Roads To Nowhere

Now that the gab-fest is over, what chance the A5 will run out of road?

The idea of gouging a dual carriageway across the North was dreamt up at “peace talks” at St. Andrews in October 2006 as a sweetener for Nationalist parties being pressed to give backing to the cops. Bertie Ahern promised that Southern taxpayers would pick up half the tab – around €480 million. Sinn Féin and the SDLP hailed the pledge as a practical example of the sort of cross-border co-operation now set to transform the entire island.
The planned route from Derry to the border at Aughnacloy: the Newtownstewart bypass, completed in 2002 at just under €10 million; the second stage of the Strabane bypass, finished in 2003 for more than €5 million; and the third phase of the Omagh throughpass, finished 2006, cost €12 million.
Opponents of the scheme include hippies, badger-lovers, DUP farmers, Trotskyists, rail enthusiasts, environmentalists and folk with an attachment to rationality.
The project would involve the take-over of 4,000 acres of farmland and splitting farms all along the 50-mile route. Entire local co-systems would be bulldozed and glorious pieces of built heritage damaged to their foundations. Trucks pounding along the carriageway would pass within 50 metres of Harry Avery’s Castle, named after Aonraí Aimhbreidh O’Neill (died 1392), a very rare structure – few Gaelic chieftains built stone castles – with two imposing D-shaped towers, a sight of mystical beauty when silhouetted against a sunset. It won’t have rated a glance from the planners as they plotted laying concrete across the terrain.
However, help may be at hand. The Labour Party’s Joe Costello argued in the course of the campaign that at a time when Ireland cannot afford minimal decency for its own most vulnerable citizens, it makes no sense to bung half a billion to a vanity scheme for the North.
It wouldn’t be the first promise to the North that Dublin has welshed on, but may be the first that such a broad range of Northerners fervently hope will be welshed on. Go to it, Joe!
Hookey’s two hours aren’t over just yet, and maybe never will end.
Hookey is Thomas McDermott. Like myself, from Rossville Street in the Bogside. Which is where he achieved an elusive immortality more than 40 years ago.
In the midst of the gas and swirling mayhem of the Battle of Bogside in 1969, Hookey occupied the studios of Radio Free Derry by locking himself into his granny’s front room on the eighth floor of the Rossville Flats where the people’s commissariat had installed its transmitter. Rebel songs, news from the barricades, stirring pleas to keep up the fight, that sort of thing. Except for Hookey.
A soul rebel of cool mien and flowing mane, Hookey treated the embattled populace to two hours of the Incredible String Band interspersed with whispers of, “Freedom is love, people, love is the answer...” Sturdy revolutionaries eventually forced an entry and reinstated a playlist heavily featuring the Wolfe Tones.
A couple of weeks back, Sean McGhee, editor of the splendidly eclectic UK rock and reel magazine R2, ‘phoning me about something extraneous, mentioned that Nick Burbridge wanted to say hello. Nick is singer, songwriter and creative conductor of Brighton band McDermott’s Two Hours. Fiddles and whistles, drums, bouzouki and bass. Walk like the Clash, sing like The Pogues. Yeah, confirmed Sean, Nick had taken the name from a mention I’d made of Tommy’s two hours in a book published long, long ago.
Nick founded the band back in the ‘80s. Their album The Enemy Within detonated the creative ambition of a clutch of bands, not least The Levellers. Nick has been the constant factor through personnel changes and half a dozen albums since. He’s also a poet, novelist, dramatist and radical cultural entrepreneur. And writer in residence for the theatre company he founded in 1989, Tommy McDermott’s Theatre.
The night after my conversation with Sean, there was a bit of liveliness at the end of our street, of the sort which leads community-watch Republicans to threaten to knee-cap the next teenager who raises her or his voice out of turn. I chanced into Hookey later, hair now wisely grey in a plaited pony-tail, taut face like a Sioux shaman, and there we stood talking of days that are gone, when rowdiness was demanded of the youth of the area and the imposers of order seen as oppressors out to hold back the future.
Round and round we go, in search of a better place.

I am listening as I write to a soft, passionate, plangent performance of ‘If I Should Fall Behind’, Springsteen singing throatily from deep within, E Streeters taking turns on vocals on the verse. The Cork blond who allows me to live with her e-mailed the url in lieu of the Valentine neither of us sends.
We knew Nils Lofgren as a genius in his own right and that Van Zandt and Patti Scialfa can shape a phrase and hold a tune. But Clarence Clemons is a stand-out surprise, a New Jersey response to the call of Solomon Burke. Brilliant stuff. Go listen.

Norris to Emily and Rita as gloomy groom Peter Barlow fire-hoses the marriage blessing congregation with sulphuric home-truths about beautiful bride Leanne: “You have to hand it to the Barlows, always good value at a wedding.”