BELOW PAR

'Golf is a good walk spoiled', a quotation attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and various others, is not the widely held view in Hollywood, Co Down, for it is from this small town suburb of Belfast  (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West) that the new US Open Champion golfer, Rory McIlroy, hails. A thorough-going Rory-fest is under-way, with massive media coverage and a widespread feel good vibe emanating from Northern Ireland. The sight of an intelligent and charming young man driving and putting a golf ball better than most other men suffuses many people with pride, even people who wouldn't know a four iron from a hoover.

The images of Rory thumping a golf ball round courses in Northern Ireland are claimed to boost the prospects for the region's economy. 'Golf means tourism means money' is the mantra. Plus most CEOs of large companies, particularly Americans, play golf and Americans now love Rory and can't wait to rush this way with massive investments. So keep driving those golf balls boys!

But, please, not over and back across the lower Newtownards Road in Belfast. Golf balls are among a number of weapons of choice used by rioters, together with bricks, petrol bombs and bullets, in communal violence and attacks on the police that have plagued the area since the beginning of the week. Tension between the loyalist and nationalist working class communities is high with allegations going back and forth – like the golf balls! - that attacks are being directed at them. The police reported that the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) organised a major loyalist incursion into the nationalist Short Strand area. Dissident republicans are blamed for shooting a press photographer in the leg.

Calls for calm echo across the city. The First Minister holds talks with leaders of the UVF, bunkering the edict of 'never talking to terrorists'. Much hand-wringing ensues as images of conflict replace the smiling face of the champion golfer in the international news media. You can't bring tourists to play golf in a country where people are chucking golf balls at each other and at the police. No CEO is going to want to make profit from the labour of individuals whose principle skill is creating mayhem and who want to chuck golf balls at each other rather than act as caddies for the same CEOs, the hand-wringers assert.    

Good walks and the spoiling of them is part of the problem in that the assertion by loyal orders of a traditional right to stage large, colourful, single-identity marches across the city is one of the contributing factors in raising tensions between people of the same social class but diametrically opposed political and communal aspirations.

Marching to a different beat this week are members of the US military who heard their Commander-in-Chief and President, Barack Obama, announce they will be marching out of Afghanistan. Having contributed to the destruction of that country, the soldiers are to be brought home for nation-building. And vote catching. And a chance to work on their golf games.

Tomorrow the people of Derry and Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West) will stroll, amble, dander, meander, potter, totter, zimmer, wheel, cycle and enjoy a good walk, not a golf club in sight, across the new Peace Bridge (see http://www.ilex-urc.com/Projects/Peace-Bridge.aspx), as it officially opens. 

Can we use it to drive off into the future and find a fair way? 

LOVE YOURSELF TODAY

Damien (Damo) Dempsey sings from a fit-up stage in front of the Free Derry Museum, in Glenfada Park, the site of multiple killings by British Army paratroopers on Bloody Sunday, 1972. 

It's all good, sure it's all good, All I say to you today

Love yourself today, Okay, okay

This is Bogside, Derry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West), one year on from the release of The Saville Report and British Prime Minister's apology for the killings. Billed as a Day of Vindication, families of Bloody Sunday victims and local activists organise a day of events, culminating in the concert headlined by Damien Dempsey.

We sing, sing all our cares away, 

We'll live, to love another day, 

We grow strong, from it all, 

We grow strong, or we fall, 

We grow strong. 

The banality of the lyrics and the sentimentality of the emotions are lifted by the melodic power of the performer's voice, his determination for and unbending urge to possibility, voicing a strength that infuses the modest crowd of adults and children gathered in front of him. 

The IRA are blamed for one of Northern Ireland's worst atrocities. A report by the police's Historical Enquiries Team claims the massacre of 10 Protestants near the Irish border 35 years ago was carried out by the organisation.

The Commission for Victims and Survivors for Northern Ireland writes to the First and Deputy First Ministers to alert them to growing disaffection and a loss of confidence among victims and those who provide services to them.

Readers of An Phoblacht see a call by Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams TD, for the setting up of an independent international truth commission.

Is there a head of steam building in support of a truth recovery process, driven by pressure from the legacy of the past?

Damo sings:

Well I've exchanged the spear and the sword

For words and melody

Patience, give me some of that patience, Lord,

I will keep my eye on my goal

Patience, give me some of that sweet patience, Lord,

I will keep my eye on the ball.

WANDERING WRAITHS

Further leakage from the past happens this week. Former members of The Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provos) give statements to The Smithwick Inquiry, run by the Irish state into the killing of two Royal Ulster Constabulary officers near Jonesboro (54 degrees North, 6 degrees West) in 1989. A new inquest is announced into the killing by loyalists of Gerard Slane in 1988 and a former Brigadier in The British Army is required to attend to give evidence.

These, and other, moves produce very divided views, with callers to phone-in radio programmes, comment writers to news media websites and letter writers to newspapers asserting, among other things, that the inquiries cost too much, take too long, cover the wrong incidents, are always benefiting 'the other side', are not enough, never get to the real substance of the matter and, most damning of all, leave matters in a worse shape than before.

Is it time for an agreed and comprehensive truth recovery process?

In the play AH 6905 (Dave Duggan, Sole Purpose Productions, 2005), Danny, who is undergoing an operation to have the truth of the conflict events between 1969 and 2005 cut out of him, wonders:

If I open my innards to this truth recovery and let the world listen to the thrum of blood in my heart, the gush of bile in my spleen, the susurrations of air in my lungs, the drip, drip, drip of urine in my kidneys, the clatter of corpuscles and platelets in my arteries, when I sound them all from deep inside where the dead reside, will I be healed?

Will Danny get what he wants from a truth recovery process? Knowledge, truth, prosecutions, justice, revenge, peace? What would the elements of  such a truth recovery process be, given the experience of instances in Guatemala and South Africa? They would be social and healing, judicial and legal, national, communal and personal, and above all, political.

There are 17 known cases of individuals who are suspected of having been murdered and secretly buried. There are 3269 unsolved killings before the police's Historical Enquiries Team. There are calls for international inquiries into the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane and other high profile killings. This is just the tip of the pile of unresolved matters from the past. 

And matters unresolved continue to infect society, continue to populate our world with wandering wraiths, so that the dead abound and, like Van Helsing in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, Danny arms himself with the garlic, thorn roses, crucifixes, the Host, wooden stakes, heavy mallets and other implements necessary to secure the dead in their graves and release the living, suffused with grief and sorrow, to continue their pained lives.

Note: The text of the play AH 6905 is available in Plays in a Peace Process by Dave Duggan, (Guildhall Press, 2008).

TWO MARYS

Mary McArdle is appointed as Special Advisor to the Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure in Belfast (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West) and a public outcry ensues. Sinn Féin, the political party involved, is accused of arrogance and insensitivity in making this appointment. Anne Travers, sister of Mary Travers who was killed by an Irish Republican Army (IRA) unit in 1984,  condemns the appointment, saying it re-opens old wounds and asks her and her family to compromise yet again for the good of The Peace Process.

Mary McArdle was a member of the IRA unit that killed Mary Travers and wounded her father, Tom Travers, a judge and the primary target of the attack, as the family walked home after attending Mass at their local church. 

Both Catholics, the two Marys are joined by this extraordinary historical event, one as victim, the other as perpetrator. But for this event, it is unlikely that their paths would have crossed given the residential and social divisions  of Belfast.

The two Marys are brought together again at the end of the month of May 2011, by the outcry that has arisen. Bluebells carpet woodland floors, delicate blue skies appear shyly and pearly eggshell light leads us into long evenings.  It is a tragic irony that May, the month of Mary, long celebrated in the Marian cult and the Mariology historically famous in Catholic Ireland, should be the month when these wounds re-open.

Twenty seven years after the killing, Mary McArdle sets to working in a regional administration of the United Kingdom as did Tom Travers in 1984. The character of that administration has changed significantly. Working for that administration is no longer a widely supported rationale for summary execution, though dissident republicans are targeting members of The Police Service, particularly Roman Catholic ones.

The furore around the appointment, argued by some to have been media generated, displays the gulf between the political class and the general population. The simplistic notion that an all-embracing line can be drawn under the past is exposed as seriously flawed. The conflict resolution imperative of ensuring the political project is advanced by committed, experienced and determined people requires that political ex-prisoners in conflict situations across the world, from South Africa to Ireland, from Israel to Nicaragua, are involved. 

Consistency rather than arrogance is at play. Civil servants in the current administration's Department of Justice previously served in the Northern Ireland Office in the period of the conflict when collusion between state forces and loyalist paramilitaries was widespread, both by acts of commission and omission, as specifically noted in the recently reported case of the killing of the solicitor Rosemary Nelson. The President of Ireland invites leading loyalist paramilitary figures to a state commemoration honouring Irish people who served in British Forces in the World Wars. 

These are not viewed as instances of arrogance. They are acknowledged as highly sensitive but necessary moves in the process of reconciliation and peace-building. However, as the political class creates new realities, it does so without the assurance that the general population is accommodated. 

The Woman, the political ex-prisoner, in the play Waiting.... (Dave Duggan, Sole Purpose Productions, 2000) says:

You're wrong. I felt every thing. Everything I learned. Everything I saw, everything I knew. I felt it all. That's why I acted. In history. In time. And now history and time have stopped, as if they were cogs in a great engine turning the century and I stuck my little finger in there. So they're stopped. And I'm waiting.

Re-starting history involves acknowledging the legacy of the past, both the myriad individual experiences and the over-arching collective narratives. Though the political class has a role in this – they are currently sitting on a viable approach known as The Eames-Bradley Proposals – this is essentially a social matter to be created by citizens at local and community level.

The Man, who's wife The Woman blew up, tells her:

I'm a survivor. I survived. Through all the pain, anguish, hurt, grief, history, time and blood. I survived. That's my legacy. Your legacy too. 

The story of the two Marys brings this legacy into the sharp focus of early summer light as the longest day of the year approaches suddenly.

Note: The text of the play Waiting.... is available in Plays in a Peace Process by Dave Duggan, (Guildhall Press, 2008).