TWO TRIBES GO TO WAR …

… and then they ceasefire … 

When two tribes go to war

A point is all that you can score

(Score them all, score them all)

When two tribes go to war

A point is all that you can score

(Working for the black gas)

Frankie goes to Hollywood got it partly right in their 1984 ‘straight to No 1 in the UK Top Ten’ anti-war hit, When Two Tribes Go To War. Forty years on, ‘War’ is still about the ‘black gas’ – oil, gas and lucre. 

The term ‘Tribes’ is a misnomer. The number ‘Two’ is simplistic. ‘Score no More’, however, hits the bulls-eye. 

A perverse calculus operates at the moment of ceasefire. It is based on Judith Butler’s insights into the unequal precariousness and grievability of lives. All loss of life is tragic. Some are considered more tragic than others. Over 40 000 Palestinian lives lost. Almost 1 800 Israeli lives lost. The conflict is assymetric, even in death tolls.

From an early stage, following the atrocious Hamas attack on October 7^th 2023, in which 1 139 people, mostly Israelis, were murdered and over 200 people were kidnapped and held captive, commentators within and without of Israel have said that the Israeli regime is using that atrocity to sustain itself, extend its reign and change regional geo-politics in its favour. 

At least 14 of the dead on that day were killed by members of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The regime is not keeping score. Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the regime, said: “if we don’t fight, we die”, from the safety of his office in a bunker in Tel Aviv.

Since that date the IDF, not a ‘tribe’, but one of the world’s most lethally-armed military forces, right up to and including nuclear weapons, initially developed in the mid-1960s, with the support of French regimes and, more recently, full-frontal support from US and UK regimes, has visited war from land, sea and air, with weapons of mass destruction, blockades and sanctioning of food, water and medicines and the displacement of peoples, kettling them into smaller and smaller enclaves, in Gaza and, latterly, in Lebanon.

The Israeli developers of the nuclear programme insist it is necessary to forestall another Holocaust, the genocide of European Jewish communities, perpetrated by the Nazi Regime in Germany in the 1940s.

Opposition to the IDF comes from Hamas and Hezbollah, heavily armed groups, with Islamic ideologies, supported by the regime in Iran. The IDF is a state army, with Jewish ideologies, backed by regimes infused with Christian ideologies such as USA, UK and France. Hamas and Hezbollah are registered as ‘terrorists’ by a number of countries, but not by the UN. They have contested political support in Gaza and in Lebanon, just as the Netanyahu regime’s political support is contested in Israel. 

Though they are not equivalent, all three military groups - IDF, Hamas and Hezbollah – engage in mass and indiscriminate killing, as well as tactics aimed at raising terror in populations. Consider the exploding mobile phones and walkie-talkies created by the IDF and used in Lebanon.

Part of the prologue to Frankie’s thumping rock and dance anthem is a patrician male voice-over saying:If you hear the airplane coming, you and your family must take cover.

This note foreshadows edicts from the Israeli regime that people in Gaza should move in advance of targeted IDF assaults. Such edicts, often delivered by leaflet drops, were extended to the blue-helmeted soldiers in UN peace-keeping outposts on the Israel-Lebanon border.

The Israeli state is: 

at war with Hezbollah, which has sent a barrage of rockets into Israel almost daily since October 7th 2023;

at war with Hamas, which continues to hold hostages captive; 

at war with Iran and its so-called military proxies from Yemen, Syria and Iraq.  

The people of Israel are gripped by an existential fear.

A colonial irony underpins that fear. 

For over 100 years, the expulsion of an indigenous people, Palestinians, at the behest of Turkish, British, Zionists and American imperialists, sets the political agenda. The release of hostages, a central demand of the Israeli war effort, complicates that politcal agenda.

Rashid Khalidi is a professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York. His family has been involved in negotiations with colonisers in Palestine throughout the 20^th century. His seminal book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, provides a vivid account of the period. He took part in the negotiations for the Oslo 1 Accord in 1993, aimed at setting up a framework for a settlement of the future of Palestine and Israel.

No such settlement has been achieved.

Khalidi writes, in April 2024

… a peace based on acknowledging painful historical realities and dismantling structures of oppression, and grounded in justice, equal rights and mutual recognition, does not appear to be on the horizon. However, I still retain the hope that my grandchildren, whose number since this book was first published has grown to four, will see such a lasting peace, marking the end of this war.

I echo his hope, for my own four grandchildren, for Rashid’s family and for the families of my friends in Israel and Palestine.

When Two Tribes Go To War, pop song, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ZTT Records, 1984

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHFqSzuqLSc

The Hundred Years War on Palestine, book, Rashid Khalidi, Profile Books, 2024

Precariousness and Grievability, blog, Judith Butler, Verso Books, 2015

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/2339-judith-butler-precariousness-and-grievability?_pos=3&_psq=Butler&_ss=e&_v=1.0

The Human Toll of Israel’s war on Gaza, news report, Al-Jazeera, January 2025

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/15/the-human-toll-of-israels-war-on-gaza-by-the-numbers

Hostage deal divides Israel as first captives return home, opinion, Susan Hattis Rolef, Jerusalem Post, January 2025

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-838241

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter 

SLIP SLIDING TO ANOTHER HOLYLAND

     Note: First appeared as an article in the Derry Journal, October 2024. 

Novelist Neil Hegarty asserts, in The Irish Times, that

This place (Northern Ireland) never made any ethical or economic sense – and Derry is the apotheosis of that wider failure. 

Inadequate university provision is an instance of that failure. 

In A Scandal in Plain Sight (Colmcille Press), Garrett Hargan writes:

Despite countless promises, plans and strategies, the decade 2010 to 2019 ended with an increase of fewer than 300 full-time students at Magee.

Students at the University of Ulster Magee (UU Magee) and the North West Regional College (NWRC) are welcome in the city. They bring a thirst for life and knowledge. They also bring cars.

Problems with parking plague the University Area. Some of the parking is thoughtless. Some is plain bad and illegal. Residents are afraid to use their cars for fear of not being able to return to their driveways. Access routes to schools and the doctor’s surgery are blocked. Delivery and drop-off points are compromised.

Furthermore, faced with the question: “where will our students live?”, rather than outlining plans for bespoke accommodation, the responsible agencies stand well back and rely on commercial interests. 

Family homes are converted to Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs), frequently not properly registered. Houses in the area bear the tell-tale keypad, facilitating Airbnb users. Young families struggle to find accommodation. Real estate values increase when the housing stock is converted to short-term occupancies. Laissez-faire development slurps up housing stock, building alongside detached and semi-detached houses, in blatant garden grabs. 

People using prams leave the pavements, with primary school children in tow. People using wheelchairs, sticks, crutches or wheelers are impeded. I use a mobility scooter, due to amputations, as well as vascular and respiratory problems. Corners are blocked, so I can’t access the ‘dropped kerbs’ necessary to cross a road. 

Residents welcome students, but feel ‘enough is enough’. 

Social media platforms comment that people in the University Area should not act like NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard). They say: “this is just business”. I say: “this is very bad business for the university, the neighbourhood and the city.” 

When did it become wrong to be concerned about your backyard?

Each time news of an increase in student numbers is announced, neighbours of the university search for news of accommodation and parking. When none appears, we know that the existing laissez-faire approach will intensify. The city suffers the public costs of pressure on services such as parking, sewage, water and refuse removal. Flooding on the Strand Road increases when green, soak-away areas are removed from the high ground of Rosemount.

The main-driver of congestion is expansion by UU Magee. What can we do? 

Residents can call out unsanctioned developments, by notifying Derry City and Strabane District Council (DCSDC). We can support our neighbours objecting to a change to HMO and informing DCSDC. The Planning Portal on the DCSDC website is not easy to use, but we can phone to lodge an objection or write a short note and hand/post it in to the DCSDC office. 

We can go with our neighbours to Planning Committee meetings in the Guildhall. This is an insulting experience, as the public cannot hear the discussions, due to an inadequate sound system. We can lobby councillors, especially ones on the Planning Committee, asking that they give attention to the needs of residents over developers and their agents.

We can support Glen Development Initiative (GDI), who are liaising between residents, DCSDC, UU Magee and the government-appointed Ulster University Magee Taskforce. The Taskforce published a welcome interim report and invited input from residents for its final report. Reliance on the private sector to handle student accommodation is not reassuring. The easiest option for commercial interests, often absentee landlords, is to accelerate HMO creation. 

Councillors can get fully up to date on the best approaches to take when HMO congestion threatens a street. They can charge officials with overturning developments that do not meet planning and building regulations. Councillors can lobby for a tighter cap on the number of HMOs and guest houses per street.

Ten thousand students are not suddenly going to land, though that is the current aspiration. Some people say it should be higher, as the University makes the changes for which it can secure public money. Plans for accommodation need to tangibly synchronise with these aspirations. 

UU Magee, as the major player, can decrease the pressure on congestion by combining each announcement of an increase in student numbers with accommodation and parking announcements. Green field sites can be considered for bespoke UU Magee developments. 

The development behind the Tower Museum, at the foot of Magazine Street, is a good example of re-purposing. UU Magee has a relationship with the Inner City Trust (ICT), which could renovate derelict buildings as student housing, working alongside the Department, the Council, the Chamber of Commerce, Residents Associations and other groups.

UU Magee can move colleges and accommodations beyond the Magee site, including to the Waterside. Translink can move students around, offering reliable and safe late-night services.

Riverside sites are under consideration for development. The Fort George site may not be used for residential purposes, due to the toxicity of the ground following a stint as an Army base, while it may be considered for a health centre.

The area around UU Magee is changing. With the change driving in one direction, social problems follow. We don’t want students living in cars, as reported in Galway and Dublin. Or, as witnessed in Belfast’s Holyland, in an unregulated mono-culture of HMOs, which became a by-word for anti-social behaviour. 

No one wants Derry to slide further into that situation.

Nerve Centre published Dave Duggan’s new collection of essays, Journeywork, a creative life, in November. Available in Little Acorns Bookstore, Great James Street, and other bookshops.

www.facebook.com/Dave DugganWriter

irishtimes.com

derryjournal.com

A Scandal in Plain Sight, book, Garrett Hargan, Colmcille Press, Derry, 2024

WATCHING SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE

The image of coal merchant Bill Furlong (played by Cillian Murphy) ploughing his shovel into a wall of coal, a further bank of the black nuggets rising like damnation behind him, stays with me. 

Furlong is a film-everyman, in the tradition of Atticus Finch, as played by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. Furlong is not driven by a legal search for salvation, but by a rooted urge for solidarity, mined from his own life, the loss of his mother and his fears for his family. Ultimately he is driven to do the right thing, despite advice that if he wants to get on in this life he has to ignore certain things.

‘Small’ is in the title and it is a small story, set in a small town in the south-east of a small country. Ireland, at Christmas in the 1980s, seems like Ireland in the 1950s, because much of Ireland changed very little in those thirty years. The phenomenal, often unnerving, social and physical changes in Ireland since then fail to mask the grimness of those years, as the victims of the power of church and state call for redress.

The ‘power of church and state’ is present in the nuns who run the secondary school, beside the laundry, where incarcerated young women and local people launder the dirty linen of the clergy, the hospitals, the local elite and the public, in an industry so craven that its stains will never be cleansed, but will sully Ireland for years.

I almost fall over, as I exit the cinema. I lean against a wall. I’m not helped by being on crutches, due to a disability. My wife checks with me, knowing I am liable to medical collapse. I reassure her I am moved, not ill. She has seen both manifestations before. I didn’t speak for almost 12 hours after seeing Tom Murphy’s play Conversations on a Homecoming.

I am stunned. 

It is the art that stuns me. The art of the writers. The art of the actors. The art of the film-makers. Art making imagination manifest. There is good factual work on the mother and baby homes, notably Margo Harkin’s film documentary Stolen. I favour fiction over fact. Imaginings that stun, move and silence me. I write, in Journeywork, a creative life,

Facts are disputed. Fictions are enjoyed, relished and savoured. Truth is brought to bear. 

Fictional images move me to tears.

Caitriona Cunningham’s play The Marian Hotel fictionalises her lived-experience in a mother and baby home. When a pregnant child, carrying a doll, joins the young women joshing and joking on stage, the characters and the audience are stunned to silence. All jocularity is stilled. Tragedy is vehemently presented and can’t be denied. 

Art is achieved. Deep truths, beyond facts, are accessed.

In Small Things like These, Bill Furlong makes soda-bread toast on a griddle pan and passes slices to his daughters, seated at the table, doing home-work. He urges them to eat up. His primary care, alongside his wife, is for his family. And then, in the ordinary course of his work, a young woman, incarcerated in the laundry, appeals directly for his help.

The image of Furlong dishing out the toast and speaking quietly to his daughters sits alongside images of his restlessness at night. He rises early and walks to his coal yard through the dark streets of New Ross, evoking memories of the dark streets in Waterford where I grew up, where my mother, my aunt and their neighbours worked in a Magdalene Laundry, alongside abandoned women chained to the drudge of machines, steam, heat and hard labour under the stern admonishments of nuns and priests, who delivered power over them as a matter of grace. 

The dis-grace of that historical institution stinks. The collusion with the State reeks. The actions of the men who impregnated and abandoned many of the women are criminal.

Images of my mother and the women she worked with are in the film. Seen at the sink, the back of Eileen Furlong (Eileen Walsh) is an image of my mother. The fiction wrenches my heart crossways.

How any young woman or man, called to service in the name of their God, can commit to an authoritarian, patriarchal institution, in the face of that history, shocks me. Are there no other vehicles for their service?

Ireland is fortunate in having writers like Clare Keegan and Enda Walsh, alongside actors like Eileen Walsh and Cillian Murphy, making films such as Small Things like These. Performances are excellent throughout. Murphy carries the film on his stooped shoulders, a ten hundredweight (cwt) bag of slack to bank the fire raging inside Furlong. The darkness is gripping and vivid. A sense of people doing their best runs through the film.

Go see it. Be moved to grief and anger. And admiration, as I was. 

A small thing, part of a big picture, as imagined by Richard Rorty.

… human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognised by clearing away ‘prejudice’ or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see suffering people as fellow sufferers. 

Recommended.

Small Things like These, film drama, Artists Equity/Big Things Films, Ireland, 2024 

To Kill a Mockingbird, film drama, Universal, USA, 1962

Stolen, film doc, Besom Productions, Ireland, 2023

The Marian Hotel, stage-play, Caitriona Cunningham, Sole Purpose Productions, Derry, 2024

Conversations on a Homecoming, stage-play, Tom Murphy, Druid, Galway, 1985

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, book, Richard Rorty, Cambridge, 1989

Journeywork, a creative life, book, Dave Duggan, Nerve Centre, Derry, 2024

A blog post on the novella Small Things like These by Claire Keegan

https://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.com/2023/05/reading-small-things-like-these-by.html

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