BELFAST TALKS

Talks between political parties have started again in Belfast.

About how local devolution of political powers can be made to work.
From a British point of view devolution seems a good idea. That is what they have in Britain, supreme power rests in the Monarchy and power is devolved down from Monarchy through the Houses of Lords and  Commons. To , as they say, the common people - eventually.

People find it  hard to believe this is the British system of power sharing in Britain itself but that is the way it is. Devolution from the source of power in the Monarchy down through the Lords and the Commons , the latter  representing, of course, the common folk.  Devolution  is a normal part of the  British  system under which we are ruled. In Britain this  devolution works, even though it is  not a voluntary system but  was imposed by force through hundreds of years and many think there is nothing particularly wrong in it. One disadvantage of the system is that if Monarch, army and what is called "the upper class" ( nowadays the state Church is not as influential  as it used to be)combined they could  take over power without breaking the basic  laws which are the British government system, or  constitution.  A  British commentator on the realities of this devolution  wrote that  this devolution of power from monarchy down to the representatives of the people  seems to open the possibility of power being  taken over from the top.  However, he adds reassuringly, there is a kind of gentleman's agreement that this will not happen!

Like the safeguard   mentioned by a character  in the BBC series  Yes (Prime) Minister ,  against any abuse  in the bank of England :  Really one chap doesn't let down other chaps in the City…..a  safeguard which we in Ireland who are democrats rather than monarchists  consider insufficient for anything.

So devolution  of powers from an already devolved government in London  down to  the even more devolved  one in Northern Ireland seems normal within the system but there are  problems there too. The Irish area of devolved government was carefully carved out in the nineteen twenties in order to be ruled and able to be ruled by, and only by, one  unchangeable party favourable to union with Britain.  This was done not only when imperial powers were doing much the same in the Middle East but when Irish nationalists and churches and many other  people in Ireland thought that belonging to an empire, to The Empire, the most prosperous  of European ones,  was a good thing. Even Nationalists had   fought  and  died for empire.

But empires dissolve and new ideas  about government arise from  the dust where they have been lying  not at all  forgotten by those who believe less  in being governed than in governing themselves.

One group of  people who are influential in the present  political talks in Belfast still hold on to the idea that empire brings strength and  government  dominated forever by one party in a small area specially carved out  for it is still possible ; another set of people believe that there cannot ever be good government - and good government is what the talks should be about - while the shape of that selfishly constructed political unit  remains as it is, part of a Province which was  given the name of the whole province , to be ruled over for ever  by  one unchangeable party , its unchangeableness assured by various devices which have in modern times become very  - but not completely - unpopular as undemocratic and offensive.  

 
Whom do we expect to be talking to each other in present  political talks in Belfast then ? People who say  good government is possible by some powers of the already internally devolved British government being devolved into an artificially devised Irish situation on the one hand , and  on the other hand people who say that if good government is to be had , the political shape of the area  to be governed has to be changed.

 Devolved government  in  Ireland was enforced, adjusted, re-adjusted  and  mended - at one period it seems there was  a new arrangement of it in N.Ireland once every two years or so - one might say all those failed experiments prove that  democrats  took devolution by successive downward steps and even diminishing powers as a serious  possibility to lessen the worst enormities of the system but from which we could progress towards a democratic solution.   

If another  interim repair to the system  is made this  time it will  need to be fair, reasonable, practical and constructively temporary. Negotiators  are intelligent enough to look at this reality if we insist that they do . They need not be  split by false promises and other government-generated nonsense including financial inducements.  

The  arrangements we make if  this present one fails will have to be definitive  and radical.   

We cannot keep trying yet another one, and another one and another one for much longer.  

You don't, as many of our fellow citizens might say, keep hoping, however long you keep trying, to gather figs from thistles.

Or grapes from thorns ( or thrones?).

  

LORD DELIVER US - YES, BUT WHY?

This time every year ( January 17th - January 25th) Christians pray publicly and privately for Christian Unity.

Christians have fought wars with Christians  and with others described by their Founder as "neighbours",  Christians or not. A minority of Christians have been pacifists, talking, working, suffering, dying to persuade all fellow  Christians to  abandon all  war against everyone. They have kept alive an ideal but failed miserably in fact.

Christians still ask God's help for their governments who wage war for profit and  sell arms to others to do it too, at the same time  asking God to unite us all in peace, starting with fellow Christians, as if God could do it against our will.

 

In 1988 in Belfast a citizens' writers  collective , most of whose  members  were of  Christian background,   produced this :

Little Pieces  :  An Incantation 

So we took the people all                                        

Sliced them into sections

Sacred bricks in holy wall

Severed all connections

Singled out the willing few

Safe for our elections

Stifled all the rest with new

Scripts for free injections....

So they promised people all

(Speaking each to sections )

Safe behind a holy wall

Separate resurrections....

 Nothing more  nothing less

Nothing change nothing bless

'Don't tear his cloak ' the soldiers said

So we divided Christ instead.

                                           (Published by Springhill Community House Belfast 1988)

A curious thought : Will unity among Christians come about only when Christians become  pacifist,  against war, totally dedicated to recognition of every person's dignity and right to live in peace ?

And an even more curious thought  perhaps : If Christians don't do this, do they deserve to have their prayers for peace heard ?

This question  is one of the great dividers in Christian life. Some few may favour complete pacifism - like Father Dan Berrigan who came to West Belfast in the midst of the recent war waged in Northeast Ireland in the seventies to  nineties. At the invitation of Fr Joe Mc Veigh and  local people Dan  publicly discussed this with a fellow priest , Herman Verbeek  a member of the European  Parliament. Dan said we should always take literally the Jesus saying of turning the other cheek. Herman Verbeek  argued that that was all very well but if attacked we had not only the privilege but the duty to defend our own lives and those for whom, as parents, neighbours or whatever, we had responsibility. There need be little doubt which the audience in those sad circumstance favoured.  The  important thing  was that in the midst of their trouble they had the conscience to ask people to come and talk realistically with them about it.

During the German occupation in France in the nineteen forties resistance fighters used to come down from the hills to ask advice from Church about the morality of their  armed resistance to the invasion!  That's how concerned they were about such matters, although they got little credit for it.

During the years when we were even more afraid of nuclear weapons than we are now, a prominent Catholic cleric in  London fell out with his archbishop. The Archbishop insisted that nuclear weapons were necessary  " as a deterrent". The cleric disagreed and so the Archbishop lost the services of one of the most active workers for peace in England.

So if Washington exploded two nuclear weapons  when they did not need them to win a war, what would happen when any powerful government would do even worse, having persuaded their people  they were in danger of attack ? The persuasion is on already.

Christians could have a powerful voice pushing us towards peace. There is an  honourable  place for us in this modern world even though we failed dismally in the old one. Whatever  internal arguments we have that  drive people away from us , we could unite on one issue that would enable people to believe that our prayers,  processions  and hymns are serious.

As a united  human and humane body  powerful for peace there will be no doubt about our place in this modern political world where death is used to solve problems, where war is for profit and human beings  are made to fight plenty but not to matter much.  

POSH TOSH ?

A few days ago  the BBC broadcast a programme about George Bernard Shaw and Channel 4 broadcast a play "Derry Girls".

In the BBC programme there was a segment on Shaw's play Pygmalion. In this play Shaw showed how people who are described as "upper class" show their upper class by the way they speak and create class divisions by pointing to other people as inferior by the way they speak. He despised the whole process of course.

"Derry Girls" presented viewers with a story of children whose language - and social customs - mark them out as quite special. Words that RTE, BBC, ITV , the Irish Times,  consider so unmentionable in good "Society" that they primly refer to them as the F word, the C word, peppered the script, or perhaps may have been  inserted during production to liven things up a bit.

Or to make clear to viewers that children from  a certain area, with a certain financial standard of living, of a certain religion really talk like this and can be defined and recognised by it. In Shaw's play a flower girl has a way of talking that may have been real or not but defined her as a person of lower standing in what was called "society".  In the Channel Four programme  a limited  stock of words to talk with, considering  wildness a great thing, relieving oneself into a trash can,  by these characteristics  you may  recognise the Derry girls'  world. Nothing easier than that.

Shaw is more clever about  all this than " Derry Girls". He shows why speech and accent are used to define what class you belong to and whether you are acceptable to people considered more elevated. Within the viewing area of  Channel Four's  programme there may now be people who really believe Derry speech and manners  would exclude Derry children  from "polite society" as it used to be called.  Are they being encouraged  to think that way?

After the first episode of "Derry Girls" one could wonder if perhaps that young man isolated in a male-loo-less  convent school who seemed to have a somewhat across the water accent might fall in love with one of the girls and apply the rules of Channel Four civilisation to her with disastrous results because of  alienation and possible exile for the poor girl through not being able to talk to  (or shout at) her own people any more.  Shaw's character, through learning  "correct" speech, could have lost out that way and we are never sure whether she did or not but the danger was there.  Perhaps the writer of "Derry Girls" has more strings to  her artistic bow than Shaw and   may  invent  a reasonably normal happy ending out of the play's cultural chaos.  

Years ago I spoke to an audience that  included a titled lady and a West- Minister.  I talked to them about their  floor arrangements for the Opening of their Parliament. The monarch sat in grace away up there, the lords, ladies and high clergy  seated in front of the monarch,  and away at the back, standing, were the elected representatives of the people, the Commons, the common folk.  A striking symbol of the shape of the British power system,  monarch at the top whose power and comfort are devolved  "downwards" eventually reaching the common folk, diluted. Drinking tea afterwards the titled lady was heard to say loudly : " Doesn't he know that things have changed, enormously changed  - the House of Lords has changed enormously, why,  you can tell by their accents .........."

As Shaw with typical Irish wisdom pointed out, speech is used to classify people as belonging to "Society" or not. And that is a nonsense.

 There was a time - which we old folk well remember - when the BBC and the Theatres allowed a Belfast, Ballymena or Derry accent to be used only for laughs or whimsy. Those times changed, eventually the BBC had to allow local accents to be not only used but respected.

When Radio Éireann and RTÉ came along there was discussion about them in Dáil Éireann. A  T.D. complained  : "These broadcasters", he said, "have accents that are not redolent of the soil........".   A brave effort to turn old snobbery on its head  even at the cost of creating a new one, but recognising the importance of speech and accent in letting other people decide whether you are "respectable" or not.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of the Derry Girls.  One of them perhaps, poor Derry girl converted to gentility but sadly trudging off into the sunset where  her every  word must be  acceptable to polite society but her community and friends cannot talk with  her any more. Like in Pygmalion.

Incidentally, do Derry children  really keep talking like that ?

And do  they really  have nuns with starched faces ?

And do they really shout at each other even when only a couple of feet away ? 

If not should we let  Channel Four know ?

 

 

COUNTING COST

Three ideas  2018 could well do without :

1  No use reviving Irish it's a dead language .

   The truth is that  for the past more than two thousand years there has never been a time when Irish was a dead language, it has continued to be the living language of multitudes of people from   long before the English language was put together  and up to the present ;

2   If we could teach people to live together we could solve our problems

     The truth is that people in the northeast of Ireland are well able to integrate. Indeed they are so successful at it - intermarrying, working together, living in the same districts - that government and its supporters had to create pogroms on average one every twelve years or so for a hundred years to split them apart again, so as not to upset the voting pattern necessary for control.

3    Ireland cannot afford the 9 billion a year to be united.

       Economists must  work out our financial situation efficiently.  People said the same about Malta and always say the same about any body of people who  want to govern themselves  - you can't afford it. Britain has profited extremely well from our Irish border, much better than people on either side of it  - it got a huge tract of land that it could freely roam - until the armed conflict restricted  this  - as a military and naval base from which it could dominate the Atlantic and allow NATO to do the same, it controlled our trade, commerce, import , export , surrounding seas , controlling enterprise so that it would not interfere with enterprise in Britain.  And much else besides.

 Logic suggests that if 2018 is to proceed with honesty  what we need is not just nice people to govern us in the northeast of the island  but freedom to govern ourselves efficiently in the whole of the island.  Others who  had the same problem  were  told the same tale, you cannot afford it. In the old days it was enough to say, You cannot do it, but now, having to admit we can do it, the argument adjusts, Yes, perhaps you could but you could not pay for it.   

Will  our political logicians and economists help our discussions in 2018 ?