Spirited Away

Thanking US civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson for having spent a fascinating day with us in Derry, I told a crowd in the Guildhall that, “This has been something of a spiritual experience”.

Next morning, smarty-pants callers to Radio Foyle chortled at the contradiction of an atheist speaking of spiritual experience. There is a common misconception here that needs addressed – that those who know there’s no god cannot access any spiritual realm.
I feel spiritual satisfaction surging when I listen to Martin Hayes playing the fiddle or Bessie Smith singing the blues or dance to the Happy Enchiladas or read Shelley’s poetry or the prose of Joe O’Connor, or gaze over the Sperrins as I cross the Glenshane or watch Lionel Messi slalom through a defence or call to mind the faces of my grandchildren, or, or...
It is another of my experiences that the average atheist has a richer spiritual life than the average believer.
Get in touch with your spiritual side. All you have to do is disbelieve.

When guitar legend Gary Moore died last month, nobody mentioned politics. And quite right. I’d never known the Belfast man to make a political statement.
Except, it now emerges, just a few months before his death when, during a tour of Russia, he announced that he wouldn’t play in Israel because of its “racist policies against the Palestinian people”.
I imagine he’d been influenced by the growing list of performers supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign in support of Palestinian rights – Elvis Costello, UB40, Carlos Santana, Gil Scott-Heron, Roger Waters, The Pixies, Gorillaz, Klaxons etc. 210 Irish musicians, writers, artists and performers have likewise backed BDS.
Depressing, then, if not wholly unexpected, that Bob Geldof has agreed to accept an honorary doctorate from Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva.
In an open letter to Geldof, the Irish-Palestinian Solidarity Campaign points out: “You might consider that [late premier] David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, believed that Jews were ‘more intelligent and diligent’ than Arabs... and supported the compulsory transfer of indigenous Palestinians to clear space for an ethnic Jewish state... Ben-Gurion thereby set down the template for an Israeli state premised on racism and ethnic cleansing.”
If the IPSC receives a response to the letter, I’ll let you know. But no holding your breath, okay?

The attacks a few weeks ago on Judge Moriarty by a couple of billionaires and their best political buddy – “biased... a conspiracy theorist... not up to the job... not interested in the evidence... a disgrace” – took me back a couple of decades to a story in the Sunday World about a woman who had come to me in distress because, she said, the courts had banned her from contact with her children. She was an English Protestant, her husband an Irish Catholic. The family had been living in England. When the marriage foundered, her husband had brought the children to Ireland without her consent.
She suggested that the fact that she was English and a Protestant whereas her husband was Irish and a Catholic had been a factor. One judge, she claimed, had asked in what religion the children were being brought up. I reported her views.
Within a couple of days, myself and editor Joe Kennedy were summoned to the High Court, charged with “scandalising the courts”. We were let go with a fine after a stern lecture about “disgraceful journalism” and the dangers to democracy of suggesting that a judge might ever be less than impartial.
Can we now expect to see O’Brien, Dunne and Lowry in the dock, being told that they are dangers to democracy and warned of their future behaviour?
Or is it that there’s one law for humble, jobbing journalists, another for business moguls and bagmen?

The founder of Friends of the Earth, David Brower, once remarked that, “Nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological devices for locating earthquake faults.”
Ninety percent of earthquakes happen along an arc that curves around the Pacific plate, from Chile up along the American coast, past California, on to Alaska, across to Russia and down along Japan to Australia. The arc is ornamented with nuclear installations – including, of course, the Fukushima-Daiichi facility in north eastern Japan, still releasing eddies of anxiety to spread far and wide.
Brower became nationally known in the US in the 1950s when, as Chief Executive of ‘save the wilderness’ group, the Sierra Club, he led the campaign which prevented construction of a nuclear plant at Bodega Bay, adjacent to the segment of the arc known as the San Andreas Fault. He became convinced that the danger lay not only in location but in the process of nuclear power generation itself.
He would have been grimly unsurprised by the casual confidence of the nuclear industry and its supporters even now, in the shadow of the darkness that billows from Fukushima-Daiichi.
The Science Editor of the Daily Mail writes that, “The (other) Japanese nuclear plants have performed magnificently... What has happened in Japan should in fact be seen as a massive endorsement of nuclear power.” Like praising the levee system in New Orleans because only the one above the 9th ward was breached.
What will it take to force a realisation that nuclear power poses an existential threat? One, two, three Fukushima-Daiichis?
Maybe it won’t come to that. But then, they told us it wouldn’t come to this.