Andersonstown News-09.27.97-pt.2 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source:Beananti@aol.com continued/part 2 of 2... -- SABOTAGE! -- Straight talking by Mairtmn S Muilleoir -- WAR STORIES -- Nice programme - shame about the book, though ************************************************ Andersonstown News - Thursday, 25 September 1997 ************************************************ SABOTAGE! Saboteurs opposed to the siting of a new halting site for Travellers near a West Belfast housing estate have vandalised the completed foundations. A number of men scaled the perimeter fence surrounding the site on the Hannahstown Hill and vandalised work that had only been finished that same day. The attack is the most serious incident yet in a bitter row that has split residents in the new Hawthorne Hill estate on Hannahstown Hill. In a meeting of the Hawthorne Residents' Association in a local pub last week, some residents spoke out forcefully against a Belfast City Council plan to house 20 Traveller families on the former site of Walsh's scrapyard - just yards away from the five- year-old estate. Only a small minority of residents at the meeting were in favour of the planned development. Yesterday, a Council spokesman confirmed that the site had been vandalised - although he stressed that he believed the attack to be the work of a small group of troublemakers. He confirmed that the Council was considering building a service site for Travellers on the land in question, but added that no final decision had been taken and no contract awarded. Work on the foundations, the spokesman added, was a purely technical matter primarily aimed at warding off a legal claim on the land in the future. *************************************************** Straight talking by Mairtmn SM Muilleoir Titanic Town is holed below the water line Holy Thursday 1972, the day when Martha Crawford was shot dead as she returned from the butcher's at Rossnareen Avenue during the dying moments of the fiercest gun battle ever witnessed in Andersonstown, is as fresh in my memory today as it was a quarter of a century ago. The mother of ten's death at the hands of the IRA led to the birth of a short-lived peace movement - in which my own parents were involved - and a republican backlash which involved all sorts of bully-boy tactics and skullduggery dressed up as patriotism. Mary Costello draws heavily on the traumatic experiences of her own family, who were audacious enough to sponsor the fledgling peace movement, in her fictionalised account of that period in Titanic Town. This week, Julie Walters and co rolled into Andersonstown to start work on the film version of the book. That the Costello family suffered dreadfully at the hands of republicans and louts - with strong cross-membership evident - is not in doubt. Neither is there likely to be a more poignant moment in the bleak landscape of the past 30 years more likely to lend itself to a movie than the death in crossfire of Martha Crawford - unless it is the pointless killing three years later of her 15-year-old son Patrick in the grounds of the Royal Victoria Hospital. But Titanic Town is unlikely to be that movie because the, albeit well-crafted, novel on which it is based is too filled with bitterness and rancour to tell the true tale of Andersonstown during the worst of the Troubles. In fact, rarely - mess hall banter in Silver City aside - have the ordinary people of Andersonstown been more unjustly caricatured than in Titanic Town. The entire book leaves a sour taste in the mouth as Mary Costello's pen wreaks revenge on her imagined childhood tormentors: the ordinary common five-eights of upper Andersonstown where so many of us are proud to have grown up. If my memory serves me right, a ceremonial sword was used in one of the many cowardly attacks on the Costello home but it's unlikely it was as mighty as the pen of Mary Costello when it comes to the pigs-in-the-parlour, feets-get-movin' Oirishy in Titanic Town which is bound to delight English filmgoers. Take this description of republican firebrand Mrs French: "The Frenches were...a household of hard cases. The mother was the worst, repulsive to the point of fascination, a shapeless figure, hefty, unkempt and unwashed, she invariably wore a stained floral pinafore - although she avoided housework of any description - and men's grey socks, which hung loosely around her fat ankles. Otherwise she would go bare-legged, even on the coldest winter's day. Her legs were permanently measled ...Although no more than 45 when we first encountered her she had already lost all her teeth and would never insert her falsies before lunch hour. Her hair was dyed strawberry blond, but never recently, so that it would graduate in tangles around her big, bloated face and down over her shoulders changing in colour from grey at the crown to mousey....She never put a comb through it but she did scratch it a lot...To all appearances, Mrs French was a dirty, throughother sloven...the mother of four ignorant, obnoxious and stinking children...she neglected her kids...a catalogue of rogues ...every evening...Bernadette would go down to the shops for a giant box of cornflakes and a bottle of milk. This was the evening meal, staple diet of the French establishment.. mostly Mrs French liked to drink. She also battered her husband." It goes on and on ad nauseam as the author portrays a picture of Andersonstown which would do the British tabloids proud. Are this week's editions of Eastenders, which have sparked outrage among the Irish in Britain, really any worse than that? Revenge, as Mary Costello discovers in Titanic Town, is, indeed, sweet but does it have to be this bitter? I've often thought that if hypocrisy were cattle, then Belfast City Council would be Argentina but even I found the breathtaking two-faced affrontery of the unionists outside Stormont on Tuesday difficult to take. Just days after they had paraded into Stormont with John White at their shoulder, the unionists were lecturing the rest of us about violence. Mr White, after all, is the UDA butcher so depraved that he slashed the nipples of his helpless Catholic victims even as they begged for the knife to the throat which would end the unspeakable torture being inflicted on them. Pass the sickbag, Mildred, these talks are going to put the toughest stomach to the test. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sackcloth and Ashes for Straight-talking Last week, I predicted that I probably wouldn't get a response from Pulitzer Prize winning author Frank McCourt until Christmas (1999) in response to my written enquiry about the Andersonstown address of his late father Malachy. Thank God I don't do the gee-gees for never have I been more wrong. In fact, a reply Exoceted into the office this week from the New York-based writer whose book Angela's Ashes is being hailed as one of the greatest autobiographies of all time. "If you're questioning the truth of my account of my life in Limerick, you can kiss my butt," fumed Frank in a missive directed to my desk by his great-niece Fiona Tiernan who - here's where I lucked out - is in Belfast studying at St Rose's. 14-year-old Fiona isn't behind the door either when it comes to sticking up for her great-uncle - as you might expect from a young lady brought up in Boston - and she fairly read the riot act to Straight-Talking. While I'll take a raincheck on the butt-kissing, I'm not averse to a little bit of brown-nosing in order to ingratiate myself with Frank McCourt - whose book by the way is a masterpiece. I know that sounds embarrassing but I actually went on record with my admiration for the Great One before he issued his fatwa when I wrote to his publishers in Dublin - a letter, it appears, which still hasn't been passed on. For the record, I wasn't casting any aspersions on the accuracy of Angela's Ashes but I did think it might be politic to suggest that father Malachy couldn't have been a complete rogue in case any surviving Andersonstown relatives were offended. However, the general family view seems to be that Malachy was indeed a scoundrel and a reprobate, albeit one who lived out his last days in West Belfast in the early 1980s as a peaceable, teetotaling, non-smoker who resisted, as Frank recounts in Angela's Ashes, the best efforts of local ladies to "tempt him with their delicacies". Which is good enough for me though I'll be taking up Frank's offer, via Fiona, to write to him direct in New York to suss out some more information about the Andersonstown end of Malachy McCourt. What I've found out to date, courtesy of Fiona's aunt Josie McLaughlin who's putting the Boston teenager up in her Kenard Avenue home during her Belfast sojourn, is that Malachy settled in Bunbeg Drive in Lenadoon after returning from abroad. He died in 1983, just a short while after his niece Siobhan Tiernan (nie McCourt) had visited him with little baby Fiona in tow. If I've got it right the existing McCourt connection is as follows: Josie McLaughlin's (nie Tiernan) brother Liam Tiernan (of Barleycorn fame) married Siobhan McCourt whose father Malachy (himself a famous New York actor and M.C. at Gerry Adams' recent Waldorf Astoria bash) is a brother of Frank McCourt. Liam and Siobhan, if you've been following the plot, are, of course, Fiona's parents. Angela's Ashes is by far the best-selling autobiography in the US this decade and a plaque at the former Bunbeg Drive home of Malachy McCourt would be just the ticket for visiting Yanks, so keep the information coming. In the meantime, as a Kenard Avenue old boy myself, I wonder could I claim a wee bit of a connection with Frank McCourt? Only joking, Fiona! ************************************************** WAR STORIES Television Robin Livingstone has been watching the first episode of Peter Taylor's new documentary on the Provos Open to a shot of a U.S. harbor by night. Cue the music you get on cheap 18-certificate videos when the guy with the axe appears at the window (filed under S for Sinister in the BBC music library). Beardy IRA guys try to buy surface-to-air missiles from undercover FBI guys. They want to boost the IRA's morale by getting gear that can bring down "helicopters, choppers, warships". Cut to panoramic view of Belfast rooftops and cue plaintive uileann pipe music (filed in the BBC music library under E for Everything we have ever committed to tape involving Ireland). The four-part documentary series Provos (BBC1) got off to an inauspicious start, indistinguishable from the thousand tortured filmic analyses of the Troubles that had gone before it. But then it got good. It got good because Peter Taylor knows his stuff. He's a bloke who was a familiar sight in Lenadoon back in the early 70s, a reporter who was on the streets while I was huddled under a table listening to the gunfire that signalled the end of the 1972 IRA truce. I wonder how many of his fellow hacks who have spent the past two weeks churning out pre-written pieces about how this film is a) insensitive to IRA victims or b) damaging to the peace process can say the same? I hope it wasn't out of a comradely sense of experience shared that I found his narrative insightful and involving (strong enough, indeed, to blot out the sound of the background muzak). I'm absolutely certain, though, that it was no misplaced fellow feeling that led me to conclude that the interviews were simply compelling. A British Army officer remembering a time in 1969 he marched his Catholic troops to pray at a Falls church without a weapon between them; Martin Meehan on being sworn into the IRA: "it was like getting into Westpoint"; Brendan Hughes recalling a time when Falls Road republicans were so friendly with the British Army that they showed them how to use their weapons; a squaddie telling angrily of how Falls Road women attacked his colleague before handing him over to the IRA to be shot. There was a sense of "what did you do in the war, daddy?" about it all, a palpable post-conflict feeling that pointed up the zeitgeist within the nationalist community that too many are willing to ignore or deny: an appetite for dialogue is overwhelming the appetite for violence. And you could almost - but not quite - forget that neither Gerry Adams nor Martin McGuinness agreed to be interviewed for the programme, even though just about everybody else who had ever shouted Tiocfaidh Ar La at a H-block march was included. This was particularly unfortunate for Taylor, given that part of his brief seems to be to get the goods on them both (but particularly Adams), to prove once and for all that they're the Mr Bigs not only of Sinn Fiin, but of the IRA too. **************************************************** Nice programme - shame about the book, though Michael Morgan has been reading Provos - the book of the new TV series Coming to a TV screen near you? Provos is the book of the major four-part series which started last Tuesday on BBC. Expect it to attract the predictable howls of outrage from Tory rent-a-quotes, banging on about oxygen lakes of publicity for 'terrorists', not to mention their Ulster unionist cousins who can be guaranteed to stutter with rage at this latest 'betrayal'. This time round it'll be interesting to see if they're joined by a New Labour version of the same, or whether Tony Blair's new culture of touchy-feely loving and understanding extends to Irish republicans. Somehow I doubt it. Actually there's little in the way of new material or insights here. The only real controversy will be that it signals a sort of rapprochement between the Provos and British, when former deadly enemies sit around the same table, reminiscing about 'the war'. Rapprochement implies rehabilitation and rehabilitation becomes respectability. I suspect that this forms a large part of Taylor's motivation for producing the TV series, and the book is really an offspin of that. His wish is not simply to record the details of what happened and why, but also to intervene in this process, as persuader for Sinn Fein's political credentials. To which it might be said: 'we don't need convincing'. But then the programmes will not be aimed at us but at the great British public, who, after decades of hysterical anti-republican propaganda, are in dire need of a proper education. Whether in fact the book and TV series will lead to a 'greater understanding' remains to be seen, but that is its purpose. Overall the book is a fairly straightforward narrative of the Provisional Republican Movement as it developed from its baptism of fire in August 1969 up to almost yesterday (the book was finished a mere month ago). The term 'Provos' is used by Taylor generically, to refer to the Provisional Republican Movement as a whole, of which the army (IRA) and political arm (Sinn Fiin) are constituent parts. Taylor's theme is the changing relationship between the two over the years, a change which amounts in his view to a metamorphosis. Thus the 1970s saw the emergence, consolidation and further retrenchment of the armed struggle. Within this context the IRA were dominant and Sinn Fiin largely irrelevant. The 1980s saw the development of the 'ballot box and armalite' strategy - twin strategies played almost side-by-side, each designed to dovetail with the other, but now the two parts of the movement were fast approaching an equal status - not quite but nearly. The 1990s saw the fruition of this strategy with Sinn Fiin now very much in the ascendant and the IRA allowing itself to be persuaded that the political was the way forward and therefore content - for most of the time anyway - to let the Tiocfaidh Armani brigade of aspirant Sinn Fiin politicians do the running. It might be thought the next stage in this remarkable transformation will be the total politicisation of the Republican Movement through Sinn Fiin and the eventual withering away of the IRA. Taylor doesn't go this far, ending the book on an enigmatic note: 'I asked one final question. Is the "war" over. Very few said that it was.' On the technical side, Provos is above all else a TV production (two years in the making, it's said). TV is a visual medium. It operates under certain rules and procedures, designed to enhance its visual presentation. The problem arises when the media are mixed. What works well on screen does not necessarily have the same effect in print. The core of Provos the TV series are the interviews: with Republican activists and supporters, with British Soldiers, RUC Commanders, Politicians, etc. This makes for good TV but in print they don't have the same effect. The book might seem a mite superficial because of this. And of course there are mistakes, not many though. Wolfe Tone was not 'a Belfast Protestant', the Aldershot bombing was in 1972, not 1971 and Lenny Murphy, leader of the Shankill Butchers, was never 'brought to justice' by the RUC (though he was assassinated by the IRA in 1991). I found the treatment of Bloody Sunday questionable. He dismisses the widely held view that the paras were acting on orders from above as a 'conspiracy' theory - an unhelpful term which implies we're all a bit paranoid or worse. Instead he's a little too reliant on interviews with the paras themselves. This points to a methodological problem. How does he know his interviewees are telling the truth? Nor, I think, would many be impressed with the statement that 'the loyalist cease-fire (1994-97) held despite intense provocation'. Overall, Provos the book is less than satisfying. Although it's written by a top journalist and manages to pack a lot of detail into its 354 pages of text, it yet doesn't seem to grapple with the big story that lies herein. It'll make great TV though. Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fiin, by Peter Taylor; Bloomsbury Press #16.99 ***************************************************** ================================================================= 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-09.27.97-10:19:48-18197