Social Items

TPQ
Christopher Owens 🔖“There is something urgent and sad about his work. His paintings are full of isolation and silence. Very often windows are a key feature of the composition and the viewer observes figures through them (as in Nighthawks, for example). The windows seem to emphasise the sense of separation and self-containment in his work.”


Written by Kate Innes, the above gets to the heart about what it is people seem to love about Edward Hopper. Although he would downplay it later in life, so many seem to see his art as an expression of loneliness and solitude (which, it’s important to note, aren’t necessarily the same thing). Like his contemporary Norman Rockwell, Hopper depicts an America that no longer exists, but the memory of the dream lives in the art.

With that thought, it’s no wonder Sergio Rossi and Giovanni Scarduelli made it their mission to create this graphic novel, described in the press release as an attempt to dive:

 . . . into the life of the acclaimed artist Edward Hooper, whose iconic works depict quintessentially American scenes and experiences. While many of Hopper's most acclaimed works have been embraced by American culture, the artist himself rejected much of the lyricism and romance that his audience imposed on his paintings. This unique overview of Hopper's life and career offers a fascinating and unflinching portrait of an artist trying to establish himself and define his own style.

Certainly a lot of ambition is at play here, because Hopper lived a fairly quiet life so how has the end product turned out?

Rather well, naturally.

Much like Will Eisner: A Comics Biography, it’s not the most piercing insight into Hopper’s psyche but it is a great tribute to him thanks to the combination of Scarduelli mimicking Hopper’s style and Rossi’s plain dialogue which never expresses more than it needs to, adding a crisp veneer to proceedings.

The narration is a back-and-forth conversation between Hopper and his wife/muse Josephine Verstille Hopper (an artist in her own right). Sadly there’s only one indication that the two them used to beat each other up but there is an element of tension in places where she complains about having to give up her own dreams in order to be his admin assistant and she tries to tease out relationships he may have had in Paris.

Simple, direct and successful.

Sergio Rossi (Author), Giovanni Scarduelli (Artist), 2021, Edward Hopper: The Story of His Life. Prestel. ISBN: 978-3791387352

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

Edward Hopper 📚 The Story of His Life

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Thirty One

 



Religious Derangement Syndrome @ 21

 

A Morning Thought @ 3302

Tommy McKearney ☭ During his recent visit to Ireland, Donald Trump behaved much as expected. Unwilling to share the limelight, he stole attention from Shane Lowry, winner of the Irish Open, by announcing a lifting of tariffs on Irish whiskey exports to the USA.

4-October-2026.

This populist gesture in Doonbeg was, however, superseded by repeatedly voicing support for Irish reunification. While the former gesture was widely welcomed, the latter call caused considerable discomfort among a number of political parties and senior politicians. Trump’s long-term admirers in the DUP were upset and deeply embarrassed by the president’s pronouncement. Nor was discomfort confined to northern unionists. The neo-Redmondite Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, appeared equally discommoded by the comments. Rather than address the issue directly, the Fianna Fáil leader opted instead to distract attention from Donald’s words by attacking Sinn Féin.

Elsewhere there was an acknowledgment that Trump’s intervention had certainly put the issue back on the table, for a time at least. This came in the aftermath of a blunt dismissal by Britain’s Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, of any possibility of constitutional change.

What, if anything, therefore, was behind this intervention in what is generally deemed as something beyond the remit of a US politician, even one who is the president? Trump is of course well known for his unpredictable, often ill-considered outbursts. This was offered as one possible reason for his surprising stance. Elsewhere, other commentators speculated that he was attempting to influence Irish American voters in the upcoming mid-term elections in the US.

There is, though, another plausible explanation. That is, the US deep state intervening through their president to ensure the future direction of events in Ireland. Seems far-fetched? Well, let’s consider the facts.

Notwithstanding the Fianna Fáil leader’s resistance to contemplate an end to partition, there is an inexorable momentum in that direction. A hapless, incompetent, non-performing six-county administration is incapable of generating support for that failed political entity. How long can the partitioned statelet survive in light of changing demographics and a lack of confidence among many members of the unionist community? Anyone doubting that this is widely understood in the corridors of power need only read a recent article in the arch-conservative, pro-establishment British newspaper, The Telegraph.[1]

In a lengthy piece by Lily Shanagher under the headline “Generation Kneecap’s plan to break up the UK and reshape Ireland”, she reports that in a study conducted by Queen’s University and Ulster University, a majority of all those under 35 years in the north favour reunification. These facts are neither missed nor misread by the US embassy in Dublin and reported back to Washington. Reunification over the coming decades is seemingly inevitable and, in their view, this may pose a risk to the United States’ imperial interests.

Capitalism is being challenged through its own contradictions and working people in the West are experiencing ever increasing hardship. In spite of threats from fascism, there appears to be a growth of left-leaning movements, as evidenced by Die Linke in Berlin and Zohran Mamdani in New York. Not enormous, admittedly, but indicative of a potential for change, especially when taken together with the encouraging example offered by the People’s Republic of China.

So, how does Ireland fit into this scenario? While there may be no imminent threat of a revolutionary upsurge in this country, the potential for such is always present. The enormous support for Palestine is, alone, a disturbing factor for Washington. Why, it may be asked, would a country with no obvious relationship to the Middle East demonstrate that depth of support? The answer lies in a deep-seated hostility to imperialism (in any of its manifestations) as a result of our traumatic history. There is also the evidence provided by the Catherine Connolly election campaign of a possible united front among left-leaning elements in Irish society.

Taken together with the above-mentioned leftward movements in Europe and New York, coupled with their obsessing over China’s exemplar economy, the US deep state might well believe it has cause for concern. A campaign for Irish reunification could generate the conditions for the realisation of James Connolly’s workers’ republic. For them, there is then the nightmare of a socialist state in Western Europe, or Cuba in the North Atlantic, as the British military once suggested.

So along comes the US president and emphasises his desire to see an end to partition. As a consequence, many supporters of a united Ireland may well view this development as something to be welcomed. And, moreover, under no circumstances should this advantage be imperilled by opposition to America’s agenda or its policies.

Whether or not this was the reason for Trump’s pronouncements is a matter for speculation. What is more certain is that his statements may possibly detrimentally influence the opinion of a section of Irish society that might otherwise follow a more progressive course, now and into the future.

Therein lies a challenge for the Irish left, in that the case for a workers’ republic has to be made without concession to compromise. The future must be socialism, not Yankee-led barbarism.

Notes

[1] Lily Shanagher, “Generation Kneecap’s plan to break up the UK and reshape Ireland”, The Telegraph, 18 September 2026. 
Tommy McKearney is a left wing and trade union activist.
He is author of The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament.
Follow on Twitter @Tommymckearney

Trump Embarrasses Irish Political Establishment!

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

On 21 October 1966, a mountain of colliery waste came down on a Welsh village and killed 144 people, 116 of them children. The National Coal Board had been warned in writing, three years earlier, that it would.

The last ordinary sound in Pantglas Junior School was children’s chatter about half-term. The holiday started at midday. Library books had been put away, the first lesson had begun, and when a rumbling came down off the hillside, low at first and then louder, a teacher told his class not to worry. It was only thunder.

It was not thunder. It was Tip No. 7.

Earlier that morning mothers had stood in their doorways and watched their children go up the wet streets into a fog thick enough to hide the mountain. They waved. It costs nothing to wave. You do it a thousand times without once thinking about it, and that is the particular cruelty of Aberfan: nobody got to say a proper goodbye, because nobody knew that a goodbye was required.

At around a quarter past nine, roughly 300,000 cubic yards of liquefied spoil, slack, broke away and went down the valley at speeds of up to 50mph. 

The Aberfan Disaster

Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ During the course of our lives how often have we heard the virtues of being a ‘responsible honest citizen’ usually from the police when they are looking for a tout to work for them! 

Another piece of contaminated information we are fed, usually by misguided but well-meaning parents, is “the law applies to all of us” and “we are all equal in the eyes of the law”, sentiments often echoed by schoolteachers. Of course these observations by those who, as children, we are supposed to respect are utter rubbish. We are not all equal before the law and the law. 

While on paper it may apply to everybody that the sentences handed down for similar offences by judges are certainly not equal. In Britain working-class people are more likely to a heavy sentence for such offences as assault as are people from a middle class or bourgeois background. Of those from working class backgrounds people of ethnic backgrounds are likely to get even harsher sentences. Black and Asian people tend to suffer these disparities in British law which is supposed to not recognise or prejudice against race or ethnicity. 

In the UK the state tends to heavily police and prosecute ‘street crimes’, such as low-level theft, which are more visible in working-class areas. Complex corporate fraud, tax evasion usually associated with wealthier individuals are less heavily policed and rarely result in a custodial sentence. Very similar socioeconomic and systematic prejudices are present in the twenty-six-counties legal system. Research published by the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) reveals that individuals from the most socioeconomic and deprived communities are 25 times more likely to be imprisoned than those from financially better off areas.  Even in sport, inequalities on the terraces are apparent. Before the gentrification of football and takeover of big clubs by crooked owners occasionally supporters would invade the pitch. This was usually branded as ‘hooliganism’ or ‘thuggish behaviour’ by the bourgeois media. When, however, the same or similar incidents occur at a Rugby Union game, like Twickenham frequented by the bourgeoisie, the crowd behaviour by the same media is described as ‘high spirits’ or ‘great sport’. 

Back in 1976 I was at a football match between Aston Villa and Manchester United at Villa Park. The Red Army had a reputation, partly deserved, partly not, and we were massed on the Witton Lane End terrace. At the foot of the terracing surrounding the playing area reporters from various newspapers were urging the United fans to “give us something to report tomorrow” and “come on lads invade the pitch”. Adjacent to these reporters were the West Midlands Constabulary who, in theory and if they were policing impartially, should have arrested these reporters for inciting criminality, even riot! Not one reporter was detained yet a young United fan who had done nothing was arrested supposedly for inciting violence! The older United fans, sixties men, restrained the younger hotheads, they’d been there before. The truth was these older supporters did a better job policing our end than did the official forces of law and order!

In Britain the trade unions have the law stacked against them in trade disputes. The right-wing government of Margaret Thatcher introduced a law limiting the number of pickets to a mere six. This number of pickets does not express to those contemplating going to work when they should be on strike the strength and depth of feeling among those taking strike action. The scabs would not take a token picket of six seriously and may claim, as I’m sure the legislators were aware, that this number could be perceived just how weak support may be for the strike. Of course, this legislation suited and continues to be beneficial to the employers as the 1906 reversal of the 1901 judgement by the House of Lords against the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants Judgement (trades dispute act), was eroded by Thatcher. The 1906 reversal granted limited immunities in law to the trade unions. Once again, the law is designed not for the benefit of the working-class but to make life easier and protection of the employer’s profits and property in a trade dispute.

Such draconian anti-union legislation does not apply to trade disputes or trade union laws in the twenty-six-counties where pluralist industrial relations still to a large extent prevail. I remember many years ago a trade union man in Britain, the late Sam McCluskey, the former General Secretary of the National Union of Seamen (NUS) - now part of the RMT union - was asked “what about the law”. He replied his interviewer on the radio; “I’m sick of hearing about the law, the law is there to crush us, I don’t care about the law.” Which gives us a clear idea of Sam’s opinion of the anti-union legislation.

During the eighties we witnessed on TV and, in some cases at first hand, Thatcher’s law being handed out to pickets. Police used baton charges on striking coalminers in the 1984/85 strike simply for wishing to put their case for the strike to would be scabs. The police were instructed to get these blacklegs into work at all costs with minimal or, preferably, no contact with the pickets. At Orgreave Coking plant the law was enforced using mounted cavalry police against miners. At Wapping the print dispute was again policed very aggressively to protect the scabs and property of Thatcher’s mate, Rupert Murdoch. In both these disputes the media told bare faced lies within their reports claiming ‘pickets attacked police’ which was most certainly not the case.

Capitalism is a dishonest system, it is ”not virtuous, it is not a success, it is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just – and it doesn’t deliver the goods” (John Maynard Keynes). Because this system which the police superintend is corrupt it does not need an honest police force. In fact an honest police force administering the law even handed would be detrimental to the class society which epitomises capitalism, the illegal and legal sides alike. Back in the 1960s reports tell us that many senior metropolitan police officers of inspector and above were in the pay of the Krays in East London or the Richardsons in South London. Both these organisations, the Krays and Richardsons, were ruthlessly violent gangsters. Every now and again a straight honest applicant to An Garda Siochana or one of the many British Police forces slips through the recruitment net. These Gardai or Bobbies usually start and end their careers as beat officers unless they change their ways and become corrupt tools of a bent political and economic system which discriminates against the ‘population’ to protect the ‘nation’.

This is not to suggest individuals who feel aggrieved go out and purposely break the law, do not go and drink a bottle of whiskey and attempt to drive a car just because the rich and powerful can do it. If a working-class person were to do this, get caught, and breathalysed they would lose their licence and/or be given a custodial sentence. If a rich influential person did the same the chances are a mere warning would be given and they might even get an apology! Neither am I suggesting taking a sawn-off shotgun and committing armed robbery which, although in certain circumstances may be understandable, it is not condonable. What is understandable and condonable is a person whose family are going hungry through lack of food going out and by whatever means necessary obtaining nourishment from shops which have shelves full of it. The crime here would be not doing so. Another example of breaking the law being acceptable and condonable is when a greedy landlord wishes to evict a tenant for no other reason than wishing to increase the rent. The wronged tenant would be perfectly justified in occupying the property. They would of course be told; they’re “breaking the law” yet the landlord can quite legally make a family homeless! 

The next time some well-meaning but misguided individual in defence of the system preaches a lot of rot about all being ‘equal before the law’ and how we must all ‘obey the law’ either ignore them or tell them the truth, they’re talking crap! In Nazi Germany the discriminatory laws against Jewish people were enacted at Nuremberg, 1935, many people later must have wished they’d broken those laws!!!

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

A Question Of Law?

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Thirty

 

A Morning Thought @ 3301

Jim Duffy  🏴 Oh no. Not Clare. I valued her. She helped me understand trans issues.

Clare Farrell

I admired her. I found myself checking what I posted as I would not want in any way inadvertently to cause her, and the trans community, offence. I probably didn't always get it right, but Clare and others were a reminder of the nature of the experience of the trans community.

Growing up on a farm taught me to realise that sexuality is not binary. The very first calf I saw born, in I think 1969, was neither male or female but had the organs of both. I remember the black cow that give birth to it didn't care that it had male organs and female organs. She just loved it.

It taught be that sexuality is never binary. There are people who biologically are neither male nor female. There are people who are born physically in one sex, but psychologically feel they are trapped in wrong body. Then there are some people who are attracted to their own sex, and those who are attracted to the other. And there are other variants.

All those variants exist in nature. We had a gay ram who had no interest in ewes, but had the hots for the neighbour's ram - much to the chagrin of the heterosexual neighbouring ram - who would keep running away from our gay ram basically saying "go away. I don't want to have sex with you!"

I remember overhearing Dad, Granny and Mammy in the kitchen of the old house discussing how to explain to me how the new calf had female bits and male bits and other calves due to be born wouldn't. They didn’t need to explain though. I got it. Sex is not straightforward. 

People, like the Catholic Church, who think everyone fits into one of two boxes are dead wrong. Sex, plus identity plus orientation and much else is is effectively on a scale and many of us, whether Claire, I myself, that little calf or one of Uncle John's part male part female pigs, are at different points on it. If you pardon the expression, nothing is straight.

RIP Clare.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Clare Farrell

Dixie Elliot ✊"Orange Order 'deserves credit' for Drumcree dispute remaining peaceful says Gerry Adams."


Adams would have been well aware that such a statement coming from himself at this time would have been a further distraction from the sentencing of Jeffrey Donaldson, yet he went ahead and did it.

Had the Orange Order and their two agitators, Bryson and Lockhart, got their way they would have gleefully watched on as the Garvaghy Road was 'sanitised' for them to walk through it.
 
They didn't so they tried to criminalise those people by describing them as 'a mob' who had guns and petrol bombs and who were prepared to kill the Orange Men and the PSNI.
 
So while the Sinn Féin party faithful and their supporters are still basking in the perceived glory of having stood up for the residents of the Garvaghy Road against the bigotry of the Orange Order, Adams is only too willing to contradict not just them but those determined people.
 
Simply because he wants to be seen as a peacemaker and some great reconciler.

His loyalty was only ever to himself. He led a generation of brave young Irish men and women to early graves and abandoned them by his constant denials that he was a member of the IRA. He only ever had to say that, for legal reasons, he couldn't admit to having been a member.
 
He wants the world to believe that he was an influential member of Sinn Féin who managed to convince the IRA to take the path of peace.
 
No matter how hard he tries Adams can never wash his hands of his past just as he can't help himself when it comes to betraying even those who remained loyal to him.
 
The email to the Garda Commissioner regarding the killing of the screw Brian Stack being but one example. And now this . . . 

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

The Great Reconciler

Guardian 📰 Written by  Alba Asenjo Domínguez.

No new indictments from eight-year investigation as state attorney general says church knew about abuse

30-September-2026
More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over several decades, according to a report released by the state’s attorney general’s office on Wednesday.

The eight-year-long investigation did not result in new indictments, the office said, claiming that some conduct identified was not a crime under Massachusetts law at the time it occurred, and that in other cases the applicable statute of limitations had expired.

However, three cases were referred to different district attorney’s offices and one of those resulted in criminal charges. The majority of the abuse occurred before 2002.

“The evidence gathered during this investigation also shows that, for decades, and especially before 2002, church officials in all three dioceses knew about the sexual abuse of children yet did not take effective action to prevent it or to examine the institutional failures of leadership that led to scores of children being victimized at the hands of abusive priests,” the report stated.

The attorney general’s office said the report was “the first comparable public accounting of the institutional failures within the Fall River, Springfield and Worcester dioceses”.

Continue @ Guardian. 

Catholic Clergy Sexually Abused Nearly 1,000 Massachusetts Children Over Decades, Report Finds

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on  23-June-2026.

The Bridge At Scarva • No. 3


For forty years Jeffrey Donaldson was the respectable face of a certain unionism, lecturing the Irish Catholics of the six counties on law, order and godliness. He has woken in a cell, a convicted child rapist. This is the gap the column exists to read, and it has never been wider.

He spent Monday night in Maghaberry, the first of many. That afternoon a jury of seven men and five women in Newry had deliberated for ten hours and found him guilty on every one of eighteen counts, one of rape, thirteen of indecent assault, four of gross indecency, against two children, on dates running from 1985 to 2008. He showed no emotion as the foreman spoke. He wore a small Christian fish pin on the lapel of a pristine navy suit. For four weeks he had called the two women liars from the witness stand. The jury believed them, unanimously, and the judge told a silent courtroom that a long sentence was now inevitable.

Begin there, and stay there, because everything that follows is built on that floor and must never float free of it. The two women are not material for an argument. What was done to them as children is theirs, and it is not anyone’s evidence. The only thing owed them is the plain fact that they were believed. Everything else here is about the man, and the forty years of borrowed authority the verdict has demolished.

The guarantor

For four decades Jeffrey Donaldson was a man of standing, and that was the whole of him. Not an orator, not a thinker, but a guarantor: the steady, church-going, respectable face a certain unionism presented to the world to prove it was the lawful and godly alternative to the other side. He joined the Orange Order at sixteen, and the standing began to accrue. He served in the UDR. He inherited a safe seat, walked out of a peace deal, and turned the walkout into a career. He became chief whip, then leader, then Sir Jeffrey, knight of the realm, and weeks before his arrest he was the toast of Washington and bound for the House of Lords. The standing was the product. He sold it to his party, to two governments, to the Americans, and above all to the people of his own tradition, who were invited to see in him the proof that theirs was the respectable cause. The verdict is the recall notice on forty years of that product, and reading exactly this kind of recall is what the column is for: the distance between what a man tells you he is and what the record holds.

Drumcree

To understand the standing, go to Drumcree, because Drumcree is the Planet Ulster mind entire, and Donaldson lent it his face. Each July through the late nineties, in a field outside Portadown, the Orange Order insisted on its right to march its banners down the Garvaghy Road, a road where Catholic families lived who did not want it past their doors. Not another route. Not a compromise. That road, those homes, those people, who had said no. The Order’s answer to the no was that there could be no no. The right to walk the ground was sacred, older than the objection, and the people on the ground were an obstruction to be cleared from the path of it. When the residents held, and the state at long last agreed with them, the Order laid what witnesses called a siege. Tens of thousands gathered in the fields. The whole region was brought to the edge, summer after summer, for years, until the standoff had run past a thousand days. Placards went up reading “No Taigs Here.”

And around the edges of all that righteous certainty, other men did the work the certainty licensed. The taxi driver Michael McGoldrick was murdered by loyalists in 1996. In 1998, at the very height of it, three small Quinn brothers, children, were burned to death in their home in Ballymoney. Those were the crimes of paramilitaries, and not of any Orangeman standing at the barricade, and the distinction matters and must be held without flinching. But the siege was the cause, and the cause bred the climate, and the climate killed. The march was never only a march. It was a yearly re-enactment of who was meant to hold the ground and who was meant to give way, the Boyne staged afresh down a real road past real front windows, three centuries on, by an Order that takes its name from the winning king. And there, in the photographs from the barricade in 1996, alongside Trimble and the Reverend Martin Smyth, stands Jeffrey Donaldson, Lagan Valley MP, the coming man of respectable unionism, lending the whole squalid spectacle the one thing it could not manufacture for itself: a clean, lawful, church-going face.

That is the Planet Ulster brain in full, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is the thing he embodied. It is grievance and supremacy fused into a single posture, held without any sense of the contradiction: we are the besieged and the wronged party, and we will dominate you, and we will do both at once, in our Sunday suits, with scripture to hand and a sash across the shoulder. It cannot grant the people on the road a full reality, because to do that would be to hear the no and to stop, and stopping is the one thing the worldview forbids. Donaldson was the suit it wore to be taken seriously. He was the face you fix to the front of the thing so that it can be discussed on the evening news as a question of tradition and civil rights, rather than as what it plainly was, a demand by one community to process its dominance through the front gardens of another. The standing laundered the squalor. That was its function, and he performed it for forty years without a public flicker of doubt.

The walkout

The walkout was the same instinct in a committee room. On Good Friday morning in 1998, as David Trimble led the Ulster Unionists to accept the Agreement that ended the war, Donaldson walked out. He spent the next five years convening councils against his own leader, taking the hard public line against any deal with republicans before decommissioning, and rode the wreckage of Trimble into the leadership of the rival party that had opposed the peace from the start. In 2023 he said he had no regrets.

He might have managed one, because the public hard line was never the whole story. Government papers later showed that while he was demanding full decommissioning in front of the cameras, he was in quiet contact with the republican movement, had told officials he would accept the IRA handing over no more than “a couple of bunkers,” and had tried to arrange a meeting with a senior IRA figure at the US ambassador’s residence in Dublin. The man who built a career on refusing to deal was dealing. The hard line was a costume, worn where it paid and shed where it did not. He did it again at the end: he collapsed the Stormont institutions over the Protocol in 2022 and left the North without a government for two years, swearing he would not go back until the sea border was gone, then went back in 2024 on a British command paper he said had removed the checks. The checks remained. He had not removed them. He had simply, once again, said the thing the moment required and trusted his standing to carry it.

The veto and the podium

And the whole time, he was a moral guardian. He opposed abortion. He opposed the marriages of gay people, and his party did more than oppose them. In November 2015 the Northern Ireland Assembly voted, for the first time, in favour of marriage equality, by fifty-three votes to fifty-two. A majority. The DUP struck it down with a petition of concern, the same veto Gavin Robinson and Jon Burrows reached for last week to keep ten-year-olds in the dock, turned that day against the right of people to marry. Donaldson defended the party’s view of marriage as a thing between one man and one woman, called for conscience protections for Christians who wanted no part of it, and described his faith, in his own words, as the anchor that steadied him in the storms of politics. He policed the marriages, the morals and the consciences of other people, in the name of a godliness he carried like a badge, while abusing children across the same decades. Hold the fish pin in your mind. He was wearing it in the dock.

Here the easy charge has to be set down for the true one. It would be cheap, and wrong, to say he controlled the lives of Irish republicans, or of the Catholics of the six counties he spent his career lecturing. He controlled nothing of the kind — despite his efforts as a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). The truer and heavier thing is that the settlement many agreed to in order to keep the peace required the rest of us to extend him a legitimacy the record now shreds. It asked republicans to shake his hand. It asked the people of the Garvaghy Road to treat the man at the barricade as a respectable interlocutor. It asked a whole community to receive his lectures on law and order and decency as though he had the standing to deliver them. He stood on a podium for forty years and pronounced on the fitness of others to be free, to marry, to govern themselves, to be trusted. He had no right to that podium. He never had. We know it now with the certainty of a unanimous verdict, but the structure that handed him the microphone never required the certainty. It required only the standing, and the standing was a fraud from the day it was minted.

The cell

So he wakes in Maghaberry, and the navy suit and the fish pin are in a property bag, and Sir Jeffrey is a number on the sex offenders register. The crime is the fixed and terrible fact at the centre of all this, and it belongs to two women who were children when he committed it against them, and who were, at the very last, believed. The forty years of moral authority is the second thing, the thing built on top, and that was the fraud. He was the guarantor of nothing but his own concealment. The lawful, godly Ulster he fronted was, in his own person, a lie. And the only clean thing in the whole squalid business is that it was a jury of ordinary people, in the end, and not a command paper or a podium or a parade, that finally read the gap between the man and the record, and closed it.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

Lawful, Godly Ulster & Jeffrey Donaldson

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)