Gary Mitchell interview

They say you have to suffer for your art but few have suffered as much as Gary Mitchell, the Belfast playwright who was the subject of a brutal campaign of intimidation by the people he wrote about – loyalist paramilitaries in the Rathcoole housing estate he used to call home.

It seems it isn’t just the native Irish who are given to begrudgery. Gary started getting critical acclaim for his work on radio first, then for his plays for the stage before heading towards the heady heights of network television drama. Gary’s portrayal of the grim reality of life in a soulless housing estate was talen a tad too personally by some UDA flunkies who thought drama was for “Taigs and poofs.”

Gary was becoming much too popular – his In A Little World of Our Own won The Irish Times Theatre Award for Best New Play in 1997, he won the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright and another of his Rathcoole plays, As The Beast Sleeps, was shown on the BBC network and he was writer in residence at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

The UDA Award for Excellence in Drama was a vicious campaign of harassment, not just of Gary Mitchell but of his whole family, all of whom were forced out of their homes in which some of them had lived for half a century.

Finally, when his home was attacked in 2005, his car burned out, his wife and child terrified, he decided that discretion was the better part of valour and left Rathcoole to go into hiding.

Life might have changed for Gary Mitchell, but the passion for writing about what he knows best has never left him.

He has a new play opening up at the end of this month, Love Matters, which, somewhat bewilderingly to some, has been translated into Irish.

Set in a working-class loyalist housing estate, Big Ernie is due for release from prison – only to find t that his wife has begun an affair with the 18 year old son of the Detective that put him in prison and his own son isn’t quite the man he had hoped!

An internal feud between the Loyalists and the PSNI serves as an intriguing and tense backdrop to the universal themes of love and loyalty, trust and forgiveness.

When we met in the Board Room of the Cultúrlann in Belfast, I asked Gary if it was harder to write a play about loyalism and the loyalist community when he was no longer part of that community.

He took a sharp intake of breath as if the question had re-ignited the pain of his internal exile but quickly got round to answering the question.

“Actually, it’s not as hard as I thought it would be,” he says. “Being in that environment, I assumed wrongly that distance would mean I couldn’t write anything about it. But I was very wrong. Especially in that, what I have always tried to do is to include the universal themes in my plays which tries to say that my community isn’t stereotypically anything, there is no type that makes you a loyalist, but to try and say that we too have to cope with ordinary things as much as our closest neighbours and the rest of the world but there is something particular to us that is unique about us, that we believe in certain things.

“Leaving Rathcoole – although I’m not a million miles away, I can read the papers and watch the news – it’s the reality that I am really distant from and that hurts.”

However, Mitchell agrees that he has found a new sense of openness in the space between himself and his past life.

“Even hearing my plays in other languages, it opens you up. It makes you think about other things, and it makes you see yourself and your own community differently.” he says – though I’m sure he meant it in the first person.

Which brings us to Aisling Ghéar’s production of Love Matters which will be performed in Cultúrlann McAdam O Fiaich, in the Lyric Theatre in Belfast and in The Project in Dublin’s Temple Bar.

It’s a bit of a surprise to hear that a man who has been called the John Le Carré of Ulster Loyalism is having a play produced in a language that would be an anathema to his peers He is surprised himself.

“Had you said to me when I was 16 that I was going to write a play that someone would translate into Irish, I would first of all say that I would have to have lawyers all over that, that I would have to have my own translator who would have to be an ex-UVF prisoner and I would have to have it translated secretly back into English,” he laughs.

“But that is another barrier that has been broken down on this journey that I’m on. I have to trust people and break down my own personal fear and paranoia over a language and over a people in control of that language. And the paranoia that comes with growing up in Rathcoole that says ‘you know what? They all could be mumbling Fuck the Prods, Fuck the Queen’ and I wouldn’t know.”

Now Gary knows there is poetry and song and the Irish of everyday life going on amongst those who cherish the language but he also has something to say about how Irish sounds to the untrained ear.

The original idea for a play in Irish was for Gary to hear for himself what the loyalist community would sound like in Irish and what it would be like to watch that.

“Because I heard my plays performed in German and in Hebrew and in other languages, I was struck by the difference in my emotional response to my own work.

“When you are watching a play you try to forget that you wrote it and you just try to experience it like an ordinary audience member. It’s easier to do because I didn’t write may play in German or in Hebrew and I came out with different feelings when I saw each production.

“That encouraged me to think, ‘What would that feeling be like if they were all speaking Irish? Would it be the same or would it be different?’ I have a feeling it would be totally different.

“When I listened to my play in German, it seemed to me that all the characters were angry and aggressive which is fairly normal for the loyalist play by me, most people have that reaction.

“But when I heard my play in Hebrew, it wasn’t aggressive at all. It didn’t come across as aggressive, the characters didn’t come across as violent, although they did retain that capacity, and it all seemed to come from fear and that gives you a totally different feeling to the forceful, violent language,” says Gary.

Love Matters in Irish, however, has given Gary a different feeling again, unlike the sound of German or Hebrew, unique of itself and sounding even playful or song-like or poetic.”

You can judge yourself how Love Matters sounds at:

Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich on 29 Feb @ 8pm. Tkts: £8/£6 Tel: 028 9096 4180;

The Lyric Theatre, 2 Mar – 4 Mar @ 8 (4th Mar at 3) Ticéid/Tkts: £9.50 & £11 T: 028 9038 1081;

Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar, 6-10th Mar @ 8 T: 01 881 9613 Tkts: €15 and €11

There will an after- show discussion after each performance EXCEPT 29th Feb and simultaneous translation will be available at all shows.

Naysayer Nelson

SD Minister, Nelson McCausland
DSD Minister, Nelson McCausland

You couldn’t make it up.

Page 17 of today’s Irish News has a picture whose caption reads – “Busy Year Ahead: The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Audiences NI are hosting a master class today at the Ulster Hall to inspire arts organisations to take advantage of the benefits that cultural tourism can offer in the busy year ahead.”

This master class is happening the day after the Minister for Social Development, Nelson McCausland, announced the ending of the Laganside Events Fund which helped fund such wonderful festivals and events such as Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, Open House Festival, Out To Lunch, Festival of Fools, Belfast Childrens’ Festival, Summer Sundays and Culture Night.

The fund is thought to be around £250,000 which isn’t a huge amount given the positive impact it has on the life of the city.

Let’s get one thing straight. These great events are not arty-farty luxuries for the rich and idle. You only have to look at the faces to see their universal appeal, as one small example, the Open House festival: everyone from hairy-faced hicks from Louisiana to working-class kids from Belfast being introduced to Cajun, folk and all kinds of Americana – including the enduring Ulster-Scots contribution that is Bluegrass music.

The Cathedral Quarter’s Festival in all their variety are open to all, as anyone who has experienced the glory of Culture Night will know. Prices are kept as low as possible so that as many people as possible can have a good night out, a psychological necessity in these financially straitened times.

I don’t need to spell out the benefits the arts give to society – psychologically, financially, in terms of job creation and regeneration, in terms of our self-image and how others see us, in attracting tourist income and in making it a city you are proud to live in.

A lot of us remember when Belfast was a ghost town during the dark days of the Troubles when people were afraid to come into town. It is going to become like that again?

Yes, the Cathedral Quarter is not and would never want to be, the be-all and end-all of arts provision in the city, and we have the new Metropolitan Arts Centre (the MAC), but it is contemptible that some people are attempting to take a divide and conquer approach, turning arts organisations against each other in the scramble for adequate funding.

The Cathedral Quarter has created a shared space where every citizen of Belfast, from outside and from abroad is welcome – you just can’t put a price on that.

But it seems to me that Nelson McCausland is not someone who understands the importance of the arts, unlike, strangely enough, his party leader, Peter Robinson.

I wonder how many plays he has been to? Would he know the difference between David Mamet and David Lynch? Aisling Ghéar and Aisling O’Beirn? Planxty and Slipknot? Is James Young still “stickin’ out”?

Nelson comes across as a man of little vision and even less curiosity.

The decision to cut the Laganside Events Fund is shortsighted and will end, at a stroke, the glowing praise Belfast has been garnering from respected travel publications. For the sake of Belfast now and for future generations, the fund must be re-instated.

Even if you’ve never been to an arts festival before, it’s time for everyone to oppose these shortsighted, naysaying cuts by making their voice heard.

The BBC and Irish

Niall Ó Donnghaile
Niall Ó Donnghaile

THE recent spat over the All-Ireland Fleadh going to Derry raised a totally different issue for the Bluffer – the difficulty of BBC presenters in pronouncing anything in Irish.

Foghraíocht is the word for pronunciation and when you see that group of letters together it’s little wonder people panic.

Now, those nice folk off the telly and on the radio can pronounce Gérard Dapardieu as if they’d just come up the Seine in a bubble and are fluent in Farsi when it comes go Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but talk about Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann turns them into the French policeman in ‘Allo ‘Allo:

“This is Good Morning Ulster with Koorin Fatterseen and Kyner Breedfurd.”

Weendy Oostin pronounced Comhaltas two different ways in the one sentence on Talkback and I was told the attempts at Irish on an clár is mó sa tír – the biggest show in the country was awful.

The Beeb got over it by dropping the Ceoltóirí Éireann bit and just using “Comhaltas” but that’s like saying Carlos Tevez has joined United. Manchester United? Scunthorpe United? Ballymena United?

We have Comhaltas Dhoire – the Comhaltas Derry Branch and thousands of other branches throughout the world not to mention Comhaltas Uladh – the northern branch of Conradh na Gaeilge – the Gaelic League.

But what else trips the Beeb – and other broadcasters it must be said, not the mention the general public – what trips them up? Politics. The word Taoiseach was deemed so terrifying that “The Irish Prime Minister” was used rather than the official title while his deputy, the Tánaiste never even got a mention.

An Dáil on local radio and TV is pronounced like a true Dub – the dawl – but we in the north pronounce it daal. Imagine Sarah Brett pronouncing 33 as “torty-tree, bejaysus” on your daily news fix!

On one occasion, I nearly crashed the car one morning when I heard a male newsreader say, well, I don’t know what he said but he was talking about Óglaigh na hÉireann as if he were having a mild stroke just by saying the words.

And there must have been panic Broadcasting House when Niall Ó Donnghaile was elected Ardmhéara – Lord Mayor of Belfast!

Belfast, by the way, is Béal Feirste.

Anyway, the Bluffer got in touch with the Beeb and their response was: “Correct pronunciation is important to the BBC and its audiences. We seek to maintain the highest standards in this area and across all aspects of our output.Audience feedback on our performance, and the ways in which it might be improved, is always welcome.”

That’s your cue, folks.

But while we’re at it, what about what they do to placenames in English?

This has only happened in the past few years where they have put “the clash of the ash” – a horrible k sound – in the middle of names like Maghera or Magherafelt.

The Maghera- bit comes from the Irish word machaire meaning a plain and pronounced “mahera”. Where the k sound came from, I have no idea. But for now, a chairde, it’s goodbye from the Bloofer!

Now, I know I spoil ye, but below is a pronunciation guide:

Foghraíocht (foreeakht) -pronunciation

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (coe-altiss kyawltoree ayrin) – Irish traditional music organisation

an clár is mó sa tír (un claar is mow sa cheer) – the biggest show in the country

Comhaltas Dhoire (coe-altiss girra) – the Comhaltas Derry Branch

Comhaltas Uladh (coe-altiss uloo) – the Gaelic League’s northern branch

Conradh na Gaeilge (conroo ne gaylicka) – the Gaelic League

Taoiseach (teeshaakh) – the Irish Prime Minister

Tánaiste (taanashta) – the Irish deputy Prime Minister

An Dáil (un daal) – The Irish House of Representatives

Óglaigh na hÉireann (awglee ne herin) – the Irish Volunteers of 1913 now claimed by republican paramilitary groups

Niall Ó Donnghaile (neeal o donyilla) – Niall Ó Donnghaile

Ardmhéara (aardvayra) – Lord Mayor

Béal Feirste (bell farshta) – Belfast

machaire (mahera) – a plain

And finally, if that weren’t enough, here is an audioboo which will tell you how exactly these words and phrases sound…

An tSnáthaid Mhór in Brussels

An tSnáthaid Mhór's Andrew Whitson
An tSnáthaid Mhór’s Andrew Whitson

Comhghairdeas le Andy agus le Caitríona.

Belfast’s Irish language community will know of the stunning work that the publishing company An tSnáthaid Mhór does but today Andy Whitson and Caitríona Hastings are in Brussels to present their work as part of what is called the Brussels Platform.

The Platform is the result of a collaboration between the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Executive Office in Brussels. Launched in September 2011 and running until June 2012, it will give the north’s musicians, writers, dancers, theatre practitioners and visual artists the opportunity to showcase their talents at a series of ten monthly events at the prestigious headquarters of the NI Executive.

Fans of An tSnáthaid Mhór
Fans of An tSnáthaid Mhór

Today, Andrew and author Caitríona will launch an exhibition of their work which will include extracts and imagery from their book Balor, which won the Bord na Leabhar Gaeilge Book of the Year for Young People in 2009, and from Mac Rí Éireann which won the Bisto Award for illustration in 2011.

Whilst launching the exhibition the two artists will also discuss their work in front of an international audience, including MEPs and the opinion formers amongst EU representatives in Brussels.

Caitríona Hastings from County Tyrone has written a number of books for children, including, Dea-Scéala (1998), Balor (2009), An Gréasaí Bróg agus na Síoga (2010), Mac Rí Éireann (2011), Ó Chrann go Crann (2011) and is thrilled to be bringing her strories to a wider audience in Brussels.

“It was a great honour and a great surprise for us to be invited – that is such an encouragement,’ she said.

“I see it as an acknowledgement of the quality of what we have achieved so far. I am very grateful for that and excited to see the audience’s reaction. Many traditional tales and the motifs within them came to us from mainland Europe. There was always an inflow and outflow of creativity from these shores. It is so nice to participate in that in the modern context.”

Pictured above are: Maeve and Rionach McElhatton with award winning children’s book illustrator, Andrew Whitson and author Caitríona Hastings while the girls are left to their own devices with some of Andy’s illustrations.

Van Morrison and Slí Cholmcille

When I went to the launch of Slí Cholmcille at the Linenhall Library last night, the last person I expected to see was George Ivan Morrison, Van the Man to you and me.

Linenhall Librarian John Killen giving his autograph to Van Morrison!
Linenhall Librarian John Killen giving his autograph to Van Morrison!

Slí Cholmcille or the St Columba Trail is the first visitor trail between Scotland and Ireland and is named after St Colmcille or Columba, a native of Donegal. The trail stretches from Gleann Cholm Cille in south west Donegal to the Western Isles of Scotland. There are nine interlinked routes, including three in Donegal, one in the City of Derry, and another between Coleraine and Limavady. The trail can be seen at www.colmcille.org, and can also be viewed on a screen at the Linenhall library throughout February.

But why would the legendary Irish singer be at such an event? The answer came from the always entertaining Dr Ian Adamson, a man who wears his erudition lightly.

The former Lord Mayor of Belfast talked of his family connections to the Hebrides – his great granny came from Íle (Islay) – and the young Ian Adamson was taken by his grandfather to Íle and na Hearadh (Harris) and Leòdhas (Lewis) where he imagined the songs of the people to be related to the beautiful birdsong he heard on the islands.

“The love-song of the Wandering Greenshank, for example, is one of the most beautiful birdsongs in the world. It has a haunting quality that is replicated by the Gaelic Singers of the area and I think that is a very important factor in the development of that singing,” he says, before talking about the Ó Muirgheasáins, hereditary bards and brieves (lawmakers, from the Irish word breitheamh) who left Ulster in the 15th and 16th centuries and moved to Harris in the Outer Hebrides where they were bards to the MacLeans and MacClouds.”

The songs of the Macleans were never written down and haven’t survived but the Ó Muirgheasáins did, later became Morrisons.

Another family, the MacGilleMhoire clan, also emigrated from Ulster to the Northern Hebrides and had their name Anglicised to Morrison.

But, according to Adamson, the tradition of the hereditary bards lives on, that innate, intuitive sense that has lived on generation after generation.

“We have a modern bard, one who has written transcendental lyrics, the greatest of all lyrics ever written by a person of Hebridean extraction, George Ivan Morrison.”

So the Gaelic poets who left Ulster in the late Middle Ages brought their skills to the Scottish islands and centuries later brought their culture to America where it developed into early American music, call it what you will – folk, spiritual, gospel and arguably through to soul and R&B with some scholars claiming that American gospel music has its roots in the Gaelic psalm singing of Lewis.
Van the man is part of that ancient cultural give and take.

Enjoy the Odyssey gigs, folks.

Cór Chúil Aodha ag Temple Bar

Chuir sé iontas orm an méid suilt is a bhain mé as coirm cheoil Choir Chuil Aodha oíche Shathairn seo caite.

Chuala mé roimhe iad ar an teilifís agus, ainneoin an traidisiún saibhir ceoil as ar easair siad agus clú agus cumas an fhir a ghin an cór (go meafarach!), Seán Ó Riada, agus tuigse an mhic a lean é, Peadar, ní dheaichaigh siad i bhfeidhm orm.

Sin ráite, bhí a fhios agam gur chóir dom iad a fheiceáil agus iad i mbun coirme. Mar sin, nuair a d’fhógair Temple Bar Tradfest go mbeadh an Cór ag ceol na linn na féile i Halla na Cathrach, ceann de na foirgnimh is stairiúla (chan ionann sin agus “is  clúití”, mar ba bheag Dub ar chuir mé ceist orthu a raibh a fhios acu cá raibh sé!). d’fhreastail mé an t-áiméar agus chuaigh mé ann.

Ní gá a rá go raibh an halla galánta, atrium thar a bheith ard, clog ollmhór (sé throigh is dócha) os cionn na n-amhránaithe agus dhá dhealbh ar gach taobh dóibh.

Ach ní raibh sé gan locht. Bhí sé fuar ag an chúl agus bhí olagán otharchairr chomh hard leis an amhránaíocht ag pointe amháin

Anuas ar sin, bhí díoscáin ag teacht ó go leor de na suíocháin ach fuair an ceol an bua ar na fadhbanna sin uilig.

Thosaigh an cór le roinnt amhrán diaga – Ag Críost an Síol an ceann is mó a thaitin liom – sular thosaigh siad ar amhráin spioradálta, amhráin a bhí “leath bealaigh idir na hamhráin diaga agus na hamhráin tuata,” dar le Peadar.

Thaitin fearúlacht gharbh na nguthanna go mór liom. Mheabhraigh mé ar na manaigh a thaistil ar fud na hEorpa níos mó ná 1,000 bliain ó shin agus go mbeadh siad ag ceol amhrán mar seo.

Ní raibh na hamhráin chomh sean sin, ar ndóigh ach dúirt siad amhrán a chum St John of the Cross sa 16ú céad, mar shampla.

Sa dara leath, chuala muid amhráin na daoine agus amhráin mhuintir Chúil Aodha  – Poc ar Buile, Bímis ag Ól agus mar clabhsúr, leagan spreagúil, fuinniúil de Mo Ghile Mear.

Le linn na coirme, dúirt Peadar nach Ceiltigh muid na hÉireannaigh ach meascán mearaigh de chiníocha ó na Tuatha De Danann ar aghaidh – Normannaigh, Albanaigh, Sasanaigh – agus gur cheart dúinn si a cheiliúradh

Agus sin mar a bhí an choirm, ceiliúradh ar na gnéithe is dúchasaí dár gcuid, ón chreideamh go dtí an grá agus ón dúlra go dtí an t-ol, mar atá siad léirithe inár stór amhrán, idir logánta agus uilíoch.

Plantation once again!

Late last year, I was in hillwalking on Ratharsair (Raasey) an island between Sgitheanach (Skye) and the Scottish mainland.

The scenery on Raasey, birthplace of the great Gaelic poet, Somhairle Mac Gill-Eain, is absolutely stunning as are the views of the neighbouring island and of Argyle on the mainland.

One of the things I noticed most about Raasey was the amount of woodland that had been cut down to be make way for wind turbines, as can be seen in the home page picture.

I thought of Ireland and how we all learned at school that the whole country was once covered in vegetation, whereas at the beginning of the 20th century, only 0.5% of land was covered with woodland and there is very little ancient woodland left.

In a keynote address to speech to Woodlands of Ireland/Coillearnacha Dúchasacha in 2004, woodlands expert Dr Oliver Rackham said the disappearance of Ireland’s ancient woodland was due to “Neolithic and later people creating farmland: not through felling trees because they wanted wood and timber, but through digging up trees because they wanted grassland and cropland.

“By the Iron Age, Ireland, perhaps even more than England,was a land of farmland and moorland, with little room for extensive forests.

Ireland's National Tree - Dair neamhghasáanach/quercus petraea/sessile oak

This was the case until the late 19th century when, inspired by the work of Julius Sterling Morton who had established an Arbor Day, a feast dedicated to tree planting in the United States, the Irish Forestry Society recommended a National Arbor Day for Ireland.

In a fascinating article in the Journal of the Irish Garden Plant Society. Kildare-man John Joe Costin says “the Society’s founders were passionate tree enthusiasts buoyed up on ideas of Gaelic revivalism.”

“They were influential opinionated farmers, had access to government and are credited as the first group to make it take forestry seriously.”

The first Irish Arbor Day was on November 29, 1919 and the Dair Neamhghasánach/Sessile Oak/Quercus Pertaea was named as Ireland’s National Tree.

In keeping with the national spirt of the time, a song was composed by W. O’Leary to be sung to the tune of A Nation Once Again. It was called Plantation Once Again.

When boyhood’s fire was in my blood,
And all my joints were limber,
I roamed through many a noble wood
Of Irish timber.
But scarce a tree today I see,
The stumps are all remain,
And that is why we ought to try
Plantation once again.

CHORUS
Plantation once again,
On wasted hill and plain;
The time is nigh when we must try
Plantation once again.

The timber in each Irish house
Norwegian is or Russian;
The trap we buy to catch a mouse
Is either French or Prussian.
The wood to make a three-legged stool
At home we can’t obtain,
And that is why we ought to try
Plantation once again.

CHORUS

While we prefer to send our cash
To make the stranger wealthy.
Our splendid woods of pine and ash
Have changed to swamps unhealthy;
Consumptive chills and all the ills
From damp and cold and rain
We might defy if we but try
Plantation once again.

CHORUS

We might with ease plant useful trees
On hill and waste and mireland
Our people might not cross the seas
But work and live in Ireland;
If only sticks. not politics,
Possessed the Irish brain.
And that is why we ought to try
Plantation once again.

CHORUS

With thanks to Maurice Parkinson

Sources: http://www.woodlandsofireland.com/docs/NWCAbstracts(final-Aug05).pdf

www.irishgardenplantsociety.com

Derry Fleadh bid fails

Ah well. The Fleadh isn’t coming to Derry in 2013.

The sound of the pipes, the fiddle, the bodhrán and our other traditional instruments won’t be filling the Derry air as hosts of our fellow Irish men and women and instead there will be the banshee wail of “ideology.”

And all because of two little letters. U and K.

Okay, I understand the semiology of those two little letters and I am au fait with the concept of hegemony, but I believed that bringing the All-Ireland Fleadh coming to Derry (what about that for semiology?) would subvert the whole notion of the city being a UK city.

No music please. We're Irish.

With Scotland’s possible independence, the UK could be on the verge of crumbling and the original United Kingdom was of course between England and Scotland in 1707.

The thoughts of thousands of traditional music and Irish language fans thronging the streets of Derry in an atmosphere of celebration, bonhomie, fun and whatever you’re having yourself, would reclaim (or rather, re-enforce and re-invigorate) Derry’s Irishness.

I know lots of kids and older people who couldn’t wait for the Fleadh but these people haven’t a political bone in their body. They do love their music, their heritage and the chance to celebrate it in 2013 has them filled with huge excitement and pride. The fact that the proposed Fleadh will be part of a year-long celebration with a UK moniker means little to most trad fans.

What satisfaction will the people who were railing against the All-Ireland Fleadh have, now that the application has been rejected?

Will they raise a glass tonight to celebrate the fact that Derry will be silent while the fun will be somewhere else. That the pubs and hotels will be empty, that new friends won’t me made, that Derry’s economy won’t get a boost and God knows it needs one.

“A pint of ideology please, and have one yourself.”

I’ve heard that there’s possibly going to be a quick appeal against abuse of process as last week the entire Ulster Council indicated strongly they’d support Derry’s bid, but the officer board voted against it 7-4 today on security grounds.

The Comhaltas Ardchomhairle must have a proposal (i.e notice that the Ulster Council are backing Derry) by Wednesday evening so it’s time for those who support the bid to lobby intensively for a rethink and for those opposed to it to have a rethink.

Didn’t Bobby Sands say that “our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”

Now “republicans”are giving their children a slap in the face.

Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey

Bernadette Devlin

In contrast to an opponent’s derisive description of Devlin as “Fidel Castro in a mini-skirt”, Lelia Doolan’s documentary film, Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey offers an in-depth perspective on a formidable figure of recent Irish politics.

There was a time when Bernadette Devlin (now McAliskey) seemed to have the world at her feet.

Adored by her followers in Ireland, elected as MP for Mid-Ulster at Westminster, treated like a pop star in America (where unionists were so worried that Ian Paisley and MP Stratton Mills were sent over on a counter-mission) and her revolutionary zeal for equanimity and social justice looking unstoppable.

Her strength was also her weakness. She never took a party whip and as such she never had a party machine to help her achieve major breakthroughs, but it also meant she wasn’t constrained by having to follow a party line and could set her own agenda.

As time went on and with the rise of the Provisional movement, she was more and more marginalised although her message has remained the same and her integrity intact.

Bernadette Devlin grew up in a tough no-nonsense household with strong female hegemony, through her mother, aunts and her going to an all-girls school. She was taught to think and education was highly valued.

She says she got her contrariness from her mother who came from “peasant stock”.
Her father was very intelligent, a socialist, republican, trade unionist who left school aged seven, not unusual at the time, but who was an avid reader of books.

It was a home of tough love where, if you cut your knee, you weren’t expected tow whinge about it.
The children were taught they were no better than anyone else – but no worse either.
Already we can see the kind of person that Bernie grew up to be.

When the RUC attacked a Civil Rights march in Derry in 1968, Devlin knew she couldn’t stand idly by and left Queen’s University to engage in politics, which at that time involved quite a bit of rioting.
As she says herself in the film: “Ruthlessness is not the worst quality you can have when your back’s against the wall.”

However, the sadness is that the subsequent Troubles could have been avoided.
“Had social housing been available, the situation would have been ameliorated.
People wanted a house no a united Ireland.”

Later, Bernadette became (and remains) the youngest MP elected to Westminster where she gave an astonishing maiden speech.

Through archive film and interviews with Bernie herself, the film takes us through the career of this extraordinary woman, from her witnessing Bloody Sunday, her time in prison (for incitement to riot), the Hunger Strikes of the early 1980s, which she believes ended in failure.

It was at this time that, Bernadette and her husband Michael McAliskey were shot by loyalists in a campaign against people who were involved in the H-Blocks campaign.

“I was the last of the people to be shot after John Turnley, Miriam Daly and Ronnie Bunting,” she said.
The attempt failed – no thanks to the security forces – and McAliskey later went on to co-found the IRSP with Seamus Costello, but left soon after a row over the role of its armed wing.
Her attempts to bring her views onto the national arena have failed and she now works with the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme but Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey shows that the revolutionary fire still burns in her heart, despite the setbacks over the years.

It is a film that illuminates one remarkable woman’s story but also the history of the north of Ireland and asks questions about what kind of society we want here, rather than the current Good Friday Agreement which is all about managing sectarianism she says.

Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey runs at QFT from Friday 27 January until February 2.
There will be an Introduction by Dr Liz Greene, on Fri 27 Jan at 6.40pm, followed by Q&A with director Lelia Doolan.

Out to Lunch: Will Kaufman

Will Kaufman with a portrait of Joe Hill

Woody Guthrie is a name many people will be familiar with, some being loyal disciples of arguably America’s greatest singer and writer of protest songs but most people, I would suggest, would only have a passing knowledge of Guthrie and his songs.

Will Kaufman’s show, Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travellin’ however – part of Belfast’s Out to Lunch festival – will have shed more than a little light on one of the greatest political songwriters ever, not only by telling us about Guthrie’s life in word and song but also by putting his life into the context of what was going on in America at the time, especially the period known as the Dust Bowl, a period of drought between 1930 and 1936 when the soil in the mid-west dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastward and southward in large dark clouds.

Hosts of farmers lost their livelihoods and had to take to the roads, migrating toward the Californian coast, where Okies from Oklahoma, Arkies from Arkansas and others from states suffering from the drought, were treated like the dirt that was in the air.

As Sis Cunningham, a contemporary of Guthrie said: “Along with hundreds of thousands of other dirt farmers, we battled crop failures, hunger, illness without doctors, hail and windstorms, gully washers, the death of livestock, fires… Now we could have dealt with all those normal disasters, but there was no way in God’s world we could escape the shark’s teeth of the bankers.”
Plus ça change …

Later Guthrie’s experience of the period would publish his collection of songs, Dust Bowl Ballads.

Someone who taught Guthrie the art of songwriting was Joe Hill, a mean songwriter and parodist in his own right and a martyr to the cause of international labour.

Kaufman told a full house at the Hill Street venue that, a year before Hill’s execution, he said that ‘a pamphlet no matter how good is never read more than once but a song is learnt by heart and is repeated over and over and over.

“He also said “take a few commonsense facts, put them into a song and then dress them up in a cloak of humour to take the dryness off it.”

Kaufman, Professor of American Literature & Culture at the University of Central Lancashire, has been one of the lucky people to have gone through Guthrie’s archives of 3000 songs, mostly unrecorded and many not even with tunes ascribed to them but he isn’t into hagiography and let’s us know where he think Woody got it wrong – like when Guthrie’s championing of “the outlaw” led him to support some very unsavoury characters, Pretty Boy Floyd amongst Jesse James.

All in all, Kaufman’s show was history lesson, concert, singalong, celebration of Woody Guthrie and paean to the working man. And great entertainment.

In one of the show’s standout numbers, Guthrie takes the The Ballad of Jesse James and changes it lock, stock and barrel to the Ballad of Jesus Christ.

There’s a lot of truth in this song, methinks ….