One Night

Tonight The Pensive Quill features a short story by guest writer Thomas Dixie Elliot

A reddening Irish sky casts a bloody reflection on the long narrow lake. The lofty mountain on the eastern side of the lake gradually loses it’s purples and greens to the dark grey shadows of dusk.

The incessant cawing of crows as they circle above pierces the quietude like an angry crowd. One of their number, perhaps tired after a day of foraging, alights on a fence post for momentary respite. It looks out over the valley before spreading it’s wings and flying off to join it’s comrades on their obstreperous flight. They merge into a darkening sky that draws the night like a curtain.

As the moon rises from behind the mountain casting light upon the inky landscape, clouds change shape and form as they drift across the night sky. Faint lights in the darkness indicate where those who work the land rest up before the coming day brings further toil. This land is hard but beautiful, as are those who eke their existence from it.

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Cardinal Cretin

But the overwhelming dominant norm of traditional marriage was enabled to be precisely that, a norm, because anything outside of that was treated as profoundly abnormal and either rejected or punished.  Male homosexual practice was criminalised, unmarried mothers institutionalised or shunned, the children of the outside the norm families similarly treated – anything that did not fit the dominant cultural norm was to be jailed, institutionalised or forced to flee – Irish Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly

There has been no shortage of Scottish bigots over the years. We witnessed enough of them on the streets of the North, armed and dangerous, in regiments like the Black Watch. And here they are tooling up once more with the weapons of prejudice, poised to strike again. In their sites this time around is that ‘grotesque’ act of gay marriage. Keith O’Brien, the cardinal of Scotland has targeted those societies that have opted to put a halt to discriminating against gay people. For allowing gays the same rights to marriage as straight people, they have in his warped world shamed themselves.

O’Brien preaches that if the current British government legalises gay marriage UK society would degenerate further into immorality. Which only means really that society would depart from Catholic teaching. That is hardly likely to make it more immoral. Conversely, it enhances morality by extending and deepening the concept of human rights to ever more people.

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Difficult to get caught out when you always tell the truth

Tonight the Pensive Quill features guest writer Thomas Dixie Elliot. The following piece was published as a letter in the Irish News on on 25 January, 2012.

The thing about the truth is: you can’t get caught out telling it. Maybe that’s the reason Richard O’Rawe hasn’t been caught out telling lies, or ever changed his story regarding the events surrounding the 1981 hunger strike.  Others, Danny Morrison in particular, haven’t been so consistent.

In the Irish News on January 17th Danny said “the British telephoned Duddy [Brendan Duddy, the go-between] an offer on the 6th.…”

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Throwback on Talkback

Not too long back a comment appeared on this blog suggesting that it would be worth listening to BBC Talkback’s discussion around the ongoing imprisonment of Marian Price. When I eventually found it, the suggestion turned out to be good advice. It was like one of those ‘what if?’ scenarios that historians sometimes fascinate over, where a figure from the past could be put in a studio with one from the present. The historians might go on to manufacture the exchange in order to give us a feel of what it might have been like.

There was no need to do that here. Assailing our ears was a Neanderthal determined to hug the past like a child does a comfort blanket. By opting to ignore what had happened in the meantime he rendered his perspective as antiquated as the black and white television he recalls getting his last news bulletin from.

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A New War Of Independence?

Tonight The Pensive Quill features guest writer Dr John Coulter as he outlines why he believes Irish nationalists may need to fight a new War of Independence. John is a former columnist with the Blanket and writes within what he describes as a Radical Unionist perspective.

Ireland may have a new War of Independence on its hands as an indirect result of Tory David Cameron’s snub to the Eurozone.

From 1919 to 1921, Irish republicans fought a bloody war against the British Army, police, Unionists and Protestants – mainly in Southern Ireland – which ended in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, a move which sparked the equally bloody Irish Civil War.
  
The Republic is both part of the eurozone and the massive multi-billion euro bailout to prevent the state from becoming effectively bankrupt.

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The Boys Are Black In Town

For those without religious belief the rituals associated with the phenomenon always have a touch of the unreal about them. Nothing strange about that given that religion is founded on the unreal itself and nowhere more so than its zombie culture where the dead are brought back to life. Religions have never offered any proof of it but millions claim to believe it anyway. The more mundane tricks like holy water and sin absolution are bog standard daily rituals particular to Catholicism, and the other major religions are not without their own tricks of the trade. Catholic magic is easier to stomach than the type of healing scams the Protestant televangelists get up to on screen.

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Double Jeopardy

Tonight The Pensive Quill features guest writer Martin Galvin who draws attention to some important points in the case of Gerry McGeough

Gerry McGeough must soon face a Diplock version of “double jeopardy” courtesy of the crown. On Friday, March 2nd, the Tyrone Republican will be kept in his Maghaberry cell, awaiting word of the first of these two judgments, by two sets of British judges. A victory in either proceeding will likely free Gerry McGeough to return to his wife Maria and four young children. A double defeat will likely mean at least another year of imprisonment in that Maghaberry cell for McGeough, and gift the crown with another legal precedent for jailing other Republicans.

McGeough’s double jeopardy will begin this Friday; with the judgment on his judicial review. The issue here is narrow.

Under the terms of the Good Friday deal, Republicans jailed for pre-1998 IRA actions should be entitled to early release upon serving two years. McGeough served nearly 8 years, for IRA activities, first in a notorious German bunker prison and then in American prisons.

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ACLU Intervenes In Boston College Subpoenas Case

Tonight The Pensive Quill carries a press release on the ACLU intervention in the Boston College subpoena case.

Boston College Subpoenas Would “Transform Interviewers and Interviewees Into Informers” and Liable to Execution by IRA – ACLU Amicus Brief

The two people at the center of the controversial Boston College Tapes case, former Belfast Project Director and journalist, Ed Moloney and IRA interviewer and academic, Anthony McIntyre, today welcomed the intervention of the Massachusetts affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLUM”) in support of their appeal before the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which is due to hear their appeal in early April.

In its extensive and hard-hitting amicus brief, ACLUM confirmed that the interviewers for the oral history project on the Troubles in Northern Ireland run by Boston College could face an IRA death penalty if the US government’s bid to force the handover of interview materials was to succeed. The ACLUM’s amicus brief was prepared independently without input from the Appellants or their attorneys.

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Government Documents Show Just How Exact Brendan Duddy's Notes Were.

Tonight The Pensive Quill features guest writer, Thomas Dixie Elliot, commenting on the hunger strike debate. The following was published as a letter in the Irish News on 6 January 2012.

I am a former Blanket man and during the period before and after July 1981 I was on the wing with Richard O’Rawe and Bik McFarlane. The Hunger Strikes are still a memory that haunts me to this very day. I saw brave men walk from our wing never to see them again.

I knew one thing from being on that wing and that was that Bik relied heavily upon Richard for advice concerning the Hunger Strike. I’ve followed the claims regarding the offer on July 5th for a long time and never once saw Richard waver in his claim that the Brits delivered an offer on July 5th 1981, which he and Bik agreed contained enough to end the Hunger Strike but that upon sending word outside the offer was rejected by the Adams committee who were dealing with it.

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Chris Bray on Called to Account

A librarian and a professor claimed half of the royalties from a book based on a research project they had nominally overseen, saying they would use the cash for the support of further research at their university. Then they took the money for themselves, and they didn't tell the university they'd done it. Years later, lost in the dark, the university made an outrageous attack on an outside researcher it had hired for the same project: the university's spokesman publicly denigrated the researcher for making money on the book that resulted from the project, without mentioning that the professor and the librarian had done the same. He made that false claim because he didn't know it was false, since the professor and the librarian had never mentioned that they profited from the book (and because the exceptionally reckless spokesman was making a serious personal attack based only on his uninformed assumptions).

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This & That: Take 7

Putting the Kids to Sleep

At first I was only half paying attention to this but as it went on I grew horrified until I realised I was merely allowing myself to be taken in. Sensing that that my wife was listening to my protestations of ‘murder’ I assumed the sheepish grin to mask a feeling of foolishness!

In two years time this very week my own daughter will 13. What life changing decision will I be confronted with make when she succumbs to textomania and rolling eye syndrome?

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Chris Bray on Boston College Burns the Seed Corn

The continuing discussion about Boston College and the federal subpoenas of its Belfast Project material is a discussion about the very thing itself, about the place and nature of academic inquiry. What is a research university? What does it do? What is its purpose, its structure, its premise, its principle?

Here, again, is a paragraph from a Feb. 15 story in The Heights, the student-run newspaper at Boston College:

    On the other hand, Dunn stated that the University made no such promises, and in fact informed Moloney and McIntyre of the risk of subpoena and the danger such a situation could pose to the archives. He admitted that the language "to the extent that American law provides" was not found exactly in the donor agreement, but stated his belief that the contract was drawn up by Moloney, not BC.

Ed Moloney -- a journalist, not on faculty, hired as a contractor to run a research project under BC's aegis -- supposedly wrote the contracts between BC and its research subjects.

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