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Liam Clarke

Belfast journalist Liam Clarke died this week. He was one of the most lucid and considered commentators on Northern Irish politics. This is a recording of a conversation I had with him before an audience four years ago.

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I believed in Santa Claus before I believed in God.

And when I was taught first about the baby Jesus, the story to start with was the one about the little poor baby who got presents for Christmas, brought by men who looked a bit like Santa in their colourful robes and head gear, who came from very far away, following a star and probably said things like Ho Ho Ho.

I didn’t think much of the gifts that Jesus got, the gold and frankincense and a mirror. I doubt he was keen on them himself. But the lesson of the story was that, like Jesus, you should always be glad of what you get and not complain, as I should be glad of the things Santa had brought me, which weren’t exactly what I had asked for.

So, my first religious faith was in Santa Claus, not in Jesus, who was just too complicated, who set an example for children that was not really attainable.

This was not how the nuns had intended to direct me, but if they had thought it through they would have seen that this was an inevitable consequence. What child wanted gold, frankincense and a mirror for Christmas? None that I knew.

There were other mysterious fat men in big coats in the Christmas stories. Like Good King Wences who last Last looked out on the feast of Stephen. I had trouble placing King Wences in the narrative. How he actually met his end was not clear to me either.

All I knew was that he never looked out again.

It was as well we weren’t relying on him to deliver the presents.

Or on God either.

When my theological education advanced a little further I understood how the story of Santa Claus integrates with the Christian one. He was St Nicholas. Say it quickly and Sanicklaus is Santa Claus.

This reconciliation of the two mythologies saved me for a time for Christianity and without it my entire spiritual development would have been focused on Santa Claus, a divine being who was bountiful and good and uncomplicated.

There were no stories in the lore about Santa which presented him as smiting cities, sending plagues, even asking people to sacrifice sheep for him. True, Jesus was an improvement on the old God, for when shepherds brought lambs to him he didn’t asked them to kill them. But he was still a moody God.

I have heard of a Japanese department store in which the intertwining of the stories of Jesus and Santa was so confused that Santa was depicted crucified. Santa was never crucified; he never would have been crucified because – well he never annoyed anybody – not anybody at all.

In recognition of the integration of my faith in Santa with my faith in Jesus, when the time came round for my confirmation and I had to choose a name by which to be more fully inducted into the church as a soldier of Christ, I chose the name Nicholas.

I am Malachi John Nicholas O’Doherty.

In some countries little boys could take or be given the name of Jesus, or Haysoose, as they pronounce it. And in Hindu tradition almost all boys have a name of God, Vishnu, Ram, Ishvar.

I was very young and I wasn’t declaring with any heretical confidence that Nicholas, Santa Claus, was senior to Jesus in the celestial hierarchy; but essentially that is what I felt.

For, if we wanted Jesus we went to his house, the church, to pray to him and to receive him in communion.

But, Santa came to our house.

Jesus gave you this little bit of bread which wasn’t like any bread we ever ate at home. And you were supposed to be very solemnly grateful, though it stuck to the roof of your mouth and you weren’t supposed to use your finger to get it off but to let it dissolve.

Santa gave you plastic helicopters, guns, Indian head dresses, games of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders and books.

And yet, despite this obvious contrast between them, the church and your teachers and even your parents told you emphatically and over and over again, that the one who would look after you and get you into Heaven if you were nice to him was Jesus. Jesus would give you a harp and a cloud to sit on after you died.

Santa would give you a chemistry set.

The two men even looked starkly different from each other. Santa was big and jolly and fat and Jesus was scrawny and he bled. I began to wonder if Jesus’s problem was that he didn’t believe in Santa.

For all that Jesus was good and cured sick people and woke them up when they were dead, he never seemed exactly happy. And I knew who I would rather spend a dark and wintry night with.

In truth though, Santa had his limitations too.

In the weeks before Christmas my mother would take me to Woolworths and the Co-op to see what presents I might like Santa to being me.

That is where I discovered the Johnny Seven gun. This was an amazing toy. It fired seven different types of projectile.

‘You’ll only lose them’, said my mother. ‘Why don’t you trust Santa to bring your something that will last you longer.’

She even brought me to see Santa in the Co-op. We had to go in a space ship. Or rather, we had to get into a spaceship, which then rocked about and discharged us through a different door when it stopped.

I was beginning to understand that there was an element of make believe about this, that this wasn’t really a space ship, and that therefore this wasn’t Santa, whose knee I was sat upon, but that if I went along with this pretence, I had a better chance of getting what I wanted for Christmas.

For it was also coming clear to me that not all of my presents came from Santa.

My mother was buying some of them.

I also began to realise that some people stopped believing in Santa Claus altogether and were content to only have the presents that their parents bought for them.

Many of them, indeed, carried on believing in Jesus after they had stopped believing in Santa Claus. They preferred, or found more plausible, a God who might punish them, who had a rule book, who wanted you to suffer with good grace and trust to everything being better after you died.

How could this, I wondered, be preferable to Santa who, come what may, would every year bring you gifts.

People bemoan the something for nothing culture but that’s only because they don’t get enough for nothing themselves. There is nothing better than getting something for nothing. And I think the followers of Jesus who open food banks and give to the poor embody Santa Claus.

True, your parents said he would only come if you behaved yourself through the year, but this patently wasn’t true, for the gifts came whether you were good or not.

Jesus said, inasmuch as you fed the hungry and clothed the naked you did it onto me, and that’s what gets you into Heaven. Santa does that too, but he also brings gifts to children who aren’t hungry, who aren’t naked, who aren’t in prison.

He’s the one who’s looking after the likes of you and me.

And they still gifts come. There are still times when life surprises me with unwarranted bounty and good fortune.

I have been that person who, stuck for a bob, found a pound note down the back of the sofa. I have been lucky many times in life, and unlucky too, I suppose.

But whether good things come to me or not seems little to do with justice.

I know about the world that demands obedience and patience and stoical acceptance of the bad breaks, the world that Jesus talks about, that we should put up with because we’ll be better off when we die. Much of what he teaches me, life teaches me anyway, though what he promises me I still can’t be sure of.

He forgives us as we forgive others – there’s too much of the balance sheet in that thinking.

But Santa Claus still happens along occasionally without a tally in his hand, without an accountant at his side, and gives you what you don’t deserve, and that is what I hope for most in life.

Therefore do I still place my hopes and faith in him.

This is the text of a chapter published in The Contested Identities of Ulster Protestants, edited by Paul Burgess and Gareth Mulvenna.

Over the last four years I have been invited on about twenty occasions to meet with groups of Belfast loyalists and to provide them with training in presentation and interaction with the media. Sometimes my role has been simply to give them a talk about how the media functions; more often I have workshopped them in mock interviews and press release writing.

Some of these groups have been mixed, with members of different loyalist groups and even occasionally republicans present. Mostly they have been groups from one or other of the distinct loyalist factions, either UDA or UVF. Usually the group has consisted of between four and eight people, more men than women and across a wide range of ages from about thirty to over eighty.
This experience of meeting and interacting with these groups has led me into a better understanding of Belfast loyalists than I might otherwise have.
Some of the people I have met have been in other groups that have interacted with professionals and members of other communities. They have invariably always been brought together by a funded community group or charity or local government scheme.
Some of the meetings I have had have coincided closely with eruptions of protest or violence which people attending the groups have been helping to plan or have been engaging in.
One of the consistent impressions made by these groups, across all of them, is a sense of grievance. These loyalists feel that they have been cheated. They believe that republicans are more favoured by the political establishment and the media.
They believe that the main Unionist parties have deserted them.
They distrust the media which they believe is only ever interested in belittling them.
Though they hold these convictions strongly they are not often persuasive or even well reasoned in the arguments they make in support of them.
Further, they are suspicious of those who do make strong reasoned arguments and often react as if some trickery is at work in the use of language which contradicts them.
They speak often like people who know they have been disadvantaged but don’t quite know how or by whom.
I was not surprised then by the reaction to the decision by Belfast City Council to limit the flying of the Union flag over City Hall and other public buildings. Loyalists rallied in ardent protest around an issue which was coherent and simple.
They argued that they were represented as British people by the Union flag and demanded that it be restored permanently.
The weakness in this argument, as a political move, was that it could not be met with the concession they demanded. A more politically astute movement would have sought an attainable goal.
Still, hundreds of people came out on winter nights to block traffic in Belfast, to confront the police and to risk ill health, injury and imprisonment. Many in the city responded with a sense that these protesters were stupid, committing themselves to a cause of no material value to themselves. They could not, however, dismiss them as lacking in energy and resolve.
It may be that loyalists have been outflanked by the peace process. Having endorsed it they find that they have no role within it. All that is required of them is that they be silent. Republicans who, like themselves, killed and bombed to make themselves heard, and thereby indispensable to a process for ending killing and bombing, now have partnership with Unionists in the Northern Ireland Executive.
Loyalists see a huge disparity of outcome here. That disparity arises primarily from the fact that Republicans attract votes while Loyalists do not. An irony for them to confront is that many of them do not vote at all and of those who do, most vote for parties other than those which represent loyalism.
Indeed, only one political party currently does represent loyalism and that is the Progressive Unionist Party, an offshoot of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force. The Ulster Democratic Party which advanced the interests of the Ulster Defence Association has died for want of support.
The histories of the parties which sought to represent loyalism are fractious, tensions often having strained relations between the political activists and the militants.

I will try to represent the broader experience of meeting many groups with examples of things I have heard more than once. That way I hope I will be describing fairly representative behaviour and attitudes.
In no group, for instance, did I encounter any sectarian abuse directed at me or even voiced as contempt for Catholics in general. I did encounter comments about foreigners ‘taking our jobs’ but I also often heard thoughtful comments about the need to foster community relations.
It may be that the groups I met are not representative of loyalist community attitudes in that many of them will have been through the grant application processes for support from the state and public bodies. They will have been well exposed to more liberal cultural values that would not tolerate sectarianism or racism. But how then did any of us learnt to be more accommodating of difference other than by contact and discussion?
There is Billy. Billy is about thirty and he’s skinny. He gives the impression of being more naturally angry than playful. Presumably he wants to be here, but maybe someone has told him to come. When I ask the group for their opinions about the media he tells me this story.
“The Sunday World says I am a drug dealer and I can do nothing about it. I’ve spoken to my solicitor and he says he can do nothing about it.”
I ask him if he is a drug dealer and he says he isn’t.
I tell him that if a paper said I was a drug dealer I would sue. I could lose work through allegations like that being made against me.
“But you need money to sue and they’ve got bigger lawyers.”
No matter how long we discuss it he will not accept that the situation is other than that he is innocent and helpless. And what do I know? This may be how things are.
More likely, I suspect, he does have a place in the drugs business, though perhaps smaller than that attributed to him by the newspaper.
A similar issue arises during an exercise with Frank.
We have discussed a possible news story of interest to the group and I have set out the elements of it on a flip chart.
The story is that a fictional character, John K, has been arrested. His arrest has prompted press speculation that a supergrass trial may be under preparation. John K is a community worker. He served fifteen years in prison for a double murder in the early 1980s.
“How do they know that?” says Frank.
“Know what?”
“That he done time.” They don’t, of course. This is a fictional exercise.
“Well, newspapers and broadcasters keep files. Or maybe they just googled his name and it came up.”
“You see, that’s the bit I can’t stand”, says Frank. “They rake it all up on us but there’s no one saying what Gerry Adams did.”
“They might if Gerry Adams was arrested.”
But his main point is this: “They – the media – shouldn’t have the right to go back into your past. That’s private.”
“It’s hardly private”, I say, “if the past includes a prison sentence for murder.”
“But now he hasn’t got a chance when his case comes up.”
I tell him the case is not sub judice until John K is charged.
I talk the group through different possible media responses to the arrest of John K and ask them to consider whether they want to contact the media and try to contribute to the unfolding story.
I ask them to imagine an editorial team in a newspaper discussing how they might follow up the report of the arrest of John K.
Perhaps an editor will ask a security correspondent to write an analytical or speculative piece about the history of supergrass trials and their limited success rate. A reporter might phone round people in the UVF and ask them if people are going into hiding to evade arrest. A political correspondent might write a peace asking how this might or might not affect the peace process.
“Fuck them”, says Frank. “They are just making it up. And they twist everything.”
Then there is Keith. Keith is about twenty five. He might have been to university. He is comfortable in the company of Frank and Billy but he speaks better than they do and nothing in his manner is brusque or unnerving.
What would Keith do if he wanted to influence this unfolding story about John K and the possible supergrass trial?
“My big concern here is that we are getting trial by media and I want nothing to do with it.”
Well, I suggest, you might say that you don’t want people tried by the media. You might say that in a press release or letter to the media.
“Why would they listen to me?”
“Because they don’t have anything at all yet except speculation. Any quote from a concerned party might fill out a story.”
“Then the best thing for me to do is make it harder for them to have a credible story by staying out of it.”
This is a more reasoned approach than Frank’s but arrives at the same conclusion: have nothing to do with the media because no good can come of it.
This is the point at which I get them to write a press release. Some of them don’t see the point. Keith takes my side however and reminds them that this is a training exercise. He explains to me: “If it came to it, we would never be the ones to write a press release anyway. It would come from further up.”
The press release we devise is a statement from an imaginary loyalist group calling on the media to be more restrained in its coverage of the arrest of John K. He has not been charged with anything yet his past is being raked over and this has the potential to jeopardise his prospects of a fair trial. Besides, he is a respected member of the community and this is distressing for his family.
I get Diane to read it over. “Shouldn’t we say that this is internment?”
I say, “That depends on how you want to pitch it. Do you want people to read you as political campaigners for reform of the justice system or do you want to focus on the media. I would keep it simple and focus on the media.”
They agree to this.
Now we imagine that the press release has arrived on a news desk and a reporter phones you for further information. What are you going to say to him?
“I’m going to tell him to fuck off”, says Frank. “You’ve got the press release; that’s all you’re getting.”
What do others think?
Keith says: “We pooled our thinking on the press release. We made tactical decisions about how to pitch it. We don’t want to get drawn into other discussions or say any more. So Frank’s right. We don’t talk to the reporter.”
Diane?
“If you say anything more they will just twist it.”
My plan is that they should talk to the reporter politely, using first names the way reporters always do.
I role play it for them: “Thanks very much for calling, Jean. We appreciate your interest in this story. What can I do for you? Our big concern is trial by media. If John K is going to be charged then let him have his trial in court by due process. It isn’t right that some of the papers have him damned already, is it?”
I’m asking them if it would hurt to be civil to the reporter and at the same time to stick to the line of the press release.
“I get it”, says Frank. “They twist it their way; we twist it ours.”
I say it is all about strategy and that appeals to the part of him that imagines he is a soldier.
Even though they have to be careful, in this approach, not to feed the reporter suggestions of other angles on the story, they don’t have to shut down the interview rudely.
But they also have to learn to anticipate what angles the journalist might find if they leave the agreed script. This requires them to think like a reporter and to do this they have to break out of their assumption that a prime objective of the media is to make loyalists look stupid.
They also have to recognise that every story fits into the context of the wider news agenda. The reporters will be asking themselves how this story fits into others.
We act out the conversation with the reporter and I show them where things can go wrong for them.
Reporter: “Do you think these arrests are unsettling the loyalist paramilitaries?”
Wrong answer 1: “Yes, some people are getting very annoyed and who knows what they’ll do?”
Possible headline: “Increased Threat from Loyalists Following Supergrass Arrest.
Wrong answer 2: “Well it’s made a lot of people nervous and they’re lying low.”
Possible headline: “Old Killers Back On The Run.”
Right Answer: “My primary concern is that the media shouldn’t presume John K is guilty and should know better than to risk prejudicing his trial.”
Possible headline 1: Touchy Loyalists Lecture Media on Justice: Look Who’s Talking!
Possible headline 2: Let Law Take It’s Course, Say Loyalists.

In all of these exercises it is emphasised that these tips on how to interact with the media do not guarantee fair coverage or predictable outcomes. However a long term relationship developed with the media through being civil and tactical builds up credit for those who engage, as reasonable people.

My sense is that even after some effort to persuade loyalists of this some were still resistant. The understanding within loyalist communities is that the media will always undermine them.
A corollary of that is that other groups, particularly Sinn Fein get treated more gently by the media.
Could it be, I ask, that Sinn Fein are just better at this stuff than you are? In which case the better image within the media is a reward for their persistent endeavours.
Some of these sessions were conducted during the flags protests. Several incidents in the media response to these protests were cited against me as evidence that the media is always unsympathetic to loyalists.
Inexperienced spokespeople were mauled in aggressive interviews.
So I suggested another exercise in which I would play – indeed overplay – the role of a radio presenter mocking and haranguing each of them in turn.
I advised them to agree and rehearse the line they would take in the interview and resolve not to be deflected from it. “If I say, ‘What gives you thugs the right to block the road?’ you will say, ‘The important thing here is the sense of insult felt in our communities.’ If I say, ‘Who they hell are you to complain about police brutality when you are only brutes yourselves?’ you will reply, ‘Our main concern is for the free expression of British identity in the institutions of government and the removal of any sense that one community here has scored over another.””
We played out these roles with me, at times, shouting at them and twisting their words, in some sessions dealing with the fear of supergrass trials, in some with the apprehensions about republican dissidents, in some with the flag protests. In all cases the issues we worked on were suggested by the loyalists themselves. My role was to show them what angles a journalist might take on these questions, and how they might direct the discussion back to their perspective when the only other alternatives were to disengage or get angry and lose the argument.
This exercise introduced a heightened level of drama and playfulness into the sessions. These exposed a division between those who could enter into the game with confidence and those who could not. I am always struck in these sessions by how rarely one can anticipate which will be good players.
Sometimes the more bullish men – the Frank types – were good at this, sometimes they were not. Sometimes the Diane was adept or thought she was but simply couldn’t play well enough not to be deflected. But this comes out in a lot of media training, the discovery that the people in a group best able to defend its interests may not be easy to identify and may often be the ones least inclined to take on the job.
There is a danger in these exercises that participants will conclude that they were right all along to fear and suspect the media.
As one put it: “The only thing that makes a story for them is us cocking up. We organise a street festival and bring in Catholic kids or whatever and they ignore us. Ten thousand people enjoy a parade and the media focuses on one incident of trouble.”
But their understanding of how the media comes to find the trouble at a parade is often naive. They speak as if they think the media may have flooded a parade with reporters looking for negative incidents to report. They overestimate the resources of the media. They tend to view it as a managed conspiracy against them and they make little or no distinction between the various outlets. Media, I tell them, is a plural noun.
Actually, I tell them, the media is also under resourced and, being human like yourselves, often as incompetent as yourselves.
Frank says: “How did they find out about that incident or this other incident?”
“Someone told them.”
“Who told them?”
“A man with a camera in one case. Maybe the police in another. Sometimes the reporter doesn’t even leave the office, just phones the police and asks if there was trouble and then just reports what the police say.”
“This is corrupt”, says Frank. “It is loaded against us.”
He thinks anyone can phone a reporter and tell any lie about loyalists and get into the media.
What I want him to see is that he could have a relationship with the media himself, if only to be called on occasionally to offer his own perspective.
I say, “Sinn Fein faced the media for decades being asked only about bombings and shooting and they developed a thick skin and a winning smile. You could have done the same. You still could.”

Afterthought: Some journalists might fear that work like this with loyalists encourages them to manipulate the media and evade awkward questions. That’s true, but it would only be bringing them a little closer to the level of competence in evasion and manipulation that is evinced by all other political groupings. It is the job of the journalist to work back through that to get at the story. An open society relies on their ability to do that. But in a milieu in which it is necessary for political groups to tool themselves up with the skills to defend themselves in the media little is served by one faction being conspicuously inept.

Scotland is now more sharply divided on the union than Northern Ireland is.

Polling last year showed that only 3 per cent of people here would vote for a united Ireland in an immediate referendum. Larger numbers have long term aspirations for Irish unity but the decision has already been made, in the hearts of most notional Nationalists, that things are best left as they are.

There are a number of motivations at work. One is simply to avoid a calamitous fissure and civil war. Many people who regard themselves as more Irish than British would rather have peace even at the the cost of deferring an aspiration for unity.

Which perhaps indicates also that that aspiration is not very strong.

Life inside the UK has not been a grave burden on people here. They have had a welfare state with a National Health Service to cushion them.

And they would be less inclined to try for a united Ireland now when the economy in the Republic is so weak.

In Scotland they see things differently.

For a start, their nationalism is partitionist. Irish nationalists believe that Ireland is one country because it is an island. The Scots aren’t into geographical determinism.

Forty five percent of the Scottish population is ready to leave the Union right now, today.

That figure should resonate with history,

In drawing the perameters of Northern Ireland, a six county statelet, in 1921, a simple calculation was made around the numbers who wanted to be British and those who wanted Irish independence.

Within the whole province of Ulster, which some unionists wanted to draw the border round, forty five percent of the people were Irish nationalists. James Craig, who would be the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, reasoned that this was simply too large a disgruntled minority to govern.

Well that is the figure that defines Scottish politics for now. Their sense that they are in the Union against their will is a problem that both Westminister and the devolved parliament at Holyrood in Edinburgh will have to deal with.

They will have to manage a minority of a scale that James Craig baulked at.

Of course, there is a difference.

Craig was speaking at a time of war.

The IRA had made the south ungovernable. Not even the army had been able to contain it without the support of rabble militias like the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans.

Not a single shot has been fired in the assertion of Scottish independence.

That is something that modern Irish republicans should reflect on.

The Scottish nationalists have made the same journey that they have made, in roughly the same time span. And where many marvel at Sinn Fein being in government in the North and close to being an indispensable partner in the next Dublin coalition, their achievement is entirely belittled by that of other nationalists who thrived without violence.

Alex Salmond brought Scotland closer to leaving the Union than Gerry Adams brought NI in the same period. Salmond, however, has conceded that his job is done and it’s time to go; Adams seems inpervious to the thought that his party can manage without him.

And Salmond did it without the bombs and the killings, without confrontation with the British army and without exacerbating sectarian division. He did it without lining up with foreign tyrants, in Libya and Cuba, or with national freedom struggles in Colombia, Palestine and South Africa.

Students in future will be writing essays comparing and contrasting the paths taken by Sinn Fein and the Scottish nationalists and concluding, most likely, that Irish republicans had never needed the IRA, that it only got in their way.

The other big difference between Scottish and Northern Irish opposition to the Union is that for Scotland the passion was not even nationalistic let alone sectarian.

Where Yes campaigners gathered to sing Scottish folk songs to advertise their campaign, others in the No camp complained that this was an abuse of tradition by appropriating it for a political argument. No one here ever accuses the other side of stealing its music. The point, indeed, would hardly be understood here, because in Northern Ireland, the issue is almost entirely about ethnic or community allegiance.

In Scotland the core of the issue was the sense that the country was misgoverned by Westminster and could do the job better itself.

No one in Northern Ireland believes we could govern ourselves better than Westminster does.

The vote in Scotland is being celebrated as a victory for democracy because of the record turnout, 84 per cent. That compares with the 81 per cent here who voted in the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement.

There are lessons for us and for Scotland from that experience.

The greater Scottish enthusiasm for their independence debate should be an indicator for those of us who remember ’98, that this was even bigger for them than Good Friday was for us.

But the other side of that is that our referendum was a peak in the enthusiam and it dimmed afterwards.

Successive elections, some with a prospect of saving the deal as it faltered, never realised such a turnout again.

So we might predict from our own experience that the current Scottish ardour around the demand for independence, and the rejection of London as the seat of power, may wane now.

Yet we had a decisive majority in our vote and still the issue did not go away.

Northern Ireland is, in a strange way, the region of the UK that is most comfortable with the Union and therefore most likely to be shaken up by the changes to come.

The first blows are cultural and psychological. In the past we thought of the Union as something we had to decide on ourselves. It was a static thing and we had to determine our relationship with it. Now we find that it is in flux, changeable.

One thing is for sure and that is that the Union can only be defended now on the terms that won the argument in Scotland, the economy, defence, being stronger together. Orangeism now looks like an expired argument. Ulster unionism as a badge of Protestant ethnicity is irrelevant to the strength of the Union.

Unionists have to make their case now and they have to make it primarily to their neighbours. That is a function of demographic shift inside Northern Ireland but also of the changing, possibly weakening Union.

Our party leaders may find themselves round tables in the coming years with the leaders of the other countries and will not impress them with ethnic arguments. To be fair to them, they probably already know that.

If Scotland is to stay in the Union as a more automous country, shouldn’t Edinburgh also be at the table with London and Dublin during the next round of negotiations too? After all, it will still be paying for us.

In future UK wide talks, we will be at those tables, if at all, as a region and not as a country.

Scotland is important and has the prospect of leaving the union; it has an alternative. We have no alternative and therefore nothing to barter with, at least nothing that would incline the rest of the Union to cherish us more dearly.

We appear to be entering a period in which the different parts of the United Kingdom will have less to do with each other, even as the Union has been affirmed, but they have still to hammer out how that is to be done. And we are the small guy, the one most easily crushed.

Either Cameron will meet his commitments to Scotland and devolve greater power there in tandem with similar arrangements in other devolved regions, or he will break his promise and create huge dissaffection in Scotland and the North of England.

Either way, Scotland and England will have less to do with each other.

Can we be in a Union with Westminster and expect the other countries paying into this not to want a say in how we are governed?

The other countries in the Union becoming more autonomous is bound to make us look like the clinging runt of a grown litter.

We thought we were safe within the Union, but how safe will we feel when the major issues will be discussed by three First Ministers of similar standing, for Scotland Wales and England, while we still have to be nursed by Westminster, not least because we can’t agree on much, but also because we never could hope to muster as much autonomy as those real countries can?

Otherwise we are a humble and scrawny half formed thing. Very soon we may be just a region among nations all of them bigger and with more power, and none of them, perhaps, with a powerful longing to look after us or be in Union with us.

But could Northern Ireland not go through the same kind of transformation that Scotland has seen?

Could it ever adjust to discussing its options in practical terms, without reference to religion or to the Republican tropes of Imperialist oppression and occupation or the Unionist ones of Orange heritage and the legacy of the Somme?

Could we separate ideas about the Union from those of community and identity, the way Scotland has? And what answers might we come up with if we did?

That’s what we have to do, or we will not just be the child at the big table but a particularly annoying one.

Don Juan by Sinead Morrissey.

Sinead Morrissey DLThis is a recording of Sinead Morrissey reading her rewrite of a canto of Don Juan as a satire on the financial speculation and threatened the Euro and the machinations to save it, primarily at the expense of Greece.

The recording was made at the Mountains To Sea festival in Dun Laoghaire on September 13, 2014.

 

 

Belfast and the Bike

This is a recording of a debate organised by The Fred. The proposal, led by Green Party councillor John Barry is that Belfast can never be a cycling city.
He was opposed by Thomas MacConaghie.

I chaired and there was a great animated audience.

This is a recording of a paper I gave to the Art of the Troubles Conference at the Ulster Museum today.

Gerry Adams has written two separate accounts of his attempt to escape from Long Kesh and I try to analyse why he may have told the story so differently at different times.