John,Victor, Terry.

 

Another good friend has left us, Dr John Robb who died this week.  

John belonged proudly to a great Presbyterian  liberal tradition. In his writing and conversation he shared so many ideas about medicine, education, politics. His vision of the life we could enjoy together was brilliant and always mindful of the potential all our people have for making such a vision normal for everyone, developing and enlarging our potential for greatness.

An example of quiet courage, courageously shown when we so much needed it, John  sponsored the Mac Bride Principles of Fair Employment along with Inez Mc Cormick and Brian Brady and thus enabled   Oliver Kearney and other courageous people to hasten the creation of fair employment laws for everyone.

We used to meet in the Olio Restaurant , not far from the spot  where courageous  Presbyterian merchants in Belfast long ago threw out in disgust a proposal for Belfast to make money by organising its  own slave trade.   John Robb, Victor Hamilton, another friend who remembered his liberal Presbyterian tradition with pride and hope, historian and scholar in many languages, one of those citizens who helped us to hope that Belfast would be recognised once again for its humanity and learning, and Terry Donaghy who would visit different places of worship - and places of different worship - week by week in grateful   recognition of this shared inheritance of ours .  Terry died near the City Hall at the end of a walk for peace.

Terry and Victor and John have been good to us and we are grateful.

A PRESIDENT STEPS DOWN

I have known Gerry Adams  for more than half my lifetime.

Now when he has stepped down from Presidency of Sinn Fein  I wish him well, as he has wished myself and many other friends well.  His advice and experience will remain a treasure in his Party and outside it.

 I have seen  the interplay of forces between  different "social classes" in which a nationalist politician  advised British interested parties that Gerry Adams could not write his own speeches and had to get a priest to do it for him. I have  seen how almost every initiative for peace that I was associated  with was  either cold-shouldered or opposed by people who wanted peace but believed some classes of people could not  make peace  and had to be presented with it as if it were a gift possessed by those who had lots of material gifts already and therefore were, so to speak,  a peace- making class of some kind. Peace without change was theirs to allot.

People have said , especially in contrasting Gerry Adams with Martin McGuinness, that Gerry was remote and unapproachable - this from people who refused not only to talk, but even to listen to him.

People talked about a past military "baggage"  who seemed to believe peace was only to be got by discrediting  opponents  rather than exploring each others'  minds .

When we were struggling for employment in West Belfast Gerry Adams supported peaceful efforts which others condemned. When people were travelling to Ireland, Britain, Continental Europe, Canada, the  USA,  asking support  for Principles of fair conduct to ensure fair employment for our neighbours we were opposed in public and in private by representatives of political parties, churches, diplomatic officials. Gerry Adams supported our efforts for Peace Through Equality.  The best we   were offered officially was equity - where the master treated all the servants with equal reward and punishment.  That is not equality. We had the humiliation of listening to representatives even of our own churches saying these principles of fair employment would prevent investment in N.Ireland. The truth was that with such principles for the first time in our history we could assure investors that  they could now find workers in Ireland all of whom were appointed on ability to do the job rather than membership of secret organisations. In other words we  promised efficiency.  Some important people wanted the defeat of republicans more than the prospect  of efficiency. 

Time and time again people like Father Alex Reid asked church and other leaders to get those in conflict around the table - they had nothing to lose, everything to gain - to talk to  and with them . They refused , saying that to talk to "them " would "give  them status". 

They had not accepted that   the vote of the people gives representatives status  - that principle was abandoned along with the other principle that no-one can be said to have broken a law unless and until proved to have done so beyond reasonable doubt -- a   principle being broken almost every day still  by those who accuse others of being lawless ,whether with evidence or not.  

I was content but surprised to see  lines of political people, who would not have allowed Martin McGuinness to speak,  reverently attending his funeral, and  clergy many of whom would have supported politicians and media  in that  boycott. It took a long time to persuade such people that to despise the people's representatives is to despise the people who choose them but eventually the message had to be heeded by some of them.

The support Gerry Adams  gave to peacemaker Father Alex Reid was important especially when many other people  said  Alex was being  naive and manipulated. Gerry Adams knew well that people like Alex went  talking to members of the Red Hand Commandos, the UDA, the UVF, politicians , church officials, SDLP,  anybody willing to talk and listen, all to help people find reasons to share  respect for people who  were their neighbours.

The first time I saw Gerry Adams on a public platform was when he addressed a school hall full of young people after riots in the street . He calmly and assuredly told them that rioting in the street was not going to make life better for  them or any of us , but organising , becoming one together and learning the reason for what was being done to us would set us on the way. During many years West Belfast was one of the few places where all the political parties, all the churches, pacifists like Dan Berrigan , Herman Verbeek , representatives of people engaged in political struggles elsewhere in the world were invited by the residents to speak  with them . West Belfast  probably learned more about oppressive politics , helpful and unhelpful  leadership and their own potential   than  people in most other cities did.  But they had to do it in face of cold-shouldering and even  opposition from those who could and should have helped. 

Those who helped were appreciated, and if politicians, voted for.

I have never believed in the existence  of " physical force republicanism".  In republican history military action came after years of effort to create fair government , even on terms dictated by those who ruled  unjustly ; if military action had to come it had to  be a last resort not a first one. For those who conquered other countries into bad government and created  empires military force was a first resort not a last one.

I  have  remembered that many times while watching the painful struggles from peace into war and from war into peace.

When August 1969 came and whole streets were burning and war came - not "Troubles" but war by any standard - I believed and still believe that for the police, military and politicians who made those  attacks, this, along with  the ensuing thirty years war was to be their Final Solution.

For those who flung up barricades and hurled stones and faced into the thirty years war - not "Troubles" but war by any standard - this was their Last Resort.

The war was between the Final Solution and the Last Resort.

To lead people into war is easy. Mr Blair did it. Mrs Thatcher did it. Hitler did it.

To lead people from war into peace is difficult and often opposed by nice people .

Martin McGuinness led from war into peace. So did Gerry Adams .

Most people in Ireland and Britain, apart from a courageous few, stood aside and  refused even to admit  what the conflict was about.….......

So we know whom to blame for the war. And whom to thank for the peace.  

LIVING IN NAMALAND

In 2012 Frank Connolly's book entitled Tom Gilmartin: The Man Who Brought Down A Taoiseach was published. It was a mind-piercing account , most carefully researched, into how trade, commerce, politics in Ireland interweave in a desperate rush for profit,  and how people and community suffer as a result.

Now Frank Connolly has given us another book, entitled Namaland .  It is the story of Ireland's National Asset Management Agency that , as Frank Connolly writes ..." was established to repair the mistakes caused by excessive greed and corruption across Irish business, banking and political systems....".  It is the story of the interaction of banks, property developers, politicians and , a reader  can hardly help suspecting, the inaction or inefficiency of  some  agencies  and inspectorates set up to avoid such horrors.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Ireland was hurled into financial chaos through this interaction of banks, developers , politicians and others and in the end as usual we ordinary folk had to gather up what crumbs were left on the masters' disintegrating table.  People already faced with a decreasing value of money -life savings  encouraged by government were already  reducing to near nothing - were presented with the concept of banks  "being too big to be allowed to fail", large stores of money heaped up privately and corporately - in one place or another - waiting, not to relieve the financial strain on poorer people but lying comparatively idle only to be  invested when the level of profit got high enough to satisfy. Shortage of money is  not the  problem, hoarding  is, as grim an offence against fellow citizens as hoarding food in a bad harvest time.  NAMALAND  reveals the mechanism, the mechanics who worked  it, the scale, the result and the  government arranged remedy which at times proved astonishingly  like favouring people of the same kind again, perhaps even some of the same people. 

For us ordinary folk the scale of the money manoeuvred in the pursuit of profit is staggering  as we read of someone leaving Ireland owing 450 million Euro, property deals  in Dublin which  need to attract enormous profit in  housing in a city where there is dire need of affordable  housing for the  majority of people who cannot  pursue  larger and larger profits by swooping  when  the moment arrives  to open  their vaults and invest.  

Frank Connolly does not put it like this , his treatment is admirably free from either rhetoric or righteous indignation even though there is plenty to be righteously indignant about. NAMA took over  debts of failed or failing enterprises, not necessarily failing through mismanagement or natural disaster but also through a new and damaging fever of lending by banks  not only in Ireland but primarily in Europe where bonuses could be had for persuading  clients to borrow more than they were normally likely to be able to repay  There were warnings that the money value of property - on which lenders depended for much of their profits - cannot go on rising forever and someday the boom will bust. Many people were left high and dry including those whose hard work had made them successful and whose enterprise would now be taken and sold to the highest bidders whoever they might be and wherever they might come from.  A  TD who said Ireland was being sold to the highest bidder had a lot of truth in what he said. But not only the highest bidders would benefit ,  the game was joined by advisers, politicians , officials and one person and another whose services were highly prized in all this, even though there were suggestions of irregularities in a system which does not fail but works admirably for those who know when to leap in and when to leap out of it. With advice which may be highly political as well as economic.

My Father who gave me some important lessons in his homely way about politics and money used to say people in his day felt they should lift their hats passing the bank  ( it was a reference to the Irish custom of men raising their hats or caps reverently passing a church ) , such was the reverence, sometimes fear, they had of the lenders of scarce money. He could never have imagined a time when banks would not only lend but would persuade clients to borrow more than they could afford to borrow , and when  such transactions could earn a handsome bonus for the persuader , whatever about risk for the borrower.  

These two books are so thoroughly researched, so detailed, and so incisively getting into the heart of often complicated  matters  that even for us ordinary folk it is possible to find the story even if  it is hard to understand so many details of it.

Two books that  should be read by everyone of us who grieves at how manipulation of capital and the increasing trend  of politics and business  towards profit before people has undone much of the good we thought we had achieved towards  a rational management of wealth.

SPRING IN

Welcome on  the first day of Spring.

The  Irish Spring Festival goes back a long, long way , before Christian times, and is still celebrated in traditional ways in many places in Ireland. The most powerful survivor of those pre-Christian times is Brigid , who successfully passed from pagan times into Christian history as saint Brigid - a passage responsible for many of our Irish customs , names of people,places, wells, mountains, times of the year , language and much else. The Irish co-existence  of "pagan " and "Christian" is a sign of Irish willingness to integrate and share and compromise with enjoyment ; historic accommodation of  willing people with each other is written into the words, seasons, hills, wells, language of Ireland. Nice thought. If we integrated Pagan and Christian so thoroughly we can respectfully enrich our political lives now with many differences and evolutions....................

This year we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of women voting - for the first time women were voting as themselves instead of simply offering their wisdom to men and hoping they would  vote on their behalf.  Women  had to struggle hard for that. The very name " suffragette" shows what many people thought of women voting. Through many years if you were an actor and a woman you were an actress,you might  be not a poet but a poetess, not just a suffragist but a suffragette ,each of the words either giving or being given a - this is hard to define -  a meaning of something lesser, as if somehow a poetess or  an actress might just be somewhat less than  poet or actor.

Times pass and in the slow movement towards  courtesy and recognition words change and the meanings of words change too. Slow movement of change is one thing, the painful even agonising process of making change is another, people had to march, go to jail , be force-fed and  insulted as police locked the handcuffs which were a sign  not of safe citizenship but of outlawed criminality. Interesting, the same word is used for setting slaves free and setting  Catholics free from penal law and setting women free from lower status in the human community - emancipation. Daniel Ó Connell  is hailed by many Irish people as The Liberator and Catholic Emancipation his triumph. But it was a limited freedom he won, a freedom for some, not for all. That idea of freedom for all has still to come and  flourish. He did the best he could in his day. We should  do much better in ours. .

When Mr De Valera was drawing up the Constitution  for one part of Ireland - in 1938, another commemoration this year -  he was under tremendous pressure from some people in continental Europe to name the Roman Catholic Church a state church in Ireland like the Anglican in Britain. He refused. Instead, the Constitution stated merely that the RC Church had a special position in the new State simply because  it had more adherents than any other kind of Christianity. It was a clever  way of doing something but at the same time doing nothing.

In that Constitution there was another provision saying , broadly speaking, that women should not be forced by economic necessity to work outside the home " to the harm of her duties in the home", or words to that effect. That provision of the Constitution eventually became a source of public opposition  and like the article about the position of the Catholic Church had to be changed. But the article saying the RC church was the church of the majority of the people really said nothing much and what it said about women was that they should not be forced to work outside the home. One  article was intended to fend off advocates of state churches by giving them a sop , and the other  article could have been used to defend families from exploitation by merchants and industrialists but both were  in public discourse understood as attacks on non-Catholics and women. Many workplaces  in Ireland were employing and exploiting more women than men.  If the Constitution had specially forbidden the exploitation  of women for profit and granted them  recognition of their right to have control of their choice of work and the conditions in which  they would do it  that would have been a different matter.

Adjustments to Constitutions are difficult  because people's perception of what they mean or should mean changes. Like the civil or religious insistence on indissoluble marriage , what might be a basis for safeguard could, in changing circumstances,  be seen and experienced as an intolerable hardship.

So this is an interesting year in which we remember not only the good changes but changes that could have been better and  the pain good people endured to make them. Descent into chaos may sometimes come suddenly, but change into beauty is always a  slow job of work. So with laws and constitutions.

Happy Springtime into brilliant Summer perhaps ?