Hunting Captain Nairac

 

I was at the Queens Film Theatre this afternoon for the last day of the Docs Ireland festival. The showing was "Hunting Captain Nairac" a documentary about the search for the human remains of people disappeared by republican forces during the troubles, in this instance an army intelligence officer who famously walked into a bar in South Armagh full of 200 people and was never seen again. It was an interesting and well made documentary it answered a lot of questions and debunked some old myths but it did leave me with a few questions. 

1. It did a lot to humanise Nairac and present his complexities as a person. Fair enough I suppose but I feel like they might be overegging things a little. It presents his Catholicism and seemingly genuine hibernophillia as being in contradiction with his role as an army intelligence officer. That is very simply not the case as anyone who is familiar with British colonial practice can tell you, that just made him better at his job, the British founded the SOAS to train their cadre in the complexities of the cultures they were sending them out to imperialise.

2. Fair play for trying to dispel 2 big myths you'd hear about Niarac, that his body was "fed to the pigs" as my aul Uncle Danny (RIP) used to say (and that was way before Snatch put that particular method of body disposal into the public consciousness). And that the rumours of his involvement with The Miami Showband massacre (which I also heard and believed once) was probably flack generated by the PIRAs counter intelligence machine. That said the extent and nature of his actual activities isn't really touched on. Troublingly, what he was literally said to be doing in the bar that night was to "Further a relationship" with the sister of an IRA activist. I'm sorry but to me that sounds like the very common practice in intelligence circles of undercovers getting in with a particular situation through a sexual relationship, which is rightly considered to be a form of SA as you can't meaningfully consent to sex with someone who is misrepresenting themselves at that level. That's an implication that seems rightly obvious to anyone familiar with these issues. Not that if it was the case that it justifies what happened to him, corpse-napping is a horrible thing to happen and its no more cool when the 'Ra were doing it than when the  CIA trained secret police were doing it across Latin America in the 70s and 80s or when Israel do it today, it just seems odd that that's put out there and handwaved very quickly. 

My take away from it was that it seemed oddly in step with the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man that was also featured at the Docs Ireland festival the night before (with live commentary by the editor!) about another eccentric wee man with terminal Main Character syndrome who intentionally put himself in the line of danger doing something he was passionate about and paid the ultimate price for it.

I do sincerely hope that his body is found and returned to his people. Its good that for the future generations here to heal properly we need a full reckoning with the past. I just don't want that to come at the cost of downplaying the seriousness of any aspect of the conflict in the name of "balance".

On the Derrylin arson victim Diane Gossett's posthumous outing (and what it says about our local media)

On international Women's day its nice to see the local press still keeping the flag flying for misogyny, showing that not only has it not gone anywhere but that it has evolved to meet the demands of the 21st century.

And.....?

Page 3 of today's Irish News has some very weird content in a article about a family that have died in an arson attack in Derrylin that’s made the local papers. Specifically taking a prurient interest in the artistic activities of the 19 year old daughter of the family having been a fan-artist and banging on about for 4 paragraphs of copy and an extended caption when it was totally unrelated to the incident, or we'd have to assume so since its just dropped in the middle of the article without comment along with some other random negative details of the families lifestyle. One might charitably assume that they're trying to humanise the victims of a terrible act of violence, but it doesn't quite feel that way. "Details have emerged" of what exactly? That she had a hobby? To me that just looks like rubber necking at best and victim-blaming at worst.

What does this have to do with anything? Answers on a postcard

In this the Irish News seem to have taken their lead from an article in yesterdays Belfast Telegraph which was specifically about this. No other subject, just this. As if this is even a thing that is in the public interest to know. Her brother and mother both died in the fire, yet the BelTel haven't devoted column inches to what they did with their down time. Was Edward Gossett into five-a-side football? Philately? Warhammer 40k? Where's the article about his pass-times?

Also, the PSNI have the guy that did it in custody, surely there's enough in the public sphere that the actual motivations behind this are apparent or at least get-able with a bit of effort?

Of course that would require time and effort, why do that when you can facebook-stalk the victims for juicy shit from behind your desk when you're pretending to work. Also, this is a part of a general pattern of behaviour by the BelTel, who have been involved in outing BDSM practitioners in the past, operate at least one sock-puppet account on Fetlife as well as indulging other types of Mrs Grundy-ism. This is part of a downward spiral in local journalism. I don't seem to recall all three of the locals being as seedy, tabloid-y and generally as shit as their current incarnations even ten years ago. The economic incentive towards lazy attention-grabbing clickbait is very real. I know that print journalism is dying on its arse these days but surely they can do better than kink-shaming murder victims.

The BelTel article is by far the worst offender, making an inordinate deal out of the fact that an erotic picture comes up right after one that Diane did based on her infant daughter (who also lost her life in the fire) on the timeline of the website hosting her art, like a complete n00b. Its a timeline, pictures come up chronologically, that's how it works.

There's quite a large sub-culture of people, mostly young women, who do this sort of artwork. There's a whole community of producers and consumers of it out there. For some it leads on to actual work as an artist, but even for those for whom it doesn't its still a healthy and enjoyable outlet for their sexual and creative impulses.

So-fucking-what if this young woman in her spare time, drew some dirty cartoons? Good. More power to her, I hope that it brought her some pleasure in the short time that she had on this earth. She sold a few? Good. Even better. Any of us involved in the creative arts should be so lucky as to get paid for our work.

The Gossetts extended family have set up a go-fund-me page to cover the costs associated with bringing their relatives back to England for burial. If you'd like to do something useful you can chip a few quid in towards it:  https://www.gofundme.com/help-me-collect-my-familys-remains

On the Collapse of the talks

I heard a bit of inside goss about the situation at Stormont. The source of which I'll not divulge but I will say comes from the inside and I personally trust the veracity of. Basically with the demand that Arlene step down pending investigation over RHI off the table from the Sinner's end the DUP negotiations team, i.e. most of the leadership, were happy to go back into government. This had been one of the key demands that Sinn Fein had been sticking to, but with the recent knock on Sinn Fein's public image over the whole Barry McElduff thing and Gerry Kelly's handywork with a set of bolt cutters, they've not been feeling as smug or confident in themselves.

What's fucked things up is that the first whiff the party organisation and wider membership had of a climb down over Acht Na Gaelige they were ready to throw the proverbial dummy out of the pram. Hence the DUP were hamstrung from doing what no doubt they've been itching to do since the collapse and get back to business (or at least the petty corruption that has become synonymous with the way the DUP actually do business).

Now if that's to be believed (doesn't seem unreasonable and fits with what's been made public as well as Michelle O'Neill's statement) then once again we find ourselves in a position where the possibilities of progressive change have been held back by the leadership of mainstream unionism's failure to sell their own electorate on very basic, timely and democratically mandated reforms, the sort of thing that wouldn't be remotely controversial in any right thinking part of the world. I suppose that when you make your career on being an intractable force of conservatism, having to make even an elementary compromise becomes impossible.

There's a section of the Unionist people, hard liners who had been convinced by Big Ian that they were in the right, god was on their side and eventually they would see justice done against the forces of Nationalism, the IRA would be smashed, its leaders dragged through the streets in sack cloth and ashes, those (hopefully few) taken alive jailed and order restored, and those brave men on their side whose only real crime was loyalty would be left to go about their business and everything would be fine. So it was written, so it would be and any conciliation was nothing less than a betrayal of Ulster. On such illusions did the DUP build the rack upon which they broke the mighty UUP party organisation and become the biggest of the four main political parties in Northern Ireland. However fostering such illusions in your voter base is great crack when you're the maverick outsider and its good for beating up the people who have to make the hard choices and show some conciliation every now and again by calling. Its less fun when you're in the driving seat and have to make the hard choices yourself.

Whether the bit of gossip I've tripped over this evening is true or not: here we are, the DUP fulfilling their promise at the beginning of this experiment to make the GFA unworkable. Hard to see where things go from here, short term back to direct rule but then considering the continuing crisis in British politics who knows how long the current situ over there is going to last, we've been waiting for the other shoe to drop on Theresa May's head since the last election, it may do so by the end of the year but whether it falls from the left or right remains to be seen (congratulations to anyone who followed that last sentence through at least three tortuously mixed metaphors btw). Personally I'd love it if the whole shebang came down over brexit or the NHS crisis or something, like the government is at its most precarious any UK government has been since Ted Heath in the early 1970s, which could potentially lead to an election and a Labour administration under Corbyn, possibly in coalition with the SNP with enough of a majority to be able to force through a progressive mandate. Its not out of the question as things stand. Just as easily we could see a Palace coup from the right and Gove, Rees-Mogg or even BoJo replacing May, though how long that would last would be another question.

As ever the people of Northern Ireland will just have to shoulder the burden of our dysfunctional little shithole of a political system and get on without a functioning government or the long overdue equality legislation and live with the various petty annoyances and inconveniences as well as the major ongoing injustices that it is continues to inflict on us.

 Happy Valentines Day

Update 15/02/18:

This article by Eammon Mallie corroborates what I've alluded to and goes a lot deeper, specifically to say that the deal was agreed to on Friday, that Theresa May and Leo Varadkar were in town to announce that Stormont was back on the understanding that it was settled. It also outlines the proposal, a stand alone Irish Language Act, a seperate one for Ulster Scots and some sort of "Britishness" cultural act which sounds like a bile of boak but reflects a sop to petty bourgeois Unionism. It doesn't mention marraige equality so presumably the Sinners have fudged that for the time being. So basically the DUP negotiating team had one, they'd got Gay Marriage off the table as a key demand and retained and Arlene's head, the Sinners would get the Acht but they could have two Achts of their own to sell to their side. They couldn't even manage to deliver on that.

On the Eve of the EU referrendum

In 2014 when the Scottish referendum happened what could have been a typical politically empty, nationalistic / jingoistic (from both sides) shitty spectacle actually became something more than it was intended to be. The Scottish left and activist spectrum turned it into a real debate, one centered around Austerity and the real fight happening within contemporary society beyond the circus side-show that is political discourse in the UK.


This year we're voting on the UK's continued membership of the EU, and nothing of the sort has happened. The focus of the debate has been skewed from reality of what the EU is and what the member states will be facing in the near future to a lot of petty squabbling and wars of position for hegemony within the Tory party being presented as the breath of the debate. The British left has shown no leadership in terms of getting the word out that, and I know this may surprise a lot of people, there are actually plenty of good reasons for wanting to leave the EU and that you don't have to be a slathering xenophobe to want out. and actually a lot of the arguments for staying are on extremely shaky foundations. The Left-Exit argument has been so marginalised and the Leave position so thoroughly dominated by the right that I am genuinely embarrassed to be voting to leave tomorrow, though that isn't actually going to stop me - it just pisses me off.


I can see that there are plenty of arguments for voting to remain, from the personal fear of what might happen with regards to their pensions, because they do benefit from the EU's internal migration policy, out of spite at the loyalist thugs merrily shouting 'vote leave' as they beat up random people they presume to be catholics (this is literally what happened to people I know) - the fear of a resurgent right capitalising on a Brexit vote is a legitimate one The EU at least recognises Palestine and is its biggest provider of international aid and is at least critical of Israel, though that aid is channeled through the PA and is in no small part responsible for the maintenance of the corrupt PLO leadership over the PA and consequently the continuing divisions within the movement. There's a certain validity to the argument that the EU has provided an amelioration of the excesses of the British political establishment, consensus politics in Europe does tack slightly to the Left of consensus politics in the UK (though even with the Human Rights Act, it didn't stop Section 28, or what what was going on over here during the Troubles). They're right that the Exit camp haven't really put forwards a viable or inspiring vision for an alternative outside the EU, they're right, that would have been the job of the British organised left and they fucked that one up. I honestly wouldn't think less of anyone who voted to stay in tomorrow.


Personally though I can't justify it to myself. I can't not think of Alan Kurdi, and all the other people murdered by the EU's immigration policies. I look at Greece and see the Troika doing to the Greeks what the English did to us during the Great Potato Blight of the 1840s, killing people with the ruthless application of Free market economics to ineptly fix a problem created by free market. Seriously, what they've done in Greece is disgusting, its imperialism pure and simple and I've no wish to be a part of it. That hasn't quite gone down here but at some point should we ever attempt to break in earnest with austerity, it will.


You can say that my position with regards to Brexit is abstract or idealistic but I don't see reforming the EU from within as a viable option, Syriza tried that one and got kurb-stomped for their efforts.


So, stay / go, either way its not a great choice and either way the real fights are still to be had. It didn't have to be like this, it could have been a party. Again getting back to my initial point in this post, looking at the way the debate around the Scottish referendum went I can't help but think of how different it might have been. Anyway, in spite of the class-baiting scare mongering in the popular press, its been a foregone conclusion since the start, we're definitely not leaving the EU, the vote will go to the Stay option, though probably by a slimmer margin than expected at the outset of the campaign. None of this bodes particularly well for the future.

Review: The Steven Nolan Show 09/10/2013

The Nolan Show is occasionally capable of some of the worst examples of local journalism.  The episode earlier this year where they covered the flag protest should live in infamy.  Inviting a crowd of sectarian bigots who had actually scared off a lot of the people who had ordered their tickets because you don't want an empty studio was ill considered at best and calculated irresponsible sensationalism at worst.  The show does from time to time throw up the odd surprise.

Tonights episode was something else.

They took on the abortion issue and the ambiguities in the law here by talking to the family of a woman who found out that the foetus she was carrying basically didn't have a head and wouldn't live long after the birth and the amount of shit that she and her family have been through. He had the Womans mother on the panel, Rosie Ward from the Christian Medical Centre on the other chair towing the fundamentalist Christian party line, Bernie Smith of anti choice group Precious Life in the audience, Goretti Horgan from Alliance For Choice and Breedagh Hughes from the royal college of midwives making an appearance by satellite. Nolan himself, who was definitely on the right side of this one, was chairing the whole thing as usual and let the facts speak for themselves without letting his ego get in the way of the debate, which made a nice change.

It made the family's dilemma quite clear and it also exposed the inhuman hateful attitudes of Precious Life to a T. Some of it was brutal, both in good and bad ways. Smith got a complete rinsing from Nolan and the mother of the woman, she was basically made to admit that she would force a woman against her will to carry a foetus that was going to die to full term and when presented with the Womans account of being harassed outside a FPA centre by her own activists she refused to condemn their behaviour. Its that sort of thing that has the potential to actually shift people on this issue.

I also noticed that That last chap to speak from the floor on tonights Nolan Show IS actually one of those creepy anti-choice people that stand outside the FPA on Shaftsbury square. I pass there going to work all the time and I recognise his face. The pictures they use of "aborted Fetus" as part of their scare tactics aren't taken from abortions at all, they are actually miscarriages.  Precious Life seem to have clocked that this one didn't go at all well for them and seem to be shitting themselves, and are actually calling for a campaign against the Nolan Show on twitter now.  Good.  Picketing people who are emotionally distressed isn't cool, even people I know who would be quite anti abortion are disgusted by their actions, something Nolan seemed happy to call Smith on.  Seeing the mother of the victim of that behaviour confronting Bernie Smith is probably going to be my TV highlight of the year.

Goretti played an absolute blinder explaining the political realities of the situation but wasn't on it for long enough.  The woman who was on representing the Royal College of midwives called the current legislative guidance from the NI assembly around abortion and the legalities of the women who travel to Britain to get it done "intimidatory and threatening".

There were a few niggles, but it was extremely well done. If you haven't seen it catch it on iPlayer

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03cc1jz/The_Nolan_Show_Series_3_Episode_10/