Andersonstown News, 4 Sept 97/2 of 2 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Thu, 4 Sep 1997 19:41:54 -0400 (EDT) Beananti@aol.com continued from Part i... -- Hoods cash in as IRA beatings end; vigilantes set for return -- straight talking by Mairtin O Mullineor -- Bernard's lonely voice -- US to pull plug on high-tech training initiative -- U2 finally take Dublin ************************************************ Andersonstown News - Thursday, 4 September 1997 ************************************************ Hoods cash in as IRA beatings end; vigilantes set for return Residents and community workers in upper Andersonstown are considering setting up vigilante groups in response to the huge increase in crime since the renewal of the IRA ceasefire. The IRA in Belfast has not carried out a single punishment beating since it called its second ceasefire seven weeks ago, and in that time anti-social activities and joyriding in particular have soared to unprecedented levels. A swathe of high-speed crashes and near misses have left walls and fences destroyed in past weeks, with pedestrians and other motorists narrowly missing death or serious injury. The roar of high-powered stolen cars has become a nightly feature of life for beleaguered residents. And in the most significant escalation of their activities since the ceasefire, Lenadoon 'hoods' torched the car of a recently released republican lifer in a public act of defiance against the IRA, whose units are under strict orders to carry out no acts of violence in the lead-up to the start of all-party talks. Negotiations are now under way in Lenadoon among local people and community leaders about the reactivation of vigilante squads or neighbourhood watch teams, as they've been dubbed in the new climate of non-violence. "There's no doubt that these people are exploiting a very delicate situation," one Lenadoon republican told the Andersonstown News. "Recently they have upped the ante and started targeting republicans, but we won't be goaded into the kind of knee-jerk response that could have serious implications. This is a problem from which the community is suffering and at the end of the day we are going to have to formulate a community response to it. "They have had the run of the estates for the past seven weeks and it has been very easy for them to do whatever they want. That's going to have to end and we're going to have to find ways of effectively policing our areas before this thing gets completely out of hand. You only have to lie in your bed at night and listen to the mayhem going on around you to know that the RUC is completely unwilling to do anything about it." An upper Andersonstown community worker said that there's tremendous pressure coming from ordinary people fed up with the current levels of crime. "It's very much a case of when the cat's away the mice will play," he said. "There's no point in denying that punishment beatings enjoy a very high level of support among the community, and that support is bound to rise when we see what happens when they stop. But if we're being far-sighted and humane about it, we have to realise that the beating is going to have to stop some time, and perhaps it's a good thing that circumstances have given us a window to formulate new strategies in response to anti-social activities. The meetings we have had so far have been positive and constructive. The neighbourhood watch idea is a popular one and if we can find ways of effectively co-ordinating and controlling the groups, then we're sure it can prove effective in dealing with this worrying rise in crime." ******************************************************** straight talking Golfing for Ireland at Tony's Bangor bunker Stormont education kingpin Tony Worthington may lack the guile of predecessor Michael Ancram but he certainly has no qualms about standing four-square over the policies of his Tory rivals - as I found out when I met the Stormont head boy last week. I was out at Rathgael House (The Ringfort of the Gael, indeed) in Bangor to ask why it had taken the minister's mandarins nine months to reply to a simple funding request for #20,000 from Forbairt. The money had been earmarked for a pioneering project to enable Irish speakers to get services as Gaeilge from statutory agencies like the Housing Executive and health boards as well as from private companies like NIE and BT. The good news was that the far-sighted Belfast EC Partnership - which includes several senior unionists - had already stumped up its own twenty grand for this worthy cause. But nine months after the funding bid was made to the minister's men, not as much as an acknowledgement had been received. But all that changed mysteriously the day before the bilingual pow-wow when a letter finally arrived from the minister's men refusing our request because, you guessed it, 'pressure on budgets'. Strangely enough, though the cupboard was bare when the minister went looking, it was well stocked up when the DoE needed #400,000 (enough to fund our Irish language project for 20 years) to fund a golf tournament for wrinklies in Portrush last month. When this was pointed out to Tony Worthington - via our simultaneous translation system - he had least had the good grace to allow himself a wry smile. But being a colonial big-wig in Stormont is no laughing matter for you also have to remind the natives that there's not enough of them speaking Irish to justify proper funding or adequate recognition for Irish. Your Erse, minister, might well be the response of any Gaeilgeoir involved in the phenomenal revival of Irish in the North which is so successful that there are now more children getting an education through Irish in Belfast than in all of Co Kerry. But a more thoughtful reply might be to ask the minister just what is the magic number which the Irish speaking population must pass before it's entitled to the same type of support as it gets in the rest of our country? 142,000 as revealed in the 1991 Census? 110,000 interested in Irish language programmes as recorded in a UTV survey? 70,000 fluent speakers as reported in a Department of Finance and Personnel report? Come to think of it, we did ask him that very question. His reply: "There is no magic number." Yet the great one's minions insist they can't give any more support to Irish because there just aren't enough Irish speakers about; in other words, we're not telling you what the magic number is but you can be sure you haven't reached it yet. Anyway, in a moment of astonishing patronage towards the natives, Tony Worthington has suggested we bang the application for #20,000 back in to him in the unlikely prospect that it might be a winner when the budget for the new financial year, starting in April 1998, is being determined. And I thought our Anthony was just a big man in stature. At any rate, my tete-a-tete with Tony has given me an inspirational idea as to how to ensure our application for funding succeeds next time round: Alter the job specification to ensure the person appointed as Irish Language Development Officer also has to teach golf to pupils at the bunscoil! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ On the ball! It's a dirty job but somebody has got to do it I reminded myself as I sat in the investor club seats at Parkhead last week to witness one of the most thrilling games Celtic have been involved in since the Fergus McCann era started. Few clubs in Europe can boast such a mammoth following. 47,000- plus supporters packed Paradise for what was after all just a preliminary match to enable the Celts to enter the first round of the UEFA cup proper. Yet for a club with a massive following the Bhoys certainly don't have a massive side. How many of the players who showed such heart in the thumping of FC Tirol would find a place in any of Europe's top thirty sides? That's a question which the real investors in Celtic FC - only a small fraction of whom have access to the lavish lounge bars and heated seats I enjoyed last week - want answered. They are the ordinary supporters whose company I enjoyed on a bus to the ground from Glasgow's sprawling Springburn estate - an area which makes our own dilapidated New Beechmount look like the Champs Elysies. Despite that there was hardly a father who didn't have a child - or children - in tow sporting the new #30 Celtic first team jersey. Whether those loyal fans will disinvest in Celtic if nine-in-a-row becomes ten-in-a-row is a question which, the Andersonstown News editor has been informed, might involve many more trips to Glasgow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Did the loyalists get a raw deal? On the few times I've met him, Billy Hutchinson (above) has always struck me as a fairly solid individual; someone who undoubtedly could hold his own at the conference table. And I say that as someone who's well aware that Billy has murdered a few ordinary Catholics himself and his friends have had a pop at this humble scribbler more than once. For all that, it's hard not to feel some sympathy with him when he complains that the British gave no concessions to loyalist prisoner during their lengthy ceasefire. Now you and I know that the ceasefire was a flag of convenience for a UVF policy which included punishment shootings, robberies, a feud with the LVF and the killing of Catholics and loyalist paramilitaries who fell out of favour with their bosses. Yet the British gave that ceasefire a clean bill of health and turned a blind eye to what the PUP branded "a fraying at the edges". So then why didn't Mayhew and Mowlam release loyalist prisoners in order to underpin the CLMC ceasefire? And if they took such a niggardly attitude to loyalist prisoners during their organisations' ceasefire, doesn't it bode ill for any sort of imaginative approach by the British to republican prisoners now that both ceasefires are in place? Answers can be expected shortly. ************************************************************ Bernard's lonely voice Liam Carson talks to Bernard MacLaverty about his first novel since the huge success of Cal Some people never seem to change author Bernard McLaverty is one of them. In his case, though, this is a compliment. MacLaverty radiates a rock-solid firmness of character and purpose. If you didn't know him, you'd probably expect to encounter a doom-laden introvert. His stories deal in loneliness, his characters are men and women pressured by adversity, searching inside themselves for meaning and strength as their worlds are torn apart by political or emotional conflict. But the Bernard MacLaverty who greets me on Dublin's Grafton Street is full of light a man who embraces you with a smile and a strong handshake. Talk to anyone who knows Bernard and they invariably describe him in warmest of terms defining him by his wit and good humour. He is in Ireland to promote the publication of his new novel, Grace Notes, his first since the critically acclaimed and successfully filmed Cal the tragic love story set against the bitter backdrop of the Troubles. Since Cal there have been numerous short stories and film scripts but Grace Notes sees his return to the complexities of the novel form. It also marks a fresh departure by focusing on a woman as a central character, bringing us into the world of composer Catherine McKenna. Estranged from her family in the North, Catherine moves to the remote Isle of Islay where she becomes embroiled in a disastrous relationship with an alcoholic. In Glasgow she gives birth to a baby girl, and is commissioned to produce an instrumental composition by the BBC. Returning to the North to bury her "difficult" father, she attempts to come to terms with her past. Her story is that of a woman struggling to create amidst defeat and depression. MacLaverTy admits to a certain risk in writing about a woman, but found abundant inspiration in his own life. "I seem to be surrounded by strong women like my mother and when I was growing up my grandmother and great aunt all lived in the same house, my aunt Cissie across the road, being married to Madeleine and having three daughters. "Paying attention to that is very important, nothing should outlaw you from writing about fifty per cent of the human race." Bernard is also fascinated by the obstacles a woman artist who is a mother has to overcome. "There's an image in the book of the Rose of Jericho, a wee dried-up fist of a plant. Someone gave me one with the instructions to pour boiling water in it. In minutes it's green and has spread. I found this moving in a way, thinking of the woman's baby and her first priority is to that living thing. Can she put what ideals and musical urges she has on hold until she can get around to writing them, or will she lose that? I wondered could you harbour creativity? Then there's the image of the breast milk the baby suckling actually manufactures milk. Is it the same with creativity?" In Grace Notes the Troubles still lurk as a dark presence in MacLaverty's writing. Although he's now lived in Scotland since 1981, I wonder if he finds it hard to escape his background, "I was trying to write from the age of 20 and by the time I was 29 the Troubles had 'refreshed themselves'. And if you're a writer, and you're paying attention and suddenly the world around you explodes into violence and hatred that's going to affect you as a writer and forever more. So Catherine comes back to mid-Ulster and picks up again on all those hatreds, the things that get in the way of things. Those hatreds are terrible and they are a part of the book which is in some way about the hurdles that block people's progress." Can art change these hatreds? Bernard is both optimistic and realistic. "The hope might be that if there's enough of it, said often enough in different forms, there will be an accumulative educative effect. An enlightened voice repeating. What philosophers and poets say filters through years later. But to have an immediate effect , I don't think that can happen at all." It is now 20 years since Blackstaff Press published his first book Secrets. Remembering his first impulse to write, MacLaverty is effusive. "A friend gave me a copy of The Brothers Karamazov and told me I had to read it. And I read it for months, in the bath, on the bus, all the time. It was astonishing to realise that inside your head 19th century Russia was parading around. It was a great feeling. And then the ridiculous assumption followed. I'd like to try that. It wasn't quite so direct, the beginning of my writing was out of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I found I couldn't do that. Then longer lines, prose, a paragraph about my grandmother and her handbag, that kind of stuff that was it." He sees his characters as searching for "some kind of communication, some kind of satisfaction". "Frank O'Connor spoke of the 'lonely voice', that the short story is the best place for loneliness, whereas the novel is about society and people interacting. And maybe it focuses down on one person and the struggle to unite with other people. It's very difficult to write about. You need that abrasiveness, that pain. You can say to me, I'm a happily married man. Then you think there are aspects of pain to everyone's life. And you focus on that. It's hard to write about being a happily married, settled man." MacLaverty's writing might centre on pain, but there's a sunniness in his disposition that is reflected in the comment that he inscribes in my copy of Grace Notes as I prepare to leave. It simply says "go forward singing". Grace Notes is published in hardback by Jonathan Cape at #14.99. ************************************************************ US to pull plug on high-tech training initiative A red tape wrangle is jeopardising a groundbreaking training programme linking Belfast with Pittsburgh and due to start on the same day as the historic peace talks. For six local trainees who won places on the high-tech training scheme developed by the Springvale Training Centre have been told by the US Consulate in Queen Street that they don't qualify for visas - even though the US Commerce Department played a key role in bringing the company behind the initiative to West Belfast. And now Tim Dougherty, head honcho at Electronic Healthcare Systems of Pittsburgh which has a subsidiary on the Falls Road says the administrative cock-up raises a question mark over future job links between the US and Belfast. "I got strong encouragement from the US Commerce Department when I decided to locate in West Belfast last year as my company fitted in perfectly with their drive to shore up the peace process with jobs," Tim Dougherty told the Andersonstown News from his Pittsburgh headquarters this week. "In fact, I'm due to return to Northern Ireland next month as part of an information technology trade and investment mission. Our training initiative with Springvale was designed to give six very bright and promising young people in your city the opportunity to come to the US to work with us for six months and hopefully lead to full-time employment in a cutting-edge industry. That seems to me to be a logical progression of our business in Northern Ireland and obviously the Belfast EC Partnership Board thought highly enough of the training project we put together to provide it with a generous funding package." Tim Dougherty says the visa block came "as a bolt out of the blue". "We've successfully brought three Belfast computer engineers to Pittsburgh to train with our company before they took up positions in our Belfast office but now, astonishingly, the Consulate says they should never have been given visas either. It's as if one hand, the US State Department with responsibility for visa allocations, doesn't know what the other hand, the US Commerce Department, is doing." EHS and Springvale have been told that they can have the trainees admitted to the US if they register them with a Pennsylvanian university - at a cost of $4,000. "That may be the route we have to go down but that means losing $4,000 from the salary, accommodation and travel budget we've put together for the trainees and that's obviously not something we would like to do with money set aside for the benefit of the trainees." As the starting date for the scheme looms, Tim Dougherty says he hasn't given up hope that the US Government may yet be able to cut through the red tape hampering the project. "If they don't, they're sending out the wrong message to potential investors at a time when people are looking once again at investing in areas like West Belfast," he adds. Yesterday, West Belfast MP Gerry Adams - who cut the ribbon at the opening of the new company's Twin Spires' offices last year - said he would raise the visa "fiasco" with US Commerce Secretary William Daley when they meet this week in Washington DC. "This is a time when we need to be all pulling in the same direction for those US business people who have shown a willingness to invest in West Belfast - not placing obstacles in their path." *********************************************************** U2 finally take Dublin After all the bickering and second guessing, seeing U2 live in Dublin was well worth the wait Via the Supreme Court and an army of begrudgers, Irish supergroup U2 made a triumphant homecoming to Dublin on Saturday night, giant TV screen, mirrorball lemon and all. But the highlight of this high-tech extravaganza was the Edge leading the sell-out crowd in a monster karaoke version of Dana's 1970 Euro winner, 'All Kinds of Everything'. "It's time to rock," U2's stetson-hatted guitarist announced. "You never know, by next November this could be our new national anthem!" For a band whose Christian connections are well documented, this might have been taken as a slight on the Derry lass who helps run a Christian TV station from her home in Alabama and whose presidential campaign is regarded as something of a joke. But for the thousands in attendance, it was neither a political statement nor an ironic aside: it was good, clean fun. If the politics have been dropped from the between-song patter, they still exist in a more palatable form in the stands which co-exist with the merchandise stalls and the beer tent. The causes close to the band's heart get access to the audience, but only on a voluntary basis. Bono's harangues of the past, giving the punters no room to disagree, are gone. So, it seems, is 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'. In the historic Belfast gig on the previous Tuesday, Bono promised no politics, only shrubbery in the Botanic Gardens. Instead of a rebel song, the crowd got an Elvis song - 'Suspicious Minds' - dedicated to the politicians. Bono's only conversations with the hometown crowd were limited to cheeky asides about their difficulties in staging a Dublin gig. Taken out of its obvious context, it would have made little sense to play 'Sunday' in Dublin. But Bono always said that a time might come when there was no need to play the song again. Perhaps, given the current situation, now is as good a time as any. Whether anyone from Derry present at both gigs would agree is another matter. The scale of the presentation is simply mind-boggling. From the initial wonderment of the giant screen to the surprise entrance on the extended catwalk and the re-entry from the futuristic spinning lemon, the effect is jaw-dropping. Relocating to the catwalk, the band played in close proximity as the smoke billowed, the mirrorball spun and the lights created an almost intimate effect - remarkable that it was pulled off in front of tens of thousands. Even more amazing, then, that it all comes down, as it really should, to the music. After 18 years there is no excuse for a weak moment in the set, and maybe I'm being picky if I point out Bullet the Blue Sky as the lone culprit. Played in the dance style of most of their new material, it loses its impact, the broad strokes painted on the Joshua Tree tour reduced to pale, watery imitation. Most of 'Pop' got an airing, the strongest representatives being the singles and a fiery version of 'Miami', when the giant screen came into its own as a complement to the song. Old favourites abounded too, as we were treated to 'I Will Follow', 'New Year's Day', a gorgeous 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' and an air-punching, ground-shaking 'Where the Streets Have No Name'. The set was perfectly weighted, from the funk-rock of 'Discotheque' to the acoustic version - lighters aloft - of 'Staring at the Sun'. Other highlights from 'Pop', including 'Velvet Dress' and 'Please', sounded fully-formed live in a way they could not on a first listen to the CD. I haven't bought it yet, but I probably will, seeing as I emptied my wallet on everything else the merchandisers had to offer. I couldn't resist a chuckle at myself when I saw an image cross the giant screen of a monkey evolving into a man pushing a shopping trolley: went to the gig, wore the T-shirt, bought the tour programme... "Look at what we brought you back from Las Vegas," Bono joked at the massive yellow arch. "I hope you like it, 'cos you certainly paid for it!" Shelling out so much money for gigs these days often backfires, but I don't think I've come across anyone who went to these dates and feels short- changed. There will have to come a time when U2 rely totally on their music and all the accompanying technology will look like so much window dressing. But until that time, when we'll all be suitably sophisticated, I'll settle for being blown away like I was on Saturday night. Cheers, lads. See you next time around. *********************************************************** ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytire-09.12.97-00:46:50-5281