Increasingly, right wing capitalist nation states - Russia, the US and Israel - are deferring to the only law they respect: might is right.
With the US invasion of Venezuela my mind drifted to an old tutor of mine who died at the end of August. Bill Moffett in his role as an Open University tutor guided me through the final year of an honours degree which I completed a year before release. Each night after lock up, from February to October, and over eight years, I immersed myself in studying for a general degree in politics with the bulk of it in international relations. Throughout 1991 Bill was the tutor on the Global Politics course. Once a month he would come into the H Blocks. I'd arrive in the classroom between the wings and the circle with his beverage of choice and biscuits. The hour following was devoted to coursework accompanied by probing conversation.
I loved working with Bill. He was warm and erudite, totally lacking intellectual arrogance. He didn't concern himself with the misplaced comma, the absent semicolon. His forte was intellectual, never seeking to impose a schoolmarmish regime. While, like all my tutors, he most likely struggled with my handwriting, he never complained about it and always gave me strong grades. He finished off where the brilliant Jenny Meegan, my first tutor, had started when I first set out on a degree course in February 1984.
Initially the prison education system was viewed with suspicion by republican prisoners. In Long Kesh it was effectively boycotted but after the blanket protest, prisoners in both the Cages and the Blocks began engaging with it. Many emerged with degrees. It could not have been easy for the tutors coming into the jail. The prison staff would often seek to fill their heads with horror stories about the type of person they would be educating. Whatever the political and personal view of the tutors, I think the prisoners won their respect and that was reciprocated. The tutors of the Open University displayed a commitment to education that republican prisoners found themselves at ease with, many of whom had familiarised themselves with the groundbreaking work of Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich. And so it was with Bill - he placed the emphasis on learning, teaching was merely an aid to that.
With the US invasion of Venezuela my mind drifted to an old tutor of mine who died at the end of August. Bill Moffett in his role as an Open University tutor guided me through the final year of an honours degree which I completed a year before release. Each night after lock up, from February to October, and over eight years, I immersed myself in studying for a general degree in politics with the bulk of it in international relations. Throughout 1991 Bill was the tutor on the Global Politics course. Once a month he would come into the H Blocks. I'd arrive in the classroom between the wings and the circle with his beverage of choice and biscuits. The hour following was devoted to coursework accompanied by probing conversation.
I loved working with Bill. He was warm and erudite, totally lacking intellectual arrogance. He didn't concern himself with the misplaced comma, the absent semicolon. His forte was intellectual, never seeking to impose a schoolmarmish regime. While, like all my tutors, he most likely struggled with my handwriting, he never complained about it and always gave me strong grades. He finished off where the brilliant Jenny Meegan, my first tutor, had started when I first set out on a degree course in February 1984.
Initially the prison education system was viewed with suspicion by republican prisoners. In Long Kesh it was effectively boycotted but after the blanket protest, prisoners in both the Cages and the Blocks began engaging with it. Many emerged with degrees. It could not have been easy for the tutors coming into the jail. The prison staff would often seek to fill their heads with horror stories about the type of person they would be educating. Whatever the political and personal view of the tutors, I think the prisoners won their respect and that was reciprocated. The tutors of the Open University displayed a commitment to education that republican prisoners found themselves at ease with, many of whom had familiarised themselves with the groundbreaking work of Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich. And so it was with Bill - he placed the emphasis on learning, teaching was merely an aid to that.
Bill was the last of my OU tutors and one that I have fond memories of. I guess it is safe to say I learned much more from him than he did from me. I think where I may have hit the spot with him was reinforcing a view that republican prisoners were not mindless gunmen and bombers as the NIO liked to caricature us.
Around two years ago Bill's daughter Jenny got in touch with me, telling me that her dad had spoken to her quite a bit about our interactions. He said he would like to read my book Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism. Delighted to be able to return a long standing favour, I managed to obtain a copy, signed it and posted it off to him.
Then we had a chat on the phone. It was so pleasing to be back in touch with Bill because I was forever grateful to him for providing what soccer aficionados call 'an assist' to my intellectual development. In 1991 Bill had a firm grasp of the foreign policy of the then superpowers. The year he tutored me also happened to be the one in which the sole superpower rival to the US threw the towel in, causing a shift from a bipolar world to a unipolar one, with the US now the supreme global hegemon, much as it always wanted. While I was certain he would have had tightly reasoned views on the turn that world affairs were taking in recent times, he was in and around 90 years of age, so there was no way I was going to bother him with my curiosity about the state of global politics.
Prior to his illness Jenny and her husband Dru called to the house one Sunday afternoon. They were on their way to the airport and it was convenient to drop in on us in Drogheda which is close to the main Belfast-Dublin arterial route. It was a most rewarding feeling for me to have met Bill's daughter. When Bill passed Jenny sent me a link so that I could watch the funeral service online. On the morning of the funeral somebody called to the house and by the time they had left I rushed to get online but had problems signing in which Jenny had previously said might happen. To my regret I missed the service.
Then we had a chat on the phone. It was so pleasing to be back in touch with Bill because I was forever grateful to him for providing what soccer aficionados call 'an assist' to my intellectual development. In 1991 Bill had a firm grasp of the foreign policy of the then superpowers. The year he tutored me also happened to be the one in which the sole superpower rival to the US threw the towel in, causing a shift from a bipolar world to a unipolar one, with the US now the supreme global hegemon, much as it always wanted. While I was certain he would have had tightly reasoned views on the turn that world affairs were taking in recent times, he was in and around 90 years of age, so there was no way I was going to bother him with my curiosity about the state of global politics.
Prior to his illness Jenny and her husband Dru called to the house one Sunday afternoon. They were on their way to the airport and it was convenient to drop in on us in Drogheda which is close to the main Belfast-Dublin arterial route. It was a most rewarding feeling for me to have met Bill's daughter. When Bill passed Jenny sent me a link so that I could watch the funeral service online. On the morning of the funeral somebody called to the house and by the time they had left I rushed to get online but had problems signing in which Jenny had previously said might happen. To my regret I missed the service.
There was a great bond within the H-Blocks. Even today many former blanketmen keep in touch, meet up for drinks and so on. Many of us like to echo the August 1994 sentiment of Bernadette McAliskey that the good guys lost. Bill Moffett made such an impression on me, demonstrating that republican prisoners were not the only good guys to cross the portal of the H Blocks.
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When Trump soon invades Greenland the resulting blanket trade war between the E U & US will signal a fatal death knell for the Irish economy P L C .
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