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).

SERBIA IS NOT PAKISTAN. OR SYRIA

The long arm of the (Western) law reaches into Serbia and plucks Ratko Mladic out of hiding with a view to whizzing him off to The Hague (52 degrees North, 4 degrees East), where he will face an international war crimes tribunal. The same long arm, but this time of the (Western) lawlessness, reaches into Pakistan and summarily executes Osama bin Laden. 

Both actions are greeted as triumphs for freedom and democracy, but questions arise as to why these two much-sought renegades received such different treatment. Part of the answer is that Serbia is not Pakistan. Serbia is in Europe, at least in that eastward-expanding version of Europe that is growing since the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Serbia wants Europe. Europe – Germany and France – wants Serbia, but doesn't know what it wants with Pakistan.

Mladic stands accused of horrendous crimes of violence and sexual depravity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing during the forty three month siege of Sarajevo (43 degrees North, 18 degrees East), which killed some 12, 000 people and the July 1995 Srebrenica (44 degrees North, 19 degrees East) massacre of 8, 000 Muslim men and boys. Of course Serbia is not the USA and Mladic did not kill Americans. His targets were Bosnian and Muslim.

The death toll of the World Trade Centre suicide plane attacks was 3, 000, an horrific figure, but considerably less than the outcome of the devastation ordered and inspired by Mladic. Other killings were inspired and/or ordered by bin Laden, but he never reached the grotesque numbers achieved by Mladic. However, he is not before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He is buried at sea, following summary execution. Perhaps if he had moved to Serbia and not Pakistan he would still be alive?

And if not Serbia, then perhaps Syria? How the long arm of the (Western) law curls back upon itself, rather than intervening as it is in Libya! What exactly is happening in Syria? A peoples' uprising? An ethnic civil war?

In Act 1 Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the witches, waiting to ambush the Scottish General, plan havoc on the husband of a 'rump-fed ronyon' who refused the First Witch some of her chestnuts. 

The First Witch says

'Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:

But in a sieve I'll thither sail,

And, like a rat without a tail, 

I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.'

Aleppo (36 degrees North, 37 degrees East) is the second largest city in Syria, with an ethnically and religiously mixed population of Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Muslims, Eastern Christians, Jews and others.  See pictures of the city and hear a song by the wonderful Fairuz at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF3EooAkUzI

Repression and killing by President Bashar al-Assad and his regime are the problem. The 1982 massacres in Hama (35 degrees North, 36 degrees East) and Aleppo ordered by his father and his uncle hang over the current unrest. Will the long arm of the (Western) law reach for him? Sanctions are being discussed, but no clarity exists as to The President's fate, whether it is to be summary execution or arrest. Put him in  sieve without a sail and launch him down the Euphrates river, through Iraq, all the way to the Persian Gulf and then on to The Hague for a war crimes tribunal? Along with the Second and Third Witches, George Bush and Tony Blair?

THE QUEEN'S SPEECH

Today is the last day of the state visit of The Queen of England to the Republic of Ireland. The citizens now only have the visit of The President of The United States of America to host. (See May Visitations. March Demises. 25th March 2011). 

A comic song of Dublin (53 degrees North, 6 degrees West) goes: 

The Queen she came to call on us, she came to call on all of us 

I'm glad she didn't fall on us, she's eighteen stone.

So take her up to Monto, Monto, Monto

Take her up to Monto, langeroo

The song, though written in 1958 by the music critic of The Irish Times,  George Hodnett, refers to Queen Victoria. The current British monarch is very far from eighteen stone. She is, in fact, a slim and sprightly octogenarian, seen bending to wield a garden spade to good effect at a tree planting with The Irish President, Mary McAleese, in Áras an Uachtaráin, Dublin. A Belfast (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West)  woman, the President is chiselling her name into the history books as a champion of reconciliation, accelerating a peace process she has advanced forcefully throughout her public life, now that the end of her Presidency draws near.

It won't make a film title like its gendered opposite but The Queen's speech at a Dublin Castle banquet, during which she wore an ultra-bling dress and tiara she could sell to feed a refugee camp, used the language of disappointment -  we could have done things differently or not at all – in an attempt to say something positive about the historical legacy of the colonial relationship between two neighbouring islands. 

The people of England are re-evaluating their imperial past. That it is a wealthy and nuclear-armed country today is a legacy of that imperial past. Some discomfort is being experienced among political and military elites that the British Prime Minister and the monarch are using the language of wrongdoers - regret, sorry, should not have happened - with familiarity and ease, but historical legacy issues appear increasingly present on public agendas as pressure from below has greater and greater effect. The elites know they must manage this pressure in order to maintain control.

In Ireland, there is some energy coming from elites to lance the boils of the past. One of the most inflamed and daunting of these is a damning legacy of urban poverty. The British monarch did not, in fact, get taken up to Monto, Dublin's historical red-light district, made famous by James Joyce in the Night Town sequence of Ulysses. Monto, as such, is gone, but the north inner city remains notoriously poor, full of native poor and an increasing immigrant poor population, not to be seen by The Queen, and certainly not  allowed within an ass' roar of the banquet in Dublin Castle.

The inner city is clamped in a ring of cold blue steel formed by Gardaí and elite Army personnel. Dissident republican threats necessitate this. The obverse side of the ludicrous actions of militant republicans are the fawning and the kow-towing the Queen's visit elicits. Hardly surprising, as Ireland is a young republic, with a long history of royalty holding sway, both indigenous ones, regional and national, and foreign ones of English-Norman, Dutch, Scottish and, in the current case, German origins.

Hodnett's song also has the lines:

Mister Milord the Mayor says she,

Is this all you've got to show for me,

Why no Mam there's more to see, 'Póg Mo Thóin'.

The Irish translates to English as 'kiss my arse', a line for citizens corralled behind police lines perhaps?

ARCADIA

Arcadia is a play by English playwright Tom Stoppard. It is a tonic and a puzzle, words that could be applied to the new administration emerging in Northern Ireland. Arcadia is also the idyllic Greek district ruled by the mythological King Arca, who showed his people how to weave, grow corn and make bread, tasks facing the kings (and a small number of queens), Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs), taking power by appointing themselves to various ministries.

Stoppard stands on the shoulders of Farquhar, Wilde, Ayckbourn and Frayn. He tonics us with Lady Croom: 'I have had the experience of being betrayed before the ink was dry, but to be betrayed before the pen was dipped, and with the village noticeboard, what am I to think of such a performance.' He puzzles us with Septimus Hodge: 'We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing is lost to it.'

There is nothing outside the new administration. Voters, even allowing for the relatively low turnout, overwhelmingly chose the two parties, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party, who run the coalition government in Northern Ireland, by sharing or carving up, depending on your political view. Other parties declined in votes or flattered themselves by taking votes off each other. 


The procession is indeed long and new life is breathed into it as power is disbursed. What was let fall by the last administration is picked up: the economic mess is faced by favouring international capital via preferential corporate tax arrangements; fiscal problems are addressed by cutting public services and capping social welfare, thereby underusing resources and taking money out of the economy; coping with the legacy of the violent past is airbrushed, photoshopped and talked to a standstill. The ink dries on agreements and new pens are dipped in readiness for signing new deals.

Citizens are tonicced and puzzled, but, in the main, pleased that the state military presence is thoroughly lessened and paramilitary violence is intermittent and small-scale. But herein lies a  paradox and Lady Croom warns us: 'Do not dabble in paradox..... it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit.'

Can Arcadia be enjoyed by governing - weaving, growing corn and making bread, countless other tasks - in this way?

The march is long and looking both in front and behind great aeons of time present, hence a tortoise on stage in Stoppard's play Arcadia. Named variously as Plautus and Lightning, it is the cleverest clock device in theatre. Taking the long view then, the new administration may perhaps be the route to building Arcadia, yet one of the puzzles not faced by Stoppard is how to reconcile the differing experiences and needs of the various people on the march, linked by an essential humanity, yes, but divided by, amongst other things, social class. His dazzling and wonderful play is set among aristocrats, Regency and modern, landed gentry and academics, who gently tolerate, but don't trust, the rest. Chloe says they're running: 'A dance for the district, our annual dressing up and general drunkenness. The wrinklies won't have it in the house, there was a teapot we once had to bag back from Christie's in the nick of time, so anything that can be destroyed, stolen or vomited on has been tactfully removed.'  

Arcadia will not be enjoyed by the tactful removal of resources or prohibiting entry to certain of the long marchers. There is more than a paradox here. There is a political and social puzzle. One for the new administration to unravel. As Stoppard says in his great play: 'It's the wanting to know that makes us matter'