The ghost of 'Danny Boy'

The ghost of ‘Danny Boy’

He was the only soldier that I remember feeling sorry for. Captain Nairac died in May 1977 but, like the ghost of Banquo in the story of Macbeth, he keeps reappearing to remind us of the terror of our collective past. It was only in disappearance and death that we knew his real name. To the people of Crossmaglen, he was known simply as ‘Danny Boy’. He had sung the Derry Air in one of the pubs in the village and he became known afterwards by its common title. He was no common soldier however.

Nairac was uncommon in his behaviour as a soldier, on the dangerous terrain of South Armagh, during the most violent period of the Troubles. The reason I felt sorry on hearing of his abduction and probable death was that he was the only British soldier who had struck up some kind of relationship with the people of the locality that was not based on mutual contempt. He smiled a lot and he was engaging in a charming, gentlemanly kind of way. He went out of his way to be noticed and to notice.

Every three months or so when the army regiments changed, Nairac would appear on patrol wearing the beret of the incoming regiment. He was a regular who had been patrolling the area in uniform for about a year before his death. Jokes might be made about new hats on old heads when he appeared with the distinctive beret of the several regiments that passed through the region. He wore his hair significantly longer than a regular soldier. He was a fine looking man with glossy, wavy black hair and the women of the area often openly admired his physique and bearing.

The last time I saw him was a few nights before he was abducted. I was working in our family bar when he came in with a colleague who was obviously a senior post-holder in the local regiment. There was a small crowd around the bar and lounge as it was early evening. It was the pattern of the military, at that period, to enter the village pubs occasionally, ask some people their personal details, observe who was present and then leave reasonably quickly. Nairac entered and asked those who were gathered around the television set in the lounge if they had heard the shooting that he claimed had just taken place on The Square. Nobody had heard anything and reluctantly told him so. He playfully observed that nobody ever heard or saw anything of significance in Crossmaglen. ‘You’re some boys! – You never hear or say anything around here!’

He told his small audience that he and his colleague had just been shot at. The story that he told was of how they had been discussing tactics together and had just decided to visit two other pubs separately. As they parted, a shower of bullets hit the wall between them. He described it as a near-miss for both of them. This led to a further, farcical conversation between Nairac and his potential audience. ‘What colour were the bullets?’ one man wanted to know. ‘Were they green white and orange?’ ‘Are you sure you weren’t hit? Did you check yourself for holes?’ Such was the largely good-natured tone of the teasing.

One relatively young man hit a jarring note just as Nairac was about to leave. The young man had an alcohol-abuse problem and he was in an uncharacteristically narky mood. ‘What you want is good slap in the jaw,’ he said to Nairac. If he had known of Nairac’s prowess in the boxing ring, while a student at Oxford, he might have thought twice about his suggestion. To my amazement, Nairac responded to his aggressor by sitting down next to him and adopting a counselling tone. It was not the usual military response. He spoke and listened to him for about forty minutes, disarming him with words rather than weapons. Behind the bar, my father was getting nervous. A British soldier entering your premises and not leaving for almost an hour could look mighty suspicious.

That was the last we saw of the man we later came to know as ‘Captain’ Nairac. It was already assumed that he was some kind of special operative in the British Army and it was rumoured that he had been involved in some of the more dramatic killings that had taken place in the North around that time. Only later did we learn of his background and personal history. His mysterious role in the underground, intelligence war that was being waged in Northern Ireland at the time is still the subject of speculation. His name is linked to some of the most notorious, unsolved atrocities of the period. He remains a complex character in a dirty, violent, war-world. He is still the only soldier among the North’s ‘disappeared’. Military Intelligence people are reluctant to talk of him and Republican sources are unwilling to divulge the truth about his final hours or resting place. The story reflects well on neither group.

Some see Nairac as a Walter Mitty character; an ineffectual dreamer whose fantasy life led him to an early death. Others see him as a brave but maverick, go-it-alone undercover soldier, taking on the conquest of South Armagh single-handedly. Still others see him as a reckless, out-of-control killer who stopped keeping the rules of his own organisation and paid the price for his foolishness. He may have been overly-influenced by a colleague who was his superior for a time. Julian ‘Tony’ Ball, who died a few years afterwards, is described by former colleagues as ‘nasty’, even ‘psychotic’. The pair were split up, by military orders, in 1975. Whatever the truth, his story is a mystifying and compelling drama of a middle-class English Catholic boy who excelled at Ampleforth Abbey Benedictine College and later at Oxford; only to become bogged down in the quagmire of evil that dogged Northern Ireland at that time. The past still haunts us, like Banquo’s ghost, demanding that decency be done and that the truth must out.

They call it Puppy-Love

The recent spell of warm weather has brought more than the dandelions into bloom. Young lovers, in the first blush of infatuation, find that the warmth of their feelings is complemented by the long, bright and balmy evenings. You can see them, holding on to each other, as if the loved one might disappear prematurely, like the early summer. They stick to each other like limpets to a rock, lest their experience of puppy-love fizzle out or go flat, like the effervescence of tepid beer on a warm afternoon. They are taking their cue from nature of course. The warming of the earth provides us with the animal trigger that prompts procreation and long-term planning for strong offspring by the following winter.

Those couples whose puppy-love days are over and who have reached the serious stage of commitment to mortgage and marriage plan their nuptial ceremonies in a swell that begins this time of year and lasts all through the summer and into early autumn. The rituals are well-known and rarely deviated from. Even the most non-conformist of individuals becomes a stickler for protocol when a wedding carnation is pinned on them. It can take an age for the wedding party to simply sit down at the hotel table as nobody will risk sitting in the ‘wrong’ seat. Ladies’ hats may not be removed until the bride’s mother removes her crowning creation. Only then may the feathered-nest or the satellite-dish headdress be set aside.

The mortgage market has left many couples with strict budgets and little disposable income to spend on a day that can cost tens of thousands of Euro. This is encouraging a small section of the wedding market to go abroad. The traditional destination is Rome but more are now going to other European countries. Professional wedding planners are paid to sort out the paperwork, the religious ceremony, if chosen, and the translation problems. There is also a small but growing number of marriages between immigrants from central or Eastern Europe and Irish people.

The only time many adults may ever make a public speech is at the marriage of one of their children or as best-man for a friend or sibling. It is easy for a partly-public figure like me to forget how frightening it can be for most people to stand up in front of a crowd and deliver a speech. I have sat beside so many people at weddings who have not been able to eat; such was their state of nervous tension at the prospect of speechifying later on. The worst cases are the characters who have no problem with blarney when they are sitting down but whose power of speech appears to drain away to their nether regions when they stand vertically. Some of the more nervous try to drown the butterflies in their stomachs with frequent trips to the bar and to the toilet. Others just sit and allow the table to absorb the nervous energy from their trembling legs.

The church ceremony tends to be more relaxed and better prepared than it was in past times. There is still room for the occasional gaffe. One of these was a groom who misread the text as he offered his bride a ring, ‘as a sign of my faithful love’. That inspirational sentiment somehow became a declaration of manhood as he offered her the ring with the promise that it was a sign of his ‘fertile’ love. His fertility was already beyond doubt but we all knew what he meant. One of my own less glorious moments was when I lost the text and mis-remembered the words of a blessing. Faithful and unbroken love became a little confused and conflated as I blessed the rings to be worn, ‘as a sign of unfaithful love’. I could not have picked a worse congregation or couple as an audience for my lapse. The wedding party was made up mainly of amateur drama enthusiasts.

The person who is most likely to ruin the bride’s day, and that of everyone else, is the ironically-titled ‘best-man’. A common misunderstanding among these specially-chosen attendants is that they have to be stand-up comedians and satirists as well. Rather than drawing attention to the centrality of the bride and groom they often sink into embarrassing, self-centered, adolescent stories that are no longer funny, or they tell off-colour jokes that do not go down well with the top table or on the floor. Priests are often accused of speaking for too long at Mass but try getting the microphone back from many wedding-guest orators, especially still-doting fathers of the bride. I have never heard an audience call for an encore from such a top-table speaker.

Clichés become ever more grating with the passage of time. I often wonder if the epithet ‘new wife’ indicates that the groom is guilty of having an ‘old wife’ stashed away somewhere else. Is there such a thing as a ‘new future’? The most successful speakers are those who speak simply and briefly about the couple or about one of them, and who do so with feeling and insight. The spotlight properly belongs to the couple and not to the penguin charged with managing the post-prandial proceedings. The wedding circuit is a long way from puppy-love and it all attracts a certain cynicism in our times. One priest suggested that the first line of a funeral ritual has been mis-placed and should properly be used to begin the wedding ritual. ‘Before we go our separate ways…’

Going to work on an egg

Some short time before he died I asked my father what the family diet was like when he was growing up. His family was large; he was a twin and with his brother, the last of nine children, they were reared on a farm of nine acres. That was one acre per child, a stocking rate that would be unacceptably high, even for livestock, in those days. My father told me that he did not really remember well but he added, ‘there seemed to be a lot of eggs’. To this day, eggs are associated in the African mind, with the food needs of the white man because of the dietary preferences of the missionary priests who first went there from Ireland.

The diet of most people who lived in the countryside included a plentiful supply of eggs until recent health fads and food scares relegated the egg to one or two a week at most. The huge variety of foods that we now have at hand was simply not available to people until about twenty years ago. The unavailability of foods that we now take for granted was matched by their unaffordability in many cases. ‘Fast food’ came in the form of yet another egg, boiled for the mandatory three minutes or fried in an equally short period. An egg was recommended at breakfast-time with the toast and the evening meal or ‘tea’ often revolved around another egg and more bread. Rice was eaten only as a dessert, boiled in milk or milled into powder and given to children or invalids as ‘ground rice’. Spaghetti was a genre of Western films and wine was what the priest put in the chalice.

The principle of self-sufficiency meant that people ate what they produced or what was available locally. There were exceptions like tea-leaves and sugar that had to be imported but most of what ended up on the family table did not travel far from source. The diet was limited, especially in fruit, giving rise to the phenomenon of boils and styes and carbuncles on the face and head. What it lacked in variety of product, it made up for in the ingenuity with which the same foods were presented on the plate or pan.

Eggs could easily become pancakes or pastry. They could be poached, boiled, fried, scrambled or tossed into a mug of hot milk and whisked into an egg-nog as a treat. Our speciality at home was imprisoning a raw egg inside a dollop of steaming hot potato or ‘champ’ until it cooked and then whipping it all into what was commonly called a ‘right prawkas’. Eggs were considered to be ‘nourishing’, which is the quality that people looked for in their food. I once sat beside an old man at a wedding who looked disdainfully at the chunk of half-raw melon that he was presented with. He prodded it, tasted it, seasoned it with some pepper and salt, moved it around the plate and eventually abandoned it. He asked me what it was called and I told him. “There’s not much nourishment in that”, he commented disgustedly.

Mother Teresa was once said to have been on American television for interview when she viewed one of the advertisements during their so-intrusive ad-breaks. She remarked on the irony of bread being advertised which boasted that it was not fattening or nourishing. Most of the world looks to bread, she noted, for the very qualities that the American market was boasting about as being absent from their product. Bread that does not nourish seemed to her as yet another Western madness.

‘Teaching your granny to suck eggs’ was a futile occupation indulged in by those who thought they knew better. Grannies were commonly thought to be experts in egg-production and consumption. Cracking a raw egg on your front teeth and allowing it to slide down the swallow-hole was not exactly haute-cuisine or good manners but it was thought to be a remedy for all kinds of weakness and loss of appetite; self-induced or otherwise. One old-time toper who used to frequent our pub had a more sophisticated version of this ‘cure’ that he grandly called a ‘Bombay Oyster’. His recipe was a raw egg covered over with sherry and consumed in one swallow. This combined the traditional ‘hair-of-the-dog’ cure with some semi-solid nourishment and a sense of sophisticated bravado to help steady up his shaky equilibrium.

Eggs came in a variety of shapes, sizes and tastes. There was the occasional surprise of twin embryos in a double-yoked egg. A shell-less egg occasionally turned up, prompting the addition of some extra ‘grit’ in the diet of the hens. We occasionally ate pigeon eggs, pilfered from the wild and pullets’ eggs when the domesticated young hens started to lay. We graduated on to duck-eggs when our stomachs had become accustomed to strong flavours. The green duck-eggs were the stronger flavoured as became their darker shell. Brown hen-eggs were somehow favoured over white ones. This often led to the deception of boiling a white-shelled egg in tea-leaves for the usual time that it took the egg to cook. The stain from the tea-leaves would by then have changed the shell-colour to a convincing brown.

Omelettes were yet to come as our society became more travelled, more sophisticated in diet and more Europeanised. Quiche was, we were told, ‘only for wimps’ when it first came on the diet scene and as for salad… ‘Mayo, God help us’ was still a county in the west from which most people emigrated, rather than the egg-based dressing that goes with everything nowadays. We’ve come a long way from bacon and egg breakfasts and the tea-time boiled egg with salt and butter. The current talk of world food shortages and rising prices might send us back to our staples of the past and the humble egg will certainly be there, on and in the menu.

Fr Murtagh's Blogspot

No 1

Rhyming in the New Year

My father used to exchange books of Robbie Burns’ poetry with a townie friend of his. I wondered how he understood the Scots idiom of the verse. It seemed like a foreign language to my untrained ear. There was a tradition of poetry reading and verse writing in our area. Several local men and women were known to indulge in what Patrick Kavanagh’s mother used to call, “the curse o’ God rhymin”. Much of what was written locally took the form of parody or satire. Local events and characters were recorded in humourous ballads that were occasionally set to music. They were not exactly Shakespearean in insight or word-carving but they represented the aspirations of a dormant literary culture.

The poetic tradition in South East Ulster was a strong one. The best remembered local poet of times past was Art McCooey (1738?-1773). He was remembered as much for his rakish life as for his poetry. It was said that he had once walked a horse and cart full of dung up and down a field all day, in a poetic trance as he composed his verse, forgetting that his allotted work was to empty the cart and scatter its load on the pasture. He was also known for his drinking and for flouting convention in his marriage arrangements. Some of his ‘aisling’ or ‘vision’ poems survived and his Úr Chill an Chreagáin is a kind of anthem for South Armagh. Patrick Kavanagh acknowledged his influence by writing a poem called ‘Art Mc Cooey’, alluding to the incident with the cart load of dung. Kavanagh’s poem ends, ‘Wash out the cart with a bucket of water and a wangle/ of wheaten straw. Jupiter looks down./ Unlearnedly and unreasonably, poetry is shaped/ Awkwardly but alive in the unmeasured womb’.

The beginning of the year belongs, however, to the Scots poet, Robbie Burns. New Year’s celebrations invariably end with the singing of Auld Lang Syne, (literally: old long since) a poem that he re-worked and made popular across the world. He was an approximate contemporary of Art McCooey and both, like the later Patrick Kavanagh, were regarded as ploughman-poets. He shared some of Art’s other interests too. He had a complex love life and a taste for convivial company. He also died young. He had written almost all his poems by the age of twenty seven and he was dead a decade later in 1796.

Robert Burns is Scotland’s National Bard and his name is known throughout the world. His memory is kept alive in a particular way through the Burns Suppers that take place this time of year, especially around the birthday of the poet, January 25^th. The memory and works of few poets have been promoted as skilfully as have those of Robert Burns. There is a local Burns connection in that his sister and her husband are buried in Dundalk, in the graveyard of what is locally called ‘The Green Church’. She was married to a gardener, Robert Gault, who built Stephenstown Pond for the local landlord Matthew Fortescue.

One of Robert Burns best known poems comes from his ploughman days. During the course of ploughing a field, he accidentally turned over the nest of a mouse and he addressed a word of apology and a reflection on the incident in the form of a poem. The poem was simply called, ‘To a Mouse’. Using the idiom of modern English, the poem ending runs:

But, mousie, thou art not alone,/In proving foresight may be in vain,/The best laid schemes of mice and men,/ Go oft astray,/ And leave us nought but grief and pain,/To rend our day.
Still thou art blessed, compared with me!/ The present only touches thee,/ But, oh, I backward cast my eye/ On prospects drear,/ And forward, though I cannot see,/ I guess and fear.

One of the best known of Robert Burns poems arises from his sense of social justice and concern for the dignity of the individual. It is called “A man’s a man for a’ that”. Robert lived at a time of great unrest in mainland Europe and in his own country. The French Revolution was sweeping away old ideas of privilege and caste. In Scotland there was discontent with the Treaty of Union with England. The poem celebrates the worth of the ordinary person and is often sung as an anthem by those who dream of a more equitable society. It was sung at the official opening of the devolved Scottish parliament.

As we begin the New Year, I finish with a quotation from the poet of Hogmanay and of January. The poem is called ‘A bottle and friend’ and it counsels a Scottish version of the Latin axiom, ‘Carpe Diem’ - seize the moment. It reads: ‘Then catch the moments as they fly,/ And use them as ye ought, man: /Believe me, happiness is shy, /And comes not aye when sought, man”.

No 2

Beauty in the back yard

There is something very beautiful about a blanket of snow. It made me pause. I stood and stared as it transfigured all that I am familiar with. Even the skeletal trees came to life again. Their burdened branches shivered and shook off some of the excess snow at their tips. Shrubs collapsed and hugged the ground. Ditches took on the appearance of barbed-wire barriers as their angular branches stiffened and pierced each other awkwardly. It was the light that totally transfixed me however. For a moment, I thought that a spaceship might be hovering in the sky, bathing the area in a light so beautiful that I could not name it. Against the starchy white of the snow-blanket, the ambient light seemed warm and subdued; a night-light for a sleeping world, tucked away under its fleece of newly-fallen snow.

Each building wore a night-cap of frosted snow before the night was out. Like icing on a Christmas cake, the starchy snow-cap set off the mottled colours of the winter-battered walls. Window-ledges were decorated with sprinkled fringes of snow and roof-eaves were lace-edged; honoured with icicles. Parked cars sank into a deep sleep, refusing to leave their places until they had been released from their burden of frost and snow. Even the dogs stopped barking as the silence of snow permeated the muffled night.

I searched in the snow for signs of night-life when I woke up the following morning. Some early birds were holding congress at a safe height above the prowling cats. Their tell-tale excursions on the ground were mapped out in the delicate, arrow-like indents of their feet on the snow. The blackbirds had been having an apple-feast every morning until now. The autumn load of an apple tree had given up its attempt to hold on and the fruit had fallen on to a cushion of leaves underneath the tree. ‘The apple does not fall far from the tree’ as the proverb puts it. This wind-fall was for the blackbirds and now they were deprived of their apple a day.

The priest-graves in the churchyard looked colder than ever. Their Celtic-cross markers had caught a little of the snow-fall in the niches of their eternal circles. Their blankets of grey gravel refused to crunch underfoot. The snow, like a pair of new shoes, creaked and complained as it was forced into new forms and shapes by Mass-going feet. Soon the snow was veined with paths of regular footprints as people made their way through the churchyard, stepping out delicately along their traditional routes. Saint Bernadette knelt in the snow, her Pyrenean ‘capulet’ or veil now overlain with snow. The ‘lady’ sheltered in her rocky niche, smiling down, enigmatic as ever.

It was a short visit. The snow was soiled and churned up by midday. The underlying imperfections were visible again. Car tyres sprayed their muddy excess sideways as they pushed the snow aside and made tracks to return to business. The toppled torso of a hastily-built snowman rolled down a lawn. How the mighty are fallen! Holiday lie-ins were cut short and snowball fights broke out before numbness stopped play. Parents stood in the doorways of their lined-up houses and remembered.

Inside, cold young hands were wrapped around mugs of steaming tea. Old hands consecrated the fire in their hearths as they sat, spreading out their palms to absorb the heat. Grey columns of smoke rose vertically into grey clouds as the rain threatened. The slanting showers came and the snow dissolved like sugar beneath it. Only the sheltered hedgerows and the narrow country lanes hung on to their deposits of New Year snow. These deposits of frost and snow were what Patrick Kavanagh was thought to be referring to when he wrote of the ‘bright shillings of March’ in his famous poem, ‘Shancoduff’;

‘My hills hoard the bright shillings of March

While the sun searches in every pocket. 

They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn

With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves

In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage’.

“Bad weather we’re havin’ Father”. I agree for the sake of conversation and convention. I didn’t tell my greeter that I had been pulled up in my tracks the night before by the beauty of the ‘bad weather’. I might as well have been in a trance, my body and mind simultaneously put on ‘hold’, like a mystic who is reduced to wordless-ness. The surprise of the snow was not only in its unannounced arrival or in its hasty departure. Its beauty and its ability to beautify, managed to surprise my jaded senses. ‘The beauty of this world hath made me sad’, wrote Pádraig Pearse in his poem, The Wayfarer - ‘This beauty that will pass’.

No 3

The giving hand is always uppermost

The first black man I ever saw was, perhaps inevitably, a British soldier. I used to feel indignant when I saw black soldiers patrolling the streets and fields in our area. Of all people, I thought, they should know what it is like to live under the yoke of oppression and here they are as part of an occupying army. It was strange to see black soldiers patrolling the more remote parts of the countryside. I’m sure they were making a little indent in the history of the place in their being the first Africans to ever set foot on the fields of that particular part of the country.

Somehow we absorbed some of the racism that was directed against Africans, even as we deplored and fought against the racism that we dealt with daily, especially in our interactions with British or Northern Irish security people. My first direct experience of this racism in action occurred one day when I was with a friend of my brother. He was two years older than me and much more street-wise. A black soldier was on patrol on the streets of our village and he was taking cover in the doorway of my family home. My friend began to abuse him from the safety of his nearby perch. He teased the black soldier, calling him all kinds of rude and racist names and then hid his face from sight.

The soldier endured his tormentor patiently and bided his time until he was able to encounter him. In a restrained and gentlemanly fashion he told my friend that he must never again use such abuse to another human being. He told him of the need to respect others and of the dignity of each individual and he generally gave him a lecture on the evils of racism. My friend responded meekly and with compliance. Having acquitted himself with much dignity, the soldier moved off with the rest of his patrol. As he left and as my friend spotted his escape route, the soldier reminded him that he must never call people names just because the colour of their skin happened to be black. My friend began his retreat but not before he had the last word in the encounter. ‘O.K. Snowflake!’ he responded as he made his getaway, cheeky to the last.

Many years later, I met an African priest who happened to be studying the same course with me in Dublin. His name was Hyacinth and he was unaware of the character of the same name in the television programme, ‘Keeping up Appearances’ or of how ridiculous she managed to make herself. We became friends and through him I was introduced to many of his confreres and colleagues over the past fifteen years. He has now been nominated as a bishop in his own area in Southern Nigeria and I have accepted his invitation to be there for the ceremony. In this context, I recently visited the Embassy of Nigeria in Dublin to obtain a visa.

The office for passport and visa business was located at the back of the building, in a basement area. It seemed as if the immediate message was written into the layout of the building. This business of dealing with the practical concerns of Nigerian nationals and a few Europeans was to be kept out of sight and away from the gracious entrance to the Embassy in Central Dublin. ‘The giving hand is always uppermost,’ runs an African proverb. In this case it was the Africans who had the power of giving or withholding and I waited silently as the numbers on the wall-clock turned towards my designated turn.

The waiting-room, like most functional rooms of its sort, was equipped with moulded-plastic seats, water dispensers and little else by way of distraction or amusement. There were two other white faces in the room but it was overwhelmingly a Nigerian space with Nigerian rules of communication and interaction. ‘Where have you come from?’ snapped an Embassy official as he interviewed a Nigerian man who was accompanied by his wife and family. ‘From Navan’, was his incongruous reply. His wife unwrapped a slice of white, buttered bread and gave it to her small daughter as a snack.

The atmosphere was one of subdued annoyance and irritation as officials tried to explain to the supplicants what forms and procedures were needed for their particular request. Mine was simple and it was granted officiously but without delay once I had made personal contact with the Embassy staff. The experience made me reflect, however, on the indignities of being a non-national in a strange culture; on having a black face in a white country; on being at the mercy of officials of either skin colour who have power over your plans and your destiny; on being a minority in an ocean of other-ness; on the daily indignity of holding out an expectant hand, knowing that the giving hand will always remain uppermost.

No 4

A road too wide to cross?

The late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich once got himself into a spot of trouble, diplomatically speaking, when he suggested that most political prejudice in Northern Ireland emanated from the Catholic community while most religious prejudice came from their Protestant counterparts. It was not an original observation but it contained enough truth to sting commentators into action. I was reminded of this recently by the news and chat-show item regarding the selling of Rosary beads in the gift-shop of an Irish Anglican Cathedral and the hostile reactions that this evoked. The depth of anti-Catholic feeling that arose from some quarters was not surprising to those who were brought up in Northern Ireland. It is a reaction that has occasionally been turned on fellow Protestants as in the infamous case of the Reverend David Armstrong, a former Presbyterian Minister, who fled Northern Ireland in 1985. He recorded his story in a book titled ‘A Road Too far’.

The story really began with his move to Limavady in 1981 to take up a post in the First Presbyterian Church there. Shortly after his arrival, the newly-built Catholic church opposite his own building was bombed. Rev Armstrong visited the bombed building and offered condolences to the Catholic clergy and Bishop. He also spoke on television. A petition had been signed against the building of the church and soon after his visit and interview the Minister began to receive hostile messages.

Things settled down and in December 1981 Reverend Armstrong held the first Christmas Day Service in his church. Shortly afterwards he was invited to the official opening of the Catholic Church following repairs and rebuilding. He again received a hostile reaction from the local governing body of his Church. There were veiled threats about ‘losing your congregation’. In 1983, a new local Catholic priest, Fr. Kevin Mullan introduced himself when they met while on hospital visitation. On the Christmas Day of that same year, Fr. Mullan asked him to wish Happy Christmas to his congregation on his behalf. Reverend Armstrong suggested that Fr. Mullan should greet them personally. They both crossed the road that Christmas and wished each other’s congregation a Happy Christmas. There was much applause in both churches but there was a significant degree of negative reaction recorded by Rev Armstrong too. This later escalated into death threats to his wife and family.

The national media got hold of the story and it featured prominently in a Sunday newspaper. A television programme was recorded and shown. Negative reaction continued when a group of Apprentice Boys tried to insist on another Minister receiving them when they marched to a church that was in Rev Armstrong’s care. He refused their request and they marched elsewhere. In 1984 a visiting party of Christians from Britain that included some Catholics were invited to a Service in his Church and he later preached in the Catholic St. Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry. He also planned to visit Massachusetts, U.S.A. that year alongside Fr. Mullan. Before the visit took place he heard that a group of Free Presbyterians were planning to picket his church that Christmas. The picket was duly put in place and there were some unpleasant scenes within the Church when some picketers who had entered the building abused Fr.Mullan.

There was more trouble for Rev Armstrong as the elders of his congregation turned against him. He was advised to cut his ties with Fr. Mullan and not to travel to the U.S.A ‘with the priest’. He went on the trip but had to cut it short because of a family bereavement. Shortly afterwards he resigned. He preached his last sermon to his own congregation and crossed the road, saying farewell, to much applause, to Fr Mullan’s parishioners. He left for England with his wife and family shortly afterwards, taking up an offer of hospitality and an opportunity to study at Oxford University from Church of England sources. He later served in Cambridge before moving back to Ireland in 2000, settling for some time in Carrigaline, Co.Cork.

As Rev Armstrong departed Northern Ireland in 1985, a supportive statement was issued by Cardinal Tómas Ó Fiaich. ‘I hope there will never be a road between Protestant and Catholic that is too wide to cross’ he had written. He also said that the episode was one of the saddest moments of his life. David Armstrong writes of his appreciation of the Cardinal’s words and of how he was moved by this unexpected source of support. The Cardinal had also given more practical help. It all earned him a rebuke from the authorities of Rev Armstrong’s Church for interference in internal matters.

With the new dispensation in place in Northern Ireland it might be hoped that such attitudes might eventually dissolve but old prejudices die hard. The political settlement in place has won much acclaim internationally and is being held up as an example of successful conflict resolution, with many public figures taking various shares of the credit for its success. Dare we hope, as we end another ‘Week of Prayer for Christian Unity’ that the religious wing of the conflict might make similar strides towards abandonment of prejudice and achieve similar resolution?

No 5

The seven deadly sins.

Every year, during Lent I withdraw a book from my shelves called, ‘The seven deadly sins’ and I try to read through it during the six week season. For the record, the seven deadly ones are pride, covetousness, lust, anger, envy, greed and sloth. Pride is considered to be the principal, over-arching sin, the original and the root of the others. In ages that were less literate than ours the seven deadly sins often decorated works of art. These were then used to teach people as our high crosses or stained glass might have been used as teaching aids here in Ireland. The deadly sins were illustrated by symbols, by motifs and by figures, sometimes animal figures. Pride, for example is portrayed arriving, by carriage of course, drawn by six animals symbolising the particular sin that rides on each. Sloth rides an ass, gluttony a swine, lechery a goat, avarice a camel, envy a wolf and wrath a lion.

If you wish to identify those ‘deadlies’ that are particularly yours, try these exercises. If any one of the list seems no big deal to you, you have already rationalised your way around it. Think again and think real. Listen to your opponents and enemies, especially those who make a virtue out of rudeness by calling it truth. Search out the patterns of your life and examine the events of each day. Pray, reflect and read some spiritual books – ‘nothing too recent’ as one sceptic of modernity wrote lately.

Ideas of what sin is have changed of course. We rarely hear the old distinction made between mortal and venial sin. The modern diagnosis of social or structural sin, the sins of a system are more likely to be given a hearing though. Attitudes to guilt and shame have changed too mostly because of the influence of the ‘self-help’ industry, the ‘new age’ movement and the influence of popular psychology. Modern Irish writing with its ever present backdrop of ‘Catholic’ guilt has had its influence too. In this genre of writing or subsequent film-making, sometimes called ‘misery-litt’ we Irish are portrayed as permanently guilty, with shame as our constant fear. Repression, sacrifice and denial make up the daily diet of the fictional characters.

Somehow, along the route to modernity, society got rid of belief in hell. It evaporated and with it went sin, shame and guilt. We were told to express ourselves without reserve where before we had been taught the language of renunciation. We were taught to salve our self-esteem rather than to save our souls. We were chided for feeling guilty and shameful and told to accept ourselves as we are and that what mattered was that we assert our rights, that we have good feelings and liberty to pursue happiness regardless of the effects on others. So long as it felt good, all was considered fine. So long as you were happy, all was allowed. What nonsense! We need a wholesome sense of guilt and shame if we are to live peacefully together. Guilt, shame, repression, sacrifice and renunciation are all necessary, healthy and maturing when they are experienced appropriately. Critical thinking is at least as important as attending to feelings. Reason regulates the emotions. Duties and responsibilities are as necessary to good living as some rights. When these neglected ideas are missing, society loses out because it becomes more selfish and self-centred. It becomes more fragmented, more conflicted, more violent and less happy.

We ought to feel guilty when we do something that is obviously wrong. We should feel shame when we hurt others by word or action. A complete absence of guilt and shame is the mark of what is called the anti-social or pathological character type. It is often guilt that motivates us to change our behaviour, to mature beyond the foolishness of the seven deadly sins. It is the itch that alerts us to the fact that something is wrong with our attitudes or behaviour. It can get under the skin of rationalising, the unreal excuses we use to cover up the true, messy motivations for our behaviour.

Guilt didn’t go away of course. Rather than feeling guilty for the ‘deadlies’, people in this end of the world were taught to feel guilty about other things. New ‘social’ sins emerged. Smoking in company is definitely a modern ‘mortaller.’ It is more serious in contemporary estimation than most of the ‘deadlies’ listed above. It used to be fashionable, even estimable. Dessert time and food generally has become an occasion of sin and of guilt for the virtuous body-worshipper. Using pesticides rather than organic solutions is considered a sinful act of environmental sabotage. Some contemporary ‘sins’ are found only in particular cultures. Fox hunting has come in for particular odium in parts of Britain, while Hallal or ritual slaughter of animals is allowed, as is the abortion of children, even in the third semester. There is not much consistency there. Ideas of right and wrong can obviously become caught up in a web of political correctness and of fashion.

The effect of a look at the seven ‘deadlies’ can help us out of this confusion. It can clear the fog of prejudice that obscures the vision of those immersed in any culture. There are centuries of worldly wisdom, deep wells of spiritual strength and profound psychological insights in the compiling of the seven. They provide the motivation behind the great scandals and excesses of our time as truly as they did in the past. They are markers on the way to understanding the dark and murky underworld of human consciousness. They have featured in literature from earliest times and they are as contemporary as Brad Pitt and the film ‘Seven’ or the stories in your daily newspaper. If you search carefully you might even find some of them in your own less glorious moments.

No 6

‘He who sits on the cushion of advantage goes to sleep’ (Emerson).

From our earliest awakenings we were made conscious of the relative advantages that were enjoyed by our people. It took practical and symbolic shape and form in the enthronement of a ‘Mite-Box’ on teacher’s table or shelf. Though we considered ourselves as the forgotten ones; the disadvantaged ones in the ‘cold house’ for Catholics that was Northern Ireland, we knew that there were the infinitely more disadvantaged ‘black babies’ out there in the heat and in the darkness. We spoke of ‘Foreign’ Missions and of other peoples who lived in a distant ‘Far East’. The subtle message was given to us that all else other than our own was foreign and distant and that we were children of the light. The civilisation of the En-light-enment in Europe had set us on a central cushion of advantage.

We dropped our pennies into the mite-box for the ‘blacks of Africa’ and for the warm feelings of satisfaction that this form of giving gave to us. Our school books and religious magazines furnished our minds with images of pot-bellied African children in situations that could only evoke pity and compassion, laced with a touch of condescension and self-congratulation on our relative advantage.

Our Irish missionaries were ambassadors for the nation and the heroes of missionary magazine stories. Our empire was a spiritual one, extending to all corners and crevices of the accessible world. We had self-confidence in faith that we had never been able to muster culturally. Emancipation had given us a faith-story of a heretical Goliath having been slain by an Irish Catholic David who was now empowered and had built up an extended kingdom at home and throughout the world. We had the self-confidence to take on the whole world and its conversion to our faith. It had been demonstrated by our history to be a resilient faith that resisted centuries of aggression and eventually triumphed over injustice. At the height of our triumphant feelings, in the middle decades of the last century, we took on nothing less than the conversion of China. We were an underdeveloped, isolated, island nation of a few million people taking on the extra missionary commitment of saving souls in nothing less than colossal China.

As we grew up and moved into exile from the world of the mite-box we became, in the words of an Anthony Cronin poem, ‘In some ways better than our begetters/In other ways, worse’. The tide of political correctness swept away references to Foreign, Far or Black and we learned new concepts and longer words like indigenous, inculturation and reverse mission. We began to apologise for our empire-building and to direct our light on the structural darkness that was nearer home. The cushion of advantage became ever more comfortable as education unlocked our potential and as our collective purse began to fill. This collective purse we called ‘the economy’ and it soon took the place of discarded but formerly central concepts such as community, country, culture or catholic. We increasingly spoke of ‘career’ rather than of ‘calling’.

In the new dispensation that is contemporary Ireland it is the likes of Bono or Bob Geldof who have publicly taken up the dropped baton in the race to ‘make poverty history’ and to demonstrate our Irish missionary drive, though with little personal sacrifice on their own parts. They represent the still-smouldering Irish impulse to reach out to a suffering world. There is no shortage of projects and good causes or of people who wish to work in the developing world for a period, following the compulsory gap-year in Australia of course, for a limited period only, before returning to the comfort of the cushion and to the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. The days of the reckless ‘peregrinus’ or missionary monk setting out to sea on a rudderless voyage to wherever God guided him, or the Irish missionary laying down a life commitment to exile are all but over.

Some of the ‘black babies’ have returned as priests and are now preaching to us. The empire has struck back. They are occasionally bewildered by our brand of heathenism, our hedonism and our poverty of values. They see the pain and the chaos of a society that is suffering from a relatively short period of intense ‘affluenza’. We have gone to fevered sleep on our cushion of advantage. Though we occasionally talk in the turbulence of our slumbers, the prospect of our awakening this side of tragedy, or of cure, is poor. Maybe someone should remove the cushion from beneath our slumbering heads.

No 7

Where the rainbow goes to Mass

An Irish seminary professor that I knew once visited Africa. He wrote an article when he returned home, telling of his experiences. The article was titled, ‘Where the rainbow goes to Mass’. He was so taken by the vivid colours of Nigerian dress that he saw the whole rainbow range of colours every time he attended Mass.

‘Welcome to Lagos,’ my friend said as we exited the airport, ‘where nearly everyone is mad!’ We made our way through the taxi touts outside ‘Arrivals’ only to find that our own contact had not arrived and would be almost an hour late. It was hard to tell whether Lagos traffic or African time non-keeping were to blame. Despite the cratered road surfaces, the dilapidated, fumes-belching vehicles and the skeletal remains of crashed vehicles on the road verges, I learnt from the licence-plate of the car in front of me that Lagos regards itself as a ‘centre of excellence’.

Markets spring up everywhere here, especially by any roadside that delivers people, potential customers and traders. Our car later eased its way painfully through a ‘night-market’, deftly avoiding and dodging the swarms of motor-bikes that are found everywhere in the country. Shopping is a different experience here. From a dusty, ramshackle ‘tigín’, held together by a couple of sheets of rusty galvanised iron, traders, often in traditional African dress, look out for custom. In this season of ‘hamartan’ or dry cool wind, they fan small wood fires to warm themselves and carry candles or ‘Hurricane’ lamps during night-market. Day market can be anything from a few yams, piled up like a small turf-rick by the roadside, to a purpose built plastic kiosk, painted in garish colours, renting the latest DVDs or selling phone-credit.

Sunday is the annual ‘Open Day’ for the missionary society that is hosting me. It is an opportunity for another of the ‘celebrations’ that Nigerians delight in. Forgetting their troubles and the squalour that surrounds them, they let loose their voices and their bodies as they sway and sing unselfconsciously. A fatted pig, tethered to a strong shrub, succumbs to the heat and sleeps away his penultimate day of life. A bound lamb grazes contentedly beside him, innocent of the sacrifice that he is and will be.

I have begun to keep monastery hours here, getting up before dark for travel or for early morning Mass in the seminary chapels. The liturgy is Easter-like as the day breaks between the saying of Morning Prayer from the Breviary and the beginning of Mass. The Oratory benches are lined with white-soutaned young seminarians. They move piously and sing or tap out drum-rhythms as they respond to the ritual. They are geographically well removed from their contemporaries in our end of their world; a physical distance far surpassed by the cultural and spiritual chasm that modernity has opened up between their world and ours.

These seminarians, living in Spartan conditions, are our spiritual descendants in many cases, having inherited their faith from Irish missionary activity. It is more than a little unsettling, one young priest tells me, when he hears that the Irish, who brought them to faith, have abandoned their zeal for spreading it and their desire to express it in practice or in priesthood. The ‘purpose of my visit’ as the immigration people always ask, is to attend the consecration of my friend as a bishop. As a white priest, I attract my share of the deference with which people treat authority figures here. There is much bowing and curtseying. Titles are thrown around like confetti at a wedding and it is not just a religious or Catholic thing.

A legion of house-churches, sects and religious organisations of all kinds advertise their presence on rusting, paint-faded name-plates. Whether it is a church, hotel or small shop, it appears to me that there is an inverse relationship between the grandiloquence of their names and the reality of the facilities that front on to the dusty, red dirt-paths The Intercontinental Hotel vies with the Celestial Church and the Marvellous Emporium Supermarket for exaltation of title and paucity of resources. There are few problems here with public self-esteem.

Like an autumn swallow, I head south for the heat and for the climax of my visit. The car journey takes seven hours, one hour of which is spent trying to anticipate and avoid pot-holes and drivers who are swerving onto the opposite side of the road in the same manoeuvre. Police road-blocks are frequent; the blockade taking the literal form of blocking the road with some fallen timber or with whatever debris can be found in the ‘bush’. A good-humoured encounter ends with the handing over of a requested donation for ‘the fuel fund’ or ‘for water’, that essential human fuel in a hot climate.

Nigerian natives say that N.E.P.A. the National Electricity Board means ‘Never Expect Power Always’. Life here is organised around the power-cuts and the generator’s rationed output. Like progress on the motorway, it’s a stop-go process. Maybe progress is only ever made in fits and starts rather than in the straight and steady lines that we prefer. The rooster-call of daybreak finds me meditating on our own development as a nation, from medieval agricultural methods and living conditions to the push-button technology of today and all in the space of a forty-year generation. Many things become possible when a nation wakens up.

No 8

Thoughts from a far country

It is Friday, the First Friday of the month and the last day of the working week. Morning Mass in the Cathedral Church begins at 6 a.m. Guided by the beam from my latest-technology-torch, I stumble my way over rough ground to the modest, galvanised, girders and open-breeze-block building that serves as a cathedral in this not-yet-diocese, the Vicariate of Bomadi, in Delta region, the southern part of Nigeria.

On reaching the level concrete path that encircles the church, I catch a glimpse of a startled face turning away from the yellow glare and spotlight of my torch. A sleeping, homeless man re-adjusts his ‘wrapper’ and turns his face back to the wall. Inside, the only light is from a few candles around the sanctuary area but the people keep arriving and taking their places in the pews. Being Irish, I shuffle apologetically into the backmost pew and sit nearest the edge, beside the main entrance door, ‘The great escape’, always needs careful planning.

In the almost-light of the candles, the dark outlines of well-wrapped women cast further shadows along the aisle. Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of their care-lined faces. The features of the poor seldom differ. Written on their foreheads and carved in the crevices around their mouths and in the dark valleys under their eyes are sad expressive lines, together making up the her-story of their lives. In the darkness, sounds are amplified. The slow roll of the weary dragging feet of the elderly contrasts with the sharp, staccato flip-flop cracks of the more agile, as they crush the dust under their step rather than pulling it with them like the older ones.

Outside the compound, roosters compete with a ranting Pentecostal preacher for the public ear. By the time prayers begin, there are several hundred people in the church; young men dressed in shirt and jeans with shirt-tails left loosely out and cuffs turned up, á la mode, as they say on mainland Europe; very young girls dressed in headscarves like miniature old women; workers and elderly ones with cheap plastic rosaries around their necks; all are represented as they gather in kin-groups. The signal for 6a.m. is given and prayers begin with the saying of the Angelus.

A Rosary and several trimmings later and it is almost time for Mass to begin. The half-light of dawn gives the liturgy a sense of unfolding; an almost mystical movement from darkness to light; from shadow to substance; from unknowing to recognition. A plaintive chant is taken up with gusto at regular intervals by all sections of the congregation. The electric lights finally come up and the shadows dissolve. I find to my momentary embarrassment, that I am seated in the almost exclusively women’s aisle.

I am unable to hide my white but increasingly reddening face, even in the shadows. This allows me particular and special attention. As I kneel down for the Offertory of the Mass, the kind lady who is my immediate neighbour in the pew anticipates my move and prepares the way by brushing some dust off the wooden kneeling-board with her bare hand. I protest mildly but it is too late. My cover is blown but the honour of the community is retained. The ‘Oyibo’; the white man-priest has been honoured. The dust has been cleared from before his sandalled feet. The African mantra, ‘You are welcome,’ takes on its incarnate form.

‘The white man has the watch but the African has time’. There are no clock-watchers here and the liturgy is allowed to run its full course. The diminutive and spirited bishop steps forward to deliver his homily which is relayed in triplicate by himself and two translators who interpret the message in the local dialects. The main story in the readings of the day is that of King David’s adulterous and murderous liaison with Bathsheba, the wife of Urriah the Hittite. The scripture stories are followed by some people from their Bibles and missals. I wonder silently what dramas are brought to mind for those listening to this lascivious story of sexual indiscretion. ‘The poor man’s opera’ has its comforts and its crucifixions for every generation and race.

Communion time finds me kneeling by the altar-rails, tongue extended, in old-style reception of the Eucharist from the priest. The dividing line between priest and people; between the sacred and the profane; these are maintained in the hope perhaps that lines, whether written on the face, heard from The Book or finger-drawn in the dust of daily interactions, might make sense of the scripture of life. I have a commitment to meet my friend nearby at 8a.m. It is now 7.50 and Mass is almost but not quite over. Being an Oyibo, a white-man and a punctualist, I find that tension is rising within me. Being Irish, I get up and leave Mass early.

No 9

Hitting the middle years

This month is an important one for me. During March I will hit fifty or fifty will hit me. I’m not quite sure which way to look at it. I know that it is just a number, no different than forty-nine and year number forty-nine has not been in the least traumatic. The number fifty is lodged firmly somewhere in the grey matter behind my forehead, like a giant speed-warning sign or an old-fashioned milestone, reminding me that it is imminent and that I had better take note. The year of my birth has been branded into my mind with especial emphasis recently. I have discovered that it is a mistake to use such data as alarm codes or P.I.N. numbers that are used regularly. Nobody needs daily or regular reminders of how far back in the last century the happy event occurred.

Soon I will become a ‘Quinquagenarian’, a fifty year old. It sounds more dignified than ‘middle-aged’. I have become conscious recently of how over-fifties are described in the media. ‘A man in his fifties’, as the news reports often say, conjures up all kinds of images that I can not identify with. ‘Being over fifty is not what it used to be,’ the radio advertisement reassures me. The images of ‘what it used to be’ are not very comforting. The claim that the advertiser makes for his magic oil is not very convincing.

It is hard to imagine being fifty. I dread to think of how people, especially much younger people, perceive me when I think of how I viewed my parents when they were fifty years old. A comedian described this realisation-of-age process with the following quip. One morning I woke up, looked in the mirror, and said - ‘Who is that old guy wearing my pyjamas?’ The effects of advancing age are only evident, to me at least, on occasion. The print in telephone directories has been getting smaller recently. The little lines in the Missal on the altar swim around momentarily before my eyes settle down and focus properly. When I genuflect in an almost empty chapel, my knee-joints crack loudly and the sounds amplify and echo around the place, before returning to haunt me. If I squat at a hospital bedside for too long, I rise with a stiffness that I had not noticed before. I have begun to note that there are occasional special offers, concessions even, for people like me; those who reach the gold-standard of fifty.

There is something about the number fifty that suggests a mid-point, even though the truth is more likely to be that it is the beginning of Act Three, and next stop is the Finale and Curtains, if I am lucky enough to live out the average lifespan. Older people will say, ‘sure you’re only a child,’ but they are not very convincing. The writer Victor Hugo does reassure me, however, when he wrote that, ‘Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age’.

Turning fifty is not, however, a terminal affliction and I intend to survive and enjoy this stage of life just like I did my country childhood, my searching adolescence, my student-life twenties, and my priestly thirties and forties. I will reassure myself by thinking of those I knew who never reached fifty and those greats of history who died long before they had flowered or harvested the autumn of their lives.

Being fifty is a challenge I can rise to. I do not intend to indulge in any of the stocktaking exercises that are recommended or the lists of fifty that might be compiled. I do not intend to have a mid-life crisis or man-opause and indulge in any age-denying foolishness. I will allow myself a home-made, rudimentary health check and award myself a pass on the human equivalent of the N.C.T.

The big picture that has emerged from my recent ruminations on the prospect of ageing has been a canvas splashed with vivid recognition of how abundantly blessed my life is and how much I like it. I am as curious as I was at ten years old; braver and more confident than I was at twenty; wiser and more thoughtful than at thirty, and mellower than I was at forty. I am blessed with good health, a loving family, with friends and with meaningful work that I care about and enjoy. I have imagination and hope and passion in as generous a measure as ever. There are, of course, things that I will continue to work at changing. These imperfections begin in myself and ripple out into all kinds of structures and situations. The difference is that I am no longer in a hurry. Fifty years of living has taught me how to cope with whatever life throws my way. I do not feel any pressure to begin revolutions without or within. I have grown cautious and conservative in my ways; the very qualities I despised and chafed at in headstrong youth. In a way, I am looking forward to being fifty. The alternative, as the saying goes, is unthinkable.

No 10

One of the first ‘Paisley’ jokes that I heard ran as follows: ‘If Paisley and another man were ploughing in a field, how would you know which one was Paisley?’ The answer: ‘The one with the most ‘gulls’ following him’. It seemed that country people in my area could not quite understand what attracted people to follow the preacher or what his appeal was to the crowds. There were jokes about him from the very start of his public career. These stories revolved around his physique; his voice; his appearance at the ‘Pearly Gates’ and his apparent contempt for things Catholic or Irish. People were unsure whether to take him seriously or not, or indeed how he could be taken seriously, so strange was his style and the tone of his message.

When we Catholic priests give homilies at funerals, we are sometimes accused of overstatement or hyperbole regarding the deceased. There are very few people about whom many positive things cannot be said and the tradition among people is not to speak ill of the dead, (De Mortuis nil nisi bonum). It seems that the tradition has been extended to the politically recently deceased as commentators showered generous tributes on the First Minister when he announced the (almost) end of his political career lately. Much has been made of the last year of his political life and the extraordinary turn that politics has taken in Northern Ireland, now governed jointly by those known as ‘The Chuckle Brothers’. At best it shows that even the apparently most intransigent can be brought to change. Redemption is always possible, might be the Christian interpretation on such personal transformation.Wasn’t it David Trimble who said of someone else that, ‘just because you have a past does not mean that you do not have a future’.

The career of Ian Paisley spanned about forty years. He came to public prominence around 1968. It may seem mean-spirited to ask but what is the legacy of the other thirty-nine years? For all of that time he has been a regular feature on the political landscape, scowling and howling in equal measure as he delivered his half-sermon, half-speech, prophecies and denunciations. His emotional speaking style and content borrowed from contemporary American evangelists, from old-style pulpit oratory and from Apocalyptic biblical imagery. He was not, in my view, an orator capable of finely-honed sentences or speeches but rather a demagogue with the ability to whip up base emotions by playing on people’s paranoia and fears. What he lacked in content he made up for in volume.

His tactics often appeared crude and attention-seeking. Anyone who followed his career will remember some of the political stunts for which he became well-known, especially in his younger days. He craved attention, recognition and even honours and tolerated no rivals to the throne in the kingdom that he built up over the years as his political power increased. The irony is that he became a counter-image of all that he railed against in matters of religion. He was all but pope of the Free Presbyterian Church that he founded, giving way only recently to a successor. Mainstream Presbyterians are famous for changing their Moderator every year. His word generally went unchallenged. His judgments were not considered fallible. When Ian Paisley founded his church he deviously called it the ‘Free Presbyterian Church’ with the implication that the mainstream Presbyterian Church was not free. Similarly, when he founded his political party, he called it the Democratic Unionist Party, again implying that the other Unionist parties were undemocratic.

In 1966, Ian Paisley was awarded an honorary doctorate from Bob Jones University in Carolina, U.S.A. The University was regarded as a degree-mill, churning out scarcely-recognised qualifications. It was fundamentalist, virulently anti-Catholic and regarded as racist, allowing its first black students admission in 1971. It only permitted married black students initially and later sought to ban inter-racial dating among the unmarried blacks who first entered in 1975. The ban lasted until the year 2000. ‘Doctor Paisley’ craved academic recognition just as he sought political honours from the British establishment when his ‘No’ became ‘Maybe’ and finally ‘Yes’. His wife and other party members have joined the ermine ranks of the House of Lords. She is now Baroness Paisley and her husband is a ‘Privy Counsellor’, an advisor to the Head of State.

One of my former teachers once expressed the worry that Ian Paisley claimed to read the Christian Scriptures every day and yet, he said, it seemed that that the imprint or the spirit of the Scriptures did not seem evident in his pronouncements or demeanour. Commentators have said the he was a devious and skilful politician but I have not heard anyone claim that he was a holy man. This is despite his being the founder of a Christian Church. He appeared to most observers as a man of the sword rather than as a man marked by the message of ‘The Book’.

His contribution in the early days of the Troubles was to provoke further division with incendiary speeches, rallies and forays. His powers as a demagogue were formidable. More and more ‘gulls’ came along and followed. It all begs the question as to what kind of electorate ends up with an elderly, somewhat unstable cleric as their First Minister. ‘The sixteenth century is alive and living in Northern Ireland,’ as a Radharc television programme of 1989 demonstrated.

One final Paisley story: Ian Paisley was on a tour of a multi-denominational school and he asked the pupils: "Give me an example of a tragedy. "A little Presbyterian girl stood up and said: "If a person fell off a tree while playing, that would be a tragedy." "Very good", said Paisley, "but that would not be a tragedy, that would be an accident!" A little Protestant boy stood up and said: "If a busload of children crashed off a cliff, that would be a tragedy!" "Another good one", answered Ian, "but that would not be a tragedy, that would be a great loss." A little Catholic boy stood up and said, "If you were in a plane flying over this country, Mr Paisley, and it blew up, then that would be tragedy!" "Excellent", said Ian, feeling very chuffed with himself, "but how would you know that was a tragedy?" "Well," said the young lad, "it wouldn't be a great loss and it certainly wouldn't be an accident!”

No 11

Seachtain na Gaeilge came to an end recently. It was timed to end on the Feast of Saint Patrick when we remember our Christian heritage and when we celebrate things Irish. In a gesture that is truly Irish, Seachtain na Gaeilge runs for a fortnight rather than the week of its title. Only in Ireland could we have a week that lasts for a fortnight! Many of us will be familiar with the concept of a Seachtain na Gaeilge from our school-days when we occasionally tried to speak a little more of the language that differentiates us, even from our closest Celtic cousins.

I am in the habit of saying a prayer in Irish with altar servers when we return to the sacristy after celebrating Mass. Sometimes I engage the pupils from Primary School in a conversation to ascertain their attitude to the Irish tongue. Many times they will express a negative attitude to learning the language, even telling me that they ‘hate’ Irish. Sometimes I ask them if they ever met a Frenchman who hated French or a Spaniard who hated Spanish.

I am always surprised when I encounter this negativity as my own experience of learning Irish was so different. In fact I chose to go to Primary School half an hour earlier than usual in the morning to learn Irish. There was no Gaeilge on the school curriculum in those days but we had an enthusiastic teacher and fíor-Ghael who generously gave us the opportunity to learn our language. The pupils to whom I tell the story usually look baffled and bewildered at the very idea of anyone going to school ‘before school’ to learn Irish, of all things.

It seems that we sometimes only begin to appreciate something when it is removed from us or forbidden to us. Maybe that is part of the Irish national character as well. On leaving Primary School, I got a scholarship to a pre-Gaeltacht, Summer School in the Servite Priory in Benburb, County Tyrone and I later attended the Gaeltacht in Glenvar, near Kerrykeel in County Donegal over three summers. I took Irish as a specialist subject when I began studying for ‘A’ levels. Though I have forgotten much of what I learned, I still retain a love for the language and speak it regularly, if imperfectly, with some of my Gaeilgeoir friends.

The negativity that occasionally surrounds any mention of learning Irish is difficult to understand. The economic argument, the ‘what good is it to me?’ question, is still aired when people complain that Irish is of no material advantage to them and therefore it is a waste of time learning it. Some people have been put off learning the language by the method of teaching it or by the attitude of perfectionists who regard Gaeilge briste, or imperfect Irish, as an abomination. There are more riches, however, than monetary ones and the Irish language is a gold-mine of cultural wealth. A whole corporate personality is hidden in the way Irish expresses itself. There is living history and a multitude of ideas and insights into human nature in the literature associated with the language. In denying ourselves access to this, or ignoring it, it is as if we were to neglect or kill off an elderly relative because they were no longer economically viable or because we could not care enough to try to understand them.

A few years ago I went with a colleague on a last-minute sun-holiday to Spain for the first time. I found myself surrounded, not by Spanish culture but rather by English language and symbols. My reaction was to speak with my friend in Irish and create a bubble of Irishness in this sea of British ‘chav’-culture. Every evening before our meal we sat in a designated spot and enjoyed a pre-prandial drink, observed the natives and our near-neighbours in holiday-mode and commented on it all, ‘as Gaeilge’. We came to call the corner in which we habitually sat, ‘the Gaeltacht’. I have to admit that we took pleasure in confounding both sets of people as they overheard our guttural language and wondered what planet we had arrived from. There is a certain legitimate pride in speaking your own language and there may even be practical uses for speaking, in the words of the ballad, ‘a language the stranger does not know’.

Back in Northern Ireland, a war of words is going on over the use and promotion of languages. There is a great deal of posturing as one side tries to score political points against the other. Maybe it is better than a war in which people are the targets. ‘Jaw, jaw, jaw, is better than war, war, war’ to paraphrase Winston Churchill.

One of the hidden treasures of the Irish language is its spiritual understanding. As we approach Easter I leave you with one traditional prayer that has wonderful insight into the meaning of Easter and of Redemption. It contains a great deal of theology, linking the trees of Eden and Calvary in a simple and memorable form. It is called ‘Rí na hAoine’, King of the Friday:

O King of the Friday - whose limbs were stretched on the cross - O Lord, who did suffer the bruises the wounds, the loss. We stretch ourselves beneath the shield of thy might - Some fruit from the tree of thy passion fall on us this night.

No 12

Most people know the frustration of having lost something, if only temporarily. It is a common observation that we can cope with having spent money, however foolishly, but when we lose it and fail to find it again, the loss seems very acute. In these days of stock-market losses and failing banks, the amounts spoken of run into figures that we can not really appreciate or imagine. I do not know where the money that is ‘wiped off’ the price of shares goes either. When millions of Euro are wiped away, does it simply disappear off a page, enriching nobody, or does the loss turn into tangible gain for someone else? If it simply disappears, was it then just a paper-trick in the first place, an illusion, albeit one that could theoretically have been cashed in for real money, printed on special notes? Whatever the answer to these rhetorical questions, we know that the root cause of the crisis lies in the offering of money on loan, largely to poorer people who could ill-afford the burden of paying it back with interest.

In the terminology of high finance, these loans are called sub-prime mortgages. The money is loaned at a higher rate than the usual one; sub-prime referring to the less than ideal credit status of the borrower. The practice is often defined and defended as lending to borrowers with compromised credit histories. There may even be the intention on the part of the lender to watch the hapless borrower fail to meet repayments and then to seize their assets and securities. The profile of the people to whom these loans are often offered has led to accusations of racism and of exploitation. Many of those who take on the loans are people who would not ordinarily have access to easy credit. Whatever the morality of the practice, it has led to all kinds of unintended losses for both poor and rich alike. The difference is that the rich can afford to shed some superfluous assets while the poor lose all that they used to have.

The process of enriching the rich while the poor get progressively poorer has a long history. It seems that human nature has an inbuilt potential for exploitation. It has often been said that if the world’s wealth were equally distributed at any one moment, it would quickly make its way back to imbalance through the trickery and treachery by which fools and their money are soon parted. In the Old Testament, the Prophetic Tradition regularly denounced what was called ‘latifundialisation’ or the extending of one’s own property portfolio at the expense of weaker others. The Gospel has Jesus simply condemning those literate ones who enriched themselves by, ‘swallowing the property of widows’.

The Irish are no strangers to dispossession. The land and assets of families and of churches or monasteries have historically been swallowed up by the victors in the aftermath of ‘conquest’. Many families lost everything and were forced to emigrate or into internal exile; ‘to Hell or to Connaught’ as Cromwell infamously decreed. That historical experience may go some way to explaining the generous Irish outreach to the dispossessed of the world. We have ‘been there’ as contemporary jargon puts it.

One of the great stories of dispossession and exile is that of the Flight of the Earls. Last year there were many commemorations of their leave-taking and the beginning of their long journey into exile and eventually into death and extinction. Their journey, begun in late 1607, continued in early 1608 as they made their way across mainland Europe, hoping to reach Spain and military assistance but ending up in Rome and under virtual house-arrest. They were welcomed by many local dignitaries as they journeyed and they were able to feast at others expense as their ‘pilgrimage’ progressed. Before leaving they had collected rent from their vast properties and tenantry in Ulster. This money, along with other necessaries, was carried on a pack-horse that the party had acquired.

As they made their way overland through the Swiss city of Basle, heading for the Northern Italian city of Milan (then a Spanish dependency), they chose to make their way through a narrow, snow-bound Alpine pass. They were somewhat apprehensive as they journeyed through areas that were committed to the Protestant faith, fearing that the local inhabitants might be hostile to them. A different kind of misfortune was in store however. They reached a deep glen that was spanned by what was known as “The Devil’s Bridge”. The pack-horse that was carrying their money lost its footing and fell into the ravine. The horse was eventually rescued but the small fortune of one hundred and twenty pounds Sterling was irretrievably lost. To add salt to the wound, it all happened on what should have been a day of celebration; the National Feast Day of the Irish, March 17^th 1608.

No 13

‘Shopping as it should be’

Shopping is something of a new experience for me. Of course, I used to be sent to the shop when I was a boy, but the process was simpler then as I operated from a short list that I handed over to the shopkeeper. My mother trusted the shop to put the correct groceries or other items in the bag and I dutifully carried them home. It made life a lot easier and there was the certain reward of a ‘penny-chew’ or toffee at the end. There was no choosing between endless varieties of products or ethical opportunities to support the developing world by buying Fair Trade. We bought goods rather than labels in those days. The choices were made by mother, or often by necessity, and the prices were decided by the shopkeeper.

In the townland where I grew up there was a wonderfully atmospheric little shop that served as a home, a shop and a meeting place or céilí-house in the evening time. It was also a little bit of social history preserved in stone. The house humbly presented its gable end to the road as was the custom then. It was a low, one storey, thatched house with a kitchen and two rooms. The woman who lived there kept the place tidy and immaculately clean, inside and outside. The exterior was whitewashed and finished off at the level of the ‘street’ with a band of black paint or tar. The strong visual effect of this contrasting colour scheme was set off by the gentle gold of the thatched roof.

Inside the ‘kitchen’ the focal point was, of course, the hearth, with its iron crane and hook, on which swung the large, heavy kettle. The hook could be adjusted upwards or downwards so that the kettle sat nearer or farther away from the heat of the open fire. The fire was powered by a bellows. Visitors, on invitation, often took a ‘turn at blowing the bellows’. The usual furniture of a traditional Irish cottage survived in the ‘shop’ while, elsewhere in the townland, the chip-board and formica revolution was displacing it. There was the settle-bed on which we sat for the mandatory few moments ‘craic’ before we entered the ‘shop’ proper. I wondered how anyone could possibly settle in the ‘settle-bed’ at night for, during the day, it looked like a coffin with a high headboard. The dresser with its array of delpht stood to attention in the corner and the marble-topped wash-stand marked it on the other side of the bedroom door. The tin buckets for fresh water looked modern beside the thick-sided ‘milk crocks’ with their burnt-red hue that was topped off by a glossy black strip and lip. A tall, stately, parlour lamp kept vigil in the deep-set, little, lace-curtained front window and an oil lamp that hung from the open rafters threw shadows at night vying with the light from the fire.

The woman who owned the shop was known to us as Maggie. We hardly knew her family name for she was more widely known by her patronymic. She was called Maggie-Charlie. She had a mild physical deficit which meant that she wore hand-made boots that were specially made for the shape of her feet. This small difference was, however, an endless source of curiosity for the child-observer. She dressed, as women did back then, in a ‘shower-of-hail’ pinny and she wore a coarse hairnet. Maggie was a kindly, welcoming figure but she was mysterious too, with her oddly shaped feet and her museum-piece house.

The upper room served as the shop. An American trunk or something like it was used as a counter. She kept a small range of edible necessities and a few luxury products. One of these latter was tobacco and cigarettes. My father used to smoke plug tobacco, ‘Spearman’ by trade name, which was cut from a tobacco-stick with a semi-circular, tar-stained knife that was used only for that purpose. The ounce of tobacco was often smuggled across the border, in from the nearby Republic, or the ‘Free-State,’ as we insisted on calling it. Customs men regularly took an interest in such drug smuggling so Maggie would ‘hide’ the tobacco down our necks and under our clothes or down the side of our Wellington boots, ‘in case we met the Customs’. An elderly cousin of my father who ran a pub in town, used to visit her every Christmas and leave fifty shillings for sweets, a shilling per week, for his young cousins in the country. He later decided that sweets were bad for us so we used to get biscuits instead. As the price of confectionery rose and the annual stipend remained frozen, we used to negotiate subsidised biscuits every week rather than total ‘freebies’.

A violent robbery and time’s toll put an end to the shop and to the way of life that it had preserved. We heard of ‘super-markets’ for the first time and the art of shopping changed forever. As I wander along the aisles of the supermarket, picking up goods that I had not intended to buy and forgetting what I came to buy in the first place, I sometimes wish that I had a short list which I could simply pass across the counter and have my necessities parcelled up and handed to me so that I could carry them home safely and enjoy the occasional luxury of a cheap packet of biscuits or a sticky ‘Paris’ bun.

No 14

Bring flowers of the fairest

The sight of pale primroses growing on a mossy bank takes me right back to childhood. It transports me, not only to a particular time of my life, but to a place near to my home and to my heart. I have learned, perhaps with the passage of time, and in the words of Patrick Kavanagh in his poem Prelude, to ‘bring in the particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries/ and love again the weeds that grew/ somewhere specially for you. / collect the river and the stream/ that flashed upon a pensive theme’.

Our house was near the end of a narrow country road that led to the border. On either side of the road the fields sloped sharply upwards, giving it the local name, ‘the hollow road’. The rain-water that was thrown off the drumlin hills collected in a rushing stream that was channelled along one side. This stream served the several roles of drainage, of linking the local lakes and of dividing the townlands of Teer and Corliss. Its bank was quite deep and it was approachable only by descending a damp, mossy incline. The shade of the bushes and trees that overhung it gave it an almost tropical feel. It was in this cool, shaded and moist environment that the primroses of my memory grew most abundantly.

We picked them, of course, for children are naturally curious, acquisitive and destructive. Primroses are difficult to harvest because they are low-growing. We felt our way down the stalks with two fingers until we had covered a decent length and then we pinched out the flowers and brought them home triumphantly. They often decorated our improvised May-altars in the absence of anything more florally correct. Sometimes we contented ourselves with inhaling their understated but pleasing scent. If we were in a particularly adventurous mood, we dug the whole plants out and tried to transplant them to a verge nearer home. They seldom thrived. It seemed as if they missed company. Primroses are at their best in a spread, preferably along a natural bank with a bed of dark green moss, all the better to accentuate by contrast, their pale, pastel petals and their egg-yolk centres.

Another yellow April-flower that has the power to take me back in time and place is the Yellow Iris, otherwise known as the Wild Iris or simply as ‘flaggers’. They also feature in the poetic landscape of Patrick Kavanagh and they appear in one of his most extraordinary poems simply titled, The One, where he explicitly links nature and his belief in a Creator whom he showers with a trinity of ‘beautifuls’. He speaks of; ‘a humble scene in a backward place/ where no one important ever looked./ The raving flowers looked up in the face/ of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked/ the profoundest of mortals. / A primrose, a violet, a violent wild Iris – but mostly anonymous performers/ … prepared to inform the local farmers/ that beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God/ was breathing his love by a cut-away bog’.

There were marshes and boggy spots aplenty around home where wild Irises could be found. These places were often somewhat difficult or even dangerous to approach because of the terrain that the flowers favoured. The wild Iris is a tall, strong-stemmed, plant that is firmly anchored in its marshy basin. Its flowers, which bloom at this time of year, are very delicate and sparingly produced. The stems are hardy and sword-like while the flower is brittle and finely mottled. They do not survive for long as cut-flowers, perhaps in protest at being removed from their nutrient-rich bog environment.

This did not stop us seeking them out, however, and using them in an age-old ritual that did not sit easily with the piety of the May-altar. Every May-Eve, we children sought out these flowers and used them to ward off the evil spells of witches. Witches were supposed to hold their covens or Ard-Fheiseanna on May-Eve or the ancient feast of Bealtaine. The secret to warding off their evil presence or their ill-intentions was to throw some ‘flaggers’ on the roof-slates or over the porch of your house and to fling some more on to that eco-prophet of conservation and recycling, the ubiquitous ‘dung-hill’. The poet Longfellow perhaps knew something of the power of the Iris to represent the gods when he wrote; ‘Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,/ who, armed with the golden rod/ and winged with the celestial azure, bearest,/ the message of some God’.

These ‘humble scenes’, in ‘backward places where nobody important’ ever looks remain as potential moments of epiphany or of revelation to the open-minded observer. A single flower, in all its fragility, can carry many associations and memories. The sight of a bank-full of primroses not only signals the promise of more-to-come and of May-flowers. It can also carry the mind back to a time and place where May-altars and witches’ conventions were part of the furniture of the rural imagination.

No 15

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be

The last two columns I wrote could be described as exercises in nostalgia. This may have resulted from having visited my home place for a wedding on Easter Monday. The journey back to the scenes of my rearing and the contact with people whom I had not met for a long time appears to have sparked off something in my imagination. Whatever it stirred up in my conscious mind or in the unconscious basement of my brain, the result took the form of an outpouring of memories that had been carefully collected during my childhood spell in Eden.

The writer Alice Taylor (To School Through The Fields) tapped in to this market for things sweet and nostalgic in her accounts of rural Irish life during her childhood. Other authors have squeezed all the bitterness out of their early recollections in the genre that has come to be known as ‘misery literature’ or ‘misery-litt’. There appears to be market for both kinds of story. People have always looked back in anger or through the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia. Occasionally an author combines the two, alternating anger with wistful remembrances.

A Northern Irish clergyman-poet, W. R. Rogers, described the process of memory or recollection in a poem that he wrote for Easter called simply ‘An Easter Sequence’. In describing the Calvary scene and how it was remembered, he wrote, ‘Still, that is how things always happen, lousily, / but later on, the heart edits them lovingly, / abstracts the jeers and jags, imports a plan / into the pain, and calls it history. / We always go back to gloss over some roughness, / to make the past happen properly as we want it to happen’.

The word nostalgia originally meant homesickness, a neuralgia for the ‘nostos’ or home. There is something within all of us that pulls us back to whatever we call home. It may be for a temporary visit or the desire to retire in a familiar environment or it may just take the form of fond recollection. The security and simplicity of life as we experienced it, or as we remember it from childhood, becomes ever more appealing as life gathers ever more complexity in our more mature years. The desire to be somehow ‘at home’ in the world is a strong one.

James Joyce wrote that when he died, the word ‘Dublin’ would be found written into his heart. This quote always reminded me of the confectionery ‘rock’ that we used to buy during my childhood. This had the name of the seaside resort in which it was bought written into it. Like several other great writers, Joyce lived his life largely in exile and in protest, yet his writings famously describe the Dublin of his childhood in extraordinary detail. He quipped that Dublin could be recreated from his texts in the event of it being destroyed. This sense of an unreachable home, set in the past or in the future, has inspired many great literary works and an avalanche of maudlin, saccharine songs and ballads with little literary or musical merit.

It was Patrick Kavanagh who gave subsequent scribblers permission to hone in on the local and to name places and people, the ‘home’ that reared them. His own relationship with the environment of his childhood and early manhood was ambivalent. Like others, he moved away from it, yet he never escaped it. It gave him images and experiences that moved him to inspired verse or prose, even as he disparaged it. In his famous poem, ‘Stony Grey Soil’ he accuses his native place of stunting his growth, hemming him in, blinding his vision and retarding his poetic development. ‘You flung a ditch on my vision / of beauty, love and truth. / O stony grey soil of Monaghan / You burgled my bank of youth!’

Navigating the terrain between remembering things as we wished them to be and remaining realistic about the limitations of any place and time takes skill and balance. There is a tendency among the most nostalgic to be contemptuous of the present and to be uncritical of the past or the portion of the past that they are elevating. There is never any realistic prospect of going ‘Back to the Future,’ as the film title puts it. If we wish to achieve real perspective and sound judgement on the merits of times past, it is wise to look back beyond living memory and to take the long view. Time has a way of changing our view of things and of people. There are inevitably many aspects of life and habits of living that we would not wish to return to. Nostalgia is, of its nature, selective. The heart edits out the pain, as the poet quoted above suggested, and we make the past happen properly, as we would have wished it to happen. Wishful thinking is all we then end up with.

No 16

A rabbit out of the hat

It was a grand Spring evening and Ben was feeling content with his ten years of life. The road out of town was downhill and before long he would be across the border and in sight of home. His mother would surely be ‘watching’ him back so there was an edge to his final urban adventure. He propped the bicycle against the wrought iron bars that shielded the bevelled glass of the last shop in town and entered. The journey home would be sweetened by a couple of Highland Toffee bars. There was adequate time to reduce them to liquid consistency by a combination of athletic chewing, to the rhythm of the turning bicycle wheels, and the body-heat generated by a young man pumping pedals. The door-bell that alerted the shop-keeper to an entering customer sprang into tinkling sound.

As Ben emerged from the high-countered shop, his heart missed a beat and appeared to sink right down into his strong, laced-up, Blackthorn boots at the same time. There was a ‘fella’ sitting on his bike. This was a townie fella with his hair shaved tight to his skull, as if he had been suffering from nits. He was snotty-nosed, dishevelled and weather-beaten. Ben had seen him, or one of his multitudinous brothers, before. He knew where they lived and he had been just a little bit afraid as he passed their house. It was on Ben’s way home, a little out of the town. They seemed like a wild crowd, full of self-confidence and bravado, unafraid to confront strangers or harass them. Ben tried to remember the fella’s first name. He was not the kind of intimate that you could roar at, so Ben thought out his softly-softly tactics on the hoof as he approached his hijacked bicycle.

‘Are you any good at a scrap’? It was not the dream start that Ben had hoped for. He had never heard the word ‘scrap’ used in that context before, except in British comics. He thought that the fella’s family might have a different concept of ‘scrap’ and its potential for self-enrichment. Ben knew exactly what the fella’s invitation meant and he instinctively figured that the outcome of a scrap would not be to his advantage. He would not last three seconds in a fist-fight with that fella.

Ben walked over, unsteadily, for his knees were knocking, and he pluckily placed his hand on the handlebars of what used to be his bike. At least he might be able to ensure that the fella would not ride off on the bike and maybe someone might come along and intervene. He did not want to antagonise his adversary yet he knew that if the fella wanted the bike there was not a lot Ben could do about it. The fella’s house was a few hundred yards down the hill on the left hand side of the road. He asked Ben if he wanted a lift and offered him ‘a bar’. The fella was fifteen or sixteen years of age. Ben was ten and terrified, trapped between his aggressor and the handlebars of his own bike.

When they arrived at the fella’s house, he asked Ben if he wanted to sell the ‘bike’. Ben said he couldn’t sell it for he’d be ‘killed’ if he went home without it. He accepted this reply and almost sympathised with Ben on his predicament of being offered an undisclosed sum of money; not being able to take it and on having a family that might kill you over a lost bicycle. Ben’s family used to have pet white Albino rabbits and he said he would get one for the fella and bring it up to him some day. It was a sort of black rent or protection racket on Ben’s part, buying time and ensuring safe passage out of town. It made him feel wimpish but it was an instinctive gesture of generosity.

A week or so later, Ben, true to his word and eager to please; a desire born out of fear, he dampened down his anxiety and brought a rabbit as peace-offering to the fella at his home. The teenage recipient was dumbstruck and Ben could not at first figure out why. This big fella hugged that rabbit like nobody ever hugged a rabbit before. No-one in Ben’s farming family ever hugged animals like that. You would think it was human the way he handled and hugged it. Ben was astonished at the affectionate way the fella held this delicate, furry, pink-eyed creature. What a curious mixture of affection and aggression this fella was turning out to be.

Ben was still wary of townies, rabbits or no rabbits. This dread was somewhat tempered, however, when he saw the fella in town on subsequent visits. He even called Ben over once and introduced him to another fella who looked twice as tough and equally dirty. He described Ben as his ‘friend’, making Ben feel suddenly grown up and ‘well-in’. A little white rabbit, pulled out of the coward’s hat, sealed their relationship, saved his bicycle from being hijacked or stolen and kindled flames of real affection from the crushed embers of humanity in a fella from town.

No 17

The spirit of sixty-eight

It was a time tinged with rebelliousness. We had that famous poster-image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara-Lynch in our classroom and the spirit of rebellious 1968 had spread all over Europe. The French still call the activists of that era ‘soixante huitards’ or ‘sixty-eighters’. The Americans had their own upheaval. The Civil Rights Movement there was strong and inspiring, especially under the leadership and oratory of Martin Luther King. Eventually the spirit of ’68 reached the far Western European shores of Ireland. People shook off their shackles and took to the streets in protest at all kinds of indignities and injustice.

There was less of a spirit of entrepreneurship or careerism among teenagers then. The idea of an ‘us’, that was worth sacrifice, had not been beaten into retreat by the individual, self-regarding ‘I’. Some of us became intoxicated by the revolutionary spirit that prevailed. Many young people foolishly threw away their lives and brought others with them as the ‘Troubles’ took hold in Northern Ireland. Some spent large portions of their youth and early maturity in gaols or in exile. It took the space of a whole generation, almost forty years, to make people wise up to the waste into which the spirit of 1968 had deteriorated.

That was the backdrop to a short scene in the teenage drama of life in the North during those years. Donal and I were good friends and we shared some of the same interests. One of his siblings was said to be ‘involved’ somewhat in one of the paramilitary groups that evolved around that time. She spoke of ‘Molotov Cocktails’ as if they were groceries that you could buy, or drinks that you might try sometime, rather than lethal petrol-bombs. She went further and taught us the technique of making home-made explosives. There were no, ‘don’t try this at home,’ warnings so we graduated as teenage bomb-makers, eager to put into practice the knowledge we had acquired.

At the time it was possible to buy a common weed-killer, sodium-chlorate, which came in powder form. It was available from chemists with no questions asked. When it was mixed with a reducing agent such as common sugar and packed into a cylinder, it could become explosive. This was our recipe and our raw material. We mixed our ingredients and packed them into a length of copper piping that had been abandoned by the plumbers on a half-built housing estate. As an experiment, we packed in some coal dust and a few nails to add special effects to our home-made bomb. The fuse was made from some of the sugar and weed-killer that we had held back for the purpose. Then we (dangerously) hammered the pipe-ends closed, leaving a trickle open on one side for the fuse to ignite the mixture.

The chosen evening having arrived, we placed the pipe-bomb in the garden of a semi-built house, lit the fuse and retreated to the garage of the house. The fuse burnt a very vivid orange. Unsure whether we had time to run before the fuse fully burnt its course, we stayed and sheltered until the device exploded with what seemed like a thunderous bolt. Then we both ran across some gardens, in the knowledge that someone would certainly investigate a strange explosive sound in the neighbourhood. It all ended in farce. The garden fences of the houses along which we were running were being strung with horizontal strips of steel wire and then faced with sheep-wire. There must have been a scarcity of sheep wire so the horizontal strips were uncovered and somewhat invisible in poor light. It was twilight and my friend, who was running faster than me, ran straight into four strips of tightly-strung wire and fell across it into the adjacent garden. When I arrived, he was winded and lying writhing on the ground. He called my name in great distress and when I stopped and asked him what had happened, he replied, I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot!

When he awoke the next day he had four horizontal strips of bruising along his body from his chest level to his ankles. The incident on the previous night had not been our first experiment but it proved to be our last. We returned to the scene some time later and retrieved the ends of the copper tubing which now looked like the butts of a pulled Christmas cracker with jagged edges on both sides. There was some damage done to the glazing nearby but nothing had been demolished other than a little of our innocence. We awoke to the dangers that our game was exposing us to and the sale of sodium chlorate across shop-counters was, coincidentally, banned around the same time. The empire had struck back and our short-lived revolution was over.

No 18

The boy in the hen-coop

One of the joys of growing up in a rural area was the available space that we had to play in and to explore. Even our Primary School had an expanse of three whole fields through which we were free to run. When we were old enough, we had a long walk home through the countryside and once home, the family farm, if not the townland, was at our disposal. It is probably true to say that there was more freedom of movement for children then, though there were places that were out of bounds too. Flax-holes, where inquisitive children might go to collect frogspawn, were strictly off limits. The grassy carpet that covered these long-abandoned pits was deceptive. Underneath was a quicksand of dark mud or ‘glar’. We were only allowed to play at or to fish in the local lakes and rivers under the supervision of a parent. There were limits to where we might visit yet our expansive playground was limited only by the tiredness of our legs.

One of the stories that we all heard and that horrified us at the time was that of the boy who had been reared in a hen-house. He had been confined there for so long that he perched like a hen and only spoke hen-sounds. We were all familiar with hen-houses then and we knew that hens are not house-proud by nature or affectionate companions. One of the worst possible jobs in a farmyard was the cleaning out of the hen-coop. The story of the hen-house boy captivated the mind of the general public for a generation. The poet Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about the incident. ‘The child in the hen-house/ put his eye to the chink. /Little henhouse boy, /Sharp faced as new moons /Remembered your photo still /Glimpsed like a rodent /On the floor of my mind’.

The incident happened over fifty years ago, in 1956, in Crossgar, County Down. It was still talked about all through my childhood as if it had happened just the week beforehand. The child had been ‘discovered’ by other, neighbouring children who were out playing and peered into the hen-house. They returned several times, gathering more friends each time as they tried to figure out who or what was being confined in the locked house. The boys were terrified by what they found and eventually alerted some adult authority.

What turned out to be a seven-year old boy called Kevin was taken to a Children’s Home run by Religious Sisters. On examination he was found to be severely affected by rickets, probably because of lack of sunlight. He had severe curvature in his ankles and could not stand up for any length of time. He was only thirty inches high and weighed a mere two stone. During a subsequent court-case, his mother claimed that she only locked the boy in when she was going shopping in the local town. She was sent to gaol for nine months. The hen-boy responded to treatment, including surgery on his feet and speech therapy. He eventually left the Children’s Home for sheltered employment.

Seamus Heaney’s poem about the incident is called Bye-Child. His empathy with the incarcerated child is obvious. The stolen freedom of childhood and the cruelty of captivity obviously moved him deeply. He wrote, ‘Little moon-man, /Kennelled and faithful /At the foot of the yard, /Your frail shape luminous, /Weightless, is stirring the cobwebs, old droppings /under the roosts /And dry smells from scraps /She put through your trapdoor, /morning and evening. /After these footsteps, silence, /Vigils, solitudes, fasts, /Unchristened tears’.

If Kevin had been born and incarcerated in our own time, the chances are that he would not have been found by the inquisitive boys who pulled back the bags that were covering the windows of the hen-house and peered inside. In a sense, we may have more freedom to travel nowadays and the money to make more consumer choices. Our children are less free, though, to wander and to explore their neighbourhoods. Adults are less free to get involved in the lives of their neighbours. We have left the imprisonment of ignorance and poverty only to become imprisoned by a host of fears and addictions in many cases. Children, too, can be imprisoned without the use of a single lock or bar. There are chains of our own making that can be the strongest and most difficult to break. Maybe the recent terrible revelations of the incarceration of a whole family in Austria and our memories of the hen-house boy in County Down will awaken us and give us the freedom to look out for each other again. ‘Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine’ as the Irish proverb puts it. ‘In the shelter of each other, the people live’.

No 19