January saw the death of Mary Reid. She and I had flirted for years. Never went any further. She was too sensible. Otherwise, “sensible” wasn’t a word much associated with her. I’ve never known a person who so readily gave things away. Money, time, labour, clothes, her car, her home, anything. Her body was washed up on rocks on Lacacurry beach near the Isle of Doagh in Donegal, where she’d gone walking with her dogs on one of those days of dramatic, turbulent Donegal weather. She was a revolutionary, an internationalist, a fine writer and an indefatigable political and community activist. She saw transient things transfigured, found magnificence in the mundane, had a huge heart and a wild imagination. It feels like only last week she was infuriating me with mystical explanations of political happenstance. Such is life, as time accelerates.
* * * * *
February 15th was the best of days and the worst of days. The best because upwards of 20,000 from all arts and parts gathered outside Belfast City Hall to oppose war on Iraq – the biggest political mobilisation here for decades on an issue unconnected with Orange-Green rivalry. The worst because, even in association with tens of millions of others assembled worldwide, we failed to stay the war-makers’ hand. And because the only joint activity undertaken by Orange and Green leaders thereafter in 2003 was to provide the Bush-Blair war summit at Hillsborough in April with the cover of the “peace process”. They ought now to be cringing with shame. But of course they are not.
* * * * *
On a Sunday in August, Prime Minister Blair was spotted as he emerged glistening from the surf at a beach near Sugar Hill, Sir Cliff Richard’s holiday home in Barbados. Said Gill King, 56, “disturbed” (according to the Daily Mirror) at the tight fit of the Prime Minister’s trunks: “I think he’s just trying to get fashionable from a different angle.” Many were reminded of the Blairs’ holiday two years previously on the “Mexican Riviera”, where (according to The Times) Tony and Cherie underwent a “re-birthing experience” under the supervision of “Mayan priestess” Nancy Aguilar. “Ms. Aguilar told the Blairs to bow and pray to the four winds as Mayan prayers were read out. Within the Temazcal, a type of ancient Mayan steam bath, herb-infused water was thrown over heated lava rocks to create a cleansing sweat and balance the Blairs’ ‘energy flow’. Priestess Nancy then chanted an ancient Mayan hymn while the Blairs annointed one another’s bodies with a crushed watermelon and papaya mixture blended with local mud. Before leaving the Temazcal to walk hand and hand down into the sea, the couple screamed loudly to signify the pain of rebirth while making a wish.”
* * * * *
Anne Daly and Ronan Tynan’s film, Race To The Bottom, shown on TG4 in March, told how 51 women and girls, some as young as 10, had burned to death in a factory fire in the Bangladeshi town of Narshindhi in November 2001, the locked doors and barred windows symbol and substance of lives held as cheap as their labour. Throughout this year, clothes-maker Desmonds, unable to compete, have been shifting their north-west production eastwards, including to Bangladesh. Shop stewards Nazma Akter and Rita Keyes talked quietly of the connected experience which has woven them into a single process of immiseration. Race To The Bottom was, by a distance, the Film of the Year.
* * * * *
Following controversy sparked by reports from, among others, Andrew Gilligan of the BBC, it was announced in June that the Intelligence and Security Committee of the British parliament would investigate whether Tony Blair had had dependable information on which to base the contention in a dossier presented to the Commons the previous September that Saddam Hussein had amassed 26,000 litres of anthrax spores, a ton and a half of VX nerve agent and 30,000 special delivery weapons primed and ready for launch at 45 minutes’ notice against a range of targets, including British targets. Public hearings ensued, to which Dr. David Kelly was called. Lord Hutton was appointed to probe Kelly’s death. Blair waits nervously to discover whether Hutton will dare tell the truth.
* * * * *
Kelly McBride from the New Lodge in Belfast stood in the Brent East by-election in September to draw attention to the fact that Scots Guards James Fisher and Mark Wright, the murderers of her brother Peter, had been accepted back into the British Army and were reportedly in Iraq defending, according to the British Government, human rights and the rule of law. The killing in September 1992 had been described in the High Court in Belfast in June by Lord Justice McCollum: “The shooting took place in daylight, there was no confrontation and no confusion at the scene, there was no menacing crowd or mob. The lives of the soldiers were not under any risk... Nothing had occurred to justify the use of a lethal weapon... I find it difficult to comprehend the view... that it is desirable to retain Fisher and Wright in army service... The murder of an innocent fellow citizen should rank as a crime of the greatest magnitude, and one would expect that soldiers who have misused the lethal weaponry with which they are equipped in order to take away a life without justification should be regarded as quite unfitted for further army service.” But fitted for service in Iraq, obviously.
* * * * *
Mother Teresa was beatified in October, Pope John Paul having certified that the recovery from a tumour of Monica Besra from Dangam, north of Calcutta, had been a miracle wrought by God following personal intervention by the dead nun. Said Monica’s husband, Seiku: “It is much ado about nothing. My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle.” At Balurghat Hospital, Dr. Tarun Kumar Biswas and Dr. Ranjan Mustafi insisted that Monica had had a painful lump in her abdomen, not a malignant tumor. “She responded to our treatment steadily.” Monica’s medical records, containing sonograms, prescriptions and all the doctors’ notes had gone missing. Monica said that a Sister Betta of Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity had “taken them away”. Hospital officials told local newspapers that the order had vainly been “pleading” with them to categorise Monica’s cure as miraculous. Prabir Ghosh of the Science and Rationalist Association of India pledged to close down the association and hand over its assets to the Missionaries of Charity if the order would put the locket with Teresa’s picture which had been rubbed on Monica’s stomach to the test by checking whether it would cure a lump which had actually been diagnosed as a tumour. The nuns would have none of it. No fools they.
* * * * *
December opened with exchanges on Questions And Answers between David O’Connell and Dana about the ethics of stem-cell research on early embryos. What they were really arguing about was the intellectual viability of Christianity. Dana holds that the embryo is sacred because she believes that a soul enters the fertilised egg at the instant of conception: it is this, “pro-lifers” believe, which makes the embryo human, with the same right to life as a sentient adult. They have to take this view because they hold that god entered the world at the instant of Jesus’s conception within Mary – a belief which arose at a time when science understood conception to consist of a man injecting a miniature human into the body of a woman: the embryo which grew into the baby born at Xmas, then, was not an egg of Mary’s fertilised but a reproduction of god in human form introduced independently by god into Mary’s womb. Three times during the discussion Dana mentioned “the slippery slope”. Well might she have felt there was no secure ground for her to stand on outside the narrowness of her own certainty. If the pro-lifers give an inch on the notion that a 14-day embryo – a cluster of cells one five thousandth of a metre in length and with no capacity for consciousness or pain because lacking in brain or nerve cells – is, morally, a fully-formed human, they will have abandoned the belief on which the entire body of Christian teaching pivots. What’s at issue in the stem-cell research controversy is whether religion or rationality is to have primacy in the ordering of human affairs.