MOYGASHEL BURNING

This year saw themes and actions from the 1988 Hollywood crime film Mississippi Burning echo in events at Moygashel, a suburban village on the edge of Dungannon, Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Moygashel’s Bonfire Community Association erected a huge bonfire of wooden palettes to mark 12^th of July commemoration events. They placed a model of a mosque on top, intending to burn it along with the bonfire. The Association uses FaceBook effectively to advertise its activities and plans. Messages of support and images of other bonfires are shown. Lamp posts in Moygashel carry flags of the United Kingdom and other flags of Unionism and British culture. Google Maps show a well-constructed and visually interesting 12^th of July arch at Grove Place in the village.

The police called the Moygashel bonfire a ‘hate display’.

Mississippi Burning features the story of man who killed a mule that belonged to a black neighbour.

I looked over at my daddy's face. I knew he done it. He saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and said, If you ain't better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?

You think that's an excuse?

My old man was just so full of hate that he didn't know that bein' poor was what was killing him.

The burning of effigies and models is a feature of the Moygashel and some other bonfires. It is not the same as burning and lynching people. However, burning people out of their homes happened in Belfast and Antrim a month ago. Both activities have the effect of intimidating and frightening people.

Such human actions arise from social structures of poverty, deprivation and manipulation: material poverty; poverty of information; poverty of empathy; deprivation of educational and employment opportunities; manipulation by rich and powerful social media and press magnates, often well-outside Moygashel. These sorts of actions are seen across the world. Because of their connection with Moygashel’s 12^th of July commemorations, there is a distinctly British dimension to them in this instance.

The bonfire, effigies, statements and signs seek to make political points about radical Islam and immigration. There is no mass illegal immigration into Northern Ireland by any group of people, least of all Muslims. Moygashel is not a centre for radical Islamists. Small boats with refugees never land in Moygashel.

No one in a mosque decides upon and implements immigration policy in Northern Ireland. Such decisions are made by parliamentarians in London, who meet in The Palace of Westminster. Might a model of that place, with its famous clock tower, be a better symbol of discontent with immigration policy?

The Moygashel Bonfire Association asserts that their symbols and actions are not aimed at any individuals, but at an ideology. These sentences, also, are not aimed at individuals, but at ideologies: the ideologies of exceptionalism, racism, and supremacism. However, ideologies are not abstractions in books, blogs, bonfire models, or people’s heads. They exist in the thoughts, words and lived actions of individuals and groups, such as burning models of places of religious worship on top of a triumphalist bonfire that, ironically, marks a military victory for religious freedom.

Another ideological action would be to put a Christian Church on top of another bonfire.

This would simply compound the human tragedy.

You can tell your bosses - people got the wrong idea about the South. You know what I'm talkin' about. Everybody runnin around ragged, backwards, illiterate, eatin' sow-belly and corn pone three times a day. The simple fact is, Anderson, we got two cultures down here: a white culture - and a coloured culture. Now, that's the way it always has been - and that's the way it always will be.

The rest of America don't see it that way, Mr. Mayor.

Rest of America don't mean jack shit. You in Mississippi now.

Some people, notably business promoters and leaders, find this bonfire embarrassing and distasteful. They react by distancing themselves from the people of Moygashel. Chamber of Commerce leaders worry about the impact of coverage of such symbolic acts on Northern Ireland’s reputation abroad and its effect on inward investment. Currently Northern Ireland is said by economists to be experiencing full-employment (sic!), though there is considerable economic non-activity in sections of the population, when viewed by age and by geography. Back-office data-handling jobs in financial services in Belfast are of limited use to many people in Moygashel.

I told you, I'm a businessman. I'm also a Mississippian, and an American! And I'm getting SICK and TIRED of the way us Mississippians are getting our views distorted by you newsmen and on the TV. So let's get this straight. We do NOT accept Jews, because they REJECT Christ! And their control over the International Banking Cartels are at the root of what we call Communism today. We do not accept Papists, because they bow to a Roman dictator! We do not accept Turks, Mongrels, Tartars, Orientals nor Negroes because we are here to protect Anglo-Saxon Democracy, and the American way!

Some people in Moygashel feel their identity is under threat from the British political powers to which they give allegiance in Belfast and London. They feel their version of the Imagined Community (as written about by Benedict Anderson and others) of Britishness is under threat. This threat manifests as distancing, being ignored, feeling condescended to, being unable to assert their power as they used to and as they feel entitled to.

Many people in Moygashel base their sense of identity on events in The Williamite Wars and on The 1689 Siege of Derry, where the catchphrase ‘No Surrender’ was first used. A further layer was added to this base when over 5 000 soldiers of the British Army’s Ulster Division lost their lives in two days killing at The Somme in 1916. 

Refusal to give in or compromise and willingness to accept sacrifice: these are core ethics likely to be strongly-felt among the Moygashel bonfire builders and the hundreds of people who attended its ignition ahead of police intervention.

The bonfire at Moygashel is a tragedy. 

Other incidents at bonfires add to the list of tragedies during this year’s festivities. Two houses and a garage were burned down, with adjacent bonfires implicated. Neighbours are made homeless, including an elderly couple in Greenisland. A man fell to his death from a bonfire in Braniel, East Belfast. Another man, now homeless, said the worst impact was the loss of his family history. 

There’s opportunity in all tragedies. One religious/faith community feels threatened, following a period of threats and physical violence. There is an opportunity for other religious/faith communities in Northern Ireland to stand with people in Moygashel, in a spirit of support for religious freedom, including for Muslims. While they have been absent from the public media on this matter, the hope is that they are active on the ground among their clergy, believers and neighbours. 

The Orange Order distances itself from bonfire builders, though they draw from a common source: the Williamite success in the war of rival British monarchs in 1689-1691 in Ireland. When this year’s Orange festivities are over senior members of The Orange Order and faith leaders of Christian Churches can present themselves to the people of Moygashel.

And listen.

They can attend to the people of Moygashel’s attempts to be heard and to create other options for making political statements, including fires in the tradition of the beach beacons used in the Williamite Wars.

One measure of a society, an imagined community, at peace with itself is its manner of dealing with its minorities of race, colour, religion and sexual orientation.

You must know how we all feel down here. We don't take to outsiders telling us how to live our lives. And I'm here to tell ya, our nigras were happy, till those beatnik college kids came down here stirrin' things up. Before that, there wasn't anybody complainin'.

Nobody dared.

Bonfires are a form of boundary marking. You gather round this fire and you are ‘us’.

Further away from the bonfire? You are ‘not us’.

Mississippi burning. Moygashel burning.

This can of worms only opens from the inside.

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Clips of dialogue, in Courier New Bold, edited from Mississippi Burning, (film, Alan Parker, 1988)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095647/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_mississippi

Short note on Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson (Verso, revised, 2016)

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/imagined-communities/summary

TWO CHRISTIANS AND A SCEPTIC AT EASTER

It makes for a fine family gathering at Easter: a small holiday camp in the north-west of England, between Blackpool and Preston, accessible by car from the city where the young ones live and by flight to Liverpool and a local taxi for the grandparents. 

The taxi driver is calm, able and an ardent Christian. Our conversation turns to Christianity when I push back against inappropriate remarks he makes on Islam, after comments on changes to his High Street. I suggest the changes might be more economic than religious. His neighbours change shopping habits from the high street to out-of-town malls and superstores. Many similar changes are driven, literally, by cars and the chimera of convenience. 

The driver reads about Christianity and Islam, including the Bible, the Koran and commentaries on the books in the Daily Mail and other aligned publications. He avers that God is Good and that humans are created in his image. I don’t raise the gender issue. I regret that. I ask if he means all humans and he answers ‘yes’. 

He takes the Genesis story as his starting point.When I ask who created the Serpent he says “God”. From there, we stumble through thickets of The Problem of Evil and the use of Free Will. I suggest putting Free Will in an image of God himself might have been a mistake. The driver ends by proposing capital punishment for Axel Rudakubana, the so-called Southport Killer, serving a long prison sentence for murdering three young girls. He says he would hang him. When I ask “would you tie the noose, throw the lever in the trapdoor, plunge home the poison-driver, fire the executioner’s gun?” he replies that he would. 

I mention John Walker, one of The Birmingham Six, released after 16 years wrongful imprisonment when found to be innocent of the IRA pub bombings that killed 21 people in Birmingham in 1974. I say that if the driver's view is taken, then John Walker, and many others, would be dead. He doesn’t respond.

I put it to him that he could write to Axel Rudakubana and offer him his love, as Jesus advised.

We part on good terms. Our family greets us and we settle into the Easter holiday accommodation.

Nanny, daughter and two grand-daughters go swimming the next day. I follow on my hired mobility scooter. I park up and hobble around on crutches, seeking a spot from which to view the family. I don’t manage it and I make my way back to the scooter. I am familiar with these scooters, as I use one at home and hire various models, when travelling.

It becomes clear that I can’t insert the key into the ignition, no matter which way I swivel it. A number of passersby check if I need help. I thank them and they move on. It’s obvious that I really do need assistance, when a man in gym shorts and tee-shirt, carrying a water bottle and a phone, stops. He tries the key. No luck.

I ask if he would phone the scooter hire company. There is a sticker with contact details on the handlebars. I tell him my phone is back at the accommodation. He phones and carries on a back-and-forth conversation with a woman from the scooter company. She asks him to describe the key. When he does, she says it’s not one of theirs. I box the pockets of my jacket and jeans. I find another set of very similar keys. One of them slots easily into the ignition, turns without a hitch, and illuminates the lights on the control panel.

Tears gather in my eyes.

A severe bout of respiratory illness, probably pneumonia, in February leaves me frail and hapless. Even more frail and hapless than from the crippling respiratory and mobility conditions that see me using a mobility scooter, a wheelchair and crutches.

I apologise to the man. I thank him. He invites me to thank Jesus. I laugh lightly, wondering if I am on an Easter Special. It’s Spy Wednesday of Holy Week in the Christian calendar. 

- You are my second Christian this week. 

He smiles and, just like my first Christian, he asks

- Are you a person of faith?

I repeat my earlier and regular answer to the question.

- Yes, I am a person of faith, but not of religious faith.

I tell him I believe in him.

He invites me to believe in Jesus, who, he says, loves me and found the keys. I suggest that he uncovered the keys, not Jesus. There is nothing mysterious about a heavily-medicated seventy one year old man, struggling with pain and disability, experiencing lapses of memory and mental acuity. I say 

- I love you, not Jesus.

He says that Jesus brought us together. I demur. I say the same could be said about contingency. Chance brought us together. It’s not a saviour or an open tomb. It does not offer grace, nor chocolate eggs. Good people like him happen along.

We part on good terms.

On Maundy Thursday, two girls and their grandparents enjoy a quiet meal. The girls’ parents have a ‘night off’. The older girl tells of her drama work at a club and at her primary school. She speaks about a recent show; a pastiche of scenes and songs from the musical Annie. Then she takes us through her school show, a live telling of incidents in the life and death of Jesus, as they take place on the days of Easter week.

She starts with the palm-strewn lanes of Jerusalem, with Jesus on a donkey. Step by step, she moves through the week and the narrative known to Christians as The Greatest Story Ever Told. She recounts the tale with relish and detail. She has the Roman Governor washing his hands, as the people call for Barabbas, not Jesus, to be released. She asks questions of herself, her grandparents and of the story: who? how come?

She tells about a supper and a betrayal: what does that mean? why? She gets her characters to the garden. She details a kiss on the cheek and offers that French and Spanish people do that, but not so much English and Irish people. People are different.

The little sister acts and plays in her own story, coming and going from the table and her half-empty plate, asserting contradictions: I finish. I hungry.

We get to the three men crucified: why three? She describes Jesus’ mother and other women. She describes the soldiers, one of whom she played in the school play. She gets us to the tomb, the empty tomb, the people amazed.

She is not amazed. She is enthralled and full of questions, as she is with many of the stories she hears. Her Nanny comments that if she remembers the geography and history stories she’ll be told at school, she’ll have no bother.

I am delighted. Stories are important to me. They are the structured imaginings with which I explain the world and my experiences to myself.

The storyteller leaves an empty plate and the table. She joins her sister at a jigsaw, until they bicker and the grandparents distract them with fruit and a biscuit. After all, they are human, in their own image. They suffer pain. They inflict pain. They salve pain. Pain unites them and us. Including the two men I met. 

I wish us well, as Easter marks brighter mornings, more heat and a Spring in our gloriously human steps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on3M7YWlewo

Film trailer: The Greatest Story Ever Told

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PROBLEMS OF LEGACY ARE PROBLEMS OF NOW

Radio talk shows are full of speakers who default to the intractability of ‘Problems of Legacy’, when discussing social and political difficulties that bedevil citizens in Northern Ireland today. 

The war between state forces, their allies and anti-state paramilitaries left great wounds. Grieving families, mutilated bodies, devastated infrastructure and social schisms in the aftermath of grim violence perpetrated by a range of combatants did not lead to formal resolution of the underlying causes. They produced a cessation of violence and a precarious peace process that was very welcome, but inherently fragile, despite agreements in 1998 and 2006.

One key source of conflict was the manner in which the state enacted policing on its citizens. Policing is the iron fist of state power delivered at citizen level. It presumes the consent of the citizenry, a challenging presumption all over the world.

In Northern Ireland intense debate produced proposals to create a service from the existing force, in 2001. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was stood down and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) was formed. It has new powers, badges, protocols and a whole new recruitment process known as 50-50, a form of positive action seen in different jurisdictions. It sought to draw people from the Nationalist/Irish/Roman Catholic elements of the community in the face of the preponderance of members from Unionist/British/Protestant members of the community.

This was an understandable, but crude and contested response to the need for change. As society changes, it has proven inept in tilting the recruitment balance to an even keel. 50-50 was dropped in 2011. Calls for its return are made at present, because recruitment into the PSNI remains stubbornly below the desired figures. 

Various reasons for the recruitment problem are cited by politicians and others on the radio talk shows. They are invariably bundled as ‘Problems of Legacy’, notably the threat from anti-state para-militaries, which, though reduced, is still very real. 

These ‘Problems of Legacy’ are de facto intractable. When the term is used, no speaker names or lists them. No definitions are rolled out. Chambers Dictionary says that a legacy can be money or property received from someone who has died. Or, more relevantly, legacy can be situations that developed as a result of past actions and decisions. Such problems are presented as beyond the realm of the human. It is as if they are ‘outside of time’. And yet they are as current as the weather.

With regard to policing and its recruitment difficulties, no one mentions that the PSNI is an organisation trammelled with failure. It failed to protect the private details of its staff at least twice in August 2003, publishing them on an external website and losing them in a laptop left in a car. leading to a threat to life, followed by a compensation bill that cannot be met within current budgets. Officers were put under investigation for sharing inappropriate images of incarcerated people. Officers are cited for misogyny. A disturbing case of a once-serving PSNI officer being investigated for multiple incidents of sexual crimes, including rape, has just been made public.

Radio reports of a recent inquest into the disappearance and death of a boy include details of officers not following up on calls, not keeping hand-written notes and not reacting readily enough to developments and threats.

These are not ‘Problems of Legacy’. They are not historical. They are current.

Terming them thus allows them to be dodged. It allows senior officials and the political board of governance to raise their arms in the air in an appeal for understanding, while being ineffectual. Educated young women and men, regardless of social and political background, are understandably wary of committing to a hapless organisation that struggles to deliver on its basic aims. And that is currently a compromised bedfellow of the spooks. Vincent Kearney, Trevor McBirney and Barry McCaffrey are just three journalists enduring court processes for intrusions into their personal information. 

When flags of violent British/Unionist/Protestant proscribed organisations were hoisted on lamp-posts beside the police training college, the PSNI were unable to remove them, though a public outcry demanded it. They fluttered to flitters, leaving the organisation looking impotent. 

More flaggery accompanies the release of new public and private housing blocks, with the purpose of intimidating prospective buyers by crude sectarian territorial marking. Again the PSNI is inept, then engages in hand-wringing when families are bricked and petrol bombed. 

While individual officers performed well in dangerous circumstances, people facing racist attacks across towns and villages last summer were not served and protected as well as they should be. The burning of a replica boat of immigrants at a 12^th July event in Moygashel, without any police intervention amidst political bleating about legislation, would not encourage publicly-minded young women and men to join the service.

These are not ‘Problems of Legacy’. They are ‘Problems of Now’, in an organisation living by Brendan Behan’s observation that he knew of no situation that could not be made worse by the arrival of the police. 

These problems and others are easier to blog and comment about rather than to solve.

Long, over-running public inquiries? Check out Muckamore Hospital. The worst polluted lake in the land? Check out Lough Neagh. Connect that with the ‘cash for ash’ farrago. Or the singular over-production of chicken fillets and the mis-management of effluent by a legally immune water authority.

Many people are genuinely attempting to respond practically to these and other problems, at street level, by surmounting the barricade of ‘Problems of Legacy’ in order to act now. This is the single biggest challenge facing peace-building today. It challenges the peace-building desire for ‘moving on’, which cannot be achieved without attention to social and economic justice and the emotional impact of conflict and injustice. Now.

There is a role for artistic and imaginative work in this.

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.

Opportunities to create and implement programmes of works of non-violent social change in the direction of peace and justice can be taken. Public and philanthropic financial support for this work presents its own difficulties of co-option, distortion and power. How can state funds be used when the state is itself a continuing protagonist? And when terms like ‘change’, ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ are contested and unsettling to people?

Perhaps they provide a place to start, when working with adults. Working with children is worthy, but the challenges are present now, not in the future and lying under ‘Problems of Legacy’ or yearning for the future take from actions necessary in the present world.

Word games, writing activities, action games, movement and spatial treatments are among a range of imaginative activities and programmes with adults that can help to build peace. 

Three words – change, peace, justice. Press PLAY.

Other arts practices can also be called upon also.

This helps to ensure the availability of non-violent tools for resolving our conflicts, and will be a significant part of the process of making our society more integrated and more just.

Good luck to us all.

Waiting… by Dave Duggan, Sole Purpose Productions, 2000

Published in Plays in a Peace Process, Guildhall Press, 2008

Arts Approaches to the Conflict in Northern Ireland by Dave Duggan

Published in Arts Approaches to Conflict, ed. Marian Liebmann, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London 1996

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© Dave Duggan