|
If
Sinn Fein and the DUP do team up to administer British
rule in the post election world that awaits us at
some point in the future, hopefully the old green
shirts do not find some courageous and imaginative
reason to buckle and allow big Ian’s black shirts
to ban TV on the Lord’s Day. What could the zealots
do, apart from finding somebody who disagrees with
them, to hate and smite with the wrath of the Creator
as they boom out the words ‘have you been saved
sinner?’ Armed with the approval of their own
God who, just by way of coincidence, as Anne Lamott
would point out, happens to hate all the same people
they do, they will be hunting victims upon whom they
can inflict their truth. What chance does that give
people like me and Bap McQuillan, who don’t give
a toss for the Lord or his day and could happily spend
ours in the company of every lecherous sinner who
ever smoked dope, exchanged profanities or drank cider
while the congregation muttered and mumbled mumbo
jumbo in their chapels and churches on a Sunday morning
before arriving at their senses courtesy of the plate
being shoved under their noses? No doubt, a special
hate shall be reserved for those of us who have the
audacity - unlike Sheila Cassidy - to disbelieve.
Sunday
is bad enough without the Lord’s men making it
worse by curbing viewing hours. Apart from the papers
it is not even a good news day for the North. So last
Sunday’s Politics Show made the afternoon
that little bit less tedious. Normally, we only get
‘the line’ from the studios when Sinn Fein
representatives are on, valiantly struggling to -
what Michel Foucault once said of French Communists
- 'stand behind a fact that was the total opposite
of credible.' For that reason, it was instructive
to listen to a brace of republicans with mutually
exclusive views vent irreconcilable opinions on the
likely trajectory of republicanism. Danny Morrison
these days is a writer and a successful author and
has a weekly column in the Andersonstown News.
The times in which we live are propitious for a man
with his intelligence, ability and views. Not every
door will be opened for him but considerably fewer
will be slammed in his face. No longer the pariah
of old, the fact that he will state certain views
makes him a sought after speaker or pundit. Tommy
Gorman also writes but through inclination is not
as industrious as Danny Morrison, for whom writing
is a worthy vocation. Most of his writing he submits
to The Blanket. Because of the views Gorman
holds, he doesn’t find opportunities knocking
on his door. In the Stalinist Republic of West Belfast
those opposed to the authoritarian culture more often
than not are directed to a social Siberia. On one
occasion Gorman found that Sinn Fein were applying
pressure to his then employer to get rid of him because
he was ‘writing articles not helpful to the peace
process’. His home has been picketed by a Sinn
Fein mob and his family have been made to feel the
pressure because of his refusal to conform to the
great nonsenses of our day. It is part of an old Stalinist
tradition practiced elsewhere against the free flowing
pen and brings to mind the experience of the Czech
novelist Milan Kundera who, in the words of Olga Carlisle,
after the Soviet invasion of his country:
lost
his position as a professor at the Institute for
Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague, and
his books were banned. Little by little, life was
made unbearable for him, and he was hounded out
of his native country.
While
not comparing like with like the authoritarian similarities
are sufficient to permit a comparison to be drawn.
Both
Morrison and Gorman are republicans who have been
around quite a long time and know the score. The contrast
between the two is best captured in the discursive
grids through which they describe the peace process.
Morrison, because he was for so long at the top of
the Republican Movement tends to give answers, whereas
Gorman, seeing matters from the bottom, prefers to
ask questions. Morrison expresses it as leaders like
it to be said; Gorman poses it in terms not approved
by the leaders and for which there is a price to be
paid - a swift uprooting from republican iconography
and relocation to the social internal exile reserved
for ‘enemies of the peace process.’ But,
as Morrison has contended, ‘better to be honest,
even if it means being misrepresented, than to be
a hypocrite.’
Gorman
dislikes the peace process but not the peace. He views
Sinn Fein as having moved completely away from any
radical position to one of seeking to become part
of the establishment. In a bid to massage this actuality
out of all recognition, many Provisional republicans
have resorted to manufacturing fabrication. From the
apex to the roots organised lying grinds on remorselessly.
For Gorman, the party will do whatever it takes to
complete the journey into the heart of the establishment
even if it means dissolving the IRA; it will not,
however, dissolve its ability to kill or harm those
within its own community who threaten the new partitionist
basis of power and privilege.
For
Danny Morrison, this is all wide off the mark. The
struggle had always been about reform in the guise
of an equality agenda. To stop well short of The Republic
is an honourable compromise. What made a united Ireland
the goal was only that equality and reform could not
be achieved in a six county framework. The ranks of
the IRA were swollen by the introduction of internment
for Catholics alone. Republicans have come a long
way in terms of advances and this has rendered redundant
and unethical other armed republican groups. He argued
that the IRA would not disband - the evidence was
that the organisation had said it would not and that
to do so would be an act of surrender.
At
one level the Politics Show permitted some
insight into an internal republican struggle to control
the interpretation of events. Logically I could find
no fault with the take of Tommy Gorman - but I am
favourably predisposed toward his position. However,
it is difficult to quarrel with success. Gorman’s
advantage in this regard lies in having predicted
from the outset where the peace process was going
to take republicanism - to precisely where it is today.
On the day of the ceasefire announcement in 1994 when
he, accompanied by myself, phoned up Bernadette McAliskey
to praise her for her comments on radio that the ‘good
guys lost’, there were howls of opprobrium from
those within the ranks who swore he had it wrong and
that it was all tactical. The howls turned to scowls
when we both refused to go over to the Sinn Fein cavalcade
through West Belfast on the grounds that turkeys should
not be celebrating Christmas. They have been howling
and scowling ever since, dismissing with venom any
suggestion that republicanism would end up where it
is. When they were not howling, they settled for ostracism,
although they always manage to make it look more like
ostrich-ism, their silence caused by mouths full of
sand, so deep have their heads been buried in it.
A
considerable impediment to finding Danny Morrison’s
discourse persuasive is that it is almost a ‘riddle
of the sands' - sand building on sand. It is not as
if we have not been here before and could not possibly
have any idea of what way things are likely to go.
While there is no suggestion that Morrison is engaged
in organised lying, it does seem he has succumbed
to organised forgetting. For to claim that the IRA
will not disband because it would amount to surrender
is bizarre, given that by his own criteria the organisation
already has surrendered. A while back he wrote ‘there
will never, ever, be IRA decommissioning, an IRA surrender
… There will not be decommissioning. There will
not be a surrender…even by the year 3000.’
And then as if all of that hadn’t mattered in
the least, he recently informed us in the Guardian
that the IRA had in fact decommissioned; and in the
Andersonstown News told his readership that
on two occasions the IRA had put weapons beyond use
and were poised on the brink of a third act of decommissioning.
Three surrenders and still undefeated? When you build
on sandy founds…
Perhaps
because he was a leader of the Republican Movement
he does not want it said that the IRA was defeated.
There is then less for leaders to be called to account
on. But if the IRA wasn't defeated why then accept
the terms of defeat - the consent principle/veto,
decommissioning, no disbanded RUC, no declaration
of intent by the British to go etc, etc? As Breandan
O Muirthile asks so saliently 'if you bumped into
defeat in a dark alley, how would its face differ
from what we have now?'
And
if we were not led to defeat by our leadership, why
do we stand poised to squabble over the renamed RUC?
The terms of the debate amounting to little more than
who will be the prestigious sergeant and who will
be the lowly constable? Could we have imagined that
being discussed in the prison hospital during the
hunger strikes? It took the Armani suit to replace
the blanket before that could be contemplated. Seemingly,
Joe Slovo of the ANC was not wide off the mark when
he said if a man wears a suit long enough his politics
change. Our leaders, it seems, have wardrobes full
of them.
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
