Grumpy morning thoughts

Not much blogging today. I'm going to hold tutorials with my research methods students, then go home to bed as I'm still feeling rotten. I shall eat poached eggs from my mum's hens and drink the champagne my dad gave me for going home to do some stats for him. There now isn't anything I don't know about the incidences of keratoanthoma in North Staffordshire…

I'm also a bit depressed about Northern Ireland. I'm a Republican in the Irish and wider senses, and supported armed resistance to the old undemocratic statelet, which operated as a South African style colonial entity. What the CIRA and RIRA are doing isn't collective self-defence or resistance, it's atavistic thuggery designed to attract respect from disaffected teenagers with limited horizons. Popping the occasional peeler doesn't bring about a united Ireland (though nor does the current political process, which seems indistinguishable from Britain's 19th-century India policy).

I finished Jim Crace's Pesthouse yesterday. It's very moving, and draws on lots of American cultural myths. It's also clearly an inspiration for Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Both, being literary authors having a holiday in dystopian future writing, have the skill to resist filling in the gaps: we don't know the reasons for social and political collapse, or the 'big picture' - all we get are the effects on two people struggling to survive.

Northern Ireland: the politics of the madhouse

OK, they aren't killing each other with guns at the moment, but NI seems to have become Mississippi or somewhere like that. Where else would you have a Minister for the Environment who totally rejects climate change? Perhaps, for Sammy Wilson - a DUP member - the word green has too many negative connotations. Now he's banned a government ad encouraging people to switch off their TVs at night - because he believes that earth is 4000 years old and that interfering with God's plan (presumably for our incineration) is a bad thing.