Some
people involved with the media at times show an
intense hostility toward Pat Magee, who as a Provisional
IRA volunteer was responsible for bombing the Tory
Party while they contemplated repressing the poor
at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984. A couple
of years past, Muiris Mac Conghail was beside himself
with rage after learning that RTE, of which he was
once a censorious controller, had interviewed Magee.
On last week’s two part documentary, The
Brighton Bomb & The Hunt for the Bomber,
the veteran reporter Peter Taylor, long accustomed
with affairs peculiar to the Northern conflict and
presumably experienced enough to conceal his prejudices,
disdainfully spat out the words ‘Dr Magee’
when referring to the PhD that Magee had obtained
subsequent to his role in bombing Brighton.
Pat
Magee’s intellect and level of articulacy challenges
the media orthodoxy which seeks to depict those
movements of social protest which wage war against
the system of government promoted by the media,
as being made up of mindless thugs. Those who bomb,
but not at the behest of government, are portrayed
like the fascists Bertrand Russell described: in
possession of 'more than the average share of leisure,
brutality, and stupidity.' It is a balloon filled
with hot air which a mere moment in the company
of Magee all too easily pricks. He doesn’t
fit the stereotype, so his intellect must be subjected
to sneering ridicule. A thoughtless thug bombing
the prime minister is horrendous enough, an iconic
intellectual republican doing it can only be horrendously
evil. ‘Dr’, when applied to him, must
come replete with all the contemptuous tones normally
reserved for someone like the Nazi, Dr Mengele.
To make matters worse for his detractors Magee understands
only too well the nature of stereotyping –
his PhD and subsequent book Gangsters And Guerrillas
by all accounts mount a substantial intellectual
demolition of the construction of stereotypes. His
critics would need to get up very early in the morning
if they want to stand a chance of fitting him into
a box of their making.
The
documentary in which Magee featured narrated the
event which could have - had the IRA achieved that
one time lucky hit referred to in its post-bomb
press statement – resulted in the decapitation
of the British government. Few in republican communities
would have lost any sleep over it. Likewise, it
is hard to imagine many in the British mining community
denouncing as ‘cowardly terrorist IRA scum’
those who carried it out. Thatcher was a right wing
messianic maniac who two years prior to the attack
on Brighton had gloated over the unnecessary deaths
of Argentine sailors on the General Belgrano. The
bombing did little to cure that. Years later she
stepped forward to bat at the crease on behalf of
the Chilean mass murderer and torturer Augusto Pinochet,
when he came close to answering for some of his
crimes. A widespread attitude towards her at the
time would have been captured in the witticism recently
applied to Ian Paisley, ‘where there is death
there is hope.’
But
she lived, and is still living ten years after the
organisation which tried to kill her gave up its
campaign to force the British to withdraw from Ireland.
Ironically, Pat Magee claimed that the attempt on
her life made a contribution to the peace process,
the very thing that ensures Britain will rule in
the North of Ireland on the same basis that it has
always ruled, namely, the partition principle otherwise
known as consent.
The
difficulty with Pat Magee’s interpretation
is to be found in the most salient feature of the
two-part presentation, which underlined just how
out of tune with today’s peace process mood
music justifications for the Brighton bomb now sound.
The documentary makers set out to present the Tory
Party as the sleeping blameless victim of terrorist
fiends who in true totalitarian fashion did their
work in the dark before skulking back over the sea
to Cork. They were singularly successful in this.
Even the lupine Norman Tebbitt, who earlier said
he wished Magee was dead, appeared sheepish. The
image of the Tories as victims was further enhanced
by contrasting their almost quiet reflectiveness
with the stridency of a distinctly uncomfortable
Danny Morrison. The former Sinn Fein publicity man
seemingly pulled the short straw in the community
of articulate Provisional commentators when the
selection process for props was initiated. Morrison
had an unenviable task. What he had to say was eminently
rational from a republican perspective of two decades
ago. But in today’s environment, where it is
more advantageous to pretend never to have been
in the IRA, Morrison’s contribution lent him
the demeanour of a loose canon awkwardly flung around
the deck of a sinking ship. If there was reason,
it didn’t rhyme. Morrison’s courage in
stepping up to the mark to say what he did was outmatched
by his visible unease, presumably occasioned by
knowing that his defence is a lonely effort, made
so by the peace process which embodies the denial
of any justification the IRA could ever lay claim
to for waging its war.
If
the IRA's Brighton bomb was in part the progenitor
of the peace process, no one has yet offered a compelling
explanation why this child of Brighton sits so awkwardly
with its parent - denying, denigrating and rebelling
against those parental values which supposedly shaped
its life.
