Not so long ago my brother and I had a row. It was one of those spats between two very determined males that often ends up in blows being struck - but for the fact of course that we are brothers and share a very strong fraternal bond.

The subject of the row is not important but what is important is how we very quickly became reconciled again. I went away and thought about it. He went away and pondered on it. He didn’t quite admit that he was completely in the wrong but never mind...

Humour aside, my point is that we both reflected and apologised for our behaviour. For digging our heels in as deep as Australia.

This, on the face of it, very simple human transaction has implications for the whole of mankind.

Now, given what I have just said, I can hear a lot of you saying -

Larkin has finally flipped. His megalomanic "Allboutme.com" attitude has finally gone to his head. But think about it.

In fact you have no choice to think about it because you are human and therefore more than the sum of your physical parts. It’s the reason why you are reading this blog. Your bodily functions are telling you to go and lie under a tree (on an indoors sofa if you are in Ireland), shut your eyes and relax but your mind, your spirit, wants to engage, find out what I am thinking and, by extension, a bit more of what you yourself believe. 

Now don’t get side-tracked by the fact that academics call this dualism. Forget about Plato's forms that really are just screenplays for a set of films he didn’t have the technology to make. At the same time, Descarte's dualism chart (see above) just looks to me more like a Joe Pesci pingpong game with bullets zinging around PING PANG PONG between objects and sensory organs in a desperate Goodfellas type search for consciousness - futile because it isn't physically there. We cant see it. We just "know" it.

No. Concentrate on your own experience.

You decide to make a cup of tea and already your is mind reflecting on all the other times you have made tea (OK coffee for God's sake if you don’t like tea - yes yes it can be decaff as well! Move on at the back!).

Crucially, you are standing at the kettle and you are saying - "this is me standing at the kettle". You rise above yourself and you study your own behaviour. You empathise with yourself (if your mind is in equilibrium - if not you are having a crisis so watch you don’t spill that boiling water).

Now here is the most amazing thing - not only are you aware that you rise above yourself and look at your own behaviour, you are also aware that all other humans do that as well. How did you know that? You are a genius! It took decades for Wittgenstein to work that one out.

To put it another way, when you look at another person you literally see/perceive double - the body and invisible consciousness of your fellow wo/man. Yes of course, you do all the accepted physical things like shaking hands, or perhaps crossing the road if he is a bit of  a bollix, but you also wonder what he is thinking. Or as the German rescue services asked a trawler captain in distress = Vat are you sinking about?!

Thinking outside the box means that we see things that are not allegedly visible. This makes us superhuman - or, if you like, more than a human animal.

I never saw a cat yet that approached a mouse and said - "Look, I've thought and reflected deeply about it and I want to say that I am really sorry for eating your brother the other day".

So the fact that myself and my brother made up has world significance, as does every reconciliation no matter how petty. For this simple act of empathy takes us beyond our physical humanity and into the realm of the Great Karma - the Holy Spirit - the  infinite soul.

Human empathy - It's there all around you.

Peace.

Born September 7th, 1950; died August 3rd, 2010

An inspirational light has gone out in the world with the passing of Mexico City based Irish painter Phil Kelly. Mo chara, mi cuate, my mate is now ar slí na fírinne - on the final path of truth and enlightenment.  What a privilege to be able to call a man who was an artistic genius a mate.

The official cause of his death was renal failure but there were previous complications.

Like Mexicans, our Celtic belief is that we are bigger than death itself. However the physical wrench of death is not to be gainsaid and must be pondered and celebrated in all its mysteries. A corrupt priesthood may come and go but we still have our artists, both physically and spiritually.

After a holiday in Mexico in the year 2000, I approached an RTÉ executive about the possibility of making a film about this wonderful painter and image poet Phil Kelly.

My heart bleeds to think that I never made that film whilst Phil was alive. This wonderfully vibrant human being and artist had promised me complete access to his catalogue, his current obsessions and to his private space. With full support, I might add of his wife Ruth Munguia.

Phil was even so generous as to send unpublished sketches and scraps of text that he was using as motivators in his endless interpretations of urban life in Mexico City. Not for a moment because he necessarily agreed with what I was going to write or film but because he gave me trust and dignity as a fellow artist to create in my own way and to interpret his work as I saw fit. In my experience, there are very few people in what is called the professions, who are so generous and flaithiúlach (open handed).  Of course, such generosity on Phil’s part stems from an utter confidence in his own abilities.

Phil Kelly’s heart was huge but also wise.

Those of you, dear readers, who are able to read even a modicum of Spanish will see from the Mexican reaction to his death that Phil's human empathy shone out from his work and his personality. He was a - “hombre bueno y un gran artista, generoso y apasionado”

Even with my shamefully poor knowledge of Mexican Art as a whole, I can see that Phil Kelly carries a tradition forward that comes from Frida Kahlo (intense vibrant colouring) and Diego Rivera (crowd scenes and murals). But Phil also stands comparison with Jack B Yeats, Georges Braque and also I would argue Francis Bacon (I would have loved to have been able to explore this latter question in my film).

However, Phil Kelly is firmly modern in the urban speed of his eye and the singular impression of life that he creates and, in my view, he  goes further with his prodigious output to reach the heights that Picasso achieved. This view is widely accepted in the arts world. See this excellent Spanish language review for example by Eva Usi of Phil Kelly's 2008 exhibition in Dublin. For this and many other reasons, Phil’s passing should have been national news here in Ireland, just as it was in Mexico.

With regards to the RTÉ executive that I approached about our film proposal, In keeping with a tradition in Irish Film and Television, his experience of actually writing and directing films of any description is miniscule. He rejected our proposal as not being “feasible”.

When it became clear that RTÉ was not going to back a major film about him, Phil didn’t just shrug his shoulders and give up. I wrote to him saying that it would make a very good book and Phil then wrote a letter to the Arts Council and here is an extract from it:

“Paul’s take on my work is fascinating for me and, where I prefer to let my art speak for itself, he gives a vivid verbal picture of how the similarities in Irish and Mexican cultures can be seen perhaps more clearly through art.”

(Phil Kelly letter to Arts Council – Mexico City, February 21^st, 2004)

It goes almost without saying that our proposal was rejected.

I cannot stress strongly enough the profound effect Phil Kelly's art manages to achieve.

 PHIL KELLY- VIVE - PHIL KELLY LIVES

In order that Cic Saor readers may get the chance to see more of Phil Kelly’s work and the bells it rang in my head after my visit to Mexico,  I intend very shortly to post the results  of our collaboration on to the Cic Saor website. The piece is physically too large, and also too broad in its philosophical approach, to be simply inserted into a blog item.

It was officially entitled Viva Mexico/Viva Irlanda but has now been rechristened as PHIL KELLY- VIVE- PHIL KELLY LIVES. At the very least, readers will enjoy the introduction and the presentation of a greater number of Phil's paintings. The narrative is deliberately episodic and can be read in that way.

In effect, PHIL KELLY- VIVE is the screenplay and/or dialogue that I gave to RTÉ in the hope that it would encourage the “national broadcaster” to give me the funds to make what would have been a remarkable record of one of our greatest ever artists. I do, after all, have something of a good track record in this kind of film making.

I look at RTÉ's output. Its shamelessly derivative formats that died slow deaths in North America a decade ago; its game shows; its alleged reality TV; its mega series on minor politicians like Des O’Malley and yet another documentary recently propagating the myth of oppressed Protestants in Ireland and its just deja vú beat me beat me all over again.

It is true that the Irish language arts show Cúrsaí Ealaíne once did a feature on Phil Kelly in 1997 but Cúrsaí Ealaíne has since been binned and the piece itself was no more than a short insert; well meaning, worthy and dull. It had no cojones. Cojones were neutered in RTÉ a long time ago - relegated to sport and the odd gem that manages to shine through like the excellent Chavez documentary. Is this why Phil Kelly was never celebrated on film in his own country even in a situation when he acted as an artistic ambassador for Ireland in a place like Mexico?

Perhaps Phil was just not cachet enough.

The man had no airs and graces and loved Mexico City as the startling unpredictable place it is. Even his painting techniques and approach were avowedly physical - a literal labour of love, where he often painted with his hands. There is a very short but brilliant interview with him that provides a nice snapshot of his outlook on life in Mexico here - Voices In The City.

Moreover, Phil was a known socialite in a city of socialites, an impressionist rebel (on his own terms) who preferred inventiveness to rules. He also loved women - the shape and feel of women and their betimes monstrousness as expressed in his art. Those cojones again and Phil had balls to burn. For all his quiet ways, Phil Kelly would think nothing of standing up to robbers or a carjacker if the notion took hold of him. His instinct (a typical and venerable Irish trait) was to stand up to bullies even though he was so gentle himself. To me he was a worker hero and like many of us he was frequently told that he was a nothing, a nobody, and would never make it but he Chumbawumbered (I Get Knocked Down - I get Up Again) and Kept On Trucking (sometimes literally).

The key thing, was that the so called common people (me included) were always comfortable with him and he in turn gained great inspiration from them. He didn’t start making a living from painting until he was in his forties and worked in a variety of jobs that would leave pupils from his former English public school (Rugby) in a state of trauma just at the thought of having to do them.

As much as I often criticise the Irish Times, it must be said that there is an excellent obituary on Phil Kelly in that very paper and it can be read here for those who wish to know a bit more about his background.

Readers will see from the PHIL KELLY- VIVE screenplay that Phil brought myself and my companion to an ornate bar just off the Zócalo in the centre of Mexico city and so began an odyssey that officially lasted a day (I know this because I hazily remember boarding a plane the following day) but it is a journey I am still making because of what Phil Kelly revealed to us that day. Over the first tequila and cerveza at half past ten in the morning, Phil and I cemented our friendship by exchanging our experiences of being forced to go to schools that we hated and which hated us.

El Ángel – The Angel

I assumed that I had come to understand a little of Mexican culture having spent a month touring around parts of this vast country but as our Phil Kelly odyssey progressed that day I realised that I could never have put my impressions to paper and envisaged a film without Phil Kelly's insights. As one of many examples, when Phil spoke of his love of The Angel - the iconic Ángel de Independencia in downtown Mexico DF, it was as if the fabric of city was mapped out in his head.

As we travelled in a taxi to one of his favourite restaurants, Phil would whip out his instamatic camera and snap fruit sellers, bystanders or market stalls; all the time revealing the city as he spoke. Not just revealing it but rebuilding it via his own inspirations – an angel rising above the sprawl, or a morose woman emerging from buildings, or maybe just the tracks of zinging tracers from cars as if they had been shot on a slow shutter speed at night.  The way I had wanted to do it in our proposed film.

Also he gave me lots of brotherly advice - “when you are naturally funny like you are – throw that into the mix”.  

I’ll finish this introduction by passing my condolences and those of Cic Saor aficionados to Phil’s wife Ruth and their two children Ana Elena and Maria José who showed us great hospitality as part of Phil’s tour of the city he adopted and the city which in turn adopted him.

Ruth was kind enough to provide me with more details about the causes of Phil’s death but I will leave it to her good self to decide whether she wants to publicise this information further. Ruth also tells me that there will be a homage day on the 2nd. of September this year and Phil’s ashes will be spread in the City of Mexico, Oaxaca and possibly Ireland at some point.

He always wondered why we, here at home, wouldn’t paint our pedestrian bridges bight yellow. Maybe we could do that to honour his memory. It would be a well deserved tribute.

Suaimhneas Dé go síoraigh ar a anam

I will provide the link to PHIL KELLY VIVE once it has been posted and send a group mail shot to that effect.

Un abrazo fuerte

Pablo



We are still in South Africa. The World Cup is still on and a right wing, fundamentalist Protestant militia called the Broederbond (a white supremacist organisation which has fraternal links with Ireland’s Orange Order and related masonic lodges) has decided to exploit the media vuvuzela around this international soccer tournament to profess its right to hold a “Trek” through a black township. Why? Well because when the whites first planted the country this was one of their traditional routes and their rights as white settlers have to be upheld at all costs.

The worldwide liberal media is up in arms with correspondents waxing indignantly about racism, the history of white colonialism and the curse of social systems based on Apartheid. The heroic struggle of the indigenous blacks, whose dress, languages and customs were banned, gets special features in all media outlets.

Meanwhile in the North of Ireland, the British settler militia... ... (the Orange Broederbond) continues to push its annual six month long Trek through native Irish areas and where is the focus of those same media outlets?

Not on 400 years of a racist plantation policy; not on 400 years of heroic resistance by the natives (God Forbid); not even on the explosive gifthorse that is annually lain at the door of dissident republicanism.

No, the focus is on young native Irish delinquents and the fact that they are throwing stones instead of being tucked up in bed.

Will somebody wake me up when this nightmare media insult to my intelligence is finally over?

Greg Baxter is a complete liar.

Perhaps I should explain this bald comment, as I consider the author of "A Preparation for Death" to be a friend and a comrade in writing (he will hate that statement). Greg Baxter is  also a damn good writer, and the students who attend his very popular “Someblindalleys” writing courses in Dublin are fortunate indeed to be tutored by such a passionate champion of the written word as an art form.

In fact, and almost in spite of himself and his pretensions for high art in low places, Baxter is so good that I urge all of my hundreds of loyal readers to go out and purchase a copy of “A Preparation for Death”.

This collection of essays, incorporating a sexual, literary and familial odyssey, is not the book that Greg Baxter claims it to be (more of which in a moment) but it is always thought provoking and has some brilliant evocations of place and time. Baxter also strives towards moments of true revelation about the human condition. There is no doubting his sincerity.

In a happy coincidence, I am reading a book by Danish author Martin A. Hansen called Løgneren – The Liar. This is one of the greatest works in the Danish literary canon and forms part of the explanation for my describing Greg Baxter as a liar. It's a compliment.

All writers are liars

In a fascinating interview in the Guardian a few years ago, muscular north American writer John Irving said this about writing and lying:

"…to any writer with a good imagination all memoirs are false. A fiction writer's memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always invent a better detail than the one we remember. The correct detail is rarely exactly what happened; and the most truthful detail is what could have happened, or what should have ... ."

Readers can see the whole article at

Article - Guardian

The point I am making about Løgneren (pronounced Loyneren) is an important one, because it goes to the heart of the debate about what writing is and what it can do for us as human beings. In other words, the dramatic lie that is fiction (when it works) often tells us a truth far better than any realist writing can.

In A Preparation For Death (henceforth APFD) Greg Baxter tells us that he is not aspiring to any specific form of literature - the author has no “aim” other than being utterly honest and, as he says in the Irish Times, to write the kind of book that has never been written before.

See - Irish Times

It is perhaps ironic, then, that the best and most readable bits of APFD come in the partially fictional and more conventional descriptive passages and not at the points of apparent brutal honesty. These latter attempts at candidness often have a naked sexual context and come across as being more contrived and worked at than the rest of the narrative.

It takes determination and a particular form of targeted writing to write page after page of detail about sexual fantasies, or the enactment of them. It doesn’t just come out.

Like APFD,  Martin A. Hansen’s novel is also a form of autobiography, except that is based on a diary. It is fiction but contains a lot of oblique references to Hansen's role in the Danish resistance movement against Nazi occupation in Denmark and his own thoughts on the question of human relationships.

Where Greg Baxter falters (by believing that writing graphically and shockingly about  sex is to reveal a “truth”)  Hansen shows that, at its highest levels, fictionalised autobiography can reach beyond itself to get much closer to the truth of our existence.

Thus, the two women in Hansen’s novel (after whom the alcoholic hero lusts) are never humped over tables or fingered inside telephone boxes as in APFD, but they are far more real as people - they are not simply orifices upon which the author can literally express himself.

A hunger for phone sex

For the most part, Baxter's women are deliberately described as objects of,  pornographic desire, whilst Martin A Hansen’s women with their false certitudes and doubts, their glimpses of body and suggestions of shape, are far more true, far more honest, because we recognise them as real people. They speak to us through words, or absence of words, gestures and body language.

Hunger Realist David Shields

Greg Baxter  makes no bones about the fact that he is heavily influenced by the idea of “Reality Hunger” as championed by the writer David Shields. To cement the connection, David Shields returns the compliment by providing the quote on the back of APFD – telling us that writing is (with a stress on the is) a preparation for death and that Baxter gives us an admirably “unvarnished confrontation” with that irreducible fact.

 Often admirable yes, unvarnished – no.

To cut a very long story short, Reality Hungerists (yes they do have a “cause”) believe that the novel as an art form can no longer give us “the sensation of life as it is lived” and that personal essays and autobiography can give us back our sensations.

Greg Baxter’s account of reality hunger is here:

See -  Irish Times

Now I think that it is a wonderful thing that groups of writers have begun extolling the virtues of the personal essay and autobiography but this revolution has already happened and not via David Shields or Greg Baxter but via the internet.  In fact you are looking at an example of it right now.

I also agree with Greg Baxter when he says that many novels are formulaic and reek of a particular affectation, which renders their characters as little more than cardboard cut outs, or marionettes speaking the author's lines. However, it seems to me that he has thrown the narrative baby out with the clichéd bath water.

Writing For His Life - Cormac McCarthy

What about Cormac McCarthy? His latest novel The Road is truly biblical in scope, is a gripping tale and deals with the most fundamental question of all – our survival as a species. McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, meanwhile is not only a sometimes terrifying murder and suspense story but also one of the most powerful anti drugs trade narratives that was ever written. The carnage going on in Mexico at the moment is a testament to his prophecy as to what is coming at us “down the pike” if we don’t take action. Where I live in Dublin, we are having something like a murder a week – and No Country For Old Men definitely gives me the sensation of life as it is being lived. 

Or take Michael Ondaatje’s The Skin Of A Lion, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, or White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.

Anyone who has read any of the above novels will be in no doubt that the characters who inhabit their pages are real and will be gripped, often viscerally, by the events that take place as their stories are told. To paraphrase Terry Eagleton in his book Ideology An Introduction, Verso 2007 – the literary Avant-garde is declaring that the novel  is “out of fashion” just at the moment when, like ideology, it is reasserting itself in devastating fashion. 

Facing Reality?

There is another way that Hunger Realists use a post modernist conceit. They tell us that everything has to be totally honest. But to take Greg Baxter's book as an example, is it really completely honest and lacking in artifice? The answer of course is no. A Preparation For Death is full of natural editorial corner tucking that make Greg Baxter's honesty more conditional.

Is the author honest, for example, about the students on the writing course he teaches? He barely mentions them as individuals. Similarly, in all his sexual adventures, Greg Baxter never mentions the use of, or failure to use, condoms; nor is the threat of STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) ever raised. However, as a former merchant sailor and subsequent barfly I can attest that these are constant topics amongst men who go gallivanting. Women also raise this topic frequently. Not it seems in Greg Baxter's ultra real world. 

Even where the author discusses literature, we find that he blindsides us. He praises Flannery O'Connor at one point as the best writer from the southern states of the USA but he never says why. This"honesty gap" on something that Greg Baxter obviously feels passionate about is yet another editorial decision, either made by the author himself or by his inevitable book editor at Penguin books.

Furthermore, proponents of more reality in writing seem just as prone to what the Yanks call "bullshit" as all other literary movements. The blurb on David Shield’s beautiful and very expensively produced book cover (not for the unemployed then) tells us that his detractors will see it as “an occasion to defend the status quo". So if you don’t agree with Hunger Realism you are part of the status quo?

Greg Baxter - in reality, preparing for life

So why do I recommend this book so strongly? Well, thankfully, Greg Baxter rarely does what he thinks he preaches. The word “beautiful” appears more often in APFD than in any book I’ve read for some time.  If readers can get over the graphic sexual content (which middle class Dubliners will pretend they hardly noticed as their stomach churns), they will find that he does indeed write beautifully and evocatively about, for example, Baton Rouge and a slightly fictionalised but utterly real southern states of the USA. The same applies to the often moving material on his  family and about his passion for writing.

Then, it must also be said, I suppose, that I have a vested interest. For, via his Someblindalleys website - http://someblindalleys.com/ Greg Baxter has published my essay on translating Ibsen and also my poem A Quiet Read.

The Ibsen essay can be read here -

Ibsen Essay

This despite the fact that we have, superficially at least, differing views on artistic creation.

In  a town like Dublin where the literati  say “orf" instead of off; give master classes to each other; frequent Southside muse restaurants and squabble over the Irish Times gossip cycle; Greg Baxter's genuine commitment to finding new literature and constantly urging new voices to speak out, is more than a breath of fresh air, it is a veritable oxygen tank.

Read A Preparation For Death - Warts and All and then let us pray that Greg Baxter and all the other Reality Hungerists finally come to understand that human beings, whilst often being fickle and exhibiting contradictory traits, also have core  characteristics  that bind us in a paradigm of empathy to each other.

For this reason, the creative impulse is not just about emoting what you feel at any particular moment; it is also about reaching out, engaging with and embracing your fellow man – be it because you have bad news or good.

In a literary context, this takes time and, dare I say it, conscious construction. There are many fine examples of this in Greg Baxter's book, despite his protests to the contrary.  

This is called storytelling and Greg Baxter, mid life crisis and all, is nothing more or less than a storyteller.

Postscript

There is a crucial moment at the end of APFD, which perhaps in hindsight (and after having read more of Greg Baxter's own thoughts on his book) deserves more attention than I have given it here. This comes where the author is preparing to leave his family in Vienna, and in particular his almost suicidal cousin Walter, and return to Dublin

In this final essay, appropriately called Abschied – Departure or Farewell in German – Greg Baxter declares  that he is shedding his former self, the self who inhabits his anti-novel, to start a new life, a new self, beyond the confines of the life he has lived and recorded in his book.

Thus there is no doubt that the author sees the book as having a cathartic quality and that he now, chrysalis like, can emerge into a new life where his partner is expecting a baby and he can look forward to new challenges. In essence, Greg Baxter sees APFD as a purging of his former self that he now has left behind forever.

All that is fine except that it never works that way.

Part of the reason I love Kierkegaard so much is that, as writer, he went down into the very entrails of human existence in a way that books like APFD and my own pathetic scribblings can only dream of.

In The Concept of Angst  - Kierkegaard says that a human being is on the one hand an individual but on the other he is also the embodiment of the whole lineage of mankind. I am going to reproduce what Kierkegaard says next in the original Danish because  it is, in my view, one of the most crucial sentences in all literature and philosophy 

"Intet Individuum er ligegyldigt mod Slægtens Historie, ligesaa lidet som  Slægten mod noget Indidvids."

No individual is irrelevant in the story of mankind, just as the story of mankind is never irrelevant in the story of any individual.

In other words, there are aspects of Greg Baxter's humanity that belong to all of us and core aspects that belong to him alone and can never be shed.

It is the difference between being human and being a butterfly.

Article - Irish Times 

Furthermore, in an article which lionizes a “legendary” British journalist a few days before the Bloody Sunday report was due to be published, it ironically highlights the role of powerful states like Britain in suppressing basic rights and the failure of journalism to do its job as the Fourth Estate.

The Fourth Estate, more than anything, is supposed to act in the name of the people against powerful vested interests. Harold Evans in his own “disinterested” way, and cheered on by Mark Hennessey, shows exactly why it has been unable to do that. Now Harold Evans, it must be said, was actually a much better journalist than many of our home grown variety but then that is not much of a recommendation. But it must also be said, that the de rigeur “impartial”, devils advocate, “on the one hand but then on the other” type of journalism only gets you so far when trying to tell a story like Bloody Sunday. In fact, it has actually proven to be a very conservative form of journalism.

Here is what Harold Evans said about Bloody Sunday, where he refers directly to soldiers from the British Army's Parachute Regiment, which murdered and maimed scores of innocent people that day (30th of January 1972):

“I think the answer is that they panicked: not that they were following orders. If they wanted to murder innocent Irish people that was possibly the worst way they could have done it.”

My God that must be right. The British wouldn't just murder innocent people (it is inferred) in such a clumsy way. This is Harold Evans after all. Those hair trigger combat soldiers panicked and Evans is an Editor Emeritus. It’s all fine. A mistake. All those Irish Times readers can relax and not worry about puking up their breakfast muesli. The might of the British state is really quite benign. Evans even has the courage to admit that his "patriotic" slip might be showing somewhat in his analysis, which is a nice touch – a God who can show humility. Respectable Ireland breathes a sigh of relief.

Just to emphasise the reliability of Evans's account (and his role as Mr Dependable), Mark Hennessey comes rushing in with a break from his interview format to tell us that Evans and his team were so thorough that they looked at FIVE HUNDRED pictures of the Bloody Sunday massacre. And the conclusion from all that thorough, impartial research was that the paratroopers panicked and no order came from on high.

All of which shows that, with the right approach, you can look at a million pictures and still not see the big one that's right in front of you. It is bigger than any elephant. Another term for this type of journalism might be selective glaucoma.

Never mind then that people were shot in the back as they fled. Never mind the fact that people were murdered whilst trying to help others. Never mind the fact that none of the dead or injured were armed. But wait there's something wrong here....

Now I remember. The same thing that happened on Bloody Sunday happened in Ballymurphy in Belfast some six months before, when eleven unarmed people were killed outright, scores more were injured and a whole community was brutalised. And lo and behold it was the same British army regiment who then on went on to Derry and did exactly the same thing. Unless of course these finely honed and trained, revved up killing machines happened to panic twice? When the wider picture – the ideology - is looked at, what legendary journalists see as panicking begins more and more to look like a deliberate policy.

Now, good readers, I am going to ask you to do something - do not trust journalists for they have let us down badly. Yes it is true, I too am, or was, a journalist. Don’t trust me either. Not me. Not Harold Evans. Not Mark Hennessey. Go off and check what I am saying; then do something else that would have our illustrious scribes going into a tailspin – think IDEOLOGY. There is an ideology going on here.

In other words, what is presented as cool reasoning is in fact ideology. In fact, non ideological journalists are the most ideological of all. When journalists tell me, as they often have, that I am ideological and that they are not, I reach for my metaphorical baseball bat.

The refusal to look at the broader anti insurrection policy being pursued by the British is ideology. An ideological choice is made. If Evans and the Irish Times had looked at the conflicting ideologies and the broader pattern of shootings, the panicking soldiers idea becomes not an explanation but a pathetic cover up.

Back to Ballymurphy with us then and the 9th of August 1971.

Eleven people, including a priest going to the aid of a dying man, and a mother of eight children, shot dead over the course of 48 hours as internment without trial was introduced and Catholic "Irish Republican” areas were locked down by the elite Parachute Regiment.  

Go to the website, which tells you the story of the Ballymurphy Massacre - here

http://ballymurphymassacre.com/index.html

Read the stories of the unarmed people who were shot in the back, shot running or crawling for cover by the same regiment who did the same things on Bloody Sunday in Derry.

One story will suffice here - Father Hugh Mullan, a curate from Corpus Christi chapel, was killed as he went to the aid of his neighbour Bobby Clarke. Bobby was shot in the back as he tried to help children out of Springmartin (then a mixed British/Irish estate) as it came under attack from loyalist mobs. Before entering the field in an attempt to help Bobby Clarke, Father Mullan telephoned the Henry Taggart Army base to explain that he was going to help the wounded man. Father Mullan entered the field waving a white babygrow.

Let us now deliver the coup de grace to the argument that Harold Evans's forensic examination of 500 photographs led him to some journalistic nirvana before which we must prostrate ourselves.

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Fr. Edward Daly trying to stop soldiers from firing in the vicinity of the dying Jackie Duddy

The above picture is of a priest (Fr. Edward Daly) waving a white handkerchief as he tried to obtain safe passage for the dying Jackie Duddy - the first victim of the Bloody Sunday massacre.What incredible bravery, knowing as Fr. Daly did (and understanding the power of ideology instinctively) what had happened six months before to his fellow priest in Ballymurphy. Harold Evans looked at the photograph of Eddie Daly but he never saw the shade of the executed priest Hugh Mullan and the ten other unarmed, innocent victims in Ballymurphy.

If Harold Evans, and indeed the rest of our so called Fourth Estate, bothered to look, they would see a colonial power bent on imposing its will. There was no need for an order to be given and there was no need to panic. It had all been done before with impunity.