The Bogman’s Cannon

Apparently Bobby Sands was an individualist performance artist; one who disarmed the Provos via self-mutilation and who used his body as an art piece, a blank canvass on which people could project whatever they wanted. Somehow or other, this caused the peace process, because Irish people’s inherent blood lust was quenched by sacrificing a young man to mythology.

This is, unpacked, what 66 Days has to say to us about the H-Block hunger strikes.
It is a very ideologically sophisticated film. It has been praised as ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ and it probably is, if balance is based off the consensus emerging from those who don’t care, or who don’t want to think about things like context, torture, extrajudicial murder, colonialism, poverty, discrimination, or the women of the period who organised the entire movement around the H-Blocks.

The film’s ideological centre, the decontextualising black hole that sucks everything into it, is Fintan O’Toole. He opens and closes the film and his message is how this film is to be perceived; it is his message that is what this film means, and all the other parts of the film are structured, edited and directed around his analysis. He comes across as fluent, charming, reasonable, moderate, which of course he is. But if you remember O’Toole’s slew of articles around that period, his life’s defining work, which you’re not supposed to, the whole mirage breaks into what it is: a mere partisan viewpoint, and a manipulation based on what is excluded.

The messaging he proposes, the non-context that frames the non-existent debate had by this film, is several words spoken by Terrence MacSwiny, Cork mayor, who went on hunger strike in 1920. He said that the legitimacy of struggle comes not from the suffering you inflict, but the suffering you suffer (and, even then, MacSwiney is lightly, and repeatedly, dissed by O’Toole). The only other options the film gives us for historical context is 1916, and some Irish bards who went on hunger strike back in the day, as though bards from a millennium ago had even a tangential impact on the republican struggle in the 1980’s.

What is not given as context is the material conditions of the Northern Irish. This renders these people as extremists from a distant, alien society, rather than people who were reacting to their circumstances.

There is, undoubtedly, some sympathy for Sands here, but it is a trap to draw you in. It is so individualised that identification with him becomes meaningless, and nearly entirely unrelated to the republican struggle. Because what you are supposed to relate to is Sands’ body, the idea of his body. The body, and its meaning in suffering.
So what is this suffering ideology that the film promotes set up against? What is it supposed to work on, and against? Well, the answer to that is very easy: Provo violence. You can’t miss it. They keep saying it. Everyone keeps saying it. If you believed this film you’d think nothing else ever happened in Northern Ireland, and that no one else, in this decontextualised and unhistoricised land, has any blood on their hands. It frames everything.

The Provo’s body count is mentioned three times. The violence of the British state, the UVF, the British military, goes unmentioned. The torture inflicted by the British state is also unmentioned. The wider movement around the H-block is unmentioned. The civilian shootings are, by and large, unmentioned. The targeted assassination of key republican organisers around the time, who organised peacefully and against violence, is unmentioned. Civil liberties get 30 seconds. And by the end of this onslaught of misinformation and selective framing, the film packs in a little sucker-punch: Bobby Sands paved the way for the peace process.
I, for one, did not see that coming.

History in this documentary is a tool used to enshrine the present and control the future and Bobby Sands has to become an empty signifier of peace and sacrifice, because, God forbid, he represented the Northern Irish working class who wanted to be Irish, a dogs-body of the IRA, a spokesperson for a communal dedication to a shared struggle, a tactically-astute mid-level leader, and God forbid he was the most visible expression of all those young men’s bodies, those unspoken-of bodies, not mentioned in the film, who were tortured by a messy, rogue state machine for merely living on the wrong street and having the wrong surname.

If someone did want to make a documentary on the body, a genuine documentary on the body, not one that uses the body as a depoliticising and individualising tool, one could look to those Northern Irish bodies that the British military honed and modernised their torture techniques on. That communal, intergenerational body that stretches to the victims of Abu Ghraib who were tortured using techniques the British military trialed in Northern Ireland, techniques they so generously shared with their American counterparts.
We’re still waiting on that documentary on the body, and we’re still waiting on a documentary of Bobby Sands, but, unfortunately, as has been made clear by this documentary, this will not happen until the archives of our history have to be made free.

There is something very repugnant about it costing hundreds of thousands of euros to access the history we ourselves created, footage of us suffering and being shot and teargassed, and then having it sold back to us at prices we cannot afford. This price tag means that this period, and any prior one, will always be mediated by a greater body whose idea of balance is to make a pacifying instrument of our living history.
At least, in regards to public access to archives, that is something the BBC has gotten right over the last 50 years.

Oisín Ó Fágáin is the author of Hostages

A BBC Spotlight investigation has again raised questions about the scale of British infiltration in the IRA.

With characters such as “Larry the Chef” and “Stakeknife” it has all the makings of a conspiracy dreamed up by an over-doped paranoiac in an attic somewhere, except that it’s real.

The new allegations come from an unnamed source, “Martin” who claims to have been a long-term British agent within the IRA and Sinn Fein. He turned after the beginning of the Peace Process. This unrepentant traitor claims moral authority citing the prevention of “another outbreak of violence” as his primary motivation. Because the best way to stop violence is to collaborate with one of the most murderous and destructive regimes on the planet. How much is Special Branch paying these days, “Martin?”

One allegation is that Gerry Adams “sanctioned” the assassination in 2005 of Dennis Donaldson, who was also a British agent. Adams has – of course – denied the allegations, as he has denied every allegation ever – I wouldn’t be surprised if he came out tomorrow and said, “Gerry Adams does not, and has never existed. He is a fictional character. I repeat, he does not exist.”

Donaldson had been recruited by RUC Special Branch in the 1980s and was one of their highest placed agents within the IRA and Sinn Fein – an “agent of influence.” In 2003 it was also alleged that the agent known as Stakeknife was Freddie Scappaticci – former head of the IRA’s internal security (!!) unit. Donaldson was shot. Freddie was not. (Freddie Scappaticci denies being an agent. He also denies being the invention of Mario Puzo.)

There were, by an apparently conservative estimate, as many as “800 informers at any one time” in Northern Ireland (in all groups). That’s a helluva lot of agents for a land with a population under 2 million. According to estimates by CAIN, IRA membership peaked at around 1,500 in the mid-70s. What proportion of the declining membership through the 80s and 90s were informers or agents?

A Dirty Peace

The peace-process is based upon foundations that are proving more and more to be bogus. The “men of peace” tried to flush too much bloody laundry down the toilet and now it’s gushing back out and flooding the house on the hill.

The larger question is to what extent the British state was “running both sides.” What involvement in or prior knowledge of IRA and Real IRA atrocities – for example, the Omagh Bombing – did intelligence agencies have? How many agents in the pay of the British State were involved in murder, torture, brutality or organised crime? How many agents are currently active in Northern Ireland? Could there be more high profile agents to be revealed in SF or the IRA? Whatever the answers, the growing evidence of widespread collusion and infiltration is proving the regime at Stormont to be a fraud – repeating sweet-sounding, flimsy myths about reconciliation and moving forward, all the while festering in a mass grave of collusion and cover-up. It would make you wonder how these paramilitary reconciliation sessions function! A former British agent hugs a former British agent and everything’s ok now? A session on comparing and contrasting MI5 handlers? Or perhaps they play a game called Which Atrocity? Guess which bombing or shooting was orchestrated by the Brits.

Dispatcherama

The national equivalent of Spotlight, BBC’s Panorama, decided to make an investigative piece on the Labour Party organisation Momentum. Channel 4’s Dispatches – also allegedly an investigative exposé program – ran an almost identical show the same night. Dispatcherama focused on finding out information through covert, investigative cleverness, which they could have found out by just asking someone…..anyone….the man down the pub even. Painting the absurd left grouping the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) as some sort of secret society that means to take over the Labour Party, the “exposé” descended into screaming McCarthyism. The idea that a raggle-taggle handful of leftists would be able to “seize control” of Labour is laughable. The greatest revelation was that people who describe themselves as left-wing tend to have left-wing ideas. Scoop!

The same day, the national press went into melt-down with allegations that Momentum now planned to indoctrinate children through their new vehicle “Momentum Kids.” Contrary to the Jonestown Massacre allusions, what Momentum actually did was set up a crèche. This would alleviate pressure on parents (particularly women) who want to attend the ‘World Transformed’ conference, and provide a safe and fun space for kids over the weekend. Downright deviant!

As the Labour Party Conference comes to my city of residence this weekend, I plan – being a commie plotter – to attend some events and see how crazy these Momentum people really are. Watch this space.

Requiem for an Ice Cap

On a lighter note, funeral arrangements are being prepared for the Arctic, which, after a long battle with carbon dioxide, has died. Warm tributes have been flooding in for the much loved region. Danny from Roscommon said, “I mean, the Arctic was always there, I remember it on TV as a child. It’s been like, a real part of my life I suppose.” Sad to see it go, the BBC plan to make a special episode of “Strictly come Dancing – On Ice!” According to sources close to the Arctic, intensive care facilities were too expensive, so world leaders agreed to “just let it die” and were hoping it would “get on with it.”

Arctic Sea Ice extent (geographically) is at its second lowest on record – though its volume may also have declined by a substantial figure meaning there could potentially be less ice overall than the 2012 record low. But of course there’s nothing to worry about folks! Sammy Wilson was talking about climate change this week and Sammy knows his stuff. According to him, we’ll be grand.

 

 

Connor Kelly