There was this fellow rigging up lights and a camera in the kitchen at 10 Downing Street when who should walk in but Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. They put on a kettle and made themselves coffee. Maxwell House, he thinks.
The chap was working on a programme which involved Jamie Oliver cooking a meal for a State occasion. He recalled: ‘I assume they were waiting to see somebody who wasn’t ready for them, so they’d been told to go on into the kitchen and make themselves a cup of coffee. They paid no attention to me, but I was thinking, ‘Weren’t their lot firing mortars at this place a while back?’’
The scene may tell us as much as we need to know about the suggestion that Martin McGuinness is a British spy.
In the course of an hour-long argy-bargy on a New York radio show with Martin Ingram – the retired British spook who made the suggestion in the first place – I said I’d need a mountain of evidence before I’d entertain the possibility of there being a sliver of truth in his tale, but that Ingram had produced no evidence of any kind. An undated document of doubtful provenance recording an ambiguous conversation between two unidentified men, one said by Ingram to have been named by an anonymous cop as Martin McGuinness, doesn’t amount to evidence but to a load of oul shite.
Naturally, there are takers for the tale. People who have been involved in conspiratorial politics tend to see conspiracies everywhere. Others just find spooksville endlessly fascinating. So much more exciting than mundane engagement with the issues of the day.
The politics of the Sinn Fein leadership and of a section of the British establishment have been on converging trajectories for some time. As far back as the early ‘70s it dawned on some Provo leaders that the Northern Catholics weren’t up for a war for a united Ireland and that the armed struggle was a waste of time. The British, too, wanted the armed struggle over. So the adversaries have had plenty to talk about, even as war rumbled on. This didn’t remotely resemble ‘collusion,’ but reflected a common purpose which it would have been politically impossible for either side publicly to acknowledge. The wool had to be pulled over myriad eyes.
There was nothing unusually sinister in this. Virtually every nationalist movement in history has travelled the same road – the ANC, the PLO, Zanu, Swapo, the Sandinistas. Nationalist movements, however ferocious their tactics or radical their rhetoric, aim not to turn the world upside down but to carve out a place within the existing order for those they believe they represent.
The important lesson has to do not with the role of particular individuals but with the inadequacy of Nationalism to the politics of the age.
‘Even in the chapels that most closely resemble the foyers of bleak motels, the air has, to my mind, a quality of stillness...And what has the air been made still by, if not by prayer?’ – Nuala O’Faolain, Sunday Tribune, June 4.
Here’s another possibility, Nuala. It’s because the windows are shut.
Every time you imagine that the mind of the country is balanced at last, along comes a Nuala to wobble anew.
Her piece was pegged on research which she wanted to rubbish. ‘What surprised me was that modern people – reputable scientists – had ever believed that the effect of prayer could be measured,’ she wittered, missing the point by miles.
The study she sought to discredit had been conducted by a Harvard team which followed the fortunes of 1,800 patients undergoing surgery. Three prayer groups of equal size – two Catholic, one Protestant – were randomly allocated lists of patients to pray for, starting on the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The prayer groups used identical formulae: each asked for ‘a successful surgery and a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.’
One group of patients was told they would be prayed for, and were prayed for. Members of a second group were told they might be prayed for, and were prayed for. Members of the third group were told they might be prayed for, but were not prayed for.
After 30 days, detailed medical reports on each patient were collated and analysed.
The results showed that prayer doesn’t work. There was no significant difference in how those who had been prayed for and those who had not been prayed for had fared.
The only significant difference noted was between those who knew they were being prayed for and those who did not. Fifty nine percent of those who knew they were being prayed for developed complications – atrial fibrillation, a fluttering of the heart related to stress, being the most common – against only 51 percent of those who didn’t know they were being prayed for. No difference was noted between those who didn’t know whether they were being prayed for but were, and those who didn’t know and were not.
The patients who fared worst, then, were those who knew they were being prayed for.
The Harvard scientists speculated as to what variable might explain this result. But Hot Press readers will have sussed it out for themselves – the people who knew they are being prayed for felt freaked and put under stress.
Some will have responded along the lines, ‘Holy Mother of God, they have the nuns praying for me!’ and given up the ghost on the spot.
Prayer is bad for you. Give it up, Nuala, while you can.
Diarmaid O’Muirithe of New Ross has thrilled all true lovers of the Irish language with his splendid philippic against craic.
Craic is as Irish as a Paddy’s Day leprechaun. It was first misrepresented as a Gaelic word in 1979. O’Muirithe, author of the Irish Times ‘Words We Use’ and of books including ‘A Word in Your Ear,’ and ‘A Dictionary of Anglo-Irish’, characterises it in the current edition of The Oldie as ‘a hideous neologism.’ Quite right.
The word is ‘crack.’ That’s how Robert Burns spelt it. It is a strong, useful, authentic, deep-rooted word, first brought to Ulster by labourers who had earned their bread in Scotland’s fields and mines.
‘Craic’ is an expression of Riverdance Irishry, designed to convey a false sense of being in contact with culture, thereby to extract dosh from the deluded. Its only useful function is in identifying a sub-set among us who wouldn’t know their etymology from their entomology or Daniel O’Donnell from Donegal tradition.
* ‘Only two prime ministers ever had State funerals – Churchill and the Duke of Wellington, who both saved the country in time of dire need. The Falklands doesn’t come into that category’
– Constitutional expert Richard Bellamy on Blair’s plan to give Thatcher a State funeral.
Bellamy surely misses the point. What I say is, they should give her any funeral she asks for. In fact, the sooner the better.  
* ‘The foreign soldiers have brought us nothing but destruction. People are still poor and jobless, except the few who shine the foreigners’ shoes. We want them out of here now.’
Shah Mahmoud, after his cousin was shot by US troops in Kabul.