Posted by Jim on September 6, 2017
DUP leader has hardened nationalist resolve like no unionist first minister before her
Eamonn Mallie. Irish Times. Dublin. Monday, September 4, 2017
As long as there was an IRA campaign of violence on this island, there was a large section of the Catholic nationalist community, North and South, who wouldn’t dare state openly: “I am a nationalist.”
In Northern Ireland these Nationalists are now standing up to be counted for the first time, thanks to DUP leader Arlene Foster and the behavior of a number of her colleagues.
There are two reasons why in the past many Nationalists kept their heads below the parapet: they hated the IRA violence; and they felt ashamed at what was being done in their names to fellow human beings, be they British soldiers, police officers, gardaí, Protestants, Catholics, Nationalists, Loyalists or Republicans.
A common refrain on the lips of Catholic nationalist mothers in Northern Ireland in the wake of the killing of a Catholic, a Protestant, a soldier, a police officer, a member of the IRA or a member or a loyalist organization was: “He is somebody’s son.”
The IRA ceasefire, followed by the loyalist ceasefire, followed by the dramatic reduction in soldiers on the streets of Northern Ireland – all culminating in the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998 – immeasurably changed the atmosphere and realized an unparalleled stability for the first time in more than three decades.
The leadership in the Assembly and Executive afforded by David Trimble, Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson, in the words of former Northern Ireland secretary of state Patrick Mayhew, “kept the bicycle upright and moving forward”.
Despite many hitches and imperfections in the relationships of Trimble, Paisley and Robinson with their fellow Nationalist ministers, a sense pervaded of Nationalists bedding in at the heart of government, feeling at last that they had an opportunity to exercise real power in the place where they live.
Enter Arlene Foster
Installing power-sharing was a major advance – so much so that both the Dublin and London governments took their eyes off the ball in recent years.
So, where are we today? Deadlocked.
The limited liberal tendencies, however, of Trimble, Paisley and Robinson and their involvement with Republicans and Nationalists at the highest level of government ultimately resulted in their downfalls.
Enter Arlene Foster as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party. Early in her tenure of office she struck a more strident note than her predecessors, refusing to engage in a “Forum on Brexit” in Dublin.
She only reluctantly met then taoiseach Enda Kenny to discuss Brexit.
She opted to support Brexit, but the majority of the people of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union.
This did not deter Foster from parading herself at home and abroad effectively as the prime minister of Northern Ireland, declaring that she spoke for “all” the citizens.
This was despite having presided over the implementation of the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal, which could potentially cost taxpayers more than £400,000,000.
And she refused to stand aside for a short period at the request of Martin McGuinness to allow time to evaluate what had happened.
Pernicious habits
By now, other pernicious habits were creeping into practices in the Assembly, with the DUP leadership stifling any and every move by Sinn Féin and other parties to introduce progressive legislation on issues such as same-sex marriage, legacy and an Irish language act.
The DUP, under Arlene Foster’s tutelage, was using a so-called “petition of concern” (a legal instrument designed to protect minority interests such as same-sex marriage) to block movement on all social matters to which they were opposed. The DUP had the necessary numerical strength to do this and ruthlessly deployed the device.
Outside the Assembly chamber, there were growing rumblings in all Nationalist areas, with comments such as “What are nationalists getting up there at Stormont?”
One also heard: “Isn’t the DUP giving them the runaround up there at Stormont?”
Bile was coming to the surface in the Assembly and Foster was not checking it.
Some DUP elected members wilfully set about insulting Nationalists interested in the Irish language while on their feet in the Assembly chamber and outside it.
Chief among the culprits was former minister Gregory Campbell, who mockingly blurted in the Assembly “Curry my yogurt can coca coalyer”, a distortion of the Irish-language term “Go raibh maith agat, a Cheann Comhairle”.
On another occasion, Campbell jibed Sinn Féin Assembly member Raymond McCartney, who took part in the hunger strikes in 1980.
“The point is Raymond McCartney, when he was on hunger strike, said he was prepared to go through with this – and he didn’t. He said he was prepared to die – and he didn’t. Somebody says they are prepared to do something and they don’t, is that success or failure?”
In the past two weeks Campbell has on BBC Radio referred to the Gasyard Féile in Derry as the “Gasyard Failure”.
Referencing an exhibition of photos by Martin McGuinness, he added: “The Gasyard failure should be a real bundle of laughs this year. First Marty’s photos (don’t know if there will be the obligatory warning at start in case those of a nervous disposition are viewing), then the serial election loser George (the cat) Galloway. Roll up, roll up, get your tickets please!”
Gaeltacht funding controversy
This habitual deriding of Sinn Féin is one thing, but the contempt for the Irish language was another.
A decision by DUP Minister Paul Givan in December 2016 to unilaterally kill off the Líofa Gaeltacht Bursary Funds Scheme – funds for children to go to the Gaeltacht in Donegal to learn Irish – was interpreted by Nationalists as revenge for the challenge to Arlene Foster to temporarily step aside over her handling of the Renewable Heat Incentive. No evidence has been found to show Ms Foster personally committed any wrong.
Nationalists right across Northern Ireland, who rarely express a political opinion, started asking about Sinn Féin’s stewardship at Stormont.
One member of the GAA community pointedly remarked in a reference to Sinn Féin that “they couldn’t even protect the bit of money for the children going to the Gaeltacht”.
It should be stated that Paul Givan hurriedly restored the £50,000 fund – but the damage was done.
Sinn Féin had been getting the message from the ground of unease at its performance dating back to the Assembly Election in 2016, when Gerry Carroll of People Before Profit topped the poll in west Belfast and veteran civil rights campaigner Eamonn McCann took a seat in Foyle, also for People Before Profit.
The crocodile bites
It was the dismissal of an Irish Language Act or Acht na Gaeilge by Arlene Foster in February this year in a pre-election comment that ultimately did for her in the nationalist psyche, particularly in the face of an extremely ill co-equal First Minister Martin McGuinness.
Crudely rejecting the granting of a free-standing’ Acht na Gaeilge (Irish Language Act) as sought by Sinn Féin and the SDLP in the lead into the March Assembly election, she stated: “If you feed a crocodile it will keep coming back and looking for more.”
That was final nail in Arlene Foster’s coffin as far as Nationalists were concerned.
Martin McGuinness had been advised by the hierarchy of Sinn Féin after Christmas that grassroots feelings were at breaking point. The political edifice was toppled by Mr McGuinness on January 16th, 2017. He died on March 21st.
The bringing-down of the Assembly and the Executive proved about as popular in Nationalist Northern Ireland as the IRA ceasefire on August 31, 1994.
Nationalist voting trends have spoken for themselves since Martin McGuinness stepped down as deputy First Minister, bringing an end to the Assembly and the Executive.
The demand for a free-standing Acht na Gaeilge is today’s “One man, one vote” of the Civil Rights campaign of over half a century ago.
It is yesterday’s banner today, and it screams:
“What do we want?
“Equality and Parity of Esteem.”
“When do we want it?
“Now.”
The big test
The demand for a free-standing Irish Language Act is emblematic of a homogeneous, radicalized Nationalist community attitude for which nothing short of full-blooded “parity of esteem” will guarantee a restoration of a devolved government.
To Nationalists, the failure of Unionism to acknowledge parity of esteem is its original sin.
The demand for Acht na Gaeilge is the political 11+ test being set by Nationalists for the DUP and Unionism to move into the big political school with a restored power-sharing administration on the basis of equality and fair play.
On March 4th, 2017, the News Letter – a Belfast-based newspaper read predominantly by Unionists – had splashed on its front page: “Northern Ireland is today waking up to a fundamentally altered political reality: Unionism is no longer a majority in the Stormont chamber for the first time since the creation of the Province a century ago.”
The message coming through to the DUP from nationalism is loud and clear: the days of being treated as second-class citizens are over, as are the days of tolerating abuse of political power.
Foster has done to Nationalism in Northern Ireland what Brexit has done to politics in Britain: she has radicalized Nationalist opinion just as Brexit has traumatized politics in the UK.
She has done more to harden the attitudes of normally moderate nationalist opinion than any of her former fellow first ministers, Trimble, Paisley or Robinson.
Posted by Jim on
The Klan is known mainly for its racism, but it also long harbored a virulent strain of anti-Catholicism
Jonathan Wright. Catholic Herald. London. Saturday, September 2, 2017
[Jonathan Wright is an honorary fellow in the department of theology and religion at Durham University. His book Layered Landscapes: Early-Modern Sacred Space Across Faiths and Cultures, co-edited with Eric Nelson, is published by Routledge,]
During its 1920s heyday the Ku Klux Klan was unremitting in its hostility towards Catholicism. As one Arkansas member put it, the loyalty of Catholics was “across the sea and the religion they profess is a foreign religion … the quicker we invite them to go back to the other side of the big pond the better it will be for us”. A typically rabid editorial in one of the Klan’s many periodicals – with the suitably sinister headline “To Your Guns!” – hammered the point home to its readership: “Drop not your fiery cross but carry it over vale and hill till pagan Roman Catholicism is expelled from our fair and free American life forever.”
The Klan pursued a goal of what it termed “100 per cent Americanism” and Caleb Riley explained why this made detestation of the Pope obligatory: “I am an Anglo-Saxon white man, and so constituted and trained that I cannot conscientiously take either my politics or my religion from some secluded ass on the other side of the world.” A Klan member from Mississippi was more succinct: he had no time for “that old dago by the Tiber”.
The fantastical allegations came thick and fast. Every time a Catholic father had a son he would add a rifle to the arsenal stored in the basement of his local church. It paid to be prepared for the great Catholic insurrection that was sure to come. After all, who could fail to notice that two antique cannon at Georgetown University in Washington were pointed directly at the Capitol Building? Worse yet, the Pope had already bought lands close to DC and was planning a “million-dollar mansion” from which he could mastermind the overthrow of the government.
At North Manchester, Indiana, a rumour once circulated that the pope was on board a train from Chicago so Klan members duly assembled at the station in the hope of giving the Pontiff what-for. In Florida, Governor Sidney J Catts, supported by the KKK, spent an inordinate amount of time travelling through his fiefdom warning of an imminent papal invasion of the state.
Ahead of the cataclysm, the Klan explained, Catholics would do their level best to ruin public morals and undermine American values. Klan audiences in the 1920s were routinely treated to speeches by women who claimed to be former nuns: they would often display leather bags in which, it was alleged, the newborn children of illicit liaisons between nuns and priests were carried to church furnaces to be cremated. Did people not realize, a Klan member in Sacramento asked, that “nearly all the bawdy houses, bootleg joints and other dives are owned or controlled by Romanists”?
Tragically, these were not simply the ravings of a fringe group. During the 1920s the Klan was extraordinarily successful.
Its membership probably topped four million and it was spread across all 48 states: 700,000 in Indiana, in the region of 400,000 in Texas and Ohio. The Klan was part of the mainstream of American politics, perfectly capable of determining the outcome of elections great and small.
Campaigns were launched against the provision of federal funds to Catholic parochial schools and Catholic teachers
in the public sector were hounded; in Atlanta, members of the school board who refused to follow the Klan’s whims had their lives threatened.
In some places, the Klan’s power went largely unchecked. When, in 1921, a man confessed to killing a Catholic priest in broad daylight, the jury in Birmingham, Alabama, mostly made up of Klan members, blithely acquitted him. Elsewhere, tensions between the Klan and its opponents boiled over. At Lilly, Pennsylvania, in 1924, a Klan rally descended into chaos and four people died. Twenty-nine rioters, all but four of them Klansmen, were arrested. In Niles, Ohio, when the Klan erected one of its burning crosses in front of a church, local Catholics burned tires outside Klan members’ houses. Such was the pitch of reciprocal violence and menace in Lafayette, Louisiana, that the local bishop urged his flock not to take “cheap revenge upon the Klan”.
By the end of the 1920s, the KKK had managed to divide the Democratic Party and had played a major role in derailing the Catholic Al Smith’s bid for the presidency, but its period of widespread political influence evaporated almost as quickly as it had arrived. The rants continued, of course, just as local politics could sometimes be infected by the Klan’s activities, and the memories of the terrible 1920s would leave deep wounds.
It was important for American Catholics to remember the stories of men like Pearce DeBardeleben, a Catholic store owner from Sylacauga, Alabama, who, in April 1921, was dragooned to the woods by Klan members, flogged with leather straps and punched so brutally that he lost most of his teeth.
The ugly nostrums that allowed the KKK to reach such giddy heights of influence may no longer be bandied about the corridors of power, but it would be remiss of American Catholics to assume that they have entirely disappeared.
Jonathan Wright is an honorary fellow in the department of theology and religion at Durham University. His book Layered Landscapes: Early-Modern Sacred Space Across Faiths and Cultures, co-edited with Eric Nelson, is published by Routledge
Posted by Jim on
VISUAL MISREPRSENTATION: More than 200
complaints were logged by RTE over its use of a map
of Ireland on which the north was conspicuously absent
Bimpe Archer. Irish News.Belfast.Tuesday, September 5, 2017
MORE than 200 complaints were logged by RTÉ over its use of a map of Ireland on which the north was conspicuously absent.
The broadcaster confirmed the extent of the negative feedback it received yesterday.
“A total of 203 complaints have been received in relation to the data map used on The Late Late Show segment on
Ireland’s Health Divide on Friday night,” a spokesman said.
“RTÉ will respond to these complaints within 20 days, in keeping with RTÉ complaints procedure established under the Broadcasting Act 2009.
“In addition, 33 viewers contacted RTÉ Information offering negative feedback.”
The appearance of the map on Friday night’s The Late Late Show prompted a storm of criticism from nationalists both north and south of the border, as well as some more mocking comments on social media.
Among the joking suggestions were that the image represented an ‘after’ picture following last month’s serious flooding or a future Brexit hard border.
RTÉ has insisted that the map was merely serving as a visual representation of the 2016 census results which consists of data solely from the Republic.
However, that has not satisfied critics who branded it “deeply offensive” and “rank partitionism”
Posted by Jim on September 4, 2017
Luke Coppen.The Spectator. London.Saturday, September 2, 2017
(Luke Coppen is editor of the Catholic Herald. London)
Among yesterday’s tributes to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, one stood out. It came not from a churchman, but from one of Britain’s most divisive politicians. Tony Blair described the late cardinal as a ‘wonderful advertisement’ for Christianity.
Now, you might expect a well-known Catholic to say something like that. Some reports did, after all, present Murphy-O’Connor as the man who ‘converted’ the New Labour leader. But while it’s true that the cardinal received Blair into the Catholic Church months after the latter resigned as prime minister, their relationship was complicated. Together they helped to decide the place of Catholics in Britain today – and not in an entirely happy way.
At the beginning of 2007 the cardinal wrote to Blair asking for an exemption from new gay adoption laws. The Cabinet said no, forcing the Church to shut or cut ties with its adoption agencies. The cardinal was furious. In one of our last email exchanges, earlier this year, he confirmed that he still felt strongly about it a decade later.
At times he seemed to blame Blair. But he also recognised that the prime minister’s authority had, by then, all but drained away. There was a small ‘Catholic tendency’ in the Cabinet, but a larger secularist one, led by ministers like Alan Johnson, who had lost a scuffle with the Catholic bishops over church schools a year earlier.
When Murphy-O’Connor succeeded the sainted Basil Hume as Archbishop of Westminster, he took up Hume’s quest to lead Catholics back into the establishment. He did well at first. In 2002, after the Queen Mother’s death, he became the first cardinal in centuries to read at an English royal funeral. That year he was also the first Catholic cleric to preach to the reigning monarch since 1688.
But his tussle with the Blair cabinet confirmed a new reality. The establishment was no longer exclusively Anglican, but it was embracing a new belief system – secular liberalism – that was no less hostile towards the Catholic Church. Hume had glimpsed a place at the heart of British affairs for Catholics; Murphy-O’Connor had discovered that it didn’t exist after all.
But he didn’t give up easily. He considered an offer by Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, of a seat in the House of Lords. He even rehearsed the opening of his first speech (‘As my predecessor, Cardinal Pole, was saying…’) But almost five centuries after Pole’s death, Rome had a different attitude to earthly power and vetoed the idea.
‘There is still a sense that being Catholic is different,’ the cardinal told me after his retirement. ‘You’re not part of the establishment and most Catholics wouldn’t want to be.’ If, in order to gain admission, he was required to abandon Catholic teaching, then ultimately he preferred to remain an outsider.
Posted by Jim on September 3, 2017
BBC NI ‘had bias against Catholics’ during Troubles, claims veteran journalist Dillon
Claire McNeilly. Belfast Telegraph. Saturday, September 2, 2017
A legendary BBC NI journalist has accused his former employers of being biased against Catholics and nationalists during the Troubles.
Martin Dillon, who worked as a reporter and producer at the corporation during the worst years of violence, claimed that the BBC “paid scant regard to Nationalist culture or social injustice” at that time, so much so that one of his colleagues described himself as the “token Catholic”.
The renowned author also revealed that, on getting to Ormeau Avenue, he was amazed to witness senior BBC NI executives holding an annual drinks party with Unionist politicians to celebrate the ‘Twelfth’ parade marching past the building.
And Mr. Dillon, an 18-year corporation veteran who introduced the then groundbreaking Talkback programme to Radio Ulster over 30 years ago, further claimed that the Beeb’s Northern Ireland newsroom “relied almost exclusively on information supplied by RUC and British Army press offices”.
His explosive claims, in a new book about his career out on Monday, were challenged by ex-Radio Ulster chief Don Anderson, who told the Belfast Telegraph that it was actually loyalists, not nationalists, who believed that the BBC was biased against them.
Mr Dillon left Northern Ireland 25 years ago following death threats from paramilitaries and now resides in the USA.
He wrote in Crossing The Line: My Life On The Edge that BBC NI tended to appoint mostly high-profile unionist figures – including a former NI Prime Minister’s wife – to the role of Governor, and further accused them of needlessly destroying precious archive film footage of the early days of the Troubles.
“I always felt the BBC did itself a disservice by appointing heavily politicised figures from one community to the role of overseeing broadcasting in Northern Ireland,” he writes. Recalling his attempts to retrieve BBC archive film of the late Brian Faulkner, who would become Northern Ireland’s most senior politician, marching through a predominantly Catholic area of Co Down in the Fifties – because he “believed the footage of Faulkner provided a singularly potent image of how Unionist and Orange Order triumphalism of the period asserted itself” – Mr Dillon said he was “reliably informed” that it had been gifted to his wife when she [Mrs. Faulkner] retired as BBC NI Governor.
He adds: “I informed Lady Faulkner I needed to locate the film. She was not helpful. At the same time, I discovered that most of BBC Northern Ireland’s archive film footage of past political events, including the early days of the Troubles, had been destroyed in the 1970s.”
Mr Dillon said that when he mentioned this, “others hinted the archive was destroyed ‘by mistake'”. They also said “‘somebody’ had given permission to get rid of unnecessary archive files, and the person charged with the task destroyed a large number of files representing a vitally important record.”
Another of the ‘Shankill Butchers’ author’s claims is that a senior BBC NI editorial figure was well-known for refusing to interview a priest in case he upset his friends in the Orange Order. And he reveals: “Others saw Catholics as the source of the violence. These views had the cumulative effect of ensuring BBC news personnel had no lines of communication into the Catholic community.”
Mr. Dillon said his then boss, Cecil Deeney, “was one of a small number of Catholics working in BBC NI programming, and that “there was some truth” when another colleague, Terry Sharkey, once joked about being a token Catholic at the Corporation.
He admits that he was “amazed” when BBC bosses gathered with Unionist politicians and dignitaries to celebrate the Twelfth on the sixth floor of Broadcasting House.
And, during the Ulster Workers Strike in the Seventies, he recalls being “asked by Dick Francis and Ronald Mason to use my paramilitary contacts to acquire UDA passes to get BBC executives through paramilitary roadblocks”.
But the award-winning Falls Road native reserved some of his harshest criticism for the late James Hawthorne, BBC Controller in the late Seventies and Eighties, whom he claimed tried to influence the way he reported the contentious Anglo-Irish Agreement.
“A year had passed since the implementation of the Agreement,” he writes. “Unionists bitterly opposed it, and I found myself facing criticism from some BBC figures for allowing Unionists to appear on the airwaves to voice their opposition to it.
“One evening, James Hawthorne summoned me to his office to express his displeasure with my coverage of the Agreement. He stressed that I should not forget I was employed by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
“Without issuing an editorial edict, he was in effect telling me, in an underhand way, to get in line with British government policy.”
Don Anderson, who was Mr Dillon’s immediate editorial boss at one time, told the Belfast Telegraph that “loyalists did not like the BBC”.
“Reporters and camera crews working on the streets were quite often attacked by loyalist crowds because they believed the BBC was biased against them,” he said.
“When I was a reporter I was shot at by a loyalist with a revolver. Luckily, it missed.”
Mr Anderson added: “Only Martin can say whether or not James Hawthorne told him to adhere to British policy when it came to reporting on the peace process.”
Dr Hawthorne, who was controller from 1979 to 1989, died in 2006.
Mr Dillon, now in his late 60s, is one of the foremost chroniclers of the Troubles.
A former Belfast Telegraph reporter, he wrote his first book, Political Murder in Northern Ireland, when he was still working for newspapers.
He joined the BBC in the Seventies as a reporter and was later promoted to programme editor. His books include The Shankill Butchers, The Dirty War and God and the Gun.
A BBC spokesman said: “BBC Northern Ireland is proud of its role in reflecting and serving the entire community.
“Accounts of people and events in the past will sometimes differ – and may even be disputed. We cannot comment on the specifics of an unpublished book at this stage.”