Category Archives: Billy King

Only the Billy King columns from 2021 onwards are accessible here. For older columns by Billy King please click on the “Go to our pre-2021 Archive Website’ tag on the right of this page.

Billy King: Rites Again, 343

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts –

We are back into the darker half of the year, past the autumn equinox, and we need the odd extra layer of clothing and a bit of heat. But as I always say, every season has its advantages and cosying up at home as it gets colder and darker outside is one advantage. And of course autumn colours in the trees, leaves flying about, and the swirl and sound of dry leaves, is another wonderful aspect of life in this season.

Chickpot

It is a while since I have given you a recipe to chew on. So here goes. As regular readers and perusers of the INNATE website may know, I have a whole pamphlet on veggie and vegan food in the appropriate section of the website https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/pamphlets/

As with most of the recipes I have shared I don’t give exact measurements as they are open to very considerable variation in ingredients and adjustment to taste. The following vegan ‘Chickpot’, so named because of chick peas and potatoes, is my take on what was given as a breakfast hangover cure (!) but I wouldn’t recommend alcoholic hangovers – or quite the amount of chilli that was in the original recipe unless you like things hot spicy. The recipe was in a small, free magazine that I received with another magazine that I subscribe to; strange. The original title was ‘Potato and chickpea breakfast bomb’.

This is now a regular, adapted, dish in our household and freezes well. It also travels well so it is often transported in a container, placed in a sealed bag in case of any leakage, but the semi-mashed potato absorbs most of the tomato juices. You can then safely carry it in a bag or backpack.

For cooking the main ingredients you can use a wok or a heavy saucepan. Place a few tablespoons of sunflower or whatever cooking oil you wish to use in your pot and use a medium high heat. Place a teaspoon or two of cumin seeds in the heating oil until they are pungent – don’t let them burn (if you don’t have cumin seeds, use ground cumin later). Then sauté 300 – 400g of onions (white, red or both) along with a well chopped, deseeded chilli, and a couple of well chopped garlic cloves. Let that cook, stirring frequently, until the onions are going a golden brown.

We cook the spuds, about 700g cut into 2 – 3 cm pieces, in a pressure cooker but you can also steam them at room pressure or cook in water. You want them cooked and hot when the rest is done and that requires guesswork or calculation. When the onions are cooked as above, add your tomatoes. If you have fresh tomatoes you could use half a dozen, chopped; you can alternatively use a tin of tomatoes…and add a couple of fresh chopped ones if you like. You want the tomatoes to be cooked and reduce a bit so whether you use fresh or tinned this might take 15 – 20 minutes with a lower heat. I also add 50 – 60g of tomato puree. Add salt or soya sauce to taste and possibly a teaspoon of turmeric.

When you have your onion and tomato mixture at about the desired consistency, add your cooked chickpeas to heat them. Of course other beans are possible but chickpeas are the best at keeping firm rather than mushy. You could even use defrosted frozen peas. If using a tin of beans I would use one tin or equivalent but you can use more – as I say this is a very adaptable dish.

When the potatoes are done, drain them and half mash them, i.e. you want both some mash to absorb some of the tomato mixture and some potato pieces to remain. Mix this potato in with the onions and tomato and serve. You can use chopped coriander, parsley, dried fried onion or nooch (look it up) or its constituent ingredient nutritional yeast (e.g. Engevita) as a garnish. Serve with your favourite chutneys or pickles. The above should serve four as a meal in itself but you can serve a veg, nuts or toasted sunflower seeds with it. However experiment with all of this until you get it the way you want, it is a very flexible recipe. Bon appetit.

The growing season

The times they are a changin’ and global heating is making its mark. We have a smaller garden than we used to so what I can grow is very limited. Intending to get a small greenhouse for the growing season this year, I decided it would ‘take over’ the available space and instead we bought a ‘glass cabinet’ kit to go against a wall; it is under 2 x 2 x 0.5 metres in terms of dimensions and you don’t walk into it, it has sliding glass panels at the front. It wasn’t cheap but is actually very flexible with removable or foldable shelves which can be used for little seedlings in the spring and then these shelves are folded or removed for when whatever you are growing as a summer crop, tomatoes in my case, need the space.

As instanced before, I grow most herbs in tubs or window boxes, and the availability of home grown herbs is Priority No.1 in a small garden because of their instant availability when you decide or discover you need such and such for a dish you are preparing in the kitchen. And buying herbs isn’t cheap while having most of your own is easy and cheap – most are perennials with a plant lasting for years. Parsley (the favourite herb of grammarians…) and scallions are exceptions and I don’t bother with the latter as we have a variety of chives (some early, some later, and garlic chives which stand longer in the winter) and Welsh onions which we use like chives (leaving the bulb and cutting the stem).

Outdoor cucumbers grow very well in tubs, training them up a few bamboo stakes and they feel like a different vegetable to shop bought ones with (organic ones having) a rather higher solid matter ratio. The biggest contrast in taste between shop bought veg and home grown is probably tomatoes; you can buy slightly more tasty tomatoes in the shops, at a price, but home grown ones are a real treat.

Some of our tomatoes, not a lot, ended up with a dark mark or part on the bottom from the plants drying out in this summer’s heat. I had space for a couple of courgettes in a ground bed and put another couple in tubs……they and the cucumbers got powdery mildew later on in the season which I treated with potassium permanganate spray which certainly helped (potassium permanganate is also used in processing cocaine….).

In terms of flowers of the annual variety I like cosmos, though some cosmos plants grew luxuriantly but left it very late to flower. The only explanation I can see is excess nitrogen though as I use a plant-based fertiliser I would have thought this was less likely to happen. The ones that grew less luxuriantly flowered better and earlier but as some with differing responses were planted close to each other I still don’t understand it. I also grew statice, some for drying, and my old helichrysum seeds didn’t germinate – I’ll use fresh seeds next year. I have a small heated propagator which I start off a succession on seedlings in the spring and that is very helpful in getting seeds off to a flying start; I was given it by a kindly neighbour who didn’t use it, many moons ago.

The miracle of plant growing and nature at work is a constant source of amazement to me. A seed a few millimetres long can become a multi-headed sunflower over two metres tall. With a small garden, space is at a premium so as one thing gets taken out, in my case cucumbers that are ‘done’, something else takes their place such as spring-cropping salad leaves like land cress that I sowed in August.

Momviolence

‘Mom’ is the USA-English affectionate diminutive of ‘mother’ but also used as a collective term as in ‘Soccer moms’. I made an interesting typo recently in an email when, with ‘m’ and ‘n’ being beside each other on the qwerty keyboard, I typed ‘momviolence’ instead of ‘nonviolence’. It certainly won’t have been the first time that has happened but I thought to myself, that’s an interesting concept.

’Nunviolence’ was said to have applied in the popular nonviolent movement in the Philippines in 1986 which overthrew the corrupt and brutal regime of Ferdinand Marcos, since many religious sisters were involved. But momviolence is a wider concept; think Mothers of the Disappeared in Chile and Argentina. Think of the women in Liberia nonviolently forcing the civil war leaders to come to an agreement (as portrayed in the film “Pray the Devil back to Hell”). Even the early Peace People upsurge in Northern Ireland in 1976 could be said to be an example of momviolence. Then there are the women of Greenham Common in England from the early 1980s. You can think of many more examples.

The struggle for women’s equality goes on and, even without the manosphere backlash, has no end in sight. When two sides are unequal – think pre-Troubles inequality in Northern Ireland – and one side makes advances, the other side can feel they have lost out and, incorrectly, that they are in an inferior position because the status quo was considered ‘equality’ or ‘fair’ and relative positions have changed. This can go on for a long time, again think Norn Iron and loyalists who feel they are disadvantaged politically. Of course men’s role has changed and is changing but that is a Good Thing and not something that should feel threatening but uncertainty can be unsettling; however what progress women have made towards equality can be under attack when negative masculinist men feel they have lost out.

When women act in the public sphere stemming from their ‘traditional’ role as carers and nurturers it can be particularly powerful and challenging for the powers that be, as in the examples above. That of course is not the only role for women since they are also a slight majority of ‘homo’ sapiens and can and do act simply as human beings.

Tough at the top – for climate criminals

My obscene quote of the month comes from a report in the Irish Times about prep for the golfing Ryder Cup in Adare next autumn. “The general manager of Ashford Castle in Co Mayo has warned that if you don’t have your helicopter already booked for the Ryder Cup at Adare Manor Hotel in Limerick next September “you are not going to get it”.” https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/09/25/ashford-castle-manager-warns-over-difficulty-in-booking-helicopters-for-ryder-cup/

Private helicopter travel should be banned on ecological grounds. And in any case no one should have the money to splurge on helicopter travel. Of course search and rescue, ambulance and firefighting helicopters etc should be used but for the filthy rich to be able to travel this way shows their contempt for the rest of humanity. So there.

You just don’t know

You just don’t know what you do or say that will have an effect. There is a great reflective piece in the relaunched, September 2026, issue of the British peace magazine Peace News (see News section this issue) about ‘Remembering Randy Kehler’ who was a prominent US peace activist. Paul Wesley recalled being very disappointed in a talk Randy Kehler gave in 1969 about resisting conscription and the draft; he expected and wanted a tub-thumping speech, which Kehler was capable of giving, but instead “he gave a very personal and gentle description of the values and emotions that had led to his decision to accept jail rather than compromise his commitment to nonviolent activism.”

One of those attending the conference concerned supported the war in Vietnam. But he was so affected by Kehler’s speech that he sat down on the toilet floor and cried. This guy had top secret documents which “showed in forensic detail how successive presidents had lied continuously to the American public about their conduct of the war in Vietnam.” He knew that if he released the documents he would likely end up in prison. He did release the papers but he was acquitted at trial. The papers were the famous Pentagon Papers and the man concerned was Daniel Ellsberg – who later declared “No Randy Kehler, no Pentagon Papers!”

When we speak out and witness to an alternative, peaceful way we usually have no way of knowing the effect, and indeed nine times out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred, that effect may be nil or minimal. But we have spoken our truth and sometimes that does hit home and make a difference.

–

I recently read Joseph O’Connor’s excellent book (fiction with some basis in fact) ‘Shadowplay’ about the life and writing endeavours of Dublin man Bram Stoker, particularly his struggle to be a writer. It was only after his death that his ‘Dracula’ came to prominence, partly through film. But reading this recently seemed quite apposite as the blood-sucking issue of Drumcree re-emerged during the month, truly the Un-Dead are gathering. No one managed to get a stake through the heart of the Drumcree issue three decades ago – I don’t favour stakes or even steaks through the heart of any beings, even vampires – and it is again terrifying people and causing an unsettling stir. [What a lurid point to end on – Ed] [I like to get my teeth into topical issues – Billy]

That’s me for now. Alexander Pope’s line that “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” is true, and just as well, because sometimes we need to draw on all the hope we can to continue in a world which seems so hell bent on destroying itself one way or another – ecologically and/or violently. So let us hope, build, sow (a bit of sewing wouldn’t be amiss either), show the way of peace for people and the earthy earth itself – Billy.

Billy King: Rites Again, 342

Billy King, Nonviolent News, ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts –

Welcome to my first Colm of the autumn, my least favourite time of the year, don’t get me wrong, I like the weather generally speaking, it is the restarting of the treadmill of regular engagements that puts me off. But once into the swing of things and routine again, well, life goes on.

Did anyone ever get done all the tasks they had set themselves to do in ’the summer’? Not likely, not me anyway, but then ‘our’ summer is likely rather shorter than meteorological summer [Excuses, excuses – Ed]. But here we are, and the autumn equinox comes later this month after which we enter the darker half of the year. But still there is light, physically and metaphorically, and we go on.

Fleadh-tering

Mary Ann Mc’Craic’en https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/53584007477/in/photolist-2p79PmQ-2pD33zT had a ringside view of the main outdoor stage at the Belfast City Hall during Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in early August, even if she did have to look out the side of her eyes. And it was difficult to believe the sight of her or our eyes. Who would have believed forty years ago https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/3337979064/in/dateposted/ that such an event and celebration would have been possible in Belfast? Not I anyway.

It was celebration of Irish music and dance on a broad basis, including a bit of the Ulster Scots tradition, plus other cultures – Macalla’s fusion of Irish and Middle Eastern musicians and music was amazing, they were working with Mshakht Collective from Iraq. It showed not just a city celebrating but welcoming people from all over the island and further afield. There was a great atmosphere that did this long term resident of Belfast a power of good. And the preservation of many traditional melodies was thanks to some of the citizens of (the then) said neat little town, mainly Presbyterian, who identified a need to preserve a priceless tradition in 1792 – and succeeded in doing so. I don’t want to harp on too much about the fact that this most important cultural event in Irish history, the Belfast Harp Festival, happened not in Dublin, Cork, Galway or Derry….but in Belfast.

The Ulster Scots Commissioner praised the inclusiveness of the Fleadh; there was a big Ulster Scots event at the shipyard and inclusion of bands and Scottish dancing at the main stage. I welcome that inclusiveness. But I do have a problem with loyalist – or any other – marching bands which are military-uniform wearing and military-style. Shankill Road Defenders Flute Band, for example, put on a good show and made an effort with the medley or Irish melodies they presented on the main stage, and their sergeant major (if that was the position of the guy wearing three military-style chevrons) was a dab two-hand with twirling the baton. It might seem churlish, and I admire their musical skill and dedication, but their military name and style I don’t go for.

The Fleadh could make you believe that Belfast and Norn Iron were normal places where people also knew how to party and celebrate. It was, as the headline above suggests, fleadh-tering. But said Norn Iron remains severely dysfunctional in its politics and decision-making at Stormont which means that many of the problems that exist in the Wee North are not tackled or dealt with adequately, for all the smiles of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. That makes me sad. But more importantly it makes for problems and pain for many of the citizens of the jurisdiction.

The blockage of course is the sectarian divide and resultant political divisions, especially those manifested through the party political system and aspects of the consociational system at Stormont. Parties are also unwilling to make necessary but partly unpopular decisions (that is common south of the border too), but could do so if they acted together. And decisions could still be made on the difficult questions – I am not even talking about the constitutional question but issues such as increasing funding so that problems in health, education and the environment can be tackled – with the goodwill of the parties and better decision making structures. And without bordering on the boring in mentioning it again in these pages, some of the voting and decision making mechanisms advocated by the de Borda Institute www.deborda.org could help mightily there. But that might remove some of the power and control of particular political parties and, without massive public clamour, they are not going to have that.

So Norn Iron remains in limbo, a post-conflict society that frequently goes from pillar to post and back again in moving on from the divisions of the past. And, unlike the Fleadh, that is definitely not something to celebrate.

Four pence a day

Four pence a day …..that is how much we paid for electricity used for May, June and July in our household (the standing charge was extra, three times as much)…….because we have solar panels and 10 kW of storage in batteries. Admittedly this was probably exceptional weather, at least some of the time, but it brings home the advantages of renewables. The previous three months we paid probably half of what we would otherwise have been billed. And that was with using some of the generated electricity for heat in our kitchen living area plus cooking and kettle included.

Getting a new roof on our house two years ago this autumn, we decided to get solar panels at the same time and have the two projects coordinated so the fittings for the panels went on before the slates and the solar installers didn’t have to drill through slates. In the North there is only one body, a charity, who will buy solar generated home electricity and what you get paid is small, but taking that into account there is much of the year when we are actually making money with the solar panels as well as having ‘free’ electricity.

We were lucky to have the saved money to pay upfront for the solar installation but in the Republic there are grants you can avail of, and various schemes. Unfortunately with an older house with chimneys and the time frame we were working on, a heat pump didn’t appear to be an option but never say never when we should be saying ‘yes’.

The Irish way of death

One of the most important aspects of Irish culture and life, yes, is its way of dealing with death. The wake is alive and well, and in the countryside attending funerals can be a way of life. Celebrating renowned popular figures and troubadours who have died has been seen in relation to Sinéad O’Connor, Dolores O’Riordan and most recently Glen Hansard with thousands attending a lying in state and an extraordinary funeral. https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/08/04/glen-hansard-funeral-dublin-live-stream/

However it is small but significant gestures which can make a big difference to the grieving, which is all of us at some time or other. My own father died far, on this island, from where was his home. Returning with his body to his homeland, his friends and neighbours travelled 30 km to meet the hearse at the city we passed through en route to his return, funeral and burial. That accompaniment of honour on his final journey home still brings a tear to my eye and a lump in my throat. And of course everyone of the males present wanted a ‘lift’ of the coffin on the way from the cemetery entrance to the grave.

The wake is a place for celebration, reminiscences and sometimes maybe a bit of song. A loved one singing one of two of the deceased’s favourite songs is guaranteed to leave not a dry eye in the house. A wake is a strange kind of enjoyable experience with sorrow and joy likely to be competing emotions if not wonderfully simultaneous.

It is a grave state of affairs to miss out on such gestures and ways of life in death which can mean so much. The dead may not know but for the living it is a rite of passage, the passage of that person from their lives and the solidifying of memories, as well as helping the grieving process. As such it is a celebration not just of the life of the person who has died but of life itself. The West’s a-wake…but then so too is some of the North, South and East….and not forgetting the Midlands (who so often get forgotten about).

1737

1737 is a long time ago, the best part of three hundred years. The Belfast News Letter began publication then and it is the oldest continuously published English language newspaper in the world. In the eighteenth century and at the time of the ‘98 rebellion its politics were very different to today. Despite changing hands a number of times in recent years it politics remain stridently unionist though it did go through a more liberal phase a few decades ago.

However, startlingly, it now only sells 5,000 copies a day of the print version, shrinking rapidly over recent years. And ‘the editor’ has been given the boot, seemingly not to be replaced except by an overall publishing group editor-in-chief. A newspaper without an editor? You’ve got to be kidding. In https://www.pressreader.com/ireland/belfast-telegraph/20260801/281586657397585 the renowned journalist Sam McBride gives the low down. Of course there are a variety of factors at work; the general decline in print in the era of digital media, the decline in the Protestant proportion of the population in the North, and the fact that those identifying as British in the North may just buy a British newspaper, if any.

Context is everything and some republicans may welcome the decline in the proportion of Prods in the North and of a venerable unionist institution like the News Letter. But unless you are looking at a humiliating defeat for one side or the other in the North – and resultant discontent and violence – you actually need ‘the other side’ to be strong enough and confident enough to strike deals and compromise (that dirty word in Northern Ireland). I certainly don’t agree with the News Letter’s often narrow unionist and conservative stand with its tunnel vision but leaving any side of a side without a voice can be counter-productive and dangerous.

And the cessation of the print publication of a newspaper on the go since 1737 would be a sad event and situation.

Peace People 50

The tragic Troubles incident which led to the start of the Peace People happened in August 1976, now just over fifty years, a half century, ago. Tempus fugit et cetera. That incident involved the IRA and the British Army and it was the latter who fired the fatal shot that caused the fatal crash. The story of the Peace People is a more complex one than many, on all sides, saw. As well as what the Peace People did themselves there were also many people who were conscientised and thrown into a broad range of community activities, even where they did not continue involvement with the Peace People structures.

It arose from a spontaneous mass movement, see e.g. https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/28364007554/in/album-72157613614963634 but it only remained a mass movement for a very short term, a number of months. It was however the largest peace upsurge against the violence of the Troubles in the North though there was also a complex picture as to what and whose violence it stood against or was seen to stand against – even if the leadership were clear it was against all violence. It continued as a sizeable organisation for a couple of decades. Of the three most publicly identified leaders, Ciaran McKeown and Betty Williams are now dead, dying in 2019 and 2020 respectively; see https://www.innatenonviolence.org/editorials/ed273.shtml#obit for an obituary in this publication on Ciaran McKeown. Mairead Corrigan Maguire is the one remaining member of the these three early leaders still alive and she continues to contribute as she can including speaking at pro-Palestine rallies in Belfast. As is well known, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.

There were many controversies during the story of the Peace People and the earlier ones are explored in a 1987 research pamphlet by the editor of this publication which is available on the INNATE website in the pamphlets section https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/pamphlets/ That includes significant information on the local group story and the Peace People finances (yes, it was relatively well off early on but there was far less money than popular perceptions held).

There were two big crisis points in the organisation, one in 1979 and another around 1994. After the latter date the Peace People was a much smaller organisation. While Betty Williams ended her involvement and went off to do her own thing within a few years of the start, and Ciaran McKeown came and went in terms of active involvement, Mairead Maguire continued her involvement throughout – and once she was free of child rearing responsibilities has made a very significant contribution to peace internationally. Mairead Maguire has been arrested in the USA and at Aldermaston in England and Faslane in Scotland, hit by an IDF plastic bullet in Palestine, visited traumatised Rohingya people in exile in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and contributed widely through the Nobel Women’s Initiative, to mention just a few points of international involvement.

INNATE’s album of photos on the Peace People is at https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/albums/72157613614963634/with/6968923928 and the Peace People website is at https://www.peacepeople.com/

–

Well, that’s it for another month and I wish you well for the autumn season…and I don’t wish you well for the autumn season if you happen to be reading this in the southern hemisphere in which case I wish you well for the spring season [How obtuse can you get? – Ed] [Do you want me to try harder???? – Billy]. See you soon, Billy

Billy King: Rites Again, 341

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , , ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

The Headitorial in this issue deals substantially with the recent racist violence in Northern Ireland so I won’t do more than mention it – and Kate Laverty’s piece in her column portrays community resistance to hate so wonderfully. Racial hate is just one other issue that has to be dealt with in the North and while the stick of the law needs to apply to those involved in racist violence, the carrot of positive multiculturalism needs to be dangled too and is most important in the long run. It is fair enough to believe ‘our’ culture is the best or at least what we want to be mainly a part of. However there are many slow learners of the lesson that we already benefit from the presence of other cultures and people. The health and care systems in both the North and the Republic would fall apart without workers who have come from elsewhere. While not advocating meat eating, meat factories – providing an economic outlet for farmers – would cease working without migrant workers.

And one of the most obvious but sometimes overlooked features of ‘foreign’ culture present in our society is food. It began with Italian chippies and ice cream. Today Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern cuisine is on the menu for most people – and probably for the vast majority of those involved in the recent racist rioting! We need to learn to appreciate what we have. There is a wonderful couple of lines in a satirical song by Scottish-Australian singer-songwriter Eric Bogle where the racist man in the song says “I never eat wog meat / I always eat at the Chinese caff / Just across the street”; in other words ‘the other’ has become so much a part of ‘us’ and what we want that it goes unnoticed and unappreciated.

Black and white tales from the dark lake

The Doolough ‘Famine’* Walk, organised by Afri, is a unique event. It is an amazing combination of detailed analysis of violence and injustice – sometimes with considerable emotion such as when a Gazan has spoken, along with solidarity, camaraderie, scenery, physical exercise, sociability, and maybe even a bit of craic unwinding in the evening. Some photos of this year’s event, which took place in mid-June, can be found at https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/55335011397/in/dateposted/ and photos beside that. *’Famine’ is in inverted commas here because ‘there was no famine’ – food was being exported in great quantities but the peasantry, dependent on the potato, had no access to it or had to sell what they had to pay rent.

Happening this year in June, it turned out excellent walking weather, dry and not too hot. My companion in life remarked on the fitness of President Catherine Connolly who participated in a personal capacity (as she has done before being president); a fast walker, come to a hill and, instead of slowing down, she accelerated, virtually running up it. Wow. She is 70.

There is a big contrast between the life and health of the walkers today and the plight of the original starving, and dying, walkers in 1849, condemned to death by an exploitative system that washed its hands of helping the people it exploited. The parallels with affairs in the world today are always explored and it is both memorialising and acting in solidarity with struggles in the world today.

You learn something new every year, not just from the information and analysis from the speakers/walk leaders but also the participants who you chat to on the way. This year one story I learnt was of Affy Dillon. Sitting on the bus to the start beside Imelda O’Grady who lives locally, she told me about Affy Dillon and the song written by her husband, Michael O’Grady, about him. https://michaelogrady.bandcamp.com/track/affy-dillon Affy was a babe in arms, well a babe strapped to his mother’s back on the Doolough ‘famine’ walk – the route we were travelling on – when his mother died and he was still alive, strapped to her back, when found; he was rescued by a local family and fed on ewe’s milk but lack of sustenance previously had left him blind. So while Affy lived a normal lifespan, as Michael O’Grady’s song says he “never viewed the pleasant scenes that abound around Clew Bay / The sunset red on Old Head hill, Croagh Patrick’s stately cone / Like luxuries were unknown to him though amid them he had grown.“ It’s a fascinating and tragic story but also one of local care and resilience.

The title of this piece is partly a reference to Afri’s 18-track CD of music associated with the Doolough walk, “The Doolough Famine Walk – Music from the dark lake” which I would recommend – available on the Afri website www.afri.ie Afri has had brilliant singers/musicians contribute over the years, as it does at other events it organises; this year it was Declan O’Rourke singing and his moving song ‘Connaught Orphan’ is on the CD.

The Phoenix falls to earth and burns

I am very sad to see the end of the fortnightly Phoenix magazine whose circulation, like so many printed publications of various sorts, has nosedived over the last couple of decades. While often described as the Irish equivalent of the British Private Eye, it had its own unique features – and an uphill struggle to survive in a relatively small country like Ireland. I was only once in their higgledy-piggledy office upstairs in south central Dublin; I was looking for an old Phoenix cartoon on the North and staff were welcoming and friendly, I was coming by arrangement.

It covered numerous issues that the mainstream media were afraid to touch and in particular took a courageous stand for Irish neutrality when the mainstream media has been bending over backwards to back EU militarisation, NATO, and pro-government stances on an issue such as the Triple Lock. It was, for example, scathing about the government-sponsored so-called Consultative Forum on International Security in 2023 which was a Department of Foreign Affairs stitch up. It also covered news about some NGOs and other bodies that, again, the mainstream media did not handle.

It will be missed. Whether anything like it arises from the ashes, a phoenix arising again, I doubt though there may be opportunities online. And on a more humorous note, as a cartoon aficionado [I thought you were a bit of a cartoon character yourself Billy! – Ed] I will miss it too. Here is a couple of them almost at random. “My wife didn’t give them a good reception” says a man as he returns a pair of boxer shorts to a clothing store returns desk; the cartoon is titled “Dodgy boxers” (the issue of ‘dodgy box’ illegal TV streaming is an ongoing one in the Re:Public). And regarding a mega-Euro Lottery jackpot, a guy in a bar says to another guy, “Apparently the rumour started that I had won the €250 million when I was overheard in the state agents enquiring about a one bed apartment in Kanturk!”.

Something fishy

The guilty verdict for Jeffrey Donaldson, two years after he was charged with child sexual abuse concerning two young girls, including rape, is a shocking turnaround for someone who was once top of the pile in Norn Iron. It has dominated news. There has been that much commentary and coverage of the trial in Ireland, and the guilty verdict, that I won’t add much more. It must have taken a huge amount of courage for the two women concerned, now adults, to confront such a towering figure when, years after the events, it was largely their words against his, and he was top dog.

It is also a feather in the cap for the PSNI to have investigated such a case and be proven right against the then most powerful political figure in the North. I won’t say much more except to note that throughout the lead up and the court case itself he wore his evangelical Christian ‘fish’ badge. This was an early Christian symbol, a fish, ichthus in Greek, which was an acronym for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour”. It became a Christian symbol in the second century CE and it also fitted since (loaves and) fishes also appear in the Christian story; the fish became identified as a secret or not so secret Christian symbol.

The simple ‘line drawing’ Christian symbol badge tends to be an evangelical Christian symbol in this part of the world these days. Did Donaldson continue to wear it because he wore it before he was charged with the child sex offences, did he wear it because he thought it would show his ‘Christian’ moral character – and therefore proclaim that he was innocent? However before his conviction I thought it is not a very good advertisement for Christianity, or its fish symbol, if he was guilty. As it turned out there was something rotten and it stank. Commentators have explored whether he weaponised his proclaimed Christianity to try to silence the victims. There might be a few less people wearing the fish symbol these days and the DUP which Donaldson led is wondering how it escape the repercussions – and who knew what about him within the party.

I expected the jury to take longer than it did to reach a verdict though a journalist who covered all the case thought it was open-and-shut and would be shorter; having been on a jury I know it takes a while even to agree that everyone is agreed. However to me it is an indication of the jury’s certainty in accepting the testament of the women victims/survivors and the prosecution case, especially in finding him guilty on all 18 charges. Meanwhile the stories and the speculation will run for quite some time.

Chickening out

Why do I feel the need to say “I am not a meat eater” before I go on to say I think there is something severely amiss with a society which gets its protein and favourite meat from the abuse of animals. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c982d389em7o Ireland is awash with chickens and Moy Park in the North, population 1.9 million, produces 6 million chickens a week. It would only take it 9 days to produce one chicken for everyone on the island.

And of course the industry has its own ‘standards’ which, typically for such non-independent voluntary regulations, is a con job. I find it difficult to fathom how such ill treatment of animals, and I presume antibiotic use entering the food chain, is tolerated. Not a good advertisement for unregulated capitalism. Of course people have a choice to buy more expensive organic and relative cruelty free chicken but with the advertising industry at work, and the price differential, it is not a choice that crosses many people’s minds. With so many vegan protein sources available – some very cheap such as pulses – it is very sad but the chicken industry sees itself as responding to the demand for cheap food – excuses, excuses.

I also object to the description that most chicken is produced on ‘family farms’ – free range chicken being the exception. This conjures up a cosy image rather than the nightmare reality. They are not on a ‘farm’, they are on a cruel production line which is so unlike what I would call a ‘farm’ as to be preposterous. In the children’s story, Chicken Licken is afraid the sky is falling down; the poultry producers do what they want and know that the sky – that their chickens never see – will not fall on their heads and there will be no restrictions or repercussions for their cruelty to living beings. And this is a sad state of affairs for the chickens – and for the morality of humanity.

–

Hopefully we are coming to an end of war in relation to Iran though it splutters on. The USA may have had the big guns, metaphorically and practically speaking, but the stupidity of that country going to war is incredible and it has lost far more than it has ‘gained’. When you have a doctrine of ‘might is right’ you are not only likely to end up in the wrong morally but exacerbating the situation. The human and ecological cost of the war is incalculable and the economic cost, for the USA and the world, has been massive. The War Resisters’ International motto/basis is that “War is a crime against humanity” (you can get a fine print great ‘broken rifle’ poster by Lynn Finnegan at https://warresistersint.teemill.com/product/war-is-a-crime-against-humanity-art-print/ and this was never truer.

Anyway, on to the summer and I wish you a peaceful time and hopefully a chance to get your head showered – which with typical Irish weather may happen naturally in the open….. There is no full issue of this e-steamed publication in August, just a news supplement, so I will talk to you [‘talk at you’? – Ed] again in September – the summer is only here and I am talking about autumn already! Billy. l

Billy King: Rites Again, 340

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Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

Hello, I was hoping that this Colm [I think you are trying to be Uncle Colm from Derry Girls? – Ed] would be a TFZ – a Trump Free Zone – but it proved impossible. However I will keep it short and sweet and not mention the Donald again, this issue, I promise. You may have read that according to Atlantic magazine, the occupant of the POTUS post has stopped comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and decided he is more in the league of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon. Maybe that makes him a bit of a dick-tator but on a serious note it also makes him incredibly dangerous when in his last few years of insuperable military power he can obliterate what he wants to destroy with no repercussions for him personally.

So we may be in for a rollercoaster ride at best and a downward spiral at worst. Lets hope he gets wrapped up and obsessed with his boorish monuments to himself so he can’t be obnoxious and violent to others. He is a walking illustration of the perils of militarism (the egotism perhaps goes without saying though I have just said it) – as have many US presidents before him. Actions can have a myriad of consequences; for example, the US blockade of Cuba has doubled of even tripled the infant mortality rate there, with much other hardship too.

Meanwhile here we are into meteorological summer which in Ireland means the rain is warmer, or if you are logical and look at a clear night sky long enough you are likely to see a meteor. Well, you never know what will be thrown at us. Cue the old old story about someone from Norn Iron trying to book holiday accommodation in Britain by phone “for the Twelfth fortnight in July” and wondering why they were getting an incredulous response…. The longest day comes later this month and it always strikes me as strange – though obviously not meteorologically – that ‘summer’ comes when the days are already getting shorter. Mind you we have had a few days of record heat in late May which for most people in Ireland were pleasant – but not as a harbinger of ongoing global heating, and not in some places in Europe where temperatures were 10°C or more hotter than in good old Atlantic facing Ireland – tourist slogan “Come for the craic and stay for the cool”….

Own goal

There are own goals and own goals, and would you like to own a goal? [I will keep you goal posted on that – Ed] But the biggest own goal of the last month in relation to Northern Ireland was scored by Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party in Britain. Her office issued a social media post on the usual – and totally discredited – theme that there is a vendetta against British army personnel, veterans, who operated in the North and that Labour government proposals would facilitate that. In fact the number of cases taken show that this is a non-issue but it has become an English/British nationalist shibboleth (as well as a means to try to avoid state culpability).

However the post carried film footage of British soldiers in Derry during Bloody Sunday in 1972 when 14 unarmed people were shot dead by the British army. Her post was withdrawn when it was pointed out that this was what the clip showed. But by including this what it unintentionally said is that the full rigour of the law should be applied to soldiers who were involved in shootings and violent activities outside of human rights law. This was bad enough for her and it was the opposite of what Badenoch and her office were trying nothing should exonerate those much higher up the military and political chains of command who set the parameters for engagement and sent the soldiers in, but that isn’t how these things work, is it? If anyone gets done it is the people at the bottom and in the Norn Iron case that hasn’t even been happening.

Dream time Fianna Fáil

As the two recent by-elections in the Republic show, it is not a dream time for Fianna Fáil, even losing their deposit because their vote was so low in the Dublin election. As regular readers will know, I try to take an interest in polly-ticks on both sides of the border [Shouldn’t that be ‘regular reader’, singular, rather than ‘regular readers’? – Ed] [That is just you being singularly unpleasant again – Billy]. However I was surprised by a recent dream and its vividness in remembrance of it on waking; in the dream I was responsible for putting up an exhibition about Fianna Fáil with various panels and these included accounts of FF misdemeanours and mishandlings – but activists from said political party had stolen the panels which were especially critical of them. I had to threaten that I would publicise their theft if they didn’t return them – which they did, considering that that was the lesser of two evils.

Well, how do you interpret that dream? Where did it come from? I consider said party should have gone out of existence entirely after the economic crash debacle of 2008; Bertie Ahern and the powers that were in Fianna Fail (sic) stupidly did nothing to rein in the property and housing bubble and they made the boom times boomier – which then led to the crash times being crashier and very significant hardship for many different kinds of people.

Their current embrace of NATO and EU militarisation is, I feel, a negation of the positive foreign policy which it has undertaken at various times in its existence, and also a betrayal of what soul it possessed – if a political party, especially a populist conservative one like FF, can have a soul. Micheál Martin being friendly with, and to, unionists is a Good Thing – but not at the expense that he refuses to plan for what a united Ireland would look like. On the latter, let the people decide, as is their right – but they need to know what they are deciding on and such thinking is best done outside the febrile atmosphere of a referendum vote or votes (north, south, east and west) on a u-nighted Ireland.

I am a political animal but not a party political one and I don’t think I could toe the line to be in a political party; I made that choice while (just) still a teenager. So I could do the same critique of many’s another political party. But that was what I dreamt about (see also my next two items which concern FF…) and I have provided a dream interpretation which is not dreamy. Maybe I should dream on. [Are you sure it wasn’t a large dram you had rather than a dream, even a bottle of Dreambuie? – Ed] [That would make me sic – Billy]

T-shock* and nuclear power

Micheál Martin has said Ireland should think seriously about nuclear power, e.g. Irish Times 4/5/26. I have a one word response to this; ‘Rubbish’ – nuclear rubbish or waste that is. Would he like nuclear waste in his back garden needing to be guarded for ten millennia? Of course fossil fuels need to be eradicated from Ireland’s energy mix but the idea that Ireland with its wind, waves, water and sun (yes!) might need to rely on what is the dirtiest fuel of all (and not all it is cracked up to be in terms of carbon dioxide emissions too) is unimaginative and extremely expensive nonsense. High tech junkies keep coming up with their feeling Ireland needs nuclear power – when what it needs is green energy and devolved green energy at that.

*In this case the ‘T’ is for ‘Threat’. I have told you before about a mention of the word ‘Taoiseach’ in the British Parliament many decades ago, at the start of the Troubles, before the word was known on that island; it could have been Gerry Fitt but anyway a Norn Iron nationalist mentioned “a speech given by the Taoiseach in Sligo” – and this was reported in Hansard, the official parliamentary record, as “a speech given in a tea shop in Sligo”!

There has always been hype and spin about nuclear energy from the very beginning. The attractions of small modular reactors is the latest in that hype. There remains the dangers of accidents, environmentally or humanly caused, or even sabotage or attack. Costs can go through the roof. Waste issues haven’t even begun to be resolved. We would do well to steer clear of dangerous white elephants even if that dangerous white elephant is smaller than previously proposed white elephants.

INNATE’s photo album on nuclear power issues, much of it on the 1970s anti-nuclear power movement, is at https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/albums/72157607158367565/with/53807053772 See also Caroline Hurley’s article in this publication https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/2024/02/01/nuclear-power-is-a-regrets-industry-some-facts/

Proud of lethality

Irish people in general have been proud of the role the Irish army has played in international peacekeeping of the military variety. This has been as part of a contribution to peace in the world and has been done without fear or favour and for altruistic reasons. Those of us of a nonviolent persuasion would of course like to see support for unarmed civilian protection (UCP) and other involvements in creating and maintaining peace – including urgent work at home to prevent further climate change which is likely to cause so much conflict on a global scale in the next century.

However the Irish government has been changing tack to align the Republic much more with NATO and with EU militarisation. This has been done by a process of stealth moves so that it does not look like neutrality is being affected – but each chip at the block of neutrality wears it away; removing the Triple Lock on the deployment of Irish troops overseas is just one ingredient in the stage we are at with this. Part of this has been active and increasing engagement with NATO while not formally being a member – to the extent it won’t or doesn’t matter whether we are formally a member of not, that it makes no difference.

While public opinion is clearly in favour of neutrality, the government and Irish elite (sic) have usually been skilful in moving things in their direction; ‘Nothing to see here’ they continually opine while they know damn well they are not just gilding the lily but actively deceiving the population because they, stupidly, imagine that to be a ‘good European’ you have to be a good European militarist. This has repercussions for the Irish army and for expenditure on the military which has, thankfully and rightfully, until now been low by international standards.

But one illustration of the change that has happened appeared in that paper of establishment record, The Irish Times of 21/5/26 https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/05/21/it-was-embarrassing-for-them-irish-army-crew-beats-us-military-teams-at-their-own-game/ An Irish army team is proudly recorded as beating the USA in military ‘games’ in the USA which was defined as a “lethality competition”. And you know what ‘lethality’ is – killing people, and in war or military engagement that usually includes women, children and men who are not engaged in armed action, i.e. those traditionally labelled as ‘innocent’.

The Sullivan Cup after a week of military competition was won by an Irish army team and, as the IT proudly recorded, “In the end, the most “lethal” team came not from the US military but from Ireland”. This was despite the Irish team never having previously operated the M2 Bradley, a 35-tonne tracked vehicle, used for the exercise. Yes, armies are trained to be able to kill people but in a neutral state like Ireland which has not been under threat the main active role, international peacekeeping, has been the prevention of lethality. Taking part in a ‘lethality’ competition is a new and unwelcome departure and just one sign of a changed role for the Irish army, and taking part in one organised by the army of the most belligerent – and unlawfully belligerent – country on this planet is disgraceful.

–

That’s me for now as summer is a-comin’ in and in a short while it will be July, aye, and holliers for many. But if you are a peace or political activist there is never a shortage of things to do at any time of the year….which is why we all need a break. Cue Christy Moore’s ‘Lisdoonvarna’ which emphasises that we all do need a break….and which I usually quote around this time of year with the best description of a holiday ever – “When summer comes around each year / They come here and we go there”. See you soon, Billy.

Billy King: Rites Again, 339

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Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

As more and more US citizens try to acquire European citizenship, with Ireland certainly well up in the list, isn’t it heartening to know that for the 250th anniversary of the USA if you are a citizen you will be able to purchase a commemorative passport which includes a page with a picture of President Trump. In other words on the cover the eagle has landed whereas inside the ego has landed. And Ireland, Republic and North, in the shape of Shannon and Aldergrove airports, continues to facilitate the US military machine and its warmaking. Blessed be the US$. Speaking of which, the Iran war has reputedly cost the US state $25 billion to date; what an obscene and abhorrent use of such a sum of money..

On another matter, it is good to see Ireland will be co-hosting, with Tuvalu, the second meeting of the ‘coalition of the willing’ 60 or so countries working apart from the COP process on fossil fuel phasing out. This will be early next year and a follow up to the first meeting, with petrostates absent, in Colombia which has just finished. Ireland has talked the talk all right but it hasn’t yet walked the walk; let’s see some serious action that the government can brag about at the start of next year.

Don’t mess with messiahs

OK, OK, a million and one people have already reflected in all sorts of media on D Trump’s brush with messiahdom in the shape of a traditional-image picture of him as Jesus healing the sick …with various other things going down in the background. When the reaction to that got too much he then shared a best buddy picture of Jesus giving him a cuddle; more than the best of mates then. His excuse for the first, that he thought it made him look like a doctor, was so lame that that in turn caused all sorts of cartoons and other comparisons or memes of doctors and messiahs. There is of course a 0.01% chance that he believed it made him look like a doctor, that is if he is the most visually illiterate person in the western hemisphere….oh, on second thoughts, given his extreme kitschy tastes, increase the chances there incrementally…

But, while I am not a psychologist [You don’t need to tell us, it’s pretty obvious but that won’t stop you going on to psychologise – Ed] I did want to explore messiahdom a bit. There are many kinds of messiahs. You don’t have to think you are Jesus to ‘be’ a messiah and other religious backgrounds than Christian get it too. I don’t think Trump thought he was Jesus, rather ‘just’ (!) like Jesus in being divinely appointed and infallible despite continuous failures. The second picture he posted, of Jesus giving him a cuddle, is probably closer to his thinking even though he may see himself as a healer of the sick – and how ironic is that when he is busy cutting rights to medical care and funding for medical research. In my barometer for measuring D Trump’s compatibility with Christian thinking he gets approximately 0 out of 10.

Messiahdom is probably more common than you think. I have talked before [Often – Ed] about meeting three people in Norn Iron, from outside, who thought they were ‘a’ messiah – though one of these saw himself as the father of the messiah…… However feeling you are a ‘chosen people’ has a messianic aspect to it, and the ‘manifest destiny’ beliefs of the USA, and the puritan founding fathers (sic) approach to things has led to the USA seeing itself as ‘chosen’ – e.g. as the world’s ‘policeman’ (= military bully in other people’s thinking). So the USA and Israel under a right-wing government, where the leaders of the latter believe they have a divine right to take all the territory around them that they want, are a perfect match – a perfect match made in hell that is.

While ‘Manifest Destiny’ is thought of as a 19th century US expansionist ideology, it has never gone away. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 – opposing European intervention in the Americas – was an anti-imperialist statement but it was also part of an imperialist statement that ‘the Americas’ essentially belong to the USA, and of course the USA’s westward and southward expansion was itself imperialist. The term ‘manifest destiny’ may not have been used in the 20th century but US official thinking largely remained the same despite some variations. Amazingly – or not considering his outspokenness – Donald Trump used the term in his inaugural address in 2025. US imperialism is not just living it is, tragically, thriving even if the result of US intervention in Iran has been to make the situation far worse for Iran, the USA itself and the world.

So when you have a narcissistic megalomanic like Trump as president of the USA it is a lethal combination of a fatally flawed individual and a fatally flawed national consciousness (there are of course many people in the USA who totally and actively reject this thinking and are working away for peace and justice so it is not a ‘national’ national consciousness) with the two reinforcing each other. And we are all suffering from that but the real victims have been the Palestinians, especially Gazans, and the peoples of Iran and Lebanon. Yes, the attacks on Lebanon have been the doing of Israel but one word from the USA could have stopped them before they started (that word was ‘no’ – “No more support of any kind if you attack Lebanon”).

Nuke them

Numerous commentators have pointed out that if Iran hadn’t been trying too hard to get nuclear weapons before the current USA-Israeli onslaught that they sure as hell (sic) would in future, this would be on the same basis that the North Korean regime has nukes as an insurance policy against attack. Moving beyond the MADness of nuclear weapons has become much more difficult in our current belligerent world.

But a balance of terror is no way to run a world. It is not just a question of living in fear and wasteful expense it is is also a question of when something will go wrong. Gradually, gradually, more countries will seek to join the nuclear club and that increases the risks which are already astronomical. It is only through a combination of good luck and occasional humanity that we have not already faced nuclear armageddon and a possible (in that case probable) nuclear winter. How ironic that would be! A world facing global heating meltdown and food shortages due to lack of water through humanity’s stupidity instead freezes and most people die of starvation through cold and an inability to grow crops.

There are those who say the nuclear standoff in the Cold War prevented war. That is nonsense; there were lots of wars and proxy wars but they weren’t in Europe. We now have war in Europe again, currently in Ukraine, occasioned partly by the expansion of that western military alliance, NATO, and nuclear weapons did nothing to prevent that. Far from preventing war, NATO’s policy contributed significantly to the Russian invasion. It has been pointed out numerous times in these pages that the USA and NATO were expecting Russia to accept a situation which was intolerable for the USA. The USA threatened nuclear war in 1962 over Russian missiles in its neighbouring island, Cuba. Yet the USA and NATO expected Russia to accept NATO weapons and missiles in Ukraine, an immediate Russian neighbour with historically extremely close links. This was crass stupidity and there is ongoing crass stupidity in the USA and European countries not acknowledging their role in the tragic debacle that has led to the Ukraine war.

It is not long ago, 2017, that ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, https://www.icanw.org/ received the Nobel Peace Prize. But psychologically, and very sadly, it feels a long, long time ago given the direction things have taken since then. Even the January 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), making nuclear weapons illegal, feels a long time ago.

Not for the first time I have spoken about valuable coverage of issues by the New Internationalist. https://newint.org/ The main feature in their January-February 2026 issue is on ‘The new nuclear arms race’ and there is a good run down on the situation regarding this both globally and in relation to individual situations. It covers South Africa being the only country to develop its own nuclear weapons and then dismantle them; “Under Mandela, Pretoria championed non-proliferation and the once pariah state became viewed by many as a pillar of peace.” Regarding British surveillance of activists, the CND solicitor to the ‘Spycops’ tribunal, Paul Heron, makes the cutting point that “…we are told we live in a democracy, and the people shape how society should be. [But] when people build mass movements the state treats them as a threat.”

Getting rid of nuclear weapons is an essential part of building a peaceful world – indeed this is impossible without their removal. Building collective peaceful security is possible but the lack of imagination involved in politicians’ militarist thinking makes it brutally hard to imagine let alone bring it about. And that is where those mass, popular movements are essential – and mass movements grow from the work and actions of concerned individuals building and building on the zeitgeist.

Arms trade ding dong in the North

The ‘agin-us’ nature of politics in the North (nothing to do with going for a pint of a well known brew…) is nowhere better illustrated than by recent ding-dongs about developing the arms trade in Norn Iron. Oh, if we could make money from irony, the people of the North would be all millionaires; going from a society where people were killing one another, well some people were killing some other people, to making money from weapons to kill people elsewhere, you couldn’t make it up.

Anyway, just one aspect of this is that the British government wants to develop the arms industry in the North – in a similar but different way to what the Irish government wants to do in the Republic – in the Northern case with a well funded ‘Defence Growth Deal’, which I would consider sick and obscene. I have no proof but I suspect that for the British government, investing in and promoting the arms industry in Northern Ireland has the perceived bonus of helping to keep unionists sweet (and binding it tighter to the British economy). If the total pot for this deal is, as reported, £250 million for the whole UK, Northern Ireland‘s take of £50 million is 20% of the total for a Norn Iron population my calculations say is 2.7% of the total UK population. Something strange there.

And unionists welcomed this deal, e.g. Emma Little-Pengelly, the Deputy First Minister who proudly said “Sector turnover has more than doubled over the past decade, rising from £1 billion in 2013 to £2.2 billion in 2023.” Sinn Féin ministers did not attend the launch, however, which omission was then criticised by unionists. Michelle O’Neill then came out saying she did not support the militarisation agenda and the money could have been better used in areas that really needed it. And that in turn led to further criticism of the Sinners by unionists. The fact that Sinn Féin can be considered the ‘peace party’ in this might be considered ironic in relation to the history of the second half of the 20th century – but realities change.

Unionists seldom miss a chance to castigate Irish neutrality and the broken CD from there and many sources on the right in Europe about Ireland not doing its bit for ‘European’ defence is grating. It could be countered that the UK and EU are not doing their bit for demilitarisation…..but then M Martin’s Fianna Fáil is not doing very much for that either. DUP leader Gavin Robinson said “that the sector in 2026 “isn’t all about bullets and tanks” but also about advanced manufacturing and cyber-security, which he said will “undoubtedly help cover the gaping hole in Europe’s defence that is the Republic of Ireland”. (News Letter 25/4/26) Norn Iron Secretary of State Hilary Benn weighed in on the militarist side – it is his government’s spending – speaking about the first duty of the government being to secure the safety of the nation. Of course such funding does no such thing.

However in this ding dong there is the danger that it is seen simply as a case of unionists-for-arms-production and republicans-against-arms-production. There are other kinds of people too and some of us others are appalled. The term ‘making a killing’ has never been so apt.

Consensus….against consensus

An article by Peter Emerson of the de Borda institute www.deborda.org in the April issue of the CRC/Community Relations Council monthly publication https://mailchi.mp/nicrc.org.uk/crc-ebulletin-april-2026?e=dc08e218e6 ends with a nice or not-so-nice story about Belfast City Council: “Well, in 2004, I managed to get a consensus in Belfast City Council. The question was, would these’uns like to adopt a methodology which would facilitate consensus decision-making with those’uns. And, yes, I achieved what some might have thought was impossible, a consensus. Neither side wanted to be in consensus with the other side, so there was a consensus… against consensus.” Oh well….

You can sign up to receive the CRC digital monthly news bulletin at https://www.community-relations.org.uk/publications/e-bulletin-e-news

McKeown and I

I sometimes wonder what makes a ‘good song’ and why some amazing songs, and others that are not so amazing, take off while others are left in the shadows. In terms of the construction of songs, one Irish song that stands out for me is McKeown and I by Mickey and Cormac MacConnell. Mickey MacConnell is best known for his song ‘Only our rivers run free’ which was written when he was 17 and he said about it that “It was never a republican song per se but a song about the love of one’s country.” McKeown and I is on an oul CD I have of Mickey MacConnell’s, ‘Peter Pan and me’ (Spring Records) and you can find different versions online. Mickey MacConnell died in July 2025.

The chorus is fascinating in that it has in summary form the story told in the three verses:

We’re men of straw

We’re men of sand,

Our castles crumble,

Never meant to stand

We’re two born losers,

Sure to failure we’ve begun,

We’re snowmen built

For melting in the sun.

The ‘I’ of the story is accompanied by McKeown in the first and third verses but ‘O’Neill’ in the second. Kids from a deprived urban environment, in the first verse they build a sandcastle on a day at the beach – this is then washed away by the tide. In the second verse they build a scarecrow in the farm of the reformatory where they are incarcerated which the wind then blows away. In the final verse they build a snowman in the prison yard where the year before the judge has told them “Rot in a cell / Until you’re dead” – and they dread seeing the snowman melt away.

We don’t know what ‘I’, McKeown and O’Neill have got up to apart from where they are placed and the judge’s sentence. But the power of the song is in the imagery and the contrast between ‘society’ judging they should be locked up (and the key thrown away) and the innocence of them building a sandcastle, a scarecrow and a snowman. Very affective and effective imagery I think and an amazingly well constructed song.

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I was in the wrong part of the country to join in with Lelia Doolan’s walk at 91 years young (News, NN 338) but it was demonstrably a great occasion and joyous arrival in Dublin at the end of the long traipse from Shannon for peace. See e.g. https://www.instagram.com/walkwithlelia?igsh=eGlveXczdGFnYWVx It just shows you are never too old – or too young – to do something meaningful. That meaningful act might not be getting your walking boots on, it might be something else entirely. Anyway, for now, I remain, Billy (the kid, I am not quite 91 yet….).

Billy King: Rites Again, 338

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

Well, it is back again to war, death, environmental destruction on a MAGA scale, and potential world recession thanks to POTUS. I do believe Donald Trump is very keen on getting awards for his (dire) contributions to humanity and human history. I apologise if I don’t have a golden eagle to give him, at golf he probably cheats to get an eagle anyway. However I can proudly announce that the inaugural Billy King Award (First Class) for Sociopathetic Dangerous Eejit is hereby awarded to Donald John Trump.

I was going to substitute the work ‘Chump’ for ‘Trump’ but that did not seem appropriate given his victim count is growing all the time – and he knows what he is doing but is devoid of empathy, it is a concept unknown to him. It is all so sad and so very, very, unnecessary and unwarranted.

On another note, the news section mentions a video on French/NATO warships in Cork. There are lots of things I don’t get but ‘friendly’ visits by warships is beyond me. How is a visit by warships ‘friendly’? They are not designed to be friendly. If you want to be friendly, please send a mobile patisserie or an exhibition of your best contemporary artists. Warships have a different purpose altogether.

Fear and consternation

The more I look at it, the more amazed I am at it as a photo. It was used as the visual for INNATE’s online session entitled “Was nonviolence an option in 1969?” as part of the Imagine! Festival in Belfast. The photo is by (Nonviolent News columnist) Larry Speight and shows two soldiers in Castle Street, Belfast, in autumn 1972. It clearly shows the fear and consternation in their eyes. And we more typically get the fear and consternation in the eyes of civilians, or children, so seeing it in soldiers can be somewhat unusual, maybe even powerful or is it them powerless to cope with the situation they have been dumped in.

www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/18063000674/in/album-72157614893100575

British soldiers were thrown into a situation in the Troubles which, largely speaking, they were not trained or properly trained for, and they were certainly at risk. That in no way excuses military policies and ill treatment by soldiers, nor should it be used as a ‘keep out of jail’ card as veteran and pro-military parties in Britain wish to do. You would expect ‘state-sponsored’ soldiers to act in a more responsible and accountable manner than non-state paramilitaries. But it should raise questions about what these soldiers were tasked to do by their political masters.

Fear and consternation. Bitterness. Hatred. Revenge. All these are words associated with violence and war. But we do well to remember that on all sides in war there are human beings, most of of whom find themselves in situations they would have wished to avoid. Northern Ireland has moved past the Troubles but not yet ‘beyond’. And if this was the result in a little war with a few thousand deaths over thirty years, it is difficult to imagine what it is like when that many are killed in a much more violent situation over a day or a couple of weeks.

War is a crime against humanity.

People with greenhouses shouldn’t throw scones

With an average suburban garden I was wondering whether to get a moderate sized greenhouse both to grow a bit of summer veg and bring on little seedlings, mainly summer flowers but some herbs as well. I was hoping to buy local but in the end I decided just to get a modest (1.8m square) lean-to greenhouse for against a wall only just taller than that – you don’t enter it at all, it is only half a metre deep. And to acquire that I had to go online. Maybe I shouldn’t have been swayed by aesthetics (ascetics?) but I decided a larger, freestanding one would ‘take over’ the space in our back garden. It was all pondered long, and at my age I wondered in the expense was worth it.

As I have written here before, I grow herbs in tubs or window boxes outside, most of the ones we might want at least as far as fresh ones growable here go; parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, chives including an early and later variety, garlic chives, Welsh onions (like a larger chive with stems like scallions), red veined sorrel and a bit of wall rocket, if they counts as herbs, oregano, tarragon, mint. With the greenhouse I hope to grow basil there – to date it has had to be indoors as slugs liked it as much as myself when grown outdoors. Maybe coriander will be an option in the greenhouse, it just went to seed before when I tried it outdoors.

Clearly I have personally gone to seed. Though constructing a kit greenhouse, even a small one, has been a challenge, I hope the rewards will be worth it. I did build a large cloche, the clochasaurus as I called it, from scrap wood years ago, that in due course rotted and fell to bits and that is a Bargain Solution if you fancy doing it. This one is metal, mainly aluminium, and will see me out. It is beside our picnic table so I would hope to have the odd scone there or cup of tea and enjoy watching nature at work. People who have greenhouses shouldn’t throw scones, they should sit down in our beautiful warm weather [What country are you in? – Ed] [Sarcasm seems to pass you by – Billy] to take a break and eat one.

The devil’s buttermilk

I am not the only commentator to note the DUP’s opposition to minimum pricing on alcohol in the North (e.g. John Manley in the Irish News 25/3/26), particularly in relation, and contrast, to their founder’s (who later foundered or was foundered out of the church he founded) opposition to “the devil’s buttermilk” (alcoholic beverages). Not many people drink buttermilk now so the phrase is totally archaic, it even was in Ian Paisley Snr’s time but he had a clever and nifty if often brutal turn of phrase.

Anyway, the DUP stand is totally illogical. Spokespeople for the party point to minimum pricing being only one part of an appropriate response to alcohol abuse but don’t go on to say “but one part is better than none”. They also point to more research being needed whereas research from as close as across the nearest water shows it can have a positive effect. With deaths attributed to alcohol rising in the North surely it would be better to act now and review the matter, if required, at a later time. Minimum Unit Pricing exists in the Republic and in Britain.

Speaking of buttermilk and its origin in the dairy industry, and pollution arising from agriculture including the devastation of Lough Neagh (“Say Neagh to pollution”) it is fascinating that the DUP has also been responsible for the failure to have an independent environmental protection agency in the wee North. Whether in both cases, alcohol and pollution, change is held up by DUP pandering to its supporters plus the farmers’ lobby and the alcohol industry, well, I couldn’t possibly comment but if I did I would say ‘quite possibly yes’. However all the larger parties in Norn Iron backed intensive farming previously so they have company, or did, on that or a closely related issue.

None of this reflects well on Storm-ont’s atrocious reputation in failing to make effective decisions on issues that matter.

Corrymeela 60+

There is only one peace and reconciliation group in the North which predates the Troubles, and still is going strong, and that is Corrymeela, founded 1965. One fact it is also notable for is that ‘the founder’, Ray Davey, and many of the early members and supporters were Presbyterian. The Presbyterian Church in Ireland has been in the news for all the wrong reasons of late but there have always been progressives in its ranks though, it would seem, their number has been depleted in recent years.

Ray Davey developed his thinking on community and had a commitment to reconciliation growing from his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden (including during the bombing) in the Second World War (see e.g. https://innatenonviolence.org/readings/2015_09.shtml ). A community grew around him as Presbyterian chaplain at Queen’s and a slightly ramshackle former holiday centre on a small cliff edge outside dulse and yellowman Ballycastle (Co Antrim) was purchased; cue the old joke about early visitors who were staying there being told they would have to make their own beds….and being handed a hammer, nails and wood.

Anyone who was even of student age in 1965 would be at least around the 80 years old mark now so many of those people involved from those times are, sadly, dying. But Corrymeela has been pro-active in recording and archiving its story and the story of those involved. You can find out about current work at www.corrymeela.org and there will be an exhibition on the Corrymeela story in the vertical gallery in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast running until mid-May (see news section this issue). A publicly accessible archive on Corrymeela can be found at https://corrydocs.028ni.org.uk/index.php/documents but serious researchers would need to get accredited for documents mainly available to Corrymeela members. And a short history of Corrymeela House in Belfast appears in these pages at https://innatenonviolence.org/readings/2014_11.shtml with our photo album on Corrymeela being at https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/albums/72157654407818544/

Anyway congratulations to Corrymeela on being over 60 years young and all the best for the next 60……I look forward to visiting the exhibition at the Linen Hall Library.

Divis-ion

You’ve heard this one before from me but given the news item in this issue about the exhibition in the former St Comgall’s in Divis Street, Belfast, I’ll repeat it. The reason is the location of the story was outside the school in 1980 in an interaction with a school crossing warden in this inner city Catholic neighbourhood. A group of Buddhist monks (and one nun) came to Ireland on a peace pilgrimage https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/19216126103/in/photolist-vh4EP2 and while their visit in the context of Norn Iron was focussed on reconciliation, more generally they addressed issues of nuclear weapons and uranium mining (which was a possibility in Donegal at the time).

I borrowed a book from the monks at their Belfast meeting, some of the attendees are pictured in the link above, as there was a Hiroshima illustration I wanted to copy it professionally for possible use as a poster. I said I would return it to them the next day when they were doing a walkabout in north-west Belfast. However I couldn’t find them on either side of the divides; I hadn’t allowed for them taking a sandwich break in Woodvale Park which I hadn’t ventured into. Anyway, frustrated at not finding them I was on the (old unreconstructed) Divis Street and stopped to ask a school crossing warden. As Buddhist monks wandering about the place were not that common in Belfast I hastened to add to my enquiry that the monks were dressed in orange robes. Quick as a flash, with dead pan humour and inwardly smiling but with little hint of an outward smile, he replied “It’s the wrong road for orange men!”.

–

Meanwhile the issue of the terrible level of femicide has been aired in relation to the North with judgement in the Natalie McNally trial and around the same time the killing of Amy Doherty in Derry. It is not just at the societal or international level that us humans have problems with violence. Most women in our society who are murdered are killed by someone known to them, even their partner as in the Natalie McNally case. We have a long way to travel in relation to violence at all levels of life – and us men in particular have the furthest journey to make.

Well, that’s me for another month, we are now into Summer Time and the brighter half of the year, past the spring equinox. Long brighter evenings beckon even if we cannot say they will be warm or dry. And for another change I wish the world some peace, not very likely, but more likely if we hold to our principles and our struggles for dealing with conflict in a humane manner and not beating the tripe out of other humans and the environment. C u soon, Billy.

Billy King: Rites Again, 337

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

Welcome again and I hope it has stopped raining in your neck flood of the woods. What a month or two it has been for precipitation. It has been “Avec nous, le déluge” as opposed to France’s Louis XV and Charles de Gaulle’s “Après moi, le déluge” (“After me, the flood”). Right, that has got talking about the weather out of the way, so on with the rest of the show….

Renaming and shaming

The last issue of Nonviolent News was out of date almost as soon as it was issued and way before the paper edition reached people. There was a news item in the last issue about events at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast and it was ditching the Mitchell part of the name given links between Senator Mitchell and Jeffrey Epstein. In addition a bust of Mitchell was also removed from the front of QUB, the square in front of the old Lanyon building. QUB had gone big on the Mitchell link because of his important role in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998; he was chancellor of the university from 1999 for a decade and Queen’s celebrated their link through the bust and even involvement in a documentary film about him. They are not celebrating the link any more.

It is to Queen’s credit that they have now taken decisive action on this, perhaps helped by the fact the interim director of the former Mitchell Institute is a woman and a lawyer with impeccable human rights credentials, Prof Louise Mallinder. The statement from Queen’s said “While no findings of wrongdoing by Senator Mitchell have been made, the university has concluded that, in light of this material, and mindful of the experiences of victims and survivors, it is no longer appropriate for its institutional spaces and entities to continue to bear his name.” This seems a fair judgement.

It is indeed progress that at least some men are suffering consequences for sexual abuse which destroys lives, sometimes literally as with Virginia Giuffre. If George Mitchell is guilty as charged then he should have the book thrown at him. If not guilty then he suffers from his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and perhaps unwise judgement on his part; but he also had continued contact with Epstein after he had said he had stopped such contact (like Trump, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and others trying to distance themselves from the current international bête noire). Virginia Giuffre did withdraw an accusation against one man she had previously named and if you were on the receiving end of a conveyor belt of men willing to have sex with you, no questions asked, mistaken identity was possible. But it literally destroyed her life. How you deal with uncertainty of identification in such cases is a thorny issue.

However renaming and shaming is not only for sexual crimes. Trinity College Dublin renamed their Berkley Library because of philosopher George Berkley’s involvement in slave-owning and advocacy for slavery. There was a renaming process and the result was it became the Eavan Boland Library after the poet, the first woman to be so honoured in that university with a named building. Eavan Boland was a ground-breaking poet and had a close association with TCD, among other academic institutions; she died in 2020.

If someone is already dead or a monument or artefact is sufficiently old, there is the option of adding a modern inscription or addendum to what is there. This would not have been an option in relation to the George Mitchell bust at Queen’s since he is still alive and the issues concerned are not resolved. In some cases additional labelling may be the best option in that it acknowledges ‘history’ in relation to what was there and why it was put there but points out why they or some aspects might not be celebrated today with what we now know. This was what INNATE did on its photo site in relation to a former Irish ‘peace movement’ figure who, it transpired, violently ruined lives through paedophilia. https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/46714717942/in/photolist-2eb298q

There are no easy answers but answers have to be made and judged. There were anti-slavers and anti-slavery ideology was around in George Berkeley’s time but the practice was legal internationally. Awareness of sexual abuse and rape was there as a crime in the past but there was not the same awareness of the way it could, and did, totally destroy lives.

And renaming may not work. Belfast’s City Airport became the “George Best Belfast City Airport” in 2006 in a rebranding rather than than shaming exercise but virtually no one calls it that and even the airport itself, while not dropping the moniker completely, doesn’t necessarily use the name. Tens of thousands turned out for George Best’s funeral in 2005 because, at a time Norn Iron was going down the tubes with the Troubles, his footballing skills had been the only local bright light on the international stage. But apart from making an already perfectly good name, Belfast City Airport, longer, perhaps naming an airport after a wife beater and painfully chronic alcoholic was not a wise move.

One conundrum I have though is why the man previously known as Prince Andrew chose the surname Mountbatten-Windsor when he was being de-princed even if it was a version of the underlying ‘family’ name. He could have become Andrew Smith if he wanted. OK, ‘Dickie’ Lord Mountbatten was King Charles’ much loved great-uncle but the issue is that there is credible evidence he was a relentless child sex abuser (word search if you want the gory details) including in relation to the notorious Kincora House in Belfast. And regarding Kincora there was probably involvement of different wings of British intelligence in using it to blackmail people rather than intervene and save children. That is altogether apart from Mountbatten’s tragically botched organising of the independence of India and its partitioning.

So choosing the name ‘Mountbatten’ as a change from ‘Prince Andrew’ seemed to be a jump from the sex abuse frying pan into a well stoked fire. Mind you, the financial and other indiscretions of the man previously known as ‘Prince’ look like they have been coming home to roost with his arrest in February, and his ex hasn’t done very well in that department either.

Putting the cartoon before the horse

I have been told, and passed on this information before, that cartoons stimulate the same parts of the brain as cocaine. I would think you might need to ask a specialist neurologist – one specialising in looking at cartoons and looking at people who look at cartoons? – for confirmation of this. However I will share with you that part of my daily routine is to look at a few cartoons at https://www.gocomics.com/comics/a-to-z nearly all of which emanate from the US of A which is where that website is based. I won’t share the few that I follow but it does give me a bit of a lift as I am getting into my daily routine. However if you overdose and/or become addicted and start looking at them all then you will never get to your daily routine at all so I restrict my viewing to three or four favourites. I don’t want you to become hooked.

Seriously…….

….pretty much all approaches to, and disciplines in, life can be the subject of humour. Of course caution is needed – and my sense of humour has at times got me into trouble (cringe) – and if you are dealing with fundamental subjects close to people’s heart, such as their religion or beliefs, then great sensitivity is required and awareness of what is culturally acceptable, what is borderline, and what is a definite no-no. I have dropped a piece I had written for this issue, based on a Times of India video, about major problems with the sewage system on board a US aircraft carrier which has been part of Donald Trump’s flotilla to intimidate and/or attack Iran – did he always intend to attack? In any case with current killings by said warship and flotilla on Iran, including the death of school children, the piece now felt cruel rather than amusing, a belittling of the suffering being inflicted, despite the fact it was about the perpetrators – so it was dropped.

There are debates and have been books about Jesus’ sense of humour, and a metaphor like the chances of a camel passing through the eye of a needle sounds on the humorous side to me. Humour often gets left out of official accounts of anything (the Christian bible could be considered such) because the writers want things to look ‘serious’. And yet ancient Irish monks working on important manuscripts made whimsical additions in the margins. If INNATE had the money and the time, which it doesn’t, I would like this publication or at least my column to be stuffed with cartoons.

And that gives me a chance to tell about the cartoon of the guru on the mountaintop. [Again? – Ed] The guru is sitting on the mountaintop, not looking too happy. A couple of acolytes are talking below. One says to the other “What is wrong with the guru?” and gets the response – “He has forgotten the secret of the universe again”….

When it comes to ‘disciplines’ in life, nonviolence and nonviolence training gets a going over at https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/46378480811/in/album-72157678685228508 on the INNATE photo site – and you can click on the ‘Humour and satire’ album at that entry if you like for others in the peace field.

Dramas (more so) and comedies about lawyers are ten a euro/pound/dollar and some are excellent, some pretty poor, the usual gamut of quality. But I hadn’t seen a comedy take on mediation and mediators until I stumbled across an Australian Broadcasting Corporation/ABC series….about a lawyer. Helen is a likeable and well-meaning but somewhat hapless lawyer down on her luck when she joins a small law firm dealing mainly in wills and probate. The series is primarily about her and other aspects of her life, though mainly work. But she has a boss, Roz, who gets suspended as a lawyer, develops an interest in mediation and sets up a mediation business sharing the same office. Roz is not too great at the basics of mediation, leading to problems, but then, misinterpreting a conversation with Helen, develops a ‘beat them into submission’ approach to mediation. I don’t think saying that is too much of a spoiler in relation to the series.

The humour there is of course in the contrast between what mediation – medi-a-shun – is meant to be, a collaborative process, and what Roz develops, the exact antithesis. And in recent years a lot of lawyers have got into mediation as well so as not to miss that perceived gravy train. Anyway the series is called after the eponymous surname of the main character, ‘Fisk’ (eponymous is a word I like to show off with in writing though not speaking) and it’s on Netflix at the moment. There are 18 programmes in all over three short series of six episodes each, and Roz becomes a mediator in series 2, episode 2 although her interest is flagged up before that. In the programme, Roz is definitely a law unto herself.

Blinking blinkers

We all have things we see and things we don’t see or don’t want to see. I am personally very good, indeed excellent, at ignoring some things until I have to deal with them. The only thing I learnt in one workshop was the word ‘scotoma’ which, while it can mean a blind spot in your physical vision, was interpreted metaphorically as hidden things we don’t know or see about ourselves. Mind you I was at the concluding session of another workshop where people were asked their learnings from it; “Never to come on one of your workshops again!” was a contribution to this closing round – the programme had been totally inflexible despite repeated requests for change from participants.

But, widening the concept of blinkers, I wanted to talk about a couple of short promotional videos for the arms trade – no, I haven’t gone over to the other side. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1211542574295018 and https://defenceinvestment.campaign.gov.uk/northern-ireland/ Let’s take a look at what the videos include and don’t include. The first point is that both feature young women; this may be because they want to get more women involved in making armaments but presumably it is also to give the work a ‘soft’ look in a way while at the same time promoting it as a career choice. And of course they are talking about the benefit of job creation.

Another thing is that at no point do they talk about making armaments or weaponry components. It is about engineering, at the most ‘defence engineering’. There is no mention of making arms components or weapons that kill people. That would definitely be a no no. So the arms industry gets wrapped in cotton wool as simply an engineering opportunity and good for the community. In other words it is a lie by omission.

But the final point I wanted to make comes from the first video mentioned where the apprentice interviewee makes an absolutely amazing comment which portrays the blinkiest of blinkers, or is it a blindfold? In relation to having a high standard of work they say “You can’t just let one little thing slip by because that one little thing could cost someone their life.” The whole point of arms production work is to potentially deprive people of their life! But the only concern expressed is for those involved with producing and using the ‘product’, and there is no awareness of what it is being used for. It is sad, and sad propaganda.

–

Well, that’s my profundities [!!!!!!!!! Are you serious? – Ed] for another month, brighter days are coming meteorologically speaking and with a lot of work and hope perhaps eventually in the world too….

In closing, if you are wanting to hear both sides of the Triple Lock arguments, you can listen to a debate between Niamh Ní Bhríain (Transnational Institute, Neutrality Roadshow) and John O’Brennan, Jean Monnet (i.e. EU-funded) Chair of European Integration at Maynooth University. It’s on Newstalk with Ciara Doherty from early February, go to https://www.newstalk.com/podcasts/newstalk-daily/the-triple-lock-what-happens-if-it-goes

That’s me for now, Billy.

Billy King: Rites Again 336

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

Hello again for my first sharing of thoughts for 2026. And my first thought, looking at Afri’s Féile Bríde programme is the contrast with the Irish government which proclaimed a public holiday in Saint Brigid’s name but totally ignore anything about her such as her peace and sanctuary making and aspects of her mediation. Yes, it is indeed the first public holiday honouring a woman and to be welcomed but they avoid looking at what kind of woman she was. Anyway, on with the rest of the show –

But not before telling you, if you haven’t already listened to/seen The Neutrality Song written by John Maguire and performed by JoeBlack Ryder, do so NOW at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A87_exf8inQ

Tyred out

They were both Scottish and basically invented the same thing but it was the later person who succeeded in popularising the invention. It had been patented in Scotland by the first person but it was the second whose name became known widely around the world associated with it – and it transformed the world of transport. The second invention was in Belfast in 1888.

What was it? Most of us use the invention every day in one form or another if we are travelling by bike, bus or car. It was, of course, as those looking at the title of this piece will have realised, the pneumatic tyre and the successful re-inventer was John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish vet who developed the air filled tyre for his son Johnnie and his tricycle when they lived in central Belfast.

The INNATE peace trail of the centre of Belfast and the Ormeau Road covers the invention as it passes the former North of Ireland playing fields, now Lavinia Square, where a plaque marks a significant event in the popularisation of the invention (the trail includes some culturally or technologically significant items as well as the stories of those working for peace, justice and inclusion) There were cycle races there in 1889 and Willie Hume was a competitor in a few races – all of which he won. And that was because he had Dunlop’s pneumatic tyres. So ‘everybody’ decided they should get them and the rest has been history (initially some cycle races banned pneumatic tyres they gave so much of an advantage).

That history is actually quite complicated as is revealed by my source – a concise but detailed pamphlet by Jim Cooke (Dreoilín, 2000). The tyre and tube combination that we know for the bicycle today went through various stages and inventions by Dunlop and others (the two-way valve was one important development, Dunlop’s original valve was one-way only). The business development was equally complicated and Dunlop, already prosperous from a very successful veterinary business made money but not the fortune he could have from his invention – as is so often the way for inventors, others profit more. Initial business development was in Dublin and Dunlop moved there from Belfast and lived in that city until his death in 1921.

Johnnie, his young son for whom he initially developed the pneumatic tyre (Dunlop père coined the phrase ‘pneumatic’ for the air-filled tyre), died of meningitis aged 42. But his son, John Boyd Dunlop’s grandson, also John Boyd Dunlop, was an important figure in Irish medicine and helped to develop the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin.

Meanwhile the ‘second age’ of the bicycle is coming even if providing the infrastructure to allow it to happen is so slow. Young Johnnie Dunlop was allowed out in central Belfast late at night in 1888 to try out his new pneumatic tyres on his tricycle…..it would be a foolhardy parent who would allow that today anywhere on the island of Ireland but maybe that day will come again….

But I will share a final conundrum which those on the Belfast peace trail are asked: what did John Boyd Dunlop invent at the same time as the pneumatic tyre. Well, it’s a bit of a (flat?) joke really because the answer is “the puncture”…….[If I can get my spoke in, some tyred jokes just keep getting re-cycled – Ed]

Not so Nobel

I am again revisiting the issue of who receives the Nobel prize for peace. No, it is not because of a winner passing on their Nobel medal to the current president of the USA (which says a lot about both the recipients and the awarding body) but rather what was said by figures in Norway about the prize.

I first covered this issue quite some time ago https://www.innatenonviolence.org/billyking/bk206.shtml when writing about Fredrik Heffermehl’s “The Nobel Peace Prize – What Nobel Really wanted” (Praeger, 2010). To recap from there, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the Peace Prize “should be for champions of peace, the confraternization of nations (‘confraternization’ is a difficult term and Heffermehl’s interpretation of putting ‘brotherhood among nations’, written in Swedish, into modern language), the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” This is almost totally ignored in the modern awards.

As I stated then “Originally members of the Nobel Committee included a strong representation of peace movement people; now it is elected according to the strength of parties in the Norwegian parliament and, Heffermehl argues, is used as a tool of pro-NATO Norwegian foreign policy.” So we shouldn’t be surprised at reactionaries and war criminals (e.g. Kissinger) receiving it. In fact the award is often totally at odds with Nobel’s intentions – not so Nobel or noble indeed.

However my triggering in writing this piece was reactions in Norway to María Corina Machado’s Nobel award being passed on to POTUS. Obviously, as was stated in Norway, ‘the prize’ cannot be given away although the medal can (Mairead Corrigan Maguire has given hers to the Ulster Museum in Belfast, a suitable holder). A former mayor of Oslo who is now secretary general of Norwegian People’s Aid, said the situation could damage the reputation of the Nobel peace prize and the Nobel committee. “This is unbelievably embarrassing and damaging to one of the world’s most recognised and important prizes. The awarding of the prize is now so politicised and potentially dangerous that it could easily legitimise an anti-peace prize development.” (Guardian 16/1/26)

Yes, the Nobel Prize for Peace is still the most prestigious award, possibly of any kind. It certainly outranks the Tipperary Peace Convention/Prize. Many of the recipients are admirable people, some are not. But for those who look at the Nobel prize in relation to the original intention, and more generally in relation to the promotion of ‘peace’, its reputation, and that of the Nobel committee, is long since damaged. And why should Donald Trump worry about not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – after all he has the totally bizarre FIFA peace prise (sic) by sycophantic FIFA President Gianni Infantino – though this has become not only a widely considered joke but also a political football….

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is usually defined as believing in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people (as proposed by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill in 18th – 19th century Britain). This is of course distinct from 21st century capitalism where the aim is frequently the greatest wealth of the smallest number of people. But as you know from this Colm, I might start talking about one thing and end up on a complete tangent. Though utilitarianism does have a fair bit to recommend it.

My tangent is going to talk about a recent interaction with a utility company where, at the end of an initial contract

our household was being shoved onto their most expensive rate. So, I had a phone call to get me back where we were. Mention the possibility of leaving and you are nearly there. But said company, who have their call centre in the city where they are based, seem to try to stand out from the crowd. The first point is that the music when on hold in the queue to get a human being includes a raunchy punk number associated with the city concerned. Unusual, certainly.

And their call assistants seem to be encouraged to be human beings; on my recent call I received a strong recommendation to see a film which seemed relevant in the utility-arian’s mind given a personal detail of mine which was shared during the conversation. I have duly noted said recommended film and may view it when possible to do so. But a personal touch like that makes you feel said company has at least a bit of a soul even if it is a profit driven enterprise.

But God be with the days – or not – when you had no choice on your utility supplier – take it or leave it. The ESB (Electricity Supply Board) was the one electricity supplier in the Re:Public. And none of the utilities were private companies you could own or partly own through shares. So the ironic comment from your parent for leaving the lights on might have been “Have you shares in the ESB???!!!” when such was impossible. Of course something stronger might have been said too but that is another matter.

Our ancestors

We have have hopefully long moved on from the idea that the lives of our ancient ancestors were nasty, brutish (oops, I typed ‘british’ there, better correct that quick, ‘i’ and ‘u’ are beside each other on the qwerty keybored….) and short. They may at times have been nasty, they may have been short or shorter, but for brutish you could well look at some people’s and countries’ behaviour today.

Positive and progressive traits and skills which we associate with modern humans are all the time being found to apply to our ancient ancestors, including varieties of creativity. And the complexity of the bushy bush rather than the family tree of so-called homo sapiens keeps getting more complicated. How many varieties of hominins were around altogether? More and more seem to be discovered and our emergence is probably the result of good luck as well as good management of lifestyle and resources apart from any possible genetic advantage.

Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ is just one of the books that looks at the nature of humanity and our cooperativeness.

The Céide Fields in North Mayo is one great example of people living harmoniously and cooperatively in our pre-history on this island, 5,000 years ago. But I was struck by a paragraph from Bill Bryson (he of “A short history of nearly everything” from 2003, with a new version coming out). Asked about the complexity of the human family tree he said: “The thing that fascinates me as a complete outsider is, how did these people all get around? I mean, how did they disperse and what happened when they came upon each other? There’s a tendency to think they would have been fighting, but actually there was a lot of interbreeding. I think it’s kind of heartwarming, the idea that these people were living side by side for long periods. Because we modern home sapiens don’t do that very well at all.”

That was from the ‘New Scientist’ of 27/12/25. And a final quote from Bryson which also says a lot in a few words is “I was terrible at science in school.” And look where he got. That reminds me of the old adage that “Behold the turtle – it only makes progress when it sticks its neck out.”

But to finish off on our ancestors, it has usually been thought that towns ‘proper’ only came to Ireland with the Vikings. Monastic settlements were thought to be the nearest thing. However archaeological excavations near Baltinglass in Co Wicklow may be revealing a much earlier town as revealed at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyw59v8978o with info from Antiquity archaeology journal. The excavation is of Brusselstown Ring (SW edge of Wicklow mountains). A bronze age ‘village’ had already been identified elsewhere in Ireland with 74 roundhouses but in Brusselstown Ring there is the possibility of 600 roundhouses and Dr Brandherm of QUB said “We’re talking a proto-town of sorts, and that’s 2000 years before the Vikings.” There may also have been a stone lined cistern for storing fresh water. There are always new and exciting things to learn about our ancestors and about human innovation. And that can make us wonder why modern humans have progressed so little on areas like conflict and common concern for each other.

–

Well, we are now fairly long embarked on the year 2026 but at the end of January I and you can see and feel the daylight getting longer which is a lovely feeling. Winters are getting shorter with global waming (sic) until, catastrophe of catastrophes, havoc is caused to our weather with the Gulf Stream/AMOC disappearing when We Have Problems, and we don’t need to journey to Newfoundland any more cos Newfoundland will have come here. In the meantime storms are getting stormier and rain rainier. Always look on the bright side of life….

But if you want a bit of a laugh before you go, try Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah as an Irish folk song…..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUQEzWCknLo There are different Cohen lyrics for the song and I leave you to debate whether it’s about religion, sex or both, but the ‘Irish’ version will do you good though you need to watch the visuals too…. There’s more of MurtR Guitar at https://www.youtube.com/@MurtRGuitar/videos though I think Hallelujah is the best of the bunch and heading for half a million views…

Until we meet again, Billy.

Billy King: Rites Again, 335

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Billy King shares his monthly thoughts –

It was sad to hear about the death of Margaretta D’Arcy. I only met her a couple of times, once in her home in Galway where she was very forthright (good for her) in demanding to know why I wasn’t sitting down or doing other things deemed unlawful by the state at Shannon AirWarport. I had or have no good answer to her question except I know that in doing so the legal charges can put your life on hold for some years and prevent you doing other things that you deem important.

It is fitting that the day before her death another three people entered the guarded space of that (effectively) US military base. My congratulations and thanks go out to them and all those who have put themselves on that line. As the Simple Flying (‘simple’ is the word) website says, “Shannon holds an exclusive role as a de facto logistics node for US military operations.” https://simpleflying.com/three-arrested-van-breaches-shannon-airport-us-military-aircraft/ And as The Ditch (Dia duit) said at the end of last year “The US government uses Irish territory as a critical hub for its illegal transport of munitions to the Israel Defense Forces and Nato member states. “ https://www.ontheditch.com/irish-airspace-a-critical-hub/

But on another matter, aren’t shortages terrible, when a desired product comes in short supply. Just look at the shortage of TNT in Europe. Ooops, TNT is the major component of most military munitions. I read that NATO is facing a critical shortage of explosives after much of Europe’s TNT supply was used in the bombardment of Gaza. Poland’s state-owned Nitro-Chem, Europe’s only large-scale TNT producer, is struggling to keep up with demand. This is just one of the many ways Europe has been complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

Love Orange, Love Green

I have been digging out a few oul books. This month I look at something a bit different: “Love Orange, Love Green – Poems of Living, Loving and Dying in Working-class Ulster”, Whitcor Publications, 1974. 178 pages; this was compiled by Marion White and Jim McCorry (their surnames presumably providing, in abbreviation, the publishing name) with some help from Sam Smyth.

It is an amazing publication which can take you back to the exceedingly raw emotions of that time in Northern Ireland. As its name suggests it is poems by working class people, presumably mainly or entirely from Belfast, some proclaiming a militant loyalism, some a militant republicanism, and some a sardonic view of everything or something specific around them. There are no punches pulled and no toning down of anything, what the editors/compilers got is, I imagine, pretty much what they published. It cost 50 pence at the time, the equivalent of about £5 in 2025.

Thus you can have a loyalist viewpoint cheek by jowl with a republican one:

“Hark, it’s the sound of battle, in action we must go

As we defend old Ulster from each rebel foe

Loyal Ulster calls her faithful sons, as we together join

To fight like good King William’s men at the battle of the Boyne…..”

and then in another poem –

“Men of the North, Thraldom who scorn

Never shall bend the knee,

Defiance we throw at the old foe

Free men we wish to be…..”

These expressions nearly makes you think that old lie, that all our wars were merry and all our songs were sad (a saying accredited to G K Chesterton), has something going for it. But there is much more than paramilitary-supporting bravado. A loyalist attacks moderates for, effectively they say, supporting the Provos. A republican attacks the Irish government. Laments for some who have died. Tragedies that should not have happened. Some poems are somewhat and perhaps surprisingly subtle in their support for one side or another, although support was presumably intended, so that it is difficult to say which foot they kick with and which side they kick.

It is divided into sections – Men behind the wire, Belfast, Some who paid the price, Emotions, Incidents, Miscellaneous, The conmen, Soldiers all, Songs.

My favourite is a non-political poem entitled “The people’s taxis”, taxis which acted somewhat like buses that took off in both republican and, to a lesser extent, loyalist areas when buses were hijacked or destroyed and bus services withdrawn. There is no author/poet attribution.

“When the earth has spun a few more years upon its axis

One of the things we’ll talk about will be the people’s taxis

And we’ll look back in fondness on those stalwarts of the road.

Who wouldn’t know the meaning of the phrase “to overload”

For who would travel poe-faced on a bus that’s so inanimate

With windows closed on smoke and smells

Our best friends won’t refer to.

We jockey for position…..but complain?…we wouldn’t dare to

And who would keep their hauteur…and who would want to try.

When you are sitting cheek to cheek, and even thigh to thigh

When conversations feelers have established friend and foe

We debate politicians…and decide who’ll stay or go

We’re not afraid to speak our minds or commit a social gaffe

And always there’s a nut on board who’ll give us all a laugh

So though we long for peace to come, when trouble is no more

Then neither will the taxis be…

Just buses….what a bore…”

All aboard a very evocative poem (punctuation as in the original). In fact the “people’s taxis” have continued though, thankfully, bus hijackings are few and far between. The book was denied an Arts Council grant for effectively not being “work with aesthetic content”. This is rather sad since one of the meanings of ‘aesthetic’, which went through various transmogrifications from the Greek, is to perceive by the senses or the mind, and another is ‘attractive or appealing’ which the poems would be to lots of people. No, certainly it is not your conventional published poet-tree but heartfelt thoughts effectively expressed, a window on the real emotions of the time and a testament to both people’s humanity and their divisions. And the level of violence as in 1974 has gone but the divisions largely remain.

E-pistemology

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. E-pistemology is the study of knowledge online including AI. [Did you just invent a new take on the word epistemology? – Ed] [Yes, but dozens have probably done it before. However here is another one I guarantee no one else will have thought up – ‘epissedemology’, the study of what people know and don’t know when drunk – Billy] [Are your puns trying to drive people to drink? – Ed] [Surely you know that no one should drive and drink – Billy]

Elon Musk has come up with his Grokipedia (Chokepedia?) because he thinks Wikipedia is too left wing – but then he probably considers Adolf Hitler was too left wing and a wishy washy liberal. But not only that, he clearly considers his creation will be perfect; “Musk was so enamoured of his AI-encyclopedia he said he planned to one day etch the “comprehensive collection of all knowledge” into a stable oxide and “place copies … in orbit, the moon and Mars to preserve it for the future”. (Quote from The Guardian 3/11/25.) Talk about hubris, talk about MAGAlomania. Unchecked by human hand or brain, a significant proportion of Musk’s Grokipedia is and will be a right wing travesty.

He is clearly elon-gating his place in the history of the distortion of knowledge for nefarious purposes, or taking a musk-et to shoot up recognised and scientific processes for arriving at knowledge. Taking the ‘piste’ out of epistemology, a piste is a slippery slope for skiing and Musk’s actions are a slippery slope to a world where knowledge is all in the eye of the beholder – and that beholder is a right wing billionaire/perhaps soon trillionaire bigot. And the rest of us will be thoroughly piste off.

Speaking of billionaires, Bernie Sanders had a nice line about the USA which I am sure many others use too; Abe Lincoln spoke of “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” but the USA was now “Government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.”

On Tyranny

You are not getting away from the North American continent here either. I have already done an oul book, above, but here I am writing about one from 2017, “On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder. It is a slim volume published a year into Donald Trump’s first, disorganised, term of office – that seems so long ago now. And the book seems particularly prophetic given what Thump and company have been doing in his second term. It is talking both universally and particularly – universal lessons but often especial mention of, or allusion to, Trump and the USA, and written by someone from that part of the world.

The author should know a thing or two about tyranny if you look at his numerous books focussing on Europe, especially in the Twentieth Century. Whether Trump is T Rex or T Wrecks, well there is still debate about the nature of the man and whether he is the primary mover and shaker with his MAGAlomania and egomania or a useful idiot for the far right – or both, and my money is on ‘both’.

Some of Snyder’s twenty points look major, some minor, but we don’t know what in particular will make ‘the’ difference so it would be unfortunate to say any of them are insignificant. It is scary in the US context how many of these twenty chickens have come home to roost; No.1 is “Do not obey in advance” and yet we have seen the tech giants, and others, rushing to do Trump’s will before being required to do so. No.6 “Be wary of paramilitaries” – people in Northern Ireland should not need reminded about that, whatever their persuasion – is not just about paramilitaries but also the transformation of the police and military. We have seen that with the deployment of the military onto the streets of the USA as well as Trump’s neutral or positive comments about the likes of the Proud Boys.

“Defend institutions”, “Remember professional ethics”, “Believe in truth”, “Listen for dangerous words” are just some of the short chapters in this book, which are then illustrated with historical examples – mainly of failures but also exhortations to positivity. “Make eye contact and small talk” might seem a strange injunction/chapter but it is about maintaining human contact and unspoken solidarity in the face of peril. All of this is important, wherever we are.

However I would feel there are some deficiencies in the book. Firstly, there is no mention of the USA as a colonial enterprise ‘internally’, well, what became internal as the settlers took native lands and also Hispanic lands; this is an important factor in macho politics and (the lack of) gun control which contributes to the right wing political situation. It is an essential part of the backdrop and something which if not addressed contributes to the kind of politics we see today. Secondly, while the law being used to undermine the law is covered, the inadequacy of the US constitution in relation to modern times is not really dealt with.

Finally, although the importance of ‘standing up‘ to authoritarianism is covered, there is no specific mention of nonviolence, nonviolent action and struggle, which is a bit remiss; there is a mention of the danger of terrorist/retaliatory violence (the attack in setting fire to the Reichstag in 1933 is covered and how Hitler used it to gain total control) but not of the importance of building a nonviolent movement or the possibilities of nonviolence including hidden disobedience. Nonviolence is not easy but avoids many of the pitfalls of violence, especially in confronting a power that has most guns.

Trump is keeping his (gun)powder dry before making a move to stay on as President when his second term ends. I consider it would be out of character if he didn’t. He also knows the legal immunity he enjoys as president would disappear if he was no longer POTUS or he would be dependent on having a MAGA-Republican presidency for pardons. What false emergency he can proclaim or use to try to justify an end to US democracy at a national level, such as it is, remains to be seen. But even if that doesn’t work out Vance is waiting in the shadows. Unfortunately watch this and lots of other spaces as to how things develop. US democracy isn’t and wasn’t great but it would be obscene (morally repulsive, disgusting) for it to disappear. They may have talked the talk far more than they walked the walk but it has had positives.

But we shouldn’t imagine we, elsewhere in the world, are immune to tyrannical impulses. Racism is the Trojan horse that the right wing works hard to use to further its agenda, and we see that in both jurisdictions in Ireland. And if you come to believe in racism then you can come to believe in ‘the great replacement theory’ and all the other far right conspiracy theories. And then we are heading to hell in a souped up handcart. All the imperatives in this book apply to us too.

Losing it

There are many things we can lose – our keys, our bank cards, or even our friendships and, in the extreme, our humanity. One story which I saw recently concerned the last two of these. It was a production of ‘Address Unknown’ written by Katherine Kressman Taylor as a novelette before the Second World War and later turned into a one act play. It largely portrays the interaction between two former friends through their letters. It was an excellent amateur production in November at the Southbank Playhouse off Sunnyside Street in Belfast.

The play is set in the period 1932-34 during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and concerns two relatively well to do German friends who were art dealers in the USA, one of whom, Martin, returns to Germany and for reasons perhaps of herd mentality and lack of conscience but certainly self interest gets caught up in serving the Nazi regime. However his friend Max back in San Francisco is Jewish, watching at long distance the horror unfolding, including the horror for his younger sister who is in Germany. When Martin does not aid Max’s sister, Max plots ingenious long distance revenge. You can imagine what the curt message ‘Address unknown’ on a returned envelope implies in this context and it appears twice in the drama.

It is a fairly short book/drama but portrays how easily we can become caught up in things which we would previously have rationally rejected. No society is immune to this. The dehumanisation of others is also our dehumanisation. As we watch right wing violence in Ireland, North and South, we need to be imaginative and creative in how we support and portray the humanity of all. The tragedy of Ballymena race riots in the summer – with charges now withdrawn against the Romanian teenagers who were then-alleged rape perpetrators – is crazy; race riots with no ‘race’ to it.

It is too apocalyptic to say we are always on the edge of the abyss but it does not take long for a society with problems to become a society with extermination at some level – there are many examples of this including Northern Ireland from 1969. This of course means addressing those real problems while they can be dealt with and not leaving them to fester and become totally overboard. Ireland has much working out to do yet.

–

Well, perhaps that is not ending on a bright note but my first item, about Norn Iron, portrays the past there which was a load bleaker than the present. To say the North has problems would be an understatement but progress has been made in some areas which I hope will continue.

It’s now the race into Christmas, I hope you survive the pressures and get to enjoy your Christmas parties and festivities. I enjoy it when we get there and the lull afterwards. And speaking of lulls, there is no full issue of this e-steamed publication, just a news supplement, in January so I won’t see you again until the start of February. Meanwhile, as is my wont [Won’t what? – Ed] [Won’t give up on using that good old fashioned word ‘wont’ – Billy] I wish you and yours a peaceful Christmas and a preposterous new year – Billy.

Billy King: Rites Again, 334

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Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

Well, Michael D is finally about to up on his bikeldee and away and CC (cc Heather Humphreys), Catherine Connolly, will very soon be there in the Áras. She has been a staunch peace and neutrality supporter, sound on many social questions, as well as being a very unassuming and likeable person. The government indicated that her being elected would make no difference to plans to ditch the Triple Lock. But perhaps some Fianna Fáil TDs will look into their hearts, and that of voters in their constituencies, and find some backbone to resist Micheál Martin’s protracted and ill thought out onslaught on said Triple Lock, based on the support shown for Connolly.

The Irish presidency is primarily a representative rather than a purely political, and certainly not a party political, one. Michael D pushed the boat out in a different way to Mary Robinson who initiated the demand by Irish people for someone in the role who was not a time or place server. The office is in good hands with Catherine Connolly. It would have been interesting to have an Ulster (Monaghan) Presbyterian in Heather Humphreys in the role but on social issues and on peace she is a typical conservative Fine Gaeler so Connolly is streets or fields ahead on a wide number of issues. There were some deficiencies in the presidential election process, including the criteria to ‘enter the contest’, but Catherine Connolly won by a landslide.

Biodiversity and my-cology

The world is an amazing place. While we can get thoroughly depressed about many aspects of what is happening in the world due to the actions of Homo Sapiens (title open to dispute for a number of reasons), we can still share amazement for the wonder and adaptability of nature. We can destroy all the flora and fauna we want (or, rather, don’t want enough to alter our behaviour) but ‘nature’ will go on – and would go on even if we, Homo Sap, do not, and we are still being foolish beyond measure.

There were two stories in the Gordian recently that speak about the resilience of nature, one from Canada and one from Iceland. One is about the restoration of natural ecosystems on Toronto’s waterfront: “The century-old plants bursting from newly exposed soil initially made headlines, but it was only the first of a string of extraordinary discoveries. Pollen from the American chestnut, a tree now extinct in the area, was discovered in the dirt. So too was a seed from the 1500s. The remains of one of the largest and most important peat bogs in the region were rescued. Then, last year, the team submerged soil samples and made the astounding discovery of water fleas, trapped in the soil since at least the late 1800s, which had sprung back to life. So too had worms, larvae and zooplankton….” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/09/toronto-waterfront-soil-plants-worms

And a new, volcanic island off Iceland has amazed scientists with the speed at which life has established itself after it began to emerge in 1963. “Scientists had expected algae and mosses to be the first colonisers, building up a base of soil that would eventually support vascular plants. But that step was skipped completely. More plants were washed ashore in the following years, and some clung to the island’s bare volcanic rock……..In the early 1980s, black-backed gulls started to nest on sections of the island, sheltering in one of the stormiest parts of the Atlantic Ocean. Their arrival kicked off an explosion of life. Guano carried seeds that quickly spread grasses along the island, fed in turn by the nutrients from the birds. For the first time, whole areas of bare rock became green….” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/13/nature-volcanic-island-surtsey-iceland-ecosystems-aoe

Meanwhile, coming not only closer to home but to my actual home, we have a patch of grass at the front of our house which is less than a couple of metres wide with a hedge before the suburban footpath. And a hornbeam tree there in the footpath. The grass might have last been dug up many decades ago and what grows there, including clover, is let grow. But what I saw this autumn amazed me; not one, not two, not three, but four varieties of fungi growing, a couple overlapping but mainly in succession, presumably in symbiotic relationship with the tree outside. I did check out the possibilities for the names of said fungi but not being enough of a fun guy to be a mycologist a) I am highly unsure of identifying them correctly, and b) because of that and this not being a mycology journal I will spare you the names. I will say one was smaller but somewhat similar to a field/edible mushroom, one a thin, pale ‘toadstool’, and one was a mottled globe headed fungi.

The appearance of such fungi is just part of a cycle but I did institute a ‘no mow September’ and longer to let them do their thing, and presumably spare the spores, it wasn’t a spore-adic reaction [Spore us the puns – Ed], apologies if any of them are allergenic. I would do the same next year. It was a brilliant example of biodiversity not in my back yard but in our small front garden. There might not be much room in our front patch of grass but there is enough, indeed ‘mushroom’, for fungi.

Do you want to die for NATO?

The answer that I would give, by the way, is ‘no’ [Surprise, surprise – Ed] – and I don’t want anyone else to do so either. But in my look at oul books – last month I covered Mary Condren’s “The Serpent and the Goddess” – I dug out my rather worn and tired looking copy of Patrick Comerford’s book with that title, “Do you want to die for NATO?”. This dates from 1984 (published by Mercier Press). How topical can you get? And this was 41 years ago.

Of course much has changed in those four decades and the Irish state, underhandedly and against the wishes of the broad mass of citizens, has cosied up as much as it can to NATO. I should point out that it is INNATE practice to refer to said entity in capitals rather than the cosier looking ‘Nato’ (cf The Irish Times, the change even being made in a published letter by the INNATE coordinator) – there is nothing cosy about NATO, its practice or its commitment to first use of nuclear weapons should it deem it necessary.

The Do you want to die for NATO? Book is short but packed with detail. The context in 1984 was the risk of nuclear war between NATO and the USSR/Russia, either because of deliberate policy or because of accident (the real possibility of this happening has been well documented, where one side believes an attack is coming). Plus ca change….. As to who is winning an arms race, Patrick Comerford says “No one wins a mad race over a cliff edge” (page 12). Plus ca change…

While the Wolfe Tone quote from 1792 is included (page 50) that “We should spurn the idea of moving an humble satellite around any power”, the book does deal with the times and people with whom neutrality can be particularly identified, and those times and people who opposed it or were prepared to ditch it of the time and terms were right. But the independent Irish state got off to a good start with involvement in the League of Nations and opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and opposition to (Blueshirt) pressure to support Francoist fascism in Spain despite its supposed ‘Catholicism’.

The book details how NATO and Warsaw Pact maps or exercises assumed that in a nuclear war there would be Irish targets; 23 potential targets, North and South, are identified in total by the author in the book. It looks at Irish involvement in communications networks for NATO, including Mount Gabriel in the Republic and the (then) Bishopscourt radar base, operated by the RAF, in Co Down.

When the practice of neutrality was fearless and determined, e.g. with Frank Aiken, there were positive results, as with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which came into effect in 1968. However people on all sides of the Irish political scene could be positive or ambivalent; Charles Haughey is quoted from 1981 saying Ireland was militarily neutral but not politically or ideologically neutral – that old let out, much used since by those wanting closer involvement with NATO and EU military developments. On he other hand Garret Fitzgerald, from a party traditionally less inclined to support active neutrality, said in 1993 that Ireland “can also challenge the emergence of a European military super-power” (page 65) – while contemporary governments have attempted to jump on the militarist EU gravy train through involvement in the arms industry and the military-industrial complex.

The EEC, as it then was, is identified, rightly, as a particular challenge to neutrality. But neutrality was never just a bargaining chip to gain a united Ireland; in 1940 Dev refused Churchill’s offer to abandon neutrality in return for a united Ireland. The book also looks at some of what a non-aligned defence could be including the mining of ports and airports so to be useless to an invader.

The history of Irish neutrality is not straightforward but there is much to be proud about. Some of the historical and contemporary complexities of the time (1984) are explored in this book. Patrick Comerford says (page 89) that neutrality could be thought of as a unique contribution or gift “to an EEC seeking political union”. It is a shame and a waste if contemporary Irish politicians and commentators feel that Ireland would be better as a small cog in a large military machine rather than striking out fearlessly for peace. I consider that a failure of imagination, nerve – and backbone – in standing up to the powers that be.

Telling it like it is

There is one inveterate veteran when it comes to letter writing on peace issues in Ireland and that is former Irish army officer and Veterans for Peace and Shannonwatch activist Edward Horgan. He has more letters published than most of us have hot dinners. And all of them make sound sense. Here is one which appeared in different Irish newspapers in mid-to-late October:

“Instead of bringing peace to the Middle East the Trump dictated Gaza peace plan may end up establishing the virtual success of the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. Hopefully, the killing will stop in Gaza in the short-term. The 20-point peace plan makes no provision for justice for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, or the establishment of peace in the wider Middle East, especially in Lebanon and Syria. Israel has ensured by its environmental and physical destruction, that the Gaza Strip will be unsafe for anyone to live for decades. On 7th Oct 2025 the health ministry released details on Palestinians killed and wounded in Gaza. The recorded death toll since 7 October 2023 is now 67,183 killed, with 169,841 injured. These statistics include: 20,179 children killed, 44,143 children wounded, 4,900 children with amputations or disabilities, 51,196 children under five years old suffering from malnutrition.

This amounts to genocide, yet the present peace plan fails to hold Israel and its US and European supporters to account. The peace plan says that Gaza will initially be governed by a new international transitional body, the “Board of Peace,” which will be headed by President Donald J. Trump, and others including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair. President Trump and his predecessors, and Tony Blair, have been responsible for waging wars of aggression since 2001 that have caused the deaths of millions of people. An International Stabilization Force (ISF) will be immediately deployed in Gaza. A similar stabilization force was deployed in Afghanistan which brought twenty years of chaos to the Afghan people. The quote by Roman historian Tacitus seems appropriate “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

QCEA on EU

QCEA, the Quaker Council on European Affairs, always has interesting things to say about the way western Europe is heading, including the realities of the EU in what had been a ‘peace’ project becoming much more of a ‘war’ project. Their summary of Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union address on 10th September is “In her 10 September speech, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen spoke of peace mainly through security and defence, with 16 mentions of “fight.” We had hoped to hear more about peace as justice, dialogue, or cooperation, but competitiveness prevailed. Climate was framed as decarbonisation, overlooking nature and the environment. Migration was addressed in terms of management, without reference to the EU’s Anti-Racism Action Plan.” Von der Leyen’s speech is at https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/ov/SPEECH_25_2053 and the QCEA is at https://www.qcea.org/ where you can find out more about their work and read their publications.

Supporting genocide

I find unionist politics in Norn Iron sad in a different way to how I find some Sinn Féin policies sad – I understand why the latter support previous IRA actions but no, IRA violence was not necessary or unavoidable, it is that people on all sides saw no alternative – there were nonviolent alternatives that people did not see or know about. I recently wrote about unionist support for British militarism (they are joined by the current government in Dublin in their support of militarism). But on many questions, whether on education – dividing children into academic and less-academic schools at age 11 – or international issues, well words fail me. [That would be a first – Ed.] Support for Israel ‘to the hilt’ – appropriate as this is a sword metaphor – comes from ideological and theological but not-very-logical sources, as well of course for the all important reason of them’uns supporting Palestine.

Recently a unionist delegation went to Israel, paid for by the Israeli state (‘No expense to UK taxpayers, folks!’). The cross-party unionist group included Norn Iron Minister for Education Paul Givan and the amazing Sammy Wilson, both of the DUP. They visited an Israeli school in occupied East Jerusalem and Paul Givan had a photo put up on the NI Department of Education website. Naturally all hell broke loose with activists on Palestine and those who are not unionists and also teachers unions and bodies. The DUP are of course standing by their man or men. But I wanted to express how very thoughtful it was of the Israeli state in a war situation to offer an all expenses visit to look at educational approaches, obviously there were no ulterior motives whatsoever, and there is absolutely no question of the unionists themselves being political stooges……

– – – – – –

Well, it may not be meteorological winter until December but it feels We Have Arrived there. But every season has its pluses and minuses. Winter can be a time for relaxing at home, hopefully in the warmth, with a good book or film and maybe a pleasant chat with your partner or a friend or two. And winter weather is an excuse to stay put there rather than attend to other matters. The winter solstice is a wee bit away yet but, come the end of January, there is the chance to see days getting longer again and the process of regeneration begin. I hope you are sitting comfortably as you read this. I will see you again soon before what can be, for many people, the mad social whirl coming up to Christmas. Hibernia abu, Billy.