Tag Archives: Billy King

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, 339

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , , ,

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.

–

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 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, 333

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , , , ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

Hello – When I was writing my piece in the last issue about flagitis, the unfortunate and debilitating condition of using flags for ethno-nationalist purposes, I hadn’t referred to the fact that the disease had spread to the 26 counties, the Re:Public. This was remiss of me. The epidemic does not seem to be as widespread south and west of the border in Ireland but it is still present in many places, and it seems quite a virulent and nasty disease. I was writing about how it, obviously, has been endemic in the North but now spread to Britain where it seems to have spread like wildfire.

I hope that sensible precautions being taken will mean that it does not affect so many people and areas in the Republic; many people are already acting to welcome, and express welcome for, newcomers – who are actually needed as important parts of the economy and society. However we need to continue our research on developing effective vaccines for this terrible affliction of flagitis which poisons the whole of society.

And here we are with issue No.333 of this e-steamed publication. It is highly unlikely that it will ever reach issue 666, the supposed mark of the Divil himself, or indeed No.999 – at which point shouting ‘Help!’ might be appropriate – and at the current rate of production the latter would be sixty-odd years away. Anyway, on with my contribution to No.333…..

Jaw jaw and war war

The title of this piece is a reference to Winston Churchill’s supposed dictum that jaw jaw is better than war war, though it appears he actually said “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war” and it was Harold Macmillan, another British PM, who actually said the “jaw, jaw…war, war” bit. In any case it is not a piece of advice Churchill necessarily observed himself.

Another relevant anecdote is about the man sprinkling salt on city pavements. When asked by a passerby what he was doing he said “It’s to keep away alligators.” The passerby responded “But there are no alligators!” and the salt sprinkler said “Exactly!” The absence of something does not prove a particular reason for that absence.

However you may have noted Donald Trump’s recent claim to have stopped a war between Cambodia and Armenia, two countries some thousands of miles apart who would be largely unaware of each other’s existence let alone engaging in armed conflict. He had however been involved with partially ending Thai-Cambodian clashes and for that we can be thankful (for small mercies which is what we are likely to get at best from the current US administration). Obama was – mistakenly – given a Nobel Peace Prize at the start of his presidency, something totally out of kilter with what the Nobel Prize for Peace is about. I have previously covered what the Nobel Peace Prize was meant to be about but hasn’t been, e.g. https://www.innatenonviolence.org/billyking/bk206.shtml However Trump’s response to some intemperate comments from a prominent Russian political figure was to send two nuclear submarines across the Atlantic and in my book that should automatically exclude him. But he continues to try to prise a Prize from the Nobel committee when his due is more a Nobel Piece of Rubbish Prize.

Trump’s UN claim to have ended seven conflicts is examined in more detail by different sources, e.g. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/sep/23/donald-trump/trump-ended-seven-wars-un-general-assembly/ which concludes “The status of the seven conflicts — and the nature of Trump’s role in easing them — are more varied and tenuous than his statement portrays. We rate it Mostly False.” It is not that he and his administration have done nothing but that in none of these has he ended ‘unendable’ wars. We note that the USA uses its military muscle – with the best part of a thousand military bases around the world including, de facto, Shannon Airport – primarily for its own ends. But can he stop or will he start a very uncivil civil war in the USA?

Oul books: Patriarchy in Ire-land

One of the features of being old, not necessarily a unique feature however, is that you may possess lots of books which are also oul – read, unread, half read, dog-eared, or even in pristine condition, and ranging from much treasured volumes through to those which raise questions about your state of mind at the time of purchase. Even occasional purges of those you definitely don’t want to keep, to the hoped for benefit of a local charity shop, doesn’t seem to do the trick in keeping them under control. And we all want, but seldom, achieve, Control.

Anyway, I thought it might be illuminating in this column – for me anyway [ !!!! – Ed] – to occasionally explore some of the oul books I have hanging about. The first to hand is Mary Condren’s “The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland” first published in 1989 and then in Ireland in 2002 by New Island Books and this had a lengthy new introduction. The book is a wide-ranging dissection of religion, culture and patriarchy in Ireland – with wider significance I could add.

When I hear the term ‘patriarchy’ I think of many things, including numerous different aspects of violence and it is this that is the most relevant in the pages of Nonviolent News and which I will concentrate on here. But I also think of ‘paytriarchy’ as in “Remember the Golden Rule – He who has the gold makes the rules.” The victims of patriarchy are primarily women but, and to a much lesser extent and in a different way, men are denied or deny becoming the whole people that they could be. But on to Mary Condren’s book which is a study in partriarchalisation [Is that another of your made up words? – Ed] [Maybe, but you know what I mean so it’s a viable word – Billy].

The story about St Patrick banishing snakes from Ireland is an interesting one because Mary Condren shows ‘the serpent’ as a symbol of old matriarchal and pre-monotheistic religions. The story is thus not just one of Patrick performing a miracle in banishing animals who weren’t here anyway but in banishing old pagan religions. Christianity was stamping its mark and stamping out snakes. But – snakes alive?! There are also some illuminating insights on Brigid, goddess and saint (both of these).

I am now going to be give a few quotes, to some extent out of context, which talk about patriarchy and militarism, and this piece is not a review of the book, merely picking up some points made on the themes involved. You can search out the original for the full meaning and context.

“Contact with women could weaken men’s potency when engaging in their two most powerful activities – hearing the word of God or going to war. In this we can see a very clear connection between the development of a militaristic culture and the development of a new male identity independent of the world of women or the world women had represented.” (page 18, 2002 edition).

Quoting some of Kuno Meyer’s writing on Adamnán makes a fascinating sub-text to the Law of the Innocents (page 52 and following). The mythology involved is too complex and long to include here but Mary Condren concludes “The story reflects a time when Irish women were greatly oppressed by the warrior elitist society. Christianity had come, yet obviously the priests, like Adamnán, needed drastic measures of persuasion before being prevailed upon to confront the ruling classes….”

In a chapter on clerical celibacy, she writes (page 145) “In the more stable from of politics, singular heroic acts would not be enough to support an ongoing kingly reign. What was needed was a much more reliable marriage of politics and religion that could be called upon at a moment’s notice. Standing armies would be one way of solving the political problem, but in the new arrangements between church and state, and with a church hierarchical structure based upon a military model, more symbolic changes would be needed……The priests, in effect, became the new heroes of the society. Previously their “heroic deeds” in the service of God simply would have been proof of great holiness. Now their great power enabled them to confer religious authority upon the kings…..male priests….became a permanent caste of heroes with a monopoly on religious power.”

And one of Mary Condren’s conclusions (page 198) is that “Instead of monotheism, we now have the working strategy of unquestioning obedience to military authority, which continues to sustain various forms of patriarchal power….Those soldiers willing to sacrifice their lives confer upon the military-industrial complex a new kind of theological status, that which represents the “whole” now that traditional religion seldom serves this purpose. Indeed, the inroads of secularism may have occasioned a “sacrificial crisis” or a “collapse of the sacrificial economy” in which the search for political absolutes now becomes dominant.” Seem familiar????

Anyway, the book is an oldie but a goldie and worth seeking out if you are interested in the themes explored – in great detail.

But I have a final thought arising from the book, and that is how the powers that be can dissemble and deceive. St Brigid’s Day has, for the last few years, been declared a public holiday in the Re:Public, the first named after/connected with a woman. Oh, how progressive! But does the Irish government pay one jot of attention to, let alone follow, what St Brigid was about? Peace, protection, mediation, welcoming, women’s assertiveness, all would be associated with Brigid. And what is Ireland doing? Cosying up to the Big Boys of militarism and power in NATO and EU militarisation, and doing less than the minimum for asylum seekers. So it is “Oh, how sad!” rather than “Oh, how progressive!”.

The wizard of ID

It takes some doing to get all the parties in de Nort agreed on anything but all seemed to support the idea that Keir Starmer’s proposed UK digital identity card, even if for a mobile phone, is a Bad Idea. And even if this ‘BritCard’ was slightly hidden and you only needed to have it with you for certain occasions or services, listing your nationality – Irish, British, Klingon – is Not A Good Idea in a contested-identity region like Northern Ireland. Commentators pointed to the difficulty for cross-border workers. And unionists felt it would make no difference to immigration anyway – which, as you may know, is tiny in the North compared to the Republic or Britain and most other European countries/areas, despite the noise some of the right try to make to exploit the issue. However another unionist commentator said it was a mistake to reject the idea and playing into nationalist hands, presumably on the rationale that forcing people to have and/or carry British identification that they rejected was Good For The Union.

Identity cards have a chequered history in general. The public services card in the Re:Public might have been pushed further as a more general id card if people hadn’t pushed back against the Irish government’s moves on this. But in a society like Northern Ireland where the need is not to abolish people’s chosen identities but make those of less consequence than common humanity and mutual acceptance, it is a step backwards. Cue pictures of someone on a backstreet in the dark stopped by vigilantes or paramilitaries and asked to produce their id card. How it would actually be operationalised in Northern Ireland would be a nightmare but it would also be strange to leave the North out from an otherwise UK-wide scheme – but whether it will be identical remains to be seen.

We will wait and see what develops or founders on this, and opposition in Britain has been building. I pity any poor public servants tasked with introducing this in Northern Ireland, they would have a lot of sleepless nights on their hands; it is on the cards that it would not be very successful and any success that will be achieved will be hard won.

On another note about the UK, in a voting intentions survey or poll published in the 30/8/25 edition of the “i” newspaper, Nigel Farage’s Reform party had a 15% lead over Labour (35% to 20%) with the Conservatives on 17%; if replicated in four years time, the inequitable UK ‘first past the post’ voting system would give Reform a whopping majority… This might be welcomed by some Irish nationalists as likely leading to a united Ireland (it might) but it would actually be very bad news for the people of Norn Iron and Ireland as a whole with the likelihood of instability and chaos, whatever happened, with a far right English nationalist party in power in the UK. Any resultant transition to a united Ireland – and that couldn’t be assumed either – would be disorderly to say the least.

Speaking of the Wizard of Id, in the cartoons of that name my favourite is probably the one where the king is showing a visiting dignitary or neighbouring royalty around the kingdom. The visitor asks a peasant how they are doing and the peasant replies “I can’t complain.” A further question from the visitor about why they say that elicits the response – “It’s not allowed.” There are many dangers on this island and we are not at that stage but in many countries internationally authoritarianism is in the ascendant.

–

Well, that’s me for now as winter weather is ready to kick in. September wasn’t too bad but we didn’t get a summer-like ’Indian summer’, unfortunately, that sometimes comes in the earlier part of that month. The shops are now displaying their Christmas tat, sorry, wares, so the year moves on, and I will see you again soon. There will be a new president-elect in the Re-Public before I write again but I have already had my say on that, Billy.

Billy King: Rites Again, 332

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , , , ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

Hello again, summer doesn’t be long in going in, and before you know it again it is autumn and those autumn schedules. Well, the mysteries of time have still to be properly unravelled and all we can do is make the most of the time it is and the time we have. But I hope you had a pleasant time of it and time out over the summer. And it’s time for my first Colm of the autumn….

All the presidents, men and women

The post of President of Ireland comes up for filling in November as Michael D finishes his second term – with a presidential election before then. Let’s hope we get someone at least half as good. It is a largely symbolic role but that symbolism took on a much more dynamic character under Mary Robinson, the first woman president, elected in 1990, and it was built on by Mary McAleese and Michael D Higgins himself (he who, when Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht was the subject of a Saw Doctors’ song “Michael D, Michael D, Up on your bikeldy, Michael D Higgins, Up in the Dáil…..”) While party political support has been important in the victory of the last three presidents, most voters have looked for more than that.

Prior to Mary Robinson the role of president was essentially for retired – and tired – political figures though the very first President, Douglas Hyde, was primarily an academic and Irish language advocate, and significantly, a Protestant (as was Erskine Childers, president from 1973 until be died in 1974). Eamon de Valera was president for two full terms (1959-73), way past when he was physically capable of playing the role – he was 90 and in very poor health for some time when he retired (the exiting Michael D is 84 but still energetic enough). The ‘Hernia’ satirical page at the back of ‘Hibernia’ magazine marked Dev’s 90th birthday with the headline “De Valera at 90” and below that “Vroom, vroom, vroom!”

As to who will emerge as next president, well, the game is quite open and many names are floated but with intense scrutiny of candidates these days, their deeds and misdeeds, and it being easy to slag someone off, it is a brave or foolhardy person to put their name forward (I put Michael Flatley and Conor McGregor in the latter category of ‘foolhardy’, both unlikely to get the necessary support to appear on the ballot paper, and McGregor a civil case defined rapist – no thank you to him even being on the ballot paper).

Heather Humphreys, a former Fine Gael TD and Minister, is emerging as the likely candidate from the Fine Gael stable and as a Monaghan Prod, her grandfather signed the 1912 Unionist Solemn League and Covenant, she would be an interesting choice and a conservative with relatively broad support. However from a progressive peace and neutrality point of view it would be impossible to beat the credentials and views of Catherine Connolly, Galway West TD, and a plain spoken supporter of equality, inclusion and both peace and neutrality and opposition to NATO. It is all to play for yet.

Discerning the truth got rather more difficult

Two British colonels were captured by the Russians while on the ground directing Ukrainian military operations. This story started circulating some weeks ago and names and a picture were provided. There was just one problem with this story. It wasn’t true and the picture was a poor AI generated image. The names provided didn’t appear anywhere on British military records.

The first thing to say is that the story could have been true. What various western countries are doing to support Ukraine, beyond the obvious, is anybody’s guess. And if you look at what the British state got up to in Northern Ireland during the Troubles – within its own jurisdiction – then anything is possible; running a list of agents as long as a plethora of arms (or armaments?) with many of them recruited, presumably, through blackmail, even running a laundry, the Four Square Laundry, to gather intelligence when picking up and dropping off, and, handily, to be able to test clothes for any incriminating evidence; the Military Intelligence Museum website refers to it only covering ‘catholic’ areas. And to quote another account ““We were not there to act like an army unit, we were there to act like a terror group,” said one unidentified former member of the MRF* who didn’t disclose his name out of concerns for his safety.” https://www.coffeeordie.com/article/four-square-laundry-service *British Army unit the Military Reaction Force.

The old saying of truth being the first casualty in war is true as far as it goes but civilians including children are first, and probably last, casualties too. Propaganda is nothing new, e.g. at the start of the First World War stories about the Germans butchering Belgian babies (the label ‘Catholic’ added for Irish benefit) – there were German atrocities but magnified well beyond the truth by the Allies. But with social media just one person can start a lie/rumour and it can go viral very fast.

But let’s look at the above story about the colonels. Suppose there were British colonels captured by the Russians while fighting with Ukraine. Suppose they were secret agents who, while previously openly in the military had been ‘retired’ and given new identities. Suppose when they were captured the British secret services deliberately manufactured dodgy looking AI images of them so any discerning person would immediately assume the story was false. The possibilities are endless, particularly in the era of social media and AI.

We know some of the dastardly deeds that Russian forces and the Russian state get up to in Ukraine. But we also know that the Nord Stream gas pipelines sabotage in the Baltic in 2022, initially blamed on the Russians, was done by others (e.g. pro-Ukrainian). We simply don’t get to hear about all the activities the US, UK and NATO are doing to destabilise Russia, and you can be sure they are at it. We hear in the likes of the mainstream Irish media about the presence of dodgy Russian ships around the seas of Ireland – but not about dodgy NATO ones, here or around Russia We are fed only a fraction of the picture and propaganda gets more sophisticated all the time. And in some ways like in Russia, most people don’t read between the lines.

Discerning the truth has got more difficult and requires time, thought and investigation…but with social media a story like the British colonels one can get legs and be over the horizon before we have cottoned on that it is fake.

Unionist support for British militarism

I find it sad the way Northern unionists, the vast majority anyway, support British militarism without question. I know unionism tends to be right of centre but it seems obsessive to me. There are many positive British values that could be actively supported like Nye Bevan’s universal health service policy (not his anti-anti-nuclearism of 1957!) or some British policies and practice on multiculturalism (now seemingly in a sad state), and lots of British culture worth immersing in. Going back in time the DUP wanted Cruise missiles based in Norn Iron cos Britain was getting them. It all seems so sad in a society which suffered from armed conflict for three decades from around 1969 onwards – how can you wish what was inflicted on you on people in other countries and in much greater measure?

Unhelpfully in a variety of ways, it seems British politicians of all shades regularly use arms production in Northern Ireland as a means try to keep unionists sweet. For example, Ben Lowry reported, and commented on (News Letter online 16/8/25), a visit by Rachel Reeves, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, where she is quoted “Ms Reeves said: “Northern Ireland is brimming with talent and ambition, from cutting-edge film studios to world-class defence manufacturing.” She said that the investments she announced were a “turning point”, adding: “Every pound we invest here supports good jobs, strengthens our economy, and boosts the United Kingdom’s standing on the world stage, with Northern Ireland at its heart.”

Ben Lowry went on to say “Last year, the influential centre-right think tank, Policy Exchange which is based in Westminster, issue a report that said that Northern Ireland is key to addressing the UK’s security concerns. The document called for the UK government to expand its naval and air presence in NI for “maritime patrol missions against Russian intrusion”. It also urged the UK and its regional partners to unite and “up the ante” in pressing Dublin to do its “fair share for collective security”. The then prime minister Rishi Sunak said that he would be “delighted” to examine the report and added: “I have seen, with my own visits, the vital role that Northern Ireland is playing through the location of firms like Thales and Harland and Wolff.” “

Lowry went on, in the typical militarist and British right wing fashion, to accuse the Republic of “defence freeloading”. Yes, the Republic should be doing much more on international peace and security but certainly not by dishonestly ending the Triple Lock on deployment of troops and getting as close to NATO as it possible can. Ireland’s role is ( = should be) to be a peace builder and peace maker – not a bit part player in the militarisation games of NATO and the EU. Security for Ireland comes from building peace not upping the militarist ante. And there is such a thing, in military related terminology, as ‘non-offensive defence’, aside from the possibilities of civilian based defence and planned nonviolent resistance which the 2023 Irish state-run Consultative Forum on International Security Policy refused to examine.

Flegs again

Flags including national flags can mean many things. The feeling is very different between a flag placed outside a house in a Nordic country for someone’s birthday and a flag – mainly loyalist but to some extent republican* ones too, in Norn Iron. Being resident in Norn Iron I felt (uncomfortably) ‘right at home’ when visiting the West Bank/Palestine some years ago and seeing the Star of David flags of Israeli settlers. Both tend to be marking territory, or claiming territory, in a not too subtle way. * While Irish tricolour flags are used in Northern Ireland, also to claim territory and proclaim identity, there isn’t the same culture of blanket flag raising on the Catholic/Nationalist side of the house.

While we should all be internationalists first, and nationalists with a very small ‘n’ second, pride in one’s country can be a positive thing – pride in ‘our’ culture and traditions – though not all traditions are pride-worthy and we need to be critical where ‘our’ country falls short on equality, human rights and relating to the world. Right wing nationalism and ethno-nationalism have been making strides and not just in the West – think of Hindu ethno- or religious nationalism in India.

And now we have the Northern Irelandisation of England with Union and especially St George’s flegs going up in abundance. Of course this is denied to be a racist action, and for some people they may not see it that way, but the overall effect is certainly that – England for ‘the English’, and that defined in a narrow way. For the far right it is a way to move their agenda forward in a seemingly ‘acceptable’ way. The pictures make me feel it is just like the oppressiveness of Norn Iron political culture.

Meanwhile the report of a commission on ways forward on issues to do with flags, emblems, culture and tradition in the North, with some very sensible analysis, has sat firmly and securely on the shelf since its completion in 2019 and publication in 2021. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-59266116 and https://www.executiveoffice-ni.gov.uk/publications/commission-flags-identity-culture-and-tradition-final-report It is another unfortunate illustration of the ineffectiveness of the Stormont Assembly on many issues where the 2+ sides can’t agree, and even some where they could if they faced reality (e.g. acting effectively to save Lough Neagh).

A flag on display is not a neutral object, it is an object that can be used in a thousand different ways. Overall I wish the support for fleg waving would flag. Some of the answers are blowing in the wind. But the issues involved, like flags left up for some time, leave society in the North ragged, torn and dishevelled, and stuck up a pole with difficulty in getting down.

–

Well there we go, that’s me for now and I hope you are prepared physically and mentally for autumn and winter and whatever they throw at you, which I hope won’t be too much. And however mad Ireland is you can be sure there are at least as bizarre, or bizarrer [That’s not a word – Ed] [It is now, say it out loud cos it sounds a bit bizarre – Billy] things going on elsewhere, like the guy in England arrested for sporting a ‘Plasticine Action’ t-shirt after the banning of Palestine Action under terrorism legislation – doesn’t sound like the police were modelling very good behaviour……or shooting the messenger when D Trump fired the head of an official US statistics bureau when he didn’t like the job figures given…..there are lies, damn lies, and Donald Trump.

September can still be a very pleasant month, weatherwise, in our neck of the woods, and with global warming winters aren’t as cold as they use to be either. In the damp cold of an Irish winter you may not notice too much difference though. Anyway, it is only the start of autumn, and there is plenty of time for you can catch a falling leaf and put it in your pocket, save it for a rainy day (to marvel at its construction and the passing seasons). Meanwhile International Day of Peace comes up on 21st September and International Day of Nonviolence on 2nd October – a useful hook to hang an event on if you are thinking of anything. I’ll be back next month with another dose of thoughts, until then, Billy. l

Billy King: Rites Again, 330

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , , , , , ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts –

Well, welcome again to my musings, not too many amusings this month but still. Not very entertaining perhaps, INNATE did receive an email advertising wholesale ‘shotguns’ (rifles, including semi-automatic ones) during the month, prices starting at $200. Just what we always wanted. We are neither for gunning nor gurning so we will bid them begone before we have begun.

Northern culture wars

When it comes to De Nort, a k a Norn Iron, one good cultural or even sectarian expression of identity seems to demand an equal and opposite response from The Other Side, even where the appropriate response is either appreciation of difference or simple silence. Unfortunately the numbers in the Jewish community in Belfast have been declining for a long time as those associated with it have moved away for work, marriage or simply a desire, in the context of declining numbers, for places of greater religious vitality.

Obviously Judaism is a rather different and more diverse religious and cultural phenomenon than political support for Israel. The current context of the Israeli onslaught however makes things difficult for Jews, whatever their political views – and some Jews in Ireland have put their heads above the parapet to oppose the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza which followed the Hamas massacre of Israelis on 7th October 2023. The recent arrest of a 72 year old Jewish woman, a member of Jews for Palestine, for supposedly putting stickers (!) on a Barclays ATM in Belfast is a case in point.

However some people never miss a trick to make a political point and, while disagreeing absolutely with their actions, you have to admire their ingenuity. With most Catholics and pretty much all republicans in Northern Ireland supporting Palestine, loyalists have for a long time taken to supporting Israel. This manifests itself most prominently in Belfast with respective displays of Palestinian and Israeli flags. Irish language place names being included with English on street signs is also a political football, notwithstanding the fact that the origin of most such names is in the Irish language.

However the move to have Irish language signs has brought forward the proposal to have Hebrew language signs near the, predominantly Protestant, Village area off the Lisburn Road in Belfast. This is the latest in proxy battles in Norn Iron. However the move for this in Ebor Street has been stymied because a request for Irish language signs was made first – and Belfast City Hall will only deal with one request at a time. Time for a bit of shalom / salaam / síocháin in the culture wars I think.

The Paisley pattern

I am usually, not always, reading books long after they are out and been a topic of conversation. I recently read David Gordon’s 2009 book “The fall of the house of Paisley”. While not necessarily part of that book, part of the fascination of the whole Paisley phenomenon, at least so far as IRKP (Paisley Senior) is concerned is the extent to which he was a prisoner of his followers. The Rev Ian prospered while he stoked up the prejudices of his followers. Until his final conversion to powersharing, any time he had a progressive, original idea he quickly withdrew it when his followers raised questions.

As many commentators have said, making a judgement on a man like Ian Paisley Senior is difficult. Does a few years of saying yes and cooperating with others across divides wipe out a bitter legacy of stoking up sectarian discontent for decades? I think the answer to that is in the way I have phrased the previous sentence. No is the answer. Yes, we should be grateful that he did See The Light. But he ensured the years of violence and bitterness in the Troubles were longer and more bitter than they could have been, indeed more than anyone he helped create them.

Only towards the end of his life, perhaps more aware of his mortality following illness, and wanting to leave ‘a legacy’, did he face down those who questioned his path – and get chucked out of his position in the church he founded as a result. That he did finally join the establishment who were busy praising him for a few years before his conversion (the plámás was painful to watch) was a fascinating and positive move. But it could have been so different if he had Seen The Light many years earlier (I am deliberately using the term ‘Seen The Light’ to imitate the conservative evangelical language Paisley would have used). And he only saw that light when he was already political top dog which is another relevant factor.

Of course Ian Paisley Junior has been a different kettle of fishiness, not afraid to jump in to the promotion of dubious business arrangements or take fabulous and expensive holidays from brutal regimes (which he then supported) and didn’t declare in his parliamentary returns. It was the latter which finally got him ousted from the Westminster seat which he had inherited from his Da; he was beaten by the intelligent but even more hardline Jim Allister at the British general election of July 2024. That perhaps was a further twist in the fall of the house of Paisley. ‘Junior’ hasn’t gone away but it proved further that the house of Paisley did not have solid foundations. Political edifices that seem to be securely built are shown to have feet of clay retrospectively when popular (and sometimes brutally engineered) support is withdrawn.

And that brings us on to one of the theoretical foundations of nonviolent action: regimes of any kind depend on the support of the people, voluntary and/or forced. The withdrawal of support can be fatal for protesters, given the nature of the regime and its reaction, but if enough people do it then the state is literally powerless. Or, in the words of the originally Chilean protest song, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” that I know as a chant – or in the translation ‘the people united will never be defeated’.

But….in Belarus

While the last paragraph above is undoubtedly true, in the short to medium term repressive regimes can make the lives of activists – and ordinary non-political people – hell on earth. An account by Belarusian activist, Olga Karach, in exile in Lithuania, shows the extent of that repression. “……the Belarusian authorities have intensified their campaign of repression and censorship, culminating in a new wave of court rulings that declared over 23 social media accounts and digital resources associated with the Belarusian human rights organization Our House (Наш Дом) as “extremist materials.” These decisions are not symbolic — they are instruments of legal persecution & legal harassment with potentially devastating consequences. Individuals who are members of organizations labelled as “extremist,” or who subscribe to resources designated as such, can face up to 7 years in prison under Belarusian law.” And those 7 year prison sentences can be consecutive, so for a number of charges, all for nonviolent civic activism, people can face an extraordinarily long prison sentence.

“Belarusian courts are now criminalizing not only content, but entire platforms, logos, phrases — even letters of the Russian alphabet. The phrase “Наш Дом” (Our House), regardless of context, is now effectively banned in Belarus.” In 2020, Dmitry Dudoits, a 43-year-old father of two, posted a comment under a photo on Olga Karach’s Odnoklassniki profile, calling a police officer a “bald scum.” He was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment but died shortly afterwards by suicide under extreme torture and abuse; he was later recognised as a political prisoner.

Olga Karach states that “Several Our House activists currently face deportation from Lithuania, despite documented political persecution in Belarus. If deported, they face immediate arrest, torture, or indefinite imprisonment under Belarus’s extremism laws.

But she does go on to say “What You Can Do”: “We urge you — as defenders of democracy and human rights — to take action:

  1. Publicly condemn the persecution of human rights defenders of Our House and the criminalization of digital freedom in Belarus.

  2. Demand international protection and asylum guarantees for the whole team of Our House — especially those now under threat in Lithuania. [[Contacts for the Lithuanian embassy in Ireland can be found at https://ie.mfa.lt/en – Ed]]

  3. Support and amplify the work of Our House in exile: https://news.house/donate “

Repression and dictatorships do not go on for ever. It is the work of bodies like Our House which help to keep hope alive. Belarus is like the worst of old Soviet-era regimes and in 1989 most of those got swept aside – and the day of Belarus will come too, let’s hope sooner rather than later. The effect of one effective action of international solidarity in relation to Belarus can be found at https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/54519453518/in/dateposted/

Doolough Famine walk

The Doolough Famine walk is the highest profile event in Afri’s year www.afri.ie with around a couple of hundred people gathering in Louisburgh (the ‘meadow of the buttercups’ in the Irish name), Co Mayo for the walk from Delphi Lodge back to Louisburgh. It commemorates a real walk Louisburgh-Doolough-Louisburgh in 1849 when the starving people on it died like flies. Refused help by the Poor Law Commissioners having lunch at Delphi Lodge, many were effectively condemned to death; by this stage the ‘Great Famine’ was declared over and supports withdrawn – but people had nothing.

Afri’s walk is never just about commemorating those people and their 36 km futile trudge in poor weather, poor clothing and poor health over poor paths. It always links with what is happening in the world today. This year photojournalist Eman Mohammed left not a dry eye in the house with her factual but also very personal account of realities in Gaza. This is another situation, very different to An Gorta Mór, where people and their lives are considered expendable – by the Israeli state and by the West. Biblical quotes can come across as preachy but Paul Laverty quoting the prophet Ezekiel that “They have eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear” was never more appropriate.

Clare O’Grady Walshe who has done much work and writing on food and seed sovereignty shared some of her considerable insights on how the multinational seed companies – often one and the same as the pesticide companies – are stitching up the world and depriving the poor of economic advancement by trapping them in in monocultural food production and crops where they cannot save seeds. Avoiding such control is a key part of empowerment in poor rural areas of the world, and for us all in taking control of our destinies. There is very powerful analysis by Clare O’Grady Walshe and more on this can be found in her book “Globalisation and Seed Sovereignty in Sub-Saharan Africa” which is available in an affordable ebook option (or look for the printed version through your library or college); you can also find out more online if you search her name. And photos of this year’s event, along with many others, can be found in the Afri album on the INNATE photo/documentary site https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/albums/72157623376298793/ and look out for video and maybe audio on the Afri website in due course.

Afri is involved in other, shorter, famine walks and commemorations elsewhere but the scenery and personal interactions as you walk make the Doolough walk special. There is a wild beauty to Doolough and passing Mweelrea (slightly higher than Croagh Patrick) that is really memorable. Not everyone is fit to walk 18 km but those who aren’t are well catered for. On occasions the event can be wet and wetting but determination sees people through. This year the problem with water was not getting wet but ensuring people had enough water to drink not to get dehydrated in the sunshine and heat.

Why riot? Why not?

The final report on an action-research project in relation to the ‘Why riot?” programme, covered at the start of the news section of this issue, is an important one not just for Norn Iron but more broadly. Why do young people, particularly young males, get involved in violent and anti-social behaviour? The importance of well supported and creative youth work shines through the report, about allowing young people to be fully who they can be despite all the negative influences and pressures around them.

Some people might say that the conclusions given are obvious (to those ‘in the know’) but this would be a very trite judgement on what was a very well grounded project. It is worth quoting the ‘key finding’ on what were the mechanisms that supported change: 1. Safe spaces (emotionally and physically) for learning. 2. A structured process for critical thinking. 3. Context specific tools e.g. Non-violence. 4. Dialogue and reflection. 5. Youth worker methods. 6. Led by and responsive to youth needs, issues and concerns.

One of the points in how it ‘works’ is “Using ‘safe dialogic space’ for young people to discuss difficult, contested topics of concern. By dialogic we mean non-judgmental spaces that foster questioning (‘the why’s beneath’), actively challenge biases and assumptions, and encourage young people to explore different perspectives and become self-reflective.” But there is much more which you can read in the report at https://societal-challenges.open.ac.uk/media/projects/145_learningfromwhyriot-report-final-28-05-2025.pdf

And while in Northern Ireland the problem of youth alienation and violence has very particular local aspects, and the report has very specific Northern Ireland recommendations, the methodology and learning involved have much wider implications.

–

Well, we are officially into summer so we’ll see how that goes after a record-breaking or near record-breaking spring of much fine, warm weather. In terms of being dry, April and May are often/usually better in Ireland than July and August but let’s see how we get on this year……. Things are rarely simple and while global warming may bring greater heat it will also bring more wind and flood-causing rain to Ireland. The vagaries of the weather allow some climate change deniers to excuse their pathetic lack of any scientific understanding of what is happening – but, tragically, the direction is clear; downhill all the way to damaging higher temperatures globally – and other damaging weather in Ireland. Nevertheless, make hay while the sun shines (‘make silage while the sun shines’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it….), and see you at the start of July, Billy. l

Billy King: Rites Again 329

Billy King, Nonviolent News, , , ,

Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

Tittle title

Periodically someone in the Republic suggests in a letter to the papers, or such, that the state should have an honours system, and there is a debate on possible merits and demerits, including the view that any Republic worthy of the name doesn’t need such a system. I agree with the latter point.

But living in Norn Iron I can perhaps reflect my views on the matter from a territory which has such a system with UK honours bestowed on various people – including a few friends and acquaintances. The first problematic in a divided society like the North is that people of a unionist/British persuasion are more likely to accept the offer of an award from the UK state (or even be offered it) however much those making the decisions may try to make it all balanced. It thus tends to have what amounts to a sectarian dimension.

If an honours system exists then there are likely to be various gradations and various reasons why someone would accept. Some may believe they deserve the award because of their hard work, enterprise, and uprightness. In one case I know an award was accepted partly because what it would mean to their parents and be justification for choosing a career in the community and voluntary sector which might not have been what their parents wanted for them. Others certainly feel that it gives their work, and cause, recognition and a boost, and this may or may not be true. These are legitimate and valid reasons for accepting an award when such exists.

However I do have a number of negative points. The titles of the awards are not just anachronistic but imperialist – e.g. “Member of the British Empire”. And for every person who you might say deserves the award there are probably a couple of place servers who get a gong because of their position and sitting there for years. In general it creates a division between those recognised as ‘worthy’ in respectable causes and others [You’re not jealous, are you? – Ed] [Who, moi? I am not ‘worthy’. But ‘worthiness’ does come in to it, most awards are for what is considered ‘worthy’ work, and who is to say that ‘your’ mainstream activities are more worthy than ‘my’ fringe ones? There is an inherently conservative politic at work here – Billy].

The now dead brilliant black British poet Benjamin Zephaniah refused an OBE a couple of decades ago because of his opposition to empire and British involvement in slavery; his acceptance would also have indicated co-option by the system. While most awards are to the ‘worthy’, a few are offered to maverick choices to show the ‘openness’ of the system, and that would have been the case with Zephaniah.

I have a further objection which is not usually made. It is an old ‘law’ of physics that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Choosing worthy recipients, including occasionally people outside the usual box like Zephaniah, is not just an ‘honour’ for the individual but reflects back ‘worthiness’ on the system; ‘X’ is a person who deserves an honour for their work, the state has recognised ‘X’, so the state and its relevant apparatus must also be worthy to recognise such worthiness. This I find objectionable in a society as unequal and unjust as ours. The honours system thus helps maintain the status quo and division, not least with anachronistic and imperialist names for the awards given.

MAGAlomania – the game

I have written before [Well, it is quite a long time ago though maybe rather more than once – Ed] about the exceptionalism and/or imperialism in the USA referring to itself as ‘America’. OK, US Americans may be a majority in North America but they certainly are not in ‘the Americas’. There are nearly 350 million in the USA while Canada has 40 million, however Central America (including Mexico), South America and the Caribbean has an estimated population of nearly 670 million. Thus the USA has only a third of the population in the Americas. This blinkered nomenclature of using ‘America’ for one part of the Americas has perhaps reached its apotheosis – or perhaps nadir would be a better term – with President Trump’s childish relabelling of the Gulf of Mexico as the ‘Gulf of America’ – and penalising anyone who didn’t toe the line on his conjured up name. This is just one point where the 78 year old president of the USA seems to be not 78 but 7.8 years old (and that is perhaps being unfair to 7 year olds everywhere). He believes when it comes to the USA everyone is agin’ us [‘A Guinness’? But he doesn’t drink alcohol, maybe his confusion comes from all the Diet Coke he puts away – Ed].

I have also pointed out the irony that Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the Americas are incongruously named, never actually wandered anywhere near the territory of what is now the USA, since he only ventured rather further south.

You may already know the game of rejigging the acronym MAGA from its Trumpian meaning. The G can stand for lots of things: Gerontocratic (rule by the elderly – Biden and Trump have been the oldest elected presidents I believe), Gasp (you never know what idiotic or quixotic idea or policy Trump and his cohorts will come out with next), Grotesque (a self explanatory explanation I think). See what you can come up with by yourself or with friends. ‘G’ up then. GUBU.

Signs of the times

Placing Irish language signs at Belfast’s ‘Grand’ Central Station (henceforth GCS in this piece) is one of Norn Iron’s ongoing divisive shibboleths at the moment. It wasn’t included in the original plans and the new minister responsible, who happens to be from Sinn Féin, decided it should happen. Unionists state that as a controversial matter it should be subject to a cross-community vote at Stormont but most don’t want to rock the boat too hard for fear of the Stormont barque (its barque is worse than its bite) sinking again. Perhaps there should be a vote so we can see where people stand. But some people, right across the divides, are perpetually looking for ways to ‘get’ the other side. Of course symbols and symbolism matter.

There are a variety of factors at work here. Is Irish ‘weaponised’ by some republicans? Undoubtedly. Is resistance to anything Irish weaponised by some loyalists? Also undoubtedly. Is the Irish language a treasure of many kinds and also a resource in relation to placenames throughout the island of Ireland? Yes. Is knowledge of Irish, partly through Irish medium schools, increasing in the North? Yes. And is signage at GCS going to include placenames as a key element? Of course. Was the Irish language virtually stamped out by official British policy? Yes (though that is only part of the story). Will the cost of the signage changes be substantial? Yes, perhaps £150,000. Could the money be used for other purposes including social need? Yes. Would it be so used? No, highly unlikely.

I have previously written about the use of ‘Grand’ in the ‘GCS’ name. But I have also pointed out that if unionists want to persuade nationalists, Catholics, and indeed some Prods, to keep Norn Iron in the UK then they need to bend over backwards in allowing Catholic and nationalist concerns to be catered for. As reasonable and redoubtable a figure as SDLP MP Claire Hanna has pointed out the extent to which nationalists in Norn Iron are perpetually subjected to British state imagery which they don’t go for.

Having Irish language signs at GCS should not be an issue for a variety of reasons and Welsh language signs in Wales are considered necessary. Unionists who object to Irish language signs at GCS are helping to book a ticket south for the whole of the North; they should think about that train of thought while the unification train is still in the station without a departure time. Action on the issue is currently halted because of loyalist legal action. However the two main unionist parties have not gone with a TUV/Traditional Unionist Voice petition on the matter at Stormont, as stated above because they don’t want the whole Stormont edifice to come crashing down yet again, so maybe some credit is due there.

Herbivores

A herbivore is an animal that eats plants or only eats plants. However I am deliberately mis- or re-interpreting the word here to talk about the use of herbs in food. I have to admit that I would feel distinctly impoverished if I didn’t have access to certain fresh herbs; yes, certainly, I use dried herbs in cooking but for some things I feel fresh is much superior because of the added flavour. But herbs in your supermarket or greengrocer are expensive for what you get, and you never know what you will need and when you will need it, and most don’t last too long in the fridge. So GYO (grow your own). This can be easily be done successfully, as I do, in tubs and window boxes, without needing too much space – though a bit of sun in that space helps. You do need to feed and water them though, and tubs dry out faster than the soil.

For some herbs you can cut the bother and buy a plant in a garden centre, for others you may want to or need to sow from seed. What? Sage, thyme, tarragon, rosemary, fennel, mint and oregano are some of the basics and are relatively perennial. Parsley you need to sow at least annually and you may need to cover it with protective mesh or fleece to protect it from carrot fly (yes, parsley is the same family as carrots); it would appear some years we have carrot fly about, other years not, and I can’t say whether it will be in your vicinity or not – but your burgeoning parsley getting sick and dying because carrot fly larvae have eaten the roots is very disappointing so I tend to cover it in case in the relevant period (around April to September, certainly for newly sown parsley). I only grow basil indoors or in a protected space because it is a favourite with slugs and snails as well as us humans. Mint is best grown in a bounded space because the roots spread so easily.

For salad herbs you can use some of the above but I also grow chives, garlic chives, Welsh onions (like chives but larger and I cut the stems but leave the bulbs to grow on) and lovage (a celery flavoured plant which I presume is a close relation). Garlic chives don’t grow so much in the winter but are still standing and can be picked then unlike regular chives.

Thyme and tide wait for no one, and I love lovage, so now is the time to get your herb garden sorted. Most herbs aren’t a lot of work apart from parsley and basil – and I wouldn’t like to being without those. With your own herb garden you can develop your own favourite salad dressings and bask in flavour for very little cost, and never be without that herb ingredient when you need it. When it comes to gardening, take the herb side not the herbicide.

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Well, it has been a strange month in one way as I nearly went up in flames, and I am deliberately not going to go into details out of respect for someone we had just met who did get seriously injured in the accident concerned, this was out of the domestic environment is all I will say. It can be hard to take in when something like this happens and hard to appreciate how near I was/we were to either extinction or serious injury. But here I am and I shall return for June, come what May, Billy.

Billy King: Rites Again, 327

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You couldn’t make it up, explosive munitions at Lidl

https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/54351562097/in/dateposted/ and an iPhone dictation bug that replaced ‘Trump’ with ‘Racist’ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/26/apple-to-fix-iphone-dictation-bug-trump?CMP=share_btn_url ……..manys a true word that was spoken in jest tech.

Fierce and farce in Dublin

OK, one was fierce but not a farce, the other was a fierce farce. My visits to Doubling tend to be either social or movement related so it was great to have a cultural visit recently. The first part of the visit was to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Parnell Square to see Brian Maguire’s “La grande illusion” exhibition there. The second was to see the stage production of Dr Strangelove. Both would get excellent marks from me.

We didn’t have enough time at the Hugh Lane because we hadn’t banked on spending three-quarters of an hour watching a video interview with Brian Maguire. It is at the entrance to his exhibition but once we started watching then we couldn’t pull ourselves away. Intelligent, humane, personable, concerned with justice, these are just a few of the terms that come to mind in describing the gentle but strong man in question from watching the interview. His work in prisons, at home and around the world, is remarkable.

In the video he quotes Lara Marlowe as saying he worked like a journalist and you can see that clearly in the video and his work (he can do much work to access photos of scenes of death or violence). But he gives more than that, he gives imagination, depth and humanity – where appropriate – to his subjects. The coverage in this exhibition includes Mexico and the devastation on lives by the drugs trade there, Syria, and migrants to the USA who did not make it. Regarding the first, one work looked like a stone or rock from a distance only on examination to reveal a severed head; shocking but a humane treatment of the topic. And regarding Syria his treatment of a damaged and abandoned street in Aleppo evokes the life which it once had and its emptiness now, it is an image that has stayed with me – I think you might have the same experience with any of his images. War and human rights are integral subjects to this work.

Brian Maguire’s exhibition at the Hugh Lane has had its run extended to 18th May (2025) and I certainly recommend it – but leave time for that video interview.

Doing Dr Strangelove as a stage production might seem a strange choice but it actually worked very well in the Iannucci/Foley/Coogan presentation of Stanley Kubrick’s original, and the stagecraft was good. Steve Coogan was to play 4 roles when we were attending at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre – this compares to 3 roles played by Peter Sellers in the 1964 film – and obviously doing it on stage requires nifty timing and a bit of ingenuity (which mainly but not always worked in my opinion). Not performing due to laryngitis meant Coogan’s understudy, Ben Deery, had that challenge and managed it very well when I attended.

It is of course a sign of the times that Dr Strangelove is – tragically – as relevant today as when it was filmed in terms of actual and possible mass annihilation. The violent crazies and smooth talkers are running the shows and any interventions by people with a titter of wit may be ineffective. If we even consider nuclear accidents and near misses of various kinds we can shiver in fear. Add in further human error and possible malice and we are on the edge of the precipice or indeed various precipices.

One of the stand out lines in the play is where the US President advises the Soviet ambassador and a belligerent senior air force officer that there should be no fighting as “This is the War Room”! Sadly the world is still going in the direction of gross violence and pulling back from this requires the imaginative goodwill which many of our leaders lack. So we have to provide some sanity in these troubled times.

It’s a Doge’s life

I do believe there is such a thing as ‘evil’, but as it is such an absolute term it is one I rarely use to describe people or situations. I am usually moderate enough in how I express myself [Really? – Ed] however when I saw Elon Musk gloating on television news about the apocalyptic cuts to the USAid budget, and his proud claim to have put it through the shredder, I really felt I was looking at the face of evil, undiluted evil.

The USA spends far more money on its military – and 800 military bases around the world – than any other country, by far; the budget for this is over $900 billion, say $1 trillion. You could attack USAid spending in some places for its political bias – Ukraine and Israel are the largest recipients – but the fact is it does make a difference to some of the poorest of the poor and the sickest of the sick. $40 billion is not a huge amount for a large, rich country like the USA to share though the total spent on aid by the USA is $72 billion (possibly 8% of the military budget). https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/20/how-will-trump-and-musk-freeze-on-usaid-affect-millions-around-world?CMP=share_btn_url The Trump/Musk justification for the attack was also false; three of the four projects named as wasting money by USAid were funded as cultural projects by the State Department, not USAid.

For the richest man in the world to be part of destroying help to the very poorest and sickest in the world is obscene and vengeful evil, full stop. Two thirds of soup kitchens in Khartoum, Sudan, closed as a result. Many essential health programmes in the poorest countries in the world have been decimated. And for a ‘Labour’ prime minister in the UK to subsequently cut their aid budget, already miserly as a percentage of GDP, to up military spending feels like another betrayal on the world stage. But then with Trump in the White House everyone seems to be getting in on dangerous and unjust behaviour.

Down North

What are you to make of the sadistic that while 81% of nationalist/republican voters in the North believe extreme weather events are at least partly caused by climate change, only 29% of unionist voters believe that. So 4 out of 5 nationalists/republicans are aware of the connection while more than 2 in 3 unionist voters have their heads in the shifting sand. Is this explicable by the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican ‘community’ being generally centre or left of centre and Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist politics tending to be centre or right of centre? You might expect some difference due to that but the void is staggering. I couldn’t look at the details more because the story was behind a paywall in the ‘Tele’ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/environment/just-29-of-unionist-voters-believe-climate-change-is-partly-responsible-for-extreme-weather-poll-reveals/a1145304503.html

Meanwhile it does seem the gap is closing between those who support staying in the UK and those who want a united Ireland. In an Irish Times/ARINS survey the figures were 48% to 34% respectively, and there were some changes in the non-headline figures https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/02/07/support-for-irish-unification-grows-but-unity-vote-would-be-soundly-defeated-in-north-poll-shows/ However a Lucid Talk/Belfast Telegraph poll showed figures of 48% and 41%, much closer, which begs questions about their repective methodologies. While the latter poll has consistently shown a high proportion opting for a united Ireland, both show the gap narrowing.

The conclusion is that there should be all sorts of explorations on what a united Ireland might look like and how it would initially fund, and economically develop, the poorer North, as well as guarantees on human rights and other issues. However there is a reasonable case that unionists can or could make for continuing in the UK and one start to doing that took place recently in Coleraine with a ‘Safeguarding the Union’ meeting. While demographics show the Catholic population increasingly outpacing the number of Protestants, certainly from middle age downwards, it can’t be assumed that the current direction of travel will automatically continue. What would happen if, as the Coleraine meeting heard, there was a big economic shock to the Republic? What indeed.

It is all to be played for. The hope is that the players won’t engage in fouls and that the respective supporters will temper their behaviour. Unlikely? Maybe, but not if there are processes which encourage intelligent and analytical thinking at all levels and in a variety of ways.

Global injustice: It’s rich

I didn’t read the Oxfam report concerned but Stephen McCloskey of the Centre for Global Education in Belfast did a very useful precis in the February issue of their e-Bulletin which I quote here in full:

“Oxfam have published their annual analysis of global economic inequality which this year is titled Takers not Makers: The Unjust Poverty and Unearned Wealth of Colonialism.  This annual report has become an indispensible tool for understanding the key economic forces driving poverty between and within the global North and South.  The report’s main headline is that billionaire wealth has risen three times faster in 2024 than 2023 with 204 new billionaires created.  Such is the global flow of wealth to the super-rich that Oxfam estimates that there will be five trillionaires within a decade.  Conversely, the number of people living below the World Bank poverty line of $6.85 is 3.6 billion people, the same total as 1990, which means poverty indicators are going in the wrong direction because of wealth accumulation by the one percent.  In explaining the concentration of billionaire wealth, Oxfam’s report cites two main factors: first, the rise of a new oligarchy that generates wealth through inheritance, cronyism (such as tax avoidance) and monopoly power (for example, Amazon controls 70% of online purchases in the UK); and second, both historic and ongoing colonialism of the global South through global institutions, financial markets and multinational corporations.  The report sets out the kind of systemic changes needed to address global inequities and they really should be seized by development educators as a platform for economic literacy, advocacy and activism.  The depth of the problems described in the report demand nothing less.” The report is at https://www.oxfam.org/en/takers-not-makers-unjust-poverty-and-unearned-wealth-colonialism and the Centre for Global Education is at https://www.centreforglobaleducation.com/

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That’s me as we come up towards St Patrick’s Day, that national occasion when anyone or everyone can shiver in the open because wintry weather is still around. It’s a shame(rock) that the weather can be so poor…..the day marks the death date of St Patrick himself but whether 17th March is accurate or not I don’t know, perhaps it could be ‘discovered’ that it was really sometime in the period May to August that the man himself died….. Until we meet again next month, Billy.

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Billy King shares his monthly thoughts –

There’s gold in them thar hills…

…and that’s where it should stay… While gold does have some practical usages in fine tech and so on it mainly considered valuable for being valued, i.e. it is valuable as a store of wealth, a bit like crypto currency but in metallic form and less volatile in value – it is also comparable to celebrities being famous because they are famous. Humanity’s actual need for gold is relatively small today and could be met hundreds of times over by what is already extracted from the ground. Some of the uses of gold, such as the ‘gold standard’ or its use in dentistry (gold mining is a different kind of extraction but can be very painful) have been superseded by economic and technological advances.

So what is the point in ruining the Sperrins so Dalradian can make a profit? None. There are always less jobs than promised, they will disappear after a decade or two, while meanwhile farming and other developments, such as in tourism, are stymied or ruined. The recent public enquiry into the proposed goldmining there was quickly halted after a technical error by the relevant Northern Ireland government department not doing what they should have done. Two of the groups involved in struggling against an unwelcome extraction that you can look up are Save Our Sperrins (SOS) https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=save%20our%20sperrins (see the entry for 15th January 2025 on the collapse of the public enquiry) and Friends of the Earth in the North https://friendsoftheearth.uk/northern-ireland I have quoted before the Saw Doctors’ words (in ‘The green and gold of Mayo’) on prospective gold mining beside Croagh Patrick – “Do they think our greatest asset / Can be mined, dug up, and sold….” As with coal, oil and gas – ‘Keep it in the ground!’

Drill for the truth, baby, drill for the truth

‘There are none so blind as those who will not see’ is an aphorism about a disability, physical blindness, which does not insult those who have that condition. People who are physically unable to see usually develop other skills which compensate and many skills which sighted people are unlikely to have. The aphorism actually criticises sighted people who do not, because they refuse to, see what is in front of their eyes.

I do believe there is such a category as a ‘climate criminal’. Donald Trump, the most powerful elected leader in the world, fits that description with his denial of the human-based nature of climate change and his “We will drill, baby, drill” approach – which was even included in his inaugural address as president of the USA in January 2025, all happening at the time of the destruction by fire of significant bits of Los Angeles. The oil and gas industry bosses and owners are of course highly complicit in engineering cover ups and obfuscation of what is happening and why, and refusing to take the world and the vast majority of people into account due to their own selfish and destructive interests. Trump’s tech billionaire buddies are also climate criminals for permitting untruths to be told. Climate heating is, and will do, untold damage to our earth and its inhabitants with the poor, of course, suffering most.

It is difficult to come up with imagery about where we are. The best I can do is that the rich and powerful are driving a train with the rest of humanity on it. They come to a junction. One direction is clearly ‘Hell’ while the other is ‘Not hell but not quite heaven either’ (we are already far down the global heating track). The powerful are choosing to travel with the rest of the world to ‘Hell’ because they are, unlike everyone else, in Super First Class Climate Protected carriages which they believe are immune to the effects of Hell, and to travel the other direction they would have to transfer to slightly less comfortable carriages and they don’t want to do that because they know they are superior.

Getting the truth of climate heating across to those in denial is a subject much pondered in these pages by Larry Speight in his Eco-Awareness column. There are no easy answers. Telling the truth in different ways is of course part of it. But using personal relationships and getting people in the public eye to use their influence are important. And we, individual and ‘ordinary’ citizens, can show by our own example what to do in our travel and consumer habits. We ‘ordinary people’ in the rich world are highly complicit in global heating too.

Eventually, the truth of climate heating will trump denialism. But whether we arrive at the station marked ‘Hell’ before then is still a possibility.

Room for great improvement for Belfast Assembly Rooms

There is a wonderfully historic building in central Belfast which is in a woeful condition. It is historic for a number of reasons – the rejection of slavery, its connection with the 1798 rising, and with the preservation of Irish traditional melodies, and simply for being a prime meeting place when Belfast was ‘the Athens of the North’. In fact, in relation to the preservation of Irish traditional melodies, you could say it is perhaps the culturally most important building in Ireland. But it is currently, and very sadly, unused and near derelict. However one sign of the awareness of the risks to the building comes from its inclusion recently on the World Monuments Fund 2025 Watch List and it has been on the Ulster Architectural Heritage at risk list for a couple of decades.

It is where the 1792 harp festival took place, organised by the good Presbyterian citizens of Belfast, with Edward Bunting commissioned to record the music and thus preserve it for future generations – the old harping tradition was on its death bed after their prime sponsors, the Irish aristocracy, were long defeated and gone. It is where Henry Joy McCracken was court-martialled in ‘98 following the failure of the rising before being taken to be hung nearby. It is where Thomas McCabe intervened against a move to set up a slaving company (i.e. dealing in and transporting slaves) in 1786, a successful intervention in that Belfast continued to have no direct involvement in the slave trade though it did have trade involvement in selling salted beef and clogs to slave plantations as well as through individuals.

On a more prosaic and contemporary note the Assembly rooms are on INNATE’s Belfast peace trail where the INNATE coordinator loves to gently shock participants on the walk in telling of Thomas McCabe’s interjection by bellowing out his message “May God wither the hand of any man who will sign that document!”.

Used as a bank for a long time, the building then had intermittent cultural use – and it being a cultural centre is surely the appropriate course of action for the future. But it needs major work first. Belfast City Council has purchased a couple of iconic buildings, No.2 Royal Avenue and the wonderful art deco former Bank of Ireland on a corner of Royal Avenue for civic purposes. The Assembly Rooms building is currently privately owned but going to wrack and ruin. It needs urgent attention and deserves it. For more info see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c87d8121lj3o and https://sluggerotoole.com/2025/01/17/the-inclusion-of-belfasts-historic-assembly-rooms-on-world-monuments-funds-2025-watch-list-is-a-game-changer/#respond

A migrant story

She came from a war torn country where she had been married young. We can call her Anna because that is certainly not her name. After her father and eldest child were killed in the strife in her home country, she sold everything she had and eventually ended up in Northern Ireland where she claimed asylum. One of her other children has a disabling medical condition. The first place she lived in the North she had to leave because it was attacked. Then in the racist riots of August 2024 she was personally assaulted and injured in the street with lasting effects, and she had to move again. During her time in the North her ex-husband, the father of her children, was killed in the strife in her home country. Thus she had the violent deaths in three generations of her immediate family.

She eventually received refugee status. Any one of the deaths mentioned above could break someone. While obviously deeply affected, she has been determined to keep moving forward and do the best possible for her children despite attacks in a place where she had escaped in order to be safe.

Not all migrants have as dramatic and traumatic stories and experiences as Anna. However we should of course be ashamed that in “Ireland of the welcomes” the welcome (hellcome?) she received included physical attacks on her and where she lived, inhumanity when extreme humanity was called for. Where some saw an unwelcome alien there was a resilient but hugely suffering human being who had been through tribulations which her attackers could probably not even imagine, and someone who has much to contribute if allowed to do so. Meanwhile some people reached out to try to help her.

May she now live in peace and be able to establish the life she wants for herself and her children.

Contrast

The names ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘Gustavo Gutiérrez’ are seldom uttered in the same sentence, I would imagine. Donald Trump is the president of the USA and aged 78. Gustavo Gutiérrez was a Dominican priest from Lima who died in October 2024, aged 96.

INNATE is a secular organisation which is happy to carry material or organise events in relation to connections between humanism and nonviolence or particular religions and nonviolence, and respect people of whatever secular or religious beliefs while being critical of the practices associated with any of these which are contrary to building peace and justice. In terms of parity of esteem I usually avoid sharing on my own religious beliefs and background which would be a variety of Christian. However, in moving some books recently I came across the Gutiérrez book, from the 1970s, “A Theology of Liberation” – he was one of the founders of the ‘theology of liberation’ movement in Latin America at that time, even called the “Father of Liberation Theology”, and I thought of the contrast with Trump.

Donald Trump has monetised the Christian bible, as well as made it nation-specific, in his Trump Bible; the bible is clearly a book he has little knowledge about, effectively thinking of it as a MAGA-manual. Monetising the Christian bible sounds rather like being moneychangers in the Temple, i.e. turning religion into a commercial enterprise. JC drove the moneychangers from the Temple in what to me seems like a good example of determined nonviolent action (though one conservative Christian once told me Jesus shouldn’t have done that as it gave Christians a bad name!). One joke about Trump and his desire to cut things (taxes, environmental regulations etc) is that he has already got the Ten Commandments down to six, and is working on the rest. He uses the bible and Christianity as a political prop and tool.

He also accused an Episcopalian bishop of being nasty in a presidential inaugural service when she called for him to exercise mercy in relation of migrants and people who are LGBT; mercy is usually considered a Christian virtue but Trump made it sound like a dirty word. Making the bible nation-specific, as the Trump bible seemingly does in relation to the USA, seems contrary to the ‘neither Jew nor Gentile’ part of the Christian New Testament. Trump was surrounded by billionaires at his January 2025 presidential inauguration whereas Jesus had plenty to say about those who loved riches. It was the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg who stated that the early Christian church was communist in consumption if not in production.

Gustavo Gutiérrez was an important and founding figure in liberation theology which opts for solidarity with the poor, something which seems totally in accord with Christianity and the ‘Sermon on the Mount’, while for Trump – where money is usually the bottom line – his beliefs seem to be more in relation to the ‘Sermon on the (Financial) Count’. Gutiérrez’ book, mentioned above, is overflowing with biblical references. He states clearly that “In the Bible poverty is a scandalous condition inimical to human dignity and therefore contrary to the will of God.” and that “Poverty is not caused by fate: it is caused by the actions of whose whom the prophet condemns….” (and then quotes Amos 2:6-7).

I stand with Gutiérrez.

Youphemisms

We all use euphemisms but sometimes there are ones we dislike or refuse to use, and what you use may not be something I would use. Language is always evolving so this is all a natural human process. The US English ‘restroom’ for what is commonly here called a toilet seems an unnecessary and inaccurate euphemism – and yet I might quite happily use ‘loo’ or even the southern terms ‘jacks’ (which may be medieval English in origin and also relate to the US English term ‘the john’, although the latter may also be connected with one of the inventors of the flushing toilet).

One US euphemism I refuse to use however is that someone has ‘passed’ when they have died. Passed what? Their final exams? To glory in heaven? From this earthly coil? No, not a term I find acceptable. And yet if referring to someone’s status in relation to being living or dead, e.g. on a letter coming for someone who is ‘no longer with us’ (another euphemism), i.e. dead, putting ‘Now dead’ seems too bald a statement and I might write ‘Deceased’ – which is simply another way of saying ‘no longer with us’. Death is kind of final and it is difficult not to be euphemistic. But, it is clear, I find some euphemisms a load of crap.

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That’s me for now and the bold, bad January is over, I hope you weren’t badly affected by Storm Éowyn if you live in what was its path….unfortunately with global heating there is much more of that to come. But always look on the bright side, the snowdrops are well out, the daffodils are coming, some out, and we live in hope, so until next time, Billy.