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Recently,
a local tabloid carried a little joke made at my family's
expense. Whether witty or not, it was very revealing
of the teller, especially that, in choosing this particular
horror story to get a dig at us, and printing it in
this tabloid in particular, known for being a Sinn
Fein mouthpiece, the irony of it all seemed completely
lost.
Halloween
TV - tonight's movies reviewed in full
HE'S ALIVE! Frankenstein's monster scares the locals
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. RTE1, 10:15pm
A
crowd of torch-bearing villagers make their way
through the sleepy Bavarian hamlet of Ballymurphy
to storm the castle of a wild eyed doctor who will
stop at nothing in his crazed quest for fame and
immortality. Anthony McIntyre is genuinely scary
in this landmark chiller.
In
late October and early November, 2000, my family's
home was twice picketed by a Sinn Fein led mob, outraged
at the audacious public
accusation of the Provisional IRA's despicable murder
of Real IRA volunteer Joseph O'Connor made by
my husband, Anthony McIntyre, along with his friend
Tommy Gorman. This angry mob was more outraged at
their speaking out than they were over the murder
of one of their neighbours, a heinous murder committed
in broad daylight in front of a number of witnesses
at the doorstep of the victim's mother.
I
was six months pregnant and alone in the house with
my teenage step-daughter the cold, dark night when
the mob came calling the second time. Then Sinn Fein
candidate (now Belfast City Councillor) Marie Cush
proudly marched to my door to smugly announce, "We
have a protest for you," cueing the gathered
mob to start their howls. "Where is he, Where
is he, Bring him to us," they demanded, brandishing
their placards like the torches referred to in the
joke told by Robin Livingstone, one of the editors
of the Andersonstown News tabloid. A different
editor of the paper was one of the mob shouting abuse
from the crowd that night.
After
the mob tired of yelling at me, they
then went on to attack and harangue the widow of Joseph
O'Connor, Nicola, who was also pregnant at the time.
Their fourth son, Joel, will have never known his
father.
Frankenstein,
as well as being a horror story, is a cautionary tale.
"Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least
by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of
knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes
his native town to be the world, than he who aspires
to become greater than his nature will allow,"
Mary Shelley warns; it's much better to remain uneducated,
ignorant. To dare to break free from the crowd makes
one an outsider, open to vilification and worse. Shelley
writes of man's cruelty towards those who are different,
using the doctor and his monster as examples of what
happens when society takes its vengeance upon those
it deems unacceptable.
So
perhaps Livingstone's joke holds more truth in it
than he realized when he so glibly thought of it:
West Belfast, and its insular concept of itself being
the epicentre of all things, Ballymurphy even more
so. How dare anyone think beyond it's graffitied walls!
How dare anyone contradict the leadership of their
wee town! How dare anyone break free of its conformity,
its mind-numbing self-congratulatory prison-like atmosphere?
How dare anyone challenge the status quo? Burn him,
burn him, he's a monster! There will be no thinking
here.
More
pointed in the joke, however, is the positioning of
McIntyre as Victor Frankenstein, and the barb over
his chasing of fame and immortality. What is lost
in the desire to wound, though, is the perspective
Frankenstein had gained through his life and his mistakes,
and how it can parallel that of McIntyre's writing
- not in a quest for fame and immortality but in the
theme that runs through McIntyre's work of rejecting
the use of armed struggle and the questioning of what
the worth of the loss of life was. Perhaps the monster
in question is not the exposure of the Provisional
Emperor's new clothes and the fallout that causes
for the Provisional leadership and their lackeys,
but the monster of the Provisionals themselves, of
which McIntyre readily admits to having been a part
(unlike others). A cautionary tale of the Troubles
from a Republican perspective is one which shows armed
struggle to have been futile, trust in leaders to
have been misplaced, and the over-ambitious desire
to be the standard bearers and deliverers of the 1916
Republic to have created a monster whose actions only
destroyed. Not only were lives taken - needlessly
- but so too, the hope of the revival of the Republic
ever happening. Treachery, compromise of principles,
and what has emerged as different agendas held by
the leadership from that of the rank and file all
contributed to making the monster destroy that which
it most wanted to embrace.
Like
Frankenstein's monster, who only wanted good yet was
unable to express it, the Provisionals too only wanted
what they believed to be good for their people. Arguably,
it was their expression of it - monster like - that
was their downfall, and is what has led to their being
abandoned - or disbanded - today. It may be that Livingstone
erred only in his choice of actor for Frankenstein's
role. McIntyre may have been better cast as Shelley,
telling the woe of Gerry Adams as Victor Frankenstein.
Now that would be truly scary.
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