The Armalite and The Ballot Box

After fifteen years of confusion, violence, hopes and disappointments, the war in the North has gone into a new phase with the rise of Sinn Fein as a political force. The significance of recent developments in the North is emphasised by the suggestion that Sinn Fein is about to begin a serious political push for support in the South. The cliches which have built up about the North, springing from boredom with the never-ending war or from fear or from the suppression of information, are being tested and found wanting. The pronouncements and predictions of the "experts" are again and again being proved wrong. More than at any time in recent years we need to know what is happening, why and what are the forces at play. In this issue Michael Farrell gets the IRA viewpoint and the declaration that the war will not be slowed down in line with Sinn Fein's political progress. And Farrell interviews the Sinn Fein MP, Gerry Adams, on the subtle and not-sa-subtle shifts in republican thinking and aims. Also in this issue, Nell McCafferty takes a long look at Gerry Fitt, defeated veteran MP. Her story of Fitt's rise andJall says much about how the North has developed since the young Gerry Fitt helped out with a Sinn Fein election campaign in 1958.

Smiles On a Summer Night

35

by Kevin Dawson The Bailey in Duke Street is where the beautiful people hang out: New clothes; new suntans; new smiles.

To Westminster And Back The Life and Times of Gerry Fitt

38

Nell McCafferty writes a major profile on the former MP for West Belfast.

Bowie Live

63

Michael Dwyer was in Wembley for the Bowie concert.

The Armalite and the Ballot Box

by Michael Farrell

7 17

Old Father, Old Artificer

67

ITGWU: Establishment Rules

Bruce Arnold writes about Hugh Leonard's 'Da' and his own father.

As the Workers' Party lose a major battle in the country's largest trade union, Mary Raftery reports on the current state of play.

Ollie Campbell Asks For More

John Reason reports from the Lions tour.

70

A Question of Judgement
Kerry Dougherty continues her sentencing of Gerard Cowzer.

A Continuation Of Battles Long Ago

Kevin Cashman matches.

A Grain of Truth

22

Mark Brennock examines the Irish Independent's coverage of the Ranks dispute.

Departments

The Politics of Dail Reform by Gene Kerrigan

27

There's a move towards reforming the Dail - and it's long overdue. The antics of some TDs make a farce of proceedings, cost taxpayers thousands in hidden subventions of election campaigns and undermine the claims of the Dail to democracy.

When the vote comes in

THE VOTING WAS NEARLY
finished at the polling station in Andersonstown. At first Gerry Adams' supporters thought that the Army and the RUC had come to take away the ballot boxes. Things had gone well for Gerry Adams so the supporters were ready to follow the ballot boxes down to the City Hall just to make sure that none of them were thrown away. Almost directly over the polling station a helicopter hovered motionless. But it was too early. The RUC and the Army had come to take a man away. His wife had been accused of impersonation and he had become violent. The RUC brought him down and put him in a van. Most of the Sinn Fein supporters were in their teens. All of them wore short hair; some wore ear-rings. Impersonation had been a serious problem all day, they contended. They were insisting that the SDLP were the main culprits. When Sinn Fein supporters went in to vote, they were stopped and challenged for no reason, they. said. You couldn't even cast your vote. It was, they implied, another example of the way things were. One young lad began to speculate how much compensation you could get if you were stopped in the wrong. He felt it would only run into three figures. The following morning there were more of these young lads hanging about the corridors of City Hall wearing official badges. Others wearing official badges were older but looked equally out of place. One of them explained with great glee that here they were in their City Hall. They sat on the chairs out-

side the counting room for West Belfast. Gerry Adams, soon to be their MP, was inside. Every so often one or two of them would ask the RUC questions and the RUC would answer. As the time came nearer for the results to be announced, one bloke explained to the others that there was to be no trouble. As the candidates walked into the room where the announcement was to be made, one reporter said into his tape j ecorder that there was a scuffle going on. The RUC man told him that the scuffle was being caused by the press. The RUC man was right. The three Unionist women were not causing a scuffle. They were simply waving union jacks and roaring "Murderer" at Adams. Adams, like a letter from the civil service, started and ended in Irish. The middle was in English; it was blunt. There was a soldier blown up that morning. Adams told the assembled press, politicians, police and officials that he shouldn't have been there. When Adams was finished speaking he stood to one side. Next, he had to make his way across the hall to the television studio. There were more protesters this time. One of them had a bible in his hand. "Murderer, murderer", they roared again. Their faces were contorted and tense. Adams was interviewed three times in the television studios. Each interviewer was hostile. Each time he was slow and calm. His answers were ready. As Adams and his supporters moved down the stairs, the protesters stood at the top and shouted once more. Their slogans had about them all the aura of heaven and hell. One of them turned on the press demanding why the press didn't write about the

British soldier blown up that day. Three cars were ready to take Adams and his supporters in convoy to the Falls Road. First there was a green car for Adams and last was a black taxi. At Sinn Fein headquarters in the Falls, a window was taken out and Adams stood there and made his speech again, beginning in what he had previously called "ar dteanga ", His supporters were wandering about like people who had inherited the earth.

Forget-menots
THE FIRST MAN OWNED
a factory. He had been at the races the day he was charged and the previous night had been at a function to raise money for the mentally handicapped. His licence had been withdrawn and he needed it back. He had to hire a driver and when he moved about the country he had to book his driver into hotels. Then there was the unemployed man who owed money to a bank; his income was 66.28 per week. The judge felt that he hadn't enough money to payoff the loan. Then there was the student from Maynooth who

drove without insurance and the bloke who drove along the dual " carriageway the wrong way. The next man had been caught driving at 85 miles per hour. "Yes", said his solicitor, "but he was only doing 40 when he was stopped". The court laughed uproariously. It was an ordinary morning in Naas District Court. Petty theft, driving offences, insurance. There was, however, a well-dressed man in his forties sitting behind the witness box. He was following the proceedings with a certain amount of impatience. Sometimes, though, he would find something amusing. Sometimes small twists of irony in the evidence would make him laugh. Andrew Rynne, a doctor from Clane , was having the time of his life. By forcing the authorities to charge him for selling condoms to a neighbour, he was underlining and publicising the fact that the law on contraceptives is absurd and intolerable. And by alerting the authorities to his own crime and by wanting to be found guilty, he was turning reality upside down. This seemed to amuse him as much as the absurdity of the law seemed to appal him. He had to make sure that he lost the case. He had to sit there, and when his turn came, plead not guilty and

then give evidence against himself. He was fined 500 or 28 days in jail if he didn't pay the fine in 28 days. He was going to appeal but first he was going to make sure that he had no chance of
winning the appeal. "I am going to continue to treat this

meanour that the tide had turned in the affairs of the amendment. They looked like people from the opposite side. Now if these were attending an Anti-Amendment meeting in Mullingar then this reporter could safely go back to

law with the contempt it deserves", he said. He thought that there would be strong opposition to any change in the law which Barry Desmond would propose. He invited the press back to his house for sandwiches. The ham in the sandwiches was flavoured with a mixture of mayonnaise and chutney. The house in Clane was huge. The furniture was old and well-polished. There were paintings on the walls. A sense of opulence was everywhere. This was how the other half lived. Robert Stephens, the man who bought the condoms on that fateful day, September 27, 1982, stood about Rynne 's house after the court case. He had bought ten
Forget-Me-Nets from Rynrie

for 2. He had told the court that he needed them so as not to produce an unwanted child and to avoid contracting YD. Some members of the press, this writer included, were interested in asking Robert Stephens about his activities later on that evening, who he was with, name names, etcetera. No one, however, had the courage.

THE

ANTI-AMENDMENT

Campaign was touring the heartland. Monday was Mullin gar and the rest of the week would include Birr, Tullamore, Carrick-on-Shannon. The Campaign was even going to visit Boyle, the very home of PLAC and SPUC. The Campaign was travelling in a mini bus. One of the blokes was wearing an earring in each ear. Just before eight o'clock on Monday June 20 the people of Mullingar, about 60 of them, began to arrive at the meeting. It seemed from their age and general de-

Dublin and announce that the amendment would be defeated. Two speakers from the Anti-Amendment bandwagon spoke and they were well received. There was even applause. The collection of money seemed to go well too. When this had finished a member of the audience wanted to know if there were going to be the promised local speakers. The chairman's face fell and he said they couldn't get anyone. With that a man in the audience went up to the platform. He announced that his name was Dr Flynn and he wouldn't like anyone to think that there was no support for the anti-amendment movement in Mullingar. Members of the audience began to speak. One woman, who had written down in longhand every word spoken from the platform, announced that she was "pro-life". One speaker was a student from Maynooth and told us that in Mayncoth he had been forbidden to set up an anti-amendment group. He was forced to call it the Law Reform Action Group. He was against the amendment, as was a woman sitting behind him, as was a nurse who had worked in Scotland, as was another woman who said she was a member of SPUC but was still against the amendment. But the rest of the speakers, one and all, who had come to the anti-amendment meeting in Mullingar, were in fact in favour of the amendment. They were all "prolife". "Abortion is the direct killing of a human being", they said. Or: "Contraception has been dragged into this debate. This amendment has nothing to do with contraception." Or: "I would plead with you to save the unborn baby." Or: "We are lucky to be given a chance to vote on this amendment." Or: "Where's the proof that these threats to the mother will happen." Or: "I'd take Dr

Courteney's word before I'd take Garret FitzGerald's." Or: "We're 98 percent Catholics and we want Catholic laws. If the Holy Father says abortion is evil, it's evil." The debate in Mullingar, if you can call it that, was polite and well-conducted. But the heartland remains true to itself. The amendment seems as safe as houses in Mullingar.

a lot to ask." The county manager for South Tipperary, Mr T.P. Rice, who is shortly to move to Limerick, said that the monitoring of the factory would continue if the Hanrahans wCluld.b.and. Cl'l~r IDlor-

Fear in
the valley
THE COVER STORY OF
the June issue of Magill was discussed at the meeting of South Tipperary County Council on 13 June. One local councillor pointed out that people in the area around the Merck Sharp and Dohme factory in Ballydine were worried that the council was not monitoring the factory. "We must bend over backwards to get results and
to sh.ow -people publicly whe-

ther it is damaging or not", he said. Another councillor pointed out that it was "never more necessary to have everything seen to be above board". The meeting of the council was lobbied by a group of local farmers who were concerned about the factory. Senator Willie Ryan commented at the meeting: "They have said that the monitoring system was withdrawn and they say that it was the offices of the council who instructed that it be withdrawn. They are asking that it be restored. I think that is not

mation which they had refused to the council. One councillor, Dick Tobin, said: "Then we are doing nothing." "Neither are the people who want us to do something", replied the county manager for South Tipperary. On June 9 the Minister for Agriculture was questioned by Tomas MacGiolla about Ballydine. The Minister said that his department has been dealing with the matter since 1981. He neglected to point out that in that year his department received 26 samples from John Hanrahan. Although they do not have the facilities here to test for toxic properties, they did not send the specimens abroad. They now want John Hanrahan to hand over his privately-commissioned research so they can examine it. JOhn Hanrahan has no confidence in the Department of Agriculture. He is holding on to his information until his High Court case is heard. Garret FitzGerald has been aware of the situation in Ballydine for some time. He is reported to be extremely concerned about it, as are several of his backbenchers. He has received an interim report on the situation there. Since our report on Ballydine appeared the number of cattle deaths on John Hanrahan's farm has gone up to 115.

"

Farrell Sinn Fein has achieved striking successes at the polls in the last nine months. What do y/:?u see as the significance of those successes? IRA For years the political establishment claimed that the IRA had very little support. The election results have answered that conclusively and have quantified our support.

Of course we do not say that all who voted for Sinn Fein were voting for active support of the IRA but they were showing at least passive support. The results have been a big morale boost for the IRA and have revived the enthusiasm of any Volunteers who were inclined to flag. We see the Sinn Fein vote as a clear vote for the Brits to get out.

What effect will the election successes have on the strategy and tactics of the IRA? \
The history of other anti-colonial struggles like those in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Vietnam have shown the need for guerrilla movements to have widespread political support to succeed. The election results have shown that we are building up that support. They will not lead to any real change in the strategy or tactics of the IRA, however. We attack when and where we can. Our tactics are determined by intelligence and logistics - the availability of weapons and personnel. The military struggle will not slow down to relate to Sinn Fein's political activity. If anything, subject to logistical considerations, the war is likely to be stepped up.

What is your strategy?

Our strategy has been, by military and political action, to frustrate the British aim of making the six counties governable through local power-sharing-type institutions. So far we have succeeded in this and the Brits can only govern in a direct colonial way, using 30,000 armed men. U1timate success will come when the British government decides that even colonial rule is no longer feasible. This will come about when, as a result of our military activity. the British people themselves demand an end to the war.

How do you see a British withdrawal coming about?

The level of political and military activity is not yet enough to secure this. We recognise that, even if the entire nationalist population in the six counties voted for Sinn Fein, that wouldn't be enough. There must be an increase in political activity in the 26 counties so that they also demand that the Brits get out. Even that wouldn't be enough. because the only thing colonial rulers will listen to is force. There must also be a big escalation of military activity by us and there will be.

How long will this take?

In 1978-9 we projected a long war lasting for 20 years or more. That was partly to prepare our people psychologically as there was a certain amount of war-weariness at the time. We are not so sure that it will take that long now. If the Republican movement can capitalise on all the social discontent in the 26 counties and continue its electoral successes it could be a lot shorter.

In a previous Magill interview the IRA' predicted bombing attacks in England. Recently a London Labour councillor who supports British withdrawal argued that such bombings hinder the development ofa solidarity movement there. Do you still intend to bomb Britain?
Our activity in Britain at any given time is dictated by our ability to strike there. It is still a target because we believe one bomb in Britain is worth 50 in Ireland. However. we do not intend to hold the British people responsible for their government's crimes in Ireland. Any attacks will be limited to the British political establishment and to military targets. And if there is a big growth in anti-war feeling in Britain we would have to revise our attltudc.

To what do you attribute the recent emergence of supergrasses?

The Brits have had to resort to bribing IRA Volunteers supcrgrasscs -- because our adoption (If cells (or Active

turning away recruits because we don't need them and directing them into other areas of resistance. The IRA has kidnapped the father of Raymond Gilmore, the Derry supergrass. What will happen to him? Raymond Gilmore's father will be released when Raymond Gilmore retracts his evidence. But what will happen if he does not retract? How can you justify punishing a father for the sins of his son? The fate of Raymond Gilmore's father rests in Raymond Gilmore's hands. It all rests with him. The IRA has attacked many off-duty UDR men and RUe Reservists. You justify this because they are members of the British forces, but do you not accept that such killings alienate the Protestant communities among whom these people live and work? It is a euphemism to talk of off-duty or part-time UDR men or RUC men. They are never off-duty. They are armed all the time and if they came upon IRA Volunteers they would attack them, whether they were on duty or not. We cannot allow an armed organisation which is ranged against us to go undeterred because of the sensitivities of the loyalist population. Do they care about the sensitivities of the nationalist population who have suffered so much? In the event of a British withdrawal how do you expect the Protestant population of the North to react? What will your attitude be towards them? Many loyalists have a supremacist mentality like the Afrikaners in South Africa, the Pieds Noirs in Algeria or the Israelis. They may not have as many privileges but the mentality is the same. It is very possible that people with that mentality would try to repartition the North - as, Harold McCusker MP has already suggested. And they have about 19,000 armed men in the RUC and UDR to help them do it. We don't know how many of the loyalists would take that line, but anyone who opposes Irish self-determination with 'force will have to be met with force. On the other hand we are prepared to offer them within a united Ireland what has always been denied to us - equality.

Service Units as we prefer to call them), meant they couldn't get information anymore. Very big sums of money are involved. Volunteers have been offered up to 250,000 during interrogation. A few IRA members who had been broken by spells in jail gave in to this temptation. We have learned from this and will be much more careful in future about reinvolving people who have been in jail. What effect have the supergrasses had on your organisation? The supergrasses were also an attempt by the Brits to shake the confidence of the people - on whom we rely for support - in the IRA. This worked for a while when they saw actual IRA Volunteers giving information, but the effect has worn off. The proof of this is that the IRA is still operating effectively. Remember that every Volunteer needs a billet and every weapon a dump and these are provided by the people. Even if some Volunteers are jailed because of the supergrasses it will not affect our capabilities. We have never had to deploy even 50% of our membership during the periods of most intense activity. At one time almost 2,000 alleged IRA members were interned and it didn't affect our capacity to continue the war. For some years now we have been

Farrell There has been a lot of argument about whether the Sinn Fein vote was a vote for violence. Was it, or what do you see it as a mandate for? Adams The IRA does not need an electoral mandate for armed struggle. It derives its mandate from the presence of the British in the six counties. A large percentage of the Sinn Fein vote was a vote for the armed struggle, but I don't know how to quantify that. The others showed an understanding of the need for armed struggle. Attempts are now being made to explain the vote away as a protest against bad housing, unemployment, discrimination. If we got votes because of that I think that is a good base to build on. We stood on four clear points: against the British connection and the loyalist veto, for a democratic socialist republic and defending the right of people to engage in armed struggle. What is your strategy now? Will your success in the elections affect the balance between political and military action by the Republican movement? Our strategy has three main prongs, not in any special order. We want to show clearly the degree of support for

Sinn Fein and restrict the SDLP's freedom to manoeuvre - the British, in order to maintain the partition set-up, need the support of a party which appears to represent the nationalist population and the SDLP have fulfilled that role admirably. We have now established a sort of Republican veto which I believe will grow. And we want to politicise our own organisation. I don't think the election will make a big difference to the IRA's tactics. Although there have unfortunately been some exceptions over the last few weeks, the IRA has for some time been adopting more discriminating tactics, has been a bit more refined in its tactics. It is up to them to learn the lessons from the application of armed struggle. I would be confident that if the IRA continue to refine their operations and make sure they have the maximum propaganda and political effect, there won't be any conflict between what they're doing and what we're doing. I think over the last few years the lessons of the previous period the need for control, the need for a change in tactics, the need to militarise the war, to concentrate against the British, the RUe and the UDR - have been learned by the IRA.

Revolutionary movements which use force usually argue that it is made necessary because political action is closed to them. Sinn Fein has been able to take political action very successfully recently. How does that, in your view, affect the justification for the use of force? It doesn't. I believe the use of force in the six counties is justified by the British presence. They don't give people much choice. At the end of the day they won't be argued or talked out; a movement that wants them out will either

have to use force or the threat of force. What are your short and medium-term objectives in the North? We want to consolidate and strengthen our organisation. The Westminster election took us into some completely new areas and showed up other areas where we were weak. We want to build up our organisation there. We are planning for the next local elections in 1985 when we can probably win the balance of power on a number of councils, certainly Derry city council, and we will contest by-elections which may be coming up. We have not yet decided our attitude to the EEC elections - whether to stand and whether to say we would take seats - but I think our vote could be increased there. We found, especially in the rural areas, that we can eat into the SDLP vote. Our longer term objective is to become the majority nationalist party as well as, of course, making considerable inroads in the 26 counties. Even if you do replace the SDLP as the majority nationalist party you will still be left with the Protestant population. What is your attitude to them? Do you accept that you have to win the consent of at least some of them to a united Ireland? The Unionist working class have no great reason to move away from their present position. The sectarian divisions are caused and maintained by the British. They have marginal privileges and the Unionist ruling class have significant privileges. You have to get rid of the prop which causes the sectarianism and in that new situation working class unity can be built. It would be preferable, but I don't think it is possible, to win Unionist consent to break the British connection. We have to break the loyalist veto. But I don't think it would be possible to build a democratic socialist republic without the consent of all the people, including what would then be ex-Unionists. Sinn Fein appears to have moved a lot to the Left in recent times and talks a lot about socialism, the working class and the rights of women. What are you doing to put all this into practice? There have been a number of problems. Republicans, especially in the 26 counties, compartmentalise their activities a lot. I have found many Republicans who have been active trade unionists for years at shop steward or trades council level but who make a distinction between their trade union activity and for example selling An Phoblacht. We have established a trade union department which brings Republican trade unionists together and tries to get them to integrate their trade union activities and their Republicanism. We have a lot of trade union members now but we are years behind the Workers' Party in this and have nothing like their position in the unions. But their influence may not be so great in the long run because they have grafted themselves orito the unions, they are not springing up from the bottom of the labour movement. We have a department of women's affairs going for about two and a half years. It would see its role as politicising women Republicans to fight for their rights as women and politicising male Republicans to support equality for women. It is not a feminist department though there are some strong feminists in it. They are involved in working as Republicans in women's centres, rape crisis

centres and so on, North and South. To be frank, it is only in the last few years that we have begun to treat women's affairs in a political way and we do stand open to criticism on that issue. You devoted a large part of your recent Bodenstown speech to the need. for Sinn Fein to develop new strategies in the South. There seemed to be a hint that you would contest Dail elections and that you might drop the traditional abstentionist policy. Is that so? We have not decided to stand for Leinster House. What I was saying at Bodenstown was that Republicans have to come up with a strategy which accepts the fact that most of the people in the 26 counties accept the Free State institution as legitimate. It is no use Republicans burying their heads in the sand and saying - although all these things are true - that it is a bastard State as a result of the Treaty and so on, if everyone else has a totally different view. You can't develop a strategy without taking into account {l) the effects of the acceptance of the State institutions and (2) the effect an abstentionist policy by Republicans is going to have on that strategy. Sinn Fein does have a position, however, that we will not give recognition to Leinster House. I can't be pragmatic about that. While that reo mains the position I will support it. Essentially what I was trying to say was that you've got to take all these things into account and you can't proceed on the basis of what's happening in the North, on the basis of Sinn Fein being an IRA support group. You can't get support in Ballymun because of doors being kicked in by the Brits in Ballymurphy. You've got to become a relevant political party with realistic policies which crystallise the disillusionment felt by people at the Thatcherite monetarist policies and the corruption by the Leinster House politicians. There are rumours of discontent by more traditionalist elements in Sinn Fein at the emphasis on socialism and the increasing involvement in elections. Is there likely to be a backlash against this trend? The moves to radicalise the movement have been won on the floor of the Ard Fheiseanna. There are people there

certainly - and I think it's understandable given the history of Republican politics - who are opposed to involvement in what they call politics. What they are really opposed to is constitutionalism which I am equally opposed to. I have found that once you explain things on the basis of the Proclamation saying the ownership of Ireland should belong to the people of Ireland and what Connolly and Pearse said, and how this should be updated by the nationalisation of major industries and how financiers and multinationals shouldn't be allowed to suck the wealth out of Ireland, people start coming round. I don't believe there are, in any significant numbers, ideological differences. I don't forsee any situation where, on the road to radicalising policies and strategies there would be a split. I think that some people might leave, as happened in the past. The referendum on the anti-abortion amendment will probably be held soon. What will Sinn Fein do about it? Probably nothing. You're into the silly situation there where Sinn Fein doesn't recognise the constitution of the Free State and can hardly take a stand on amending it. I would be against the amendment. I think it's nonsense, introduced for party political advantage, and doesn't deal at all with the issues involved, the conditions which force women to seek abortions. You have recently developed links with people like Ken Livingstone, the leader of the Greater London Council. How much importance do you place on the development of a solidarity movement in Britain? We see it as very important. We decided some years ago to do all we could to encourage the development of an anti-war movement in Britain even if some of the elements in it were there for chauvinist reasons like not wanting their soldiers killed in Ireland. Recently we have refined our attitude somewhat and we are making an effort to develop contacts with people with influence in the British Labour party. This is especially important with the Labour party in disarray after its defeat in the elections. Ken Livingstone thinks there may be a big swing to the Left and the party might eventually come to power committed to withdrawing from Ireland. .

votes against the leadership, against the Labour Party or simply against Browne. The split within the union is clearly perceived as a left-right one, or more broadly as pro- or anti-establishment. The Workers' Party have assumed the leadership of the left-wing, antiestablishment faction largely because of the absence of an active left-wing Labour participation. They are the largest and most organised opposition grouping and have attracted the support of a number of members and officials who would, however, strongly disagree with the party on several issues. They would not, for instance, support the affiliation of the union to the Workers' Party. Aware of the disparate nature of their support, the Workers' Party does not advocate disaffiliation from the Labour Party. And while there has been a flood of letters from members demanding exemption from their payments to the political fund (which provides financial assistance to Labour Party candidates), there is no serious support within the union for disaffiliation. he division within the ITGWU does not manifest itself in dissension on issues of policy. Of all the motions discussed during the four-day conference in Tralee, a vote was counted on only one; the size of the majority either for or against the other motions was such that counting was unnecessary. The generally irrelevant nature of the proceedings was plainly indicated by the almost complete lack of debate on motions. As soon as the elections were over, the sense of energy and drive disappeared from the conference. The contest between the two factions is more about who controls the union than how they are likely to use that control. Now that the Labour Party is secure within the union, a backlash against the Workers' Party is inevitable. There is speculation that as part of the current restructuring of the union the Development Services Division and the research sections, where the Workers' Party have considerable influence, are to be cut back. Consideration is also being given to restricting the powers of the six National Group Secretaries. It is by judicious use of those powers and by what are recognised within the union as their efficiency and competence that the two Workers' Party Group Secretaries, Des Geraghty and Pat Rabbitte, have reached positions of such prominence.

Mary Raftery examines the fluctuating leadership of the ITGWU

'th the election of Eddie Browne as Vice President of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union last month, the Labour Party establishment in the union has firmly secured its position of control. In the weeks preceding the election, Des Geraghty, a member of the Workers' Party and Browne's only opponent for the vice presidency, estimated that on the basis of the support he was promised he could win or at least do better than on his two previous attempts at general officership of the union. At one stage during the long night before the Tralee election on May 31, Eddie Browne's supporters calculated that Geraghty was six votes. ahead. Most of the delegates were scattered around the bars of the Mount Brandon Hotel, where the conference was due to start the following morning. With the news of Geraghty's lead, the canvass became more intense. Several experienced delegates said that they had never seen anything like it. By 2.30am there was general agreement that there were no more than ten votes between the two candidates, and that Browne might just squeeze in. The result thus came as an equal shock to both sides. Browne won by 222 votes to 134. Geraghty's vote was actually slightly lower than in his contest last March against Christy

Kirwan for the position of General Secretary. It was apparent that several delegates had broken their branch mandates, and that others had reneged on verbal commitments of support for Geraghty. They had succumbed to the considerable pressure which was exerted by the union's leadership. Branch secretaries, virtually all of whom attend conference as delegates, are particularly susceptible to that kind of pressure because as employees of the union, they take their orders from head office. They are a crucial link in the union's chain of command; their influence within branches and branch committees is considerable; in many cases their control is absolute. It is not possible to win a general officership election in the union without substantial branch secretary support. With the large influx in recent years of younger, more radical union officials, some of that support has shifted away from the leadership. But the Tralee election indicated that the breakthrough that Geraghty and the Workers' Party had hoped for is a long way off.

f the one third of delegates who voted for Des Geraghty, probably only a small majority actively support the Workers' Party. The rest were

he general officers of the Transport Union are effectively elected

for life. They are obliged to retire at 65, which, with John Carroll at 58 the oldest of the three officers, would mean that there would not be an election for almost seven years. There is, however, intense speculation within the union that he will retire in a little over eighteen months' time, when he reaches sixty. The person most likely to succeed him as President of the ITGWU is Michael Bell, the Labour TO for Louth. Michael Bell's decision last March to resign the Labour whip and vote against the Social Welfare Bill was highly praised and applauded at the Tralee conference. Christy Kirwan mentioned his name frequently, particularly in the context of his support for the union's tax campaign. In the eyes of a considerable section of the delegates he was the only Labour TO who had had the courage to stick by his trade union principles. From relative obscurity in the mid1970s as a Fianna Fail member of Louth County Council and General Secretary of the Shoeworkers' Union, Michael Bell became a National Group Secretary of the ITGWU on the merger of the two unions, joined the Labour Party, and in 1982 almost trebled his vote in the November elections to take a Dail seat. As National Group Secretary he gained the respect of the union's members and officials regardless of their political persuasions. He was said to

be hard-working, firm and decisive. He is currently on leave of absence from the union, and when Michael Gannon retires in August, Bell will be the second most senior-ranking Group Secretary. Politically, he is regarded by the Workers' Party as belonging to the right and by the Labour Party as left-wing. It is an ideal position from which to seek support from a membership as broadlybased as that of the ITGWU. It is interesting that his strongest support comes from the passive side of the Labour Party within the union, which includes the three general officers, none of whom have ever been active in the party. Among Labour Party activists in the union there is considerable resentment at what they perceive as his betrayal of the party. They claim that there was no great pressure on him from the union to vote against the Social Welfare Bill. The Workers' Party view his vote on that occasion as part of a wellplanned campaign to gain him support within the union, support which would not be given to a TO who toed the party line.

here were two reasons why Michael Bell did not run for the position of Vice President of the ITGWU in May. Firstly, the support of the leadership had been promised as far back as Christmas to Eddie Browne

in return for his support for Christy Kirwan in last February's election for General Secretary. And secondly, Bell was far more interested in spending the coming year as Mayor of Orogheda. If anything is likely to dissuade him from seeking the Presidency of the ITGWU it is his deep link to his constituency. Almost his entire working life has been spent as a full-time union official in Orogheda. His rule of the Transport Union in Louth was absolute. He is the first ever native Louth Labour Party TO, and the first Drogheda-born representative of the Louth constituency for thirty years. But at 46, with perhaps the Labour Party's greatest victory last year, and a secure seat behind him, his political career seems doomed, at least for the foreseeable future; he has nothing better to look forward to than a long, long stretch languishing on the back benches. Michael Bell is not a man to wait patiently, biding his time until his sins are forgiven or forgotten. The job as President of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union is his for the taking. Although the Labour Party activists within the union may resent him, they have no one of his prominence or seniority who could hope to defeat him. And as was clear from the recent vice-presidency election, the Workers' Party are a long way from making the breakthrough into the select triumverate that leads the Transport Union.

Kerry Dougherty reports on the continuing saga of Gerard Cowzer

erard Cowzer, a 23 year-old Dublin man who has been entangled in the Irish legal system for the past year and a half, is back in Mountjoy Prison, serving a five year sentence for the 1981 robbery of the Irish Permanent Building Society in Baggot Street. This is seven years less than he was originally given for the same crime and yet is still a stiff sentence by recent standards. Cowzer was sentenced in March 1982, to 12 years imprisonment for the robbery in which only 1,290 was taken and no one was injured. His sentence was one of the longest awarded in the courts last year - far surpassing punishments meted out for crimes such as murder, rape and attempted murder. At the time of his sentencing by Judge Frank Martin in the Circuit Criminal Court, several Dublin solicitors expressed shock that such a "savage" sentence had been given. Cowzer immediately announced that he intended to seek relief from the courts for either a retrial, mistrial or a reduction in sentence. "I got the same sentence for a 1,290 robbery that Nicky Kelly got for the Sallins Mail Train Robbery, one of the biggest heists in Irish history", Cowzer said at one point. One year later Cowzer was back in court - this time before the Court of Criminal Appeal. During the appeal hearing it emerged that Cowzer had been largely convicted on two pieces of evidence: the testimony of an eyewitness and a partial thumbprint found in the getaway car. The eyewitness evidence was in dispute because, on the day of the crime, three men wearing balaclava helmets and wielding lead pipes entered the building society, demanded money and left. They were in the office for about one minute. The shortness of time, combined with the fact that the perpetrators were masked, makes this eyewitness testimony arguable. Judge Martin, however, did not remind the jury not to place too much weight on this witness's identification of Cowzer as one of the robbers. The second piece of evidence, the thumbprint, was also the subject of controversy. While expert witnesses for the State testified that the print

was probably Cowzer's, the expert witness for the defence, a former member of the garda bureau, showed one point of "dissimilarity", which in police terms, disqualified Cowzer from being the owner of the print altogether. Nevertheless, Judge Martin did not remind the jury that they had listened to conflicting evidence regarding the fingerprint. Cowzer's attorneys also suggested to the court that Judge Martin had attempted to prejudice the jurors during the trial by persistently interrupting during cross examination and by suggesting that the defence fingerprint expert had been sacked by the gardai. (He had, in fact, resigned.)

not guilty and risk drawing Martin as the trial judge or enter a plea of guilty hoping the judge would significantly reduce the sentence, suspend it altogether or let it go at time already served which was 16 months. Judge Frank Martin seldom hears cases in which the plea is guilty. Three days before the trial date Cowzer called Pat McCartan and told him to enter a plea of guilty - he did not want to risk the Martin factor. On the day the trial would have begun Gerard's mother, Rita Cowzer, checked the court docket. She says Gerard was scheduled to appear in Court 15 - Judge. Martin's courtroom. While no one can predict how the retrial might have gone, the Cowzer family believes that Gerard was tactically correct to plead guilty - to something he says he never did rather than risk facing the same trial judge. But what happened in Courtroom 14 on the day of Cowzer's sentencing was also surprising. npleading guilty to the robbery, Gerard told Judge Neylon that at the time of the theft he had been a drug addict and had stolen the money to finance his heroin habit. He told the judge that since his release he had changed many of his old ways, was staying home a lot and working parttime as a driver. In addition, he offered to pay restitution for the robbery with money advanced to him by his employer with the promise that Cowzer would work off the amount later. Judge Neylon did not appear to be impressed. He told the court that he . wanted to make it clear that he was not "accepting any money in this case". He also said that committing a crime to finance another crime was not excusable. "This is a very bad crime", the judge said. "The accused has pleaded guilty. Had he pleaded not guilty and been found guilty he would have gotten a very long prison sentence." The judge then made the curious point that in sentencing Cowzer he was keeping in mind that the court of Criminal Appeal have been recently increasing sentences in cases like this one. He also pointed out that Gerard had 15 previous convictions going back to the age of 10 and that he had been "given various chances" in his early days of crime to go straight. With that he sentenced Gerard Cowzer to five years in prison. After some legal points were raised he agreed to include time already served which means that Cowzer is now

n Monday morning, March 7, the Court of Criminal Appeal did something it had not done during this entire sitting - it awarded a retrial. Cowzer was entitled to another trial, it ruled, because of Judge Martin's "inadequate and unsatisfactory" charge to the jury. It did not rule on the charges that Martin had deliberately prejudiced the jury. Although he was initially denied bail while awaiting his retrial, a bail application to the High Court was successful in getting Cowzer out of prison to await his June court date, providing he surrender his passport and check in daily with the Irishtown garda station. Throughout his brief period of freedom Gerard Cowzer hoped to be exonerated in court for the crime which he claims he did not commit. One nagging thought bothered him, however. That he might once again draw Judge Frank Martin in court .. Facing the very real possibility that his client might well stand trial again before the same judge that had already tried to send him to prison for 12 years, Cowzer's solicitor, Pat McCartan, investigated the possibility of having the case moved out of the Circuit Court and into the Central Criminal Court. The move was ruled out because of the cost involved several thousand pounds. Cowzer receives free legal aid and this legal manoeuvre would not be covered under the system. With time running out Cowzer had to make a decision - to plead

facing about another three and a half years in prison. Cowzer has said he will seek an appeal of his sentence, knowing full well that he runs the risk of having the sentence increased by the Appeals Court.

The day after Cowzer was sentenced in the Central Criminal Court, a man named Michael O'Connor received an identical five years prison sentence. Mr O'Connor had stabbed a man to death last Septern ber.

n Friday June 24 a full page article on the Ranks dispute appeared in the Irish Independent. The article was called "The Breaking of Ranks" and was advertised prominently on the front page. Inside it was claimed that Independent journalists Michael Brophy and P.J. Cunningham had gone "behind the scenes to catalogue the lead-up to the fall of the Ranks empire in Ireland". The article attempted to show that a left-wing militant shop steward Harry Fleming had single-handedly destroyed a thriving business. The article's bias against- Harry Fleming is clear throughout. He is described as "defiant", "determined", "militant", "committed", "nationalistic" and "left-wing", among other things. "The Breaking of Ranks" contains a mixture of fact and comment. Most of the fact is inaccurate and distorted; the comment is biased and misleading. The article begins:

No meeting took place on Tuesday May 10. The meetings were on May 6 and 9. Harry Fleming is not stocky. Nor is he "singularly responsible for the orchestration of the bitter Ranks dispute" . It was not Horgan's first day as mediator; he was appointed on May 2. Horgan was not met with "a stare which at once indicated defiance and determination". According to Horgan, the discussions were "relaxed and wide-ranging" . Fleming denies that he slammed his fist on the table and says that he was standing nine feet from the table through both meetings in Ranks boardroom. This has been confirmed to Magill by one other Ranks worker who was present at both meetings and by John Horgan, Vice President of the Labour Court, who was also present at both meetings. Both Fleming and Horgan deny that any "vitriolic philosophy" was "poured out". Both Fleming and Horgan also deny that Fleming "defiantly added" or ever said "we might never get what we want but we'll have f. Ranks",

rophy and Cunningham do not claim that the Ranks workers involved in the sit-in are selfish. Rather, they find a credible "expert", ITGWU Vice President, Eddie Browne, to tell us: "The 15 men are a selfish band, only interested in their own welfare." No evidence is given to support this statement. The writers fail to point out that the Ranks rationalisation plan which would have made 40 workers redundant didn't affect Harry Fleming. He would have kept his job. His occupation of the mill in support of the other workers can hardly be described as "selfish". Brophy and Cunningham dismiss the workers' point of view in favour of their own view that the workers are entirely at fault. "The Ranks dispute has been projected", according to Cunningham and Brophy, "as a classic fight between a giant multinational conglomerate and a small group of oppressed workers ... It is far from that." There is no evidence given to support this opinion. There is, however, substantial evidence to the contrary. Ranks (Ireland) is a subsidiary of the UK-based RHM Foods. The closure of Ranks (Ireland) was due to a deliberate decision not to modernise production processes when other Irish millers were doing so. This has been confirmed to Magill by the IDA. Ranks, instead, modernised their distribution network, built a new office block and bought new trucks. RHM Foods now has a readymade distribution network through which to export their flour to Ireland. There is nothing about this in the Independent article. The Ranks offices in Phibsboro were "wrecked" by the workers, according to the Independent. This reporter has visited the offices twice in the last two months and has seen no evidence of this. It is difficult not to conclude on the evidence of the article that Brophy and Cunningham are writing with considerable bias against the Ranks workers. It is ironic that on Monday June 26 the Independent claimed that the Ranks dispute was over - it was not - and implied that Brophy and Cunningham's article was instrumental in its solution. When contacted by Magill, P.J. Cunningham stated that the article was "led" by Michael Brophy, although he emphasised that he was not passing the buck. Michael Brophy stated that he stood over everything in the article. "I'm not in the business of inventing things. You can believe who you want."

t starts, sometimes, with It Says In The Papers. That early in the day. A TD is chomping the toast when he hears mention of some story from, say, page three of the Indo. The story might, perhaps, be about how some government department bought a few boxes of Belgian blotting paper. To most people it's a story of little importance, but a certain kind of TD has the imagination and sheer hard neck to work this up into an electoral asset. The TD arrives in the Dail at IO.30am for the Order of Business. This is the little ritual in which the Taoiseach announces that day's Dail business. The TDs have to be some-

where in Leinster House, just in case there's a big disagreement on the Order of Business and there's a vote called. Most TDs, when they arrive at the Dail, go to their offices and get on with their constituency work. Some go to the Chamber because they really do want to know today's order of business. Some drift in for the crack. There's usually a bit of crack at this time of day. Our friend makes sure he's there on time. After the prayer and the formal business he pops up out of his seat and demands that the Taoiseach allow time to discuss the purchase of heathen Belgian blotting paper and this disgraceful slur on the Irish blotting paper industry.

The Ceann Comhairle says that the Deputy is out of order. The TD says it is imperative, with due respect, that this issue, bearing in mind the two hundred thousand unemployed, and our young people in particular, should be discussed. ' There is no way that the Ceann Comhairle can allow such a discussion at this stage. He must restore order, must get normal business under way. Everyone knows this. The TD is asked to resume his seat. He keeps on shouting. He's then told to resume his seat. By now everyone knows what the TD is up to and others of his ilk are kicking themselves for not having thought of it first. The cute hoor. You'll be put out of The House, he's eventually told, if you continue this disruption. And he answers that, by God, he's willing to bear that sacrifice if it means he can be of some help to the poor, benighted blotting paper industry and the thousands dependent on it, our young people in particular. At which point he's ordered out. He leaves, mission accomplished. During all this his party colleagues join in and support him with cries of "Shame!", "Gerrup the yard" and "Blotting paper scandal". His opponents go "nyagh-nyagh ", or words to that effect. There is chaos, laughter, shouting. The disruption can last five minutes or twenty. Once started it can continue even when the TD who began it has been ejected. Within an hour or so the news of the TD's suspension will be in the newsrooms. It will certainly get onto the TV and radio news, perhaps just a mention, perhaps a bit more - and it will get into the evening papers. If it's a slow news day it may be blown up and stuck on the front page. "Buster Birdbrain TD ejected in fight for blotting paper jobs". This was precisely what occurred to our friend as he listened to the radio that morning and decided on the stunt. Suspension is no big deal - he had no intention that day of spending even two minutes in the Chamber, anyway. He's too busy for that political nonsense. He has a whole shoal of letters to write to constituents (free stationery, free post) telling them of his concern about unemployment, prices and inflation. And his fight for blotting paper jobs.

moves towards reform of the system operating in the Dail are cautious, conservative, fearful of upsetting the TDs - for it is they who presently abuse parliamentary democracy and who have the yea or nay on whether the abuse will

The

Idegenerate

continue. The scandal of a Dail that sits, on average, a mere 87 days a year, TDs who have no legislative function, state cars, unaccountable spending, a massive backlog of Bills, a failure to legislate on a range of major and minor issues - a thousand increasingly obvious occasions of political sin have made some TDs sensitive to accusations of irrelevancy. The move is on to do something about clearing up the mess - or at least to appear to be doing so. There is much to be cleared. The above description of the Order of Business stunt is no invention, merely a fictional representation of everyday behaviour. Such crudities are the norm. Usually it doesn't go as far as suspension - the TD merely disrupts proceedings long enough to get his name in the paper. Order of Business is a good time for it (you might make the 1.30 news), so is Question Time. But any old time will do. John Kelly tells a story of the period 1973-75, when he was Government Whip and the Dail sat until 10.30pm, and he would regularly see some TD rise to his feet at about 8.45 in the evening. Having taken the right to speak, the TD would drone on and on, a dreary, pointless speech, knowing it was too late in the evening to get media coverage. However, by holding the floor until the Dail adjourned at 10.30 he would ensure that he would be first to speak next morning. "When, of course, the press would be in that gallery, brighteyed and bushytailed, ready for anything and particularly for a bit of fun. And willing to take down whatever the Deputy who had bored the ears off everybody the previous night - might have kept up his sleeve for the following morning." There are many ways of screwing up the system, to get your name in the paper, to use the clout that the Dail has to help impress your constituents, to misuse and abuse public funds and institutions in the private interests of TDs. The examples given here are of activities observable most days in the Dail and most are based on. comments made by TDs during recent debates on Dail reform. The moves towards changing the system that are

described here are tentative, dependent on the initiative of a handful of TDs, at the mercy of the Buster Birdbrains. There are several ways of looking I~t Wednesday January 26, 1983. You could see it as the day that Charlie Haughey almost sank in the wake of the tapping and bugging row - he was at home that night writing his resignation, they said. You could see January 26 as the day John Bruton began the Dail

debate on Dail reform. But for some of us January 26 will always be the day of The Great Written Question Joust. Question Time works like this. Each day there is one hour put aside during which Ministers will answer questions asked of them by TDs. The TD writes down the question, sends it in, it goes on the list. Eventually, in several week's time, or several months, the Minister answers. In any hour of Question Time twenty questions may be answered. Or six. Out of hundreds on the list. Depends on how much disruption Buster Birdbrain gets up to. There is a shortcut. You can ask that your question receive a written reply, rather than be answered in person by the Minister. The drawback is that you don't get to ask supplementary questions, teasing out more information, or - if you're that way inclined - you don't get to cause a public row and maybe get your name

in the papers. The advantage of a written reply is that it must be made within three days of the question being put down. The institution of the Dail question was designed to enable backbenchers to have some means of calling Ministers to account. It can be used to draw out important information on government policies and on social and political developments. In theory it's a good idea. In practice it's one of the most abused institutions in the Dail. TDs put down questions by the score which ask when so-and-so's phone will be installed, when will so-and-so get a suckling grant, why did so-andso not get a pension? The questions have no parliamentary validity. They are a service provided by TDs to enhance their own image and win votes. Because of the high volume of enquiries, the Departments of P&T and of Social Welfare take weeks or months to reply to personal enquiries - even from TDs. By putting the enquiry in the form of a Dail Question the TD jumps the queue and ensures that the answer will arrive within three days. The Great Written Question Joust went like this. Bobby Molloy and Frank Fahey are TDs for Galway West, both members of Fianna Fail. It's the constituency where there's a surfeit of hopeful Fianna Failers and Fahey just squeezed out Mark Killilea last time. And it's where Michael D. Higgins is still there with a chance of getting back his seat. In other words, it's a tough constituency, lots of elbow digging, you can't afford to relax, every vote is to be struggled over. On January 26 the Order Paper carried 183 questions from Frank Fahey, 125 from Bobby Molloy. It is impossible to say which questions were "justified", but scrutiny of the total of the 308 questions indicates that 26 of Fahey's appear to be of the type for which Question Time is intended - that is, questions which elicit information which might be generally useful - and 23 of Molloy's are of that type. That leaves a total of 259 questions the sole purpose of which is to use the TDs' position to impress constituents. The fact is that such questions

are meaningless. They don't affect reality one way or the other, they merely give the impression of power and of the willingness of TDs to use that power to buy votes. The questions, to an extraordinary extent, reveal the carelessness and ineptitude of the TDs. Again and again and again and again the Ministerial answers point out that the phone was supplied six months ago or the grant was refused on obviously impeccable grounds. A large number of times the answer is that "nobody of that name has applied" for a telephone, grant or anything else. In some instances both Fahey and Molloy ask the same questions and both questions appear together on the order paper - Fahey asks the Minister for Education if she will provide the money for a School of Music in Galway, (Question 978) and then Molloy asks if she's aware of the demand for a School of Music (979), Fahey asks about a school in Gort, Molloy asks about a school in Gort. The cost of answering a Dail question (research, salaries, secretarial work, printing etc.) varies depending on the information required. Some would cost 20 a go, others 50, others 100, some even 150. Taking a conservative average - 50 a question - it appears that on January 26 the electioneering (for it is no more than that) of Fahey and Molloy cost taxpayers about 12,950. This was a contribution by us to their election funds. It also gives them an advantage over any non-TD who might challenge them at the next election, thereby distorting democracy. Molloy and Fahey don't get up to this kind of thing every day, not on the same scale. But there is a large number of TDs for whom this is a way of life, this is what the Dail exists for. Worse, some of the TDs don't put in such questions for written reply, they drag the Minister into the Dail to give an oral statement that "nobody of that name has applied" for a phone.

to put down a question concerning any subject for which he has a query. The Committee of Procedures and Privileges is unlikel)' to make an)' change in this system. It is too dear to too many TDs' hearts, would cause too much of a rear-up. There will probably be a change which will have a different Minister answering questions each day, rather than one Minister answering for several days as at present. It will make Question Time more interesting but not more productive or less corrupt.

The Publicity Game: another funcItion of the Dail at present is to provide a forum in which reporters will take down speeches in which TDs show their concern. Even if there are no press reporters present the speech will be taken down by the Dail stenographers, printed, and the TD can send it to the local paper. There are methods by which TDs can raise issues of interest. Somewhat primitive methods, admittedly. Usually, the important thing is merely to get the thing on the record. Raising an issue on The Adjournment means that a TD can stay back for half an hour after the usual business is finished and speak on some issue dear to his or her heart. The appropriate Minister must listen and reply. The Dail staff have to stay back an extra half hour. Usually, no other TD stays to listen. The TD speaks to an almost empty Chamber. Nothing is achieved, reality is not affected. Deciding the format in which to raise an issue can be a matter of whimsy or frustration. For instance, Tom MeEllistrim recently wanted to ask a Private Notice Question and was ruled out of order.

tion in and told him he couldn't discuss or argue the issue in the Chamber, he could discuss the matter llrivatel)' with the Ceann Comhairle. "I only wanted to know what steps the Minister for Industry and Energy had taken .... " "The Deputy is asking a question which has been disallowed." ". . . to prevent the closure of the .... " "Deputy McEllistrim is out of order. I am asking him to resume his seat." "There is a loss of 295 jobs .... " "I must rule Deputy McEllistrim out of order." "I want to raise this matter on the adjournment." McEllistrim hadn't started out to seek a half hour of Dail time for his issue but ended up seeking it, on the spur of the moment. One of the reasons for this kind of carry-on is the fact that back bench TDs have no function in the Dail except as voting fodder, and it is difficult for them to raise issues. Worse, there is no point in raising them, apart from publicity reasons, as there's nothing the Dail can do, unless the government agrees. The TDs are powerless. Or the dodge of raising an issue on the Adjournment can be used as a threat. Take Bobby Molloy again, and again on January 26. Ruairi Quinn was answering questions on road repairs in the west. Molloy pursued him on one question and Quinn wasn't saying what Molloy wanted him to say. After a while, the Ceann Comhairle tried to move on to the next question. Molloy kept talking. The Ceann Comhairle said: "The Deputy is very much out of order now." Molloy kept going after Quinn. Quinn didn't say a word. The Ceann Comhairle called the next question. Be-fore Quinn could move on to it Molloy was in: "Could I have a reply to the question which I put to the Minister? I do not want to bring him back on the Adjournment." The Ceann Comhairle then, despite his previous decision that the Dail had moved on to the next question, asked the Minister if he'd like to reply. Quinn replied. The problem with the Dail is not Ijust the juvenile antics of some TDs. It's also what the Dail doesn't do. There is the obvious failure to legislate on major issues, leaving them to be decided by the courts, the EEC or whatever. This is because there is currently a majority of politically impoverished TDs in the Dail, many without the courage of their convictions, others with no convictions

to have the courage of. Thus, major issues such as marital breakdown linger on untended for years, as there are no votes in it. And TDs rush to support the Abortion Amendment as there may be votes to be lost if they don't. There is, however, also a less obvious failure to legislate for minor issues. This is the fault of the system, not the TDs - except in so far as the TDs have lacked the will to change the system. John Boland gave the Dail an example of this. He told of how Balbriggan and Skerries harbours were assigned by legislation long ago to the responsibility of the Dublin Port and Docks Board. The legislation was bad. The Board can charge a maximum of 50p per year for the use of the harbour. With a fleet of 25 boats using the harbour the income is derisory. Therefore, the Board doesn't want the harbour, doesn't maintain it, can't get rid of it. The logical thing to do would be transfer responsibility to the local authority and set up realistic harbour fees. That needs legislation. There is no way that the Dail is going to bother with such a small issue, or with any of the countless other issues of that type. The usual way this works is that it's agreed that next time there is appropriate general legislation this matter will be slipped into a paragraph. Of course, the general legislation is never quite appropriate, the thing is left as it is. Boland: "It is a daft state of affairs that after all my years in this House I cannot introduce a single-section Bill at some stage, getting the House to agree to assign to the local authority the responsibility now resting with the Dublin Port and Docks Board."

The British House of Commons has updated its procedures to the extent that such matters can be dealt with legislation can be enacted which is useful, practical. It is possible that this is one of the reforms which may be made in the Dail in the future, perhaps allocating Fridays to such Bills, giving the ordinary TD some practical function in legislating. And the issues need not be local, they might be matters affecting the population at large but ones with which the Dail doesn't bother itself at present.

~...{~,"~"'l

,.:A. :'1 ~ L.~~~~ Bobby Molloy: 5,100 worth of electoral support from the taxpayers. ack in 1971/72 Des O'Malley chaired a committee on Dail reform. He has admitted that the committee was "not adventurous". Back then there wasn't so much public awareness or criticism of the mess. Barry Desmond argued the case for reform in the mid-seventies. These days the moves are being led by John Bruton, Bertie Ahern, Sean Barrett and Charlie Haughey. Haughey is probably the most cautious of the lot, but when he expresses reservations about some of Bruton's enthusiasms they are serious, not penny-ante stuff.

Ahern and Barrett seem committed enough. Bruton has initially been concentrating on introducing a workable committee system. This will be experimented with during the summer recess. The Committee on Procedures and Privileges has been discussing the outmoded voting system, the lack of debate on financial matters before commitments are made (since the introduction of economic planning in 1958 there has not been a single Dail discussion on economic plans - they are merely "laid before the House", i.e. a copy is left in the Dail library. TDs have no input), the curtailing of long pointless speeches, the Order of Business (one suggestion being that before the Dail adjourns in the evening the Order of Business for the next day be read out - so that the Buster Birdbrains wouldn't be able to get publicity by disrupting it) and several other aspects. Some TDs quite transparently want some cosmetic changes, to make the Dail "look more professional", to alleviate criticism without making any substantial changes. Others are equally obviously disgusted with some of the behaviour. Some know that without change the alienation of the public will increase. And there are the Birdbrains, happy to squander public money and subvert an institution which they ostensibly revere as the centrepiece of democracy. Getting elected is what it is about. And the vast majority of TDs retire or die having - despite the obsequious tributes they get - achieved little more than having been there. It is being said that the Dail is being reformed. That has not yet been decided. There are some moves in that direction.

HE Bailey is one of those Dublin pubs that has the misfortune to be populated almost entirely by the city's young and fashionable set, the glitterati who only drink off Grafton Street and Stephen's Green and to whom O'Connell Street is as foreign as the Shankill is to a Belfast Teague. In the eighteenth century Dublin's young dandies used to mince up and down Dame Street knocking the poorer citizenry into the gutters and challenging them to one-sided duels. Now they sit all evening in places like The Bailey and bore everybody to death. It's a bit of an improvement. At eight o'clock on Saturday evening The Bailey is already full. The drinkers are almost beautiful, the clothes are stunning. In more ways than one, it's "as if the dummies and mannequins from Mirror Mirror and The Gap had stepped out of the

windows at six o'clock and gone around the corner for a drink. Mouths open and close continuously, there's lots of buzz and chatter. Real talk only strikes up between genuine people who are interested in one another. In places like The Bailey, people are interested in each other as rivals, or foils, or sexual prizes. Everybody knows everybody else. Two guys sat at the bar and talked about the Bad" Ass Cafe, Dublin's newest, loudest, Americanest pizza joint. One of them had short hair and enthusiasm. The other was bigger and heavier and seemed to be determined to be impressed by nothing other than his own insight and originality. "I think it's really good, those things flying across the ceiling and all. It catches people's attention." "Sure", said the other. "But I mean it's all been done in Europe before."

"Bu t the staff give it everything. You get a great service." "Well, what do you expect? I mean, if you had three managers on your tail all the time . . . Listen;" he said patiently. "This is an island, right? Surrounded by water," he emphasised. All his words slowed up in the middle, as if they were driving through Old Foxrock. "But there isn't a single low-priced joint offering good seafood. What people don't realise," he explained, "is that we're sitting on a goldmine. What I want to do is to open a fast-food place with a fish orientation. " Over at the window, the conversation had a car orientation. The guy standing up with the pint in his hand was talking down to his four seated girlfriends. "Dave got a company car", he said. "He came round last night and Clodagh saw him out the window and she said: 'Hey, c'mere, Dave's got a company car'."
"Wow."

"Yeah." She leaned' over and nudged with the hand that held the Pernod. "Two new men in our lives, right?" "Yeah, right. And did you know he has a GTI Golf?" "Bitch! Oh, here's Lorraine." "Hi, Yvonne!" said Lorraine. "Hi!" said Yvonne. "Great. I'm going to the 100", said the Pernod. N the other 100, a tall thin fellow was describing to his friend some marvellous device he had. The friend was about thirty and had a Kajagoogoo haircut, one of those long, spiky, twotone New Romance jobs normally sported by twenty-year-old singers and teeny fans. "It's really tremendous", said the tall one. "You could smoke five or six hundred fucking cigarettes in one night and then one blast of this and you'd be okay, you know?" [What was he talking about? Nobody cared.] "Yeah, great", said Kajagoogoo, and went out the door to, make an effortlessly stylish re-entry onto the lounge floor. Nobody seemed to notice. He should have gone home. It was nearly nine o'clock, and an ordinary-looking young man in an aran sweater was being bounced out the door after being found to have a six-inch blade about him. Two Gardai

"Yeah. New Opel Manta, fivespeed." "Wow, great." "I was going to wear black but 1 didn't have any trousers", said a young man at the corner of the bar. "Shame", said his companion, who had an English accent. "Yeah, I had this really nice black

t-shirt, you know?" "I've got lots of black trousers", said his friend. "Small black ones, really nice. Lots of pairs'." The short tanned girl with the cropped hair and the blue bag had a stringy black top, but no trousers. Her thin friend stood beside her with a glass of Pernod and asked her how she was feeling. "Oh great. Really on a high, you know?"

arrived and questioned him inside the door. Everybody kept drinking. Nobody looked round. Near the hat stand at the bar a tall curly guy with tinted hair and glasses was explaining to everybody just why it was he turned down the gig with Bagatelle. Half-nine. Hardly room to stand. Three middle-aged Englishmen with London accents stood drinking Guinness and speaking in strict rotation. All wore M&S gear, which is not the same as S&M. Whenever one finished speaking, the other two would explode with laughter. One of them mentioned the trip over to Dublin. Riotous laughter ensued. Another referred to the flight back. Paroxysms of mirth erupted. "When you fly Aer Lingus to Birmingham you wish you'd driven", said the third. Pandemonium. A tall girl with a spotty dress and carefully Oriental features was explaining about her birthday and her boyfriend. "He gave me a Picasso picture, but when I looked at it, it made me feel so sad, I couldn't take it, you know? It was a picture of an old woman, it made me feel depressed. So I gave it back to him." A few yards away, two guys stood drinking Harp and spoke continuously in squawky Monty Python voices for at least fifteen minutes. They ceased. On a nearby table lay a pamphlet entitled "First Confession", part of a series called "Helping Catholic Parents". Underneath the table was a lavishly-illustrated colour volume on "The Post-Impressionists". The drinks in The Bailey are expensive. Perhaps they charge for the symbolism as well as for the ambience.

and companions. A few people were beginning to pass by and out the door. "He was just cycling down the road, pretty fast like, and this gate swung open. Caught him on the leg. Sheared off all the muscle along here." He indicated his calf. Sharp intakes of breath. "Painful." "Yeah. Sheared off all the muscle. You could see the bone." "I suppose it was more the shock than anything else." "He was fucked. We used to be scuttin' off lorries. One time we jumped up on the back of one, it had one 0' them bars on the back, you know, You pull it and the door opens? Well we were up on the back of the lorry and I wasn't holding onto the bar but Jimmy was and he got his hands caught. His hands came off it but his fingers were stuck and the tops of his fingers came off when his hands came away." "J aysus." "Fuckcd he was. Mutilated. The tops of his fingers came right off. You could see the bone." HE smiles and tans and tinted haircuts, the string tops and baggies and short short dresses began to pass out the door and move off towards The Pink Elephant in South Frederick Street, a few hundred yards away. The Pink Elephant is a louder and more colourful place, a place of more concentrated cool. In The Bailey, the intensity su bsided. In front of the bar a middle-aged man in a Brown Thomas jumper vomited laboriously onto the grey carpet, mostly through his nose. In the morning he might be telling everyone in the office how he was out on the tear last night, how he had a great time. His friends sipped slowly at their drinks and applied occasional vaguely therapeutic slaps to his back. It's always the same. Like Casper's and Bruxelles and any dozen other joints, The Bailey is the kind of place that tourist guides will insist on describing as "a fashionable wateringhole". Fashionable it is, but the oasis really begins outside the door.

EN o'clock. There were a few Dublin accents over near the door. Four young men were dressed in black jackets and dark trousers. Two stood, two sat. One spoke about what he and a friend had recently achieved. "Sixty charm bracelets", he said. "Stamped and all, but we got clean away. Six hundred quid's worth." He began to describe the exploits of his youth: shoplifting, stealing apples. Dreadful injuries sustained by friends

HE BANQUETING ROOM IN BELFAST'S CITY HALL IS USED FOR the really big occasions. It is there that politicians gather to hear the verdict of the electorate upon them. It is there that they are wined and dined in the successful years. A large stained glass window spells the message out for them. Pro Tanto, Quid Retribuamus. For all this, how will we repay you? On Friday June 10, 1983, at 1.39pm the politicians of West Belfast gathered in the banqueting room and the verdict was read out. Gerry Adams, of Sinn Fein, was elected to Westminster. Gerry Fitt, who had held the seat since 1966, was stripped of office. The RUC formed a massive funnel around Adams, down which he sped into the limelight of the world's media. "There's more police protecting him than attacked me in Derry" quipped Fitt. It was a joke for insiders. Outwardly, the police were protecting Adams against the wrath of loyalists, gathered in City Hall, who did not like the election result, as seventeen years earlier they had protected Gerry Fitt against the loyalists who didn't like the result then either. Unlike Fitt, though, Adams won't be referring to the matter in his maiden Westminster speech in London,

England. The difference between the two Gerries was established as long ago as Monday April 25, 1966, 7pm, exactly when the Right Honourable Gerald Fitt, Esquire, Republican Labour Party, rose to his feet to speak for the first time in the House of Commons. "Since my election", said the newly arrived MP, "I have read in sections of the British press that I have been classi fied as an Irish Republican. I should take this oppor tunity to classify my political allegiance. To classify me as an Irish Republican is not strictly correct. The Irish Republican Party in Ireland does not recognise the authority of this House in any part of Ireland and its members would indeed refuse to take their seats in this House. I have not yet given up hope, and I have not yet determined to follow the line of the Irish Republican Party, because I believe that during my term as the representative of West Belfast in this House I will be able to appeal to every reasonable member in the Chamber, and through them, to every reasonable member of the British public. I feel certain that at the end of this Parliament dramatic changes will have taken place in the North of Ireland .... "

Through all the dramatic changes that subsequently took place in the North Gerry Fitt never did give up hope that the British Government would sort things 'out. He placed particular trust in the British Labour Party, which had in 1966 swept to power under Harold Wilson with a hundred seat majority. The sobriquet "Fitt the Brit", applied with such bitterness to him now by Northern nationalists who have suffered under direct rule from England since 1972, could have been applied with equal accuracy but a lot more affection in 1966 and more before that. For many of Gerry Fitt's generation and background, religious and political, England offered an escape and refuge from the direct rule of the Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. Back in the North, he told his Westminster audience on that first day, Catholics couldn't get homes, couldn't get jobs, couldn't even get

the vote. They couldn't evcn get a hearing in the Stormont parliament, where a contrived Unionist majority turned a deaf car to such as him, the democratically elected Stormont representative for Dock. "No matter what pleas I made to the Unionists. I wouldn't get anywhere."

I' FAST father

",ORN

IN

BEL-

IN 1926, GERRY FITT GOT OUT QUICK. HIS died when he was eight and his mother was left to

bring up the children in the depressed 1930s. He ran away from home to become a fifteen year old cabin boy, in the British merchant navy, in 1941. He sailed in wartime convoys to Russia. After the war, during a port call to London, he met his future wife Anne Doherty, from Co Tyrone, who was then working as a clerk in the Conservative Ladies' Club. "I used shout Vote Labour during elections and they were annoyed", she remembers. Fitt read James Connolly at sea and other socialist literature. "You know the way it is", he says, "you dock into any port in the world and in some wee back lane you'll find the Communist Party bookshop, and wee cheap pamphlets." When he finally returned to Belfast and started his political career as a councillor, Fitt quickly attracted the attention of student militants like Eamonn McCann and Michael Farrell. "There was no smell of the Catholic grammar school off him", says McCann. "He was an urban working class man. He was abrasive. He was nice." Paddy Kennedy, the other half of the Republican Labour Party presence at Stormont, learned his politics at Fitt's electoral knee. "He came off the merchant ship and back into Belfast and he used to say to me that what he would really love to be was an MP for Cardiff or Liverpool, a dockside place where he could get stuck into a straight fight. Gerry called himself Republican Labour because the Northern Ireland Labour Party was tied into union with Britain and the Irish Labour Party was preoccupied with the border." Also, he added, Gerry didn't like big parties. Fitt's republicanism was entirely internal and personal, freeing him from bondage to any flag, although being Gerry Fitt he could wave flags with the best of them when elec-

toral advantage was to be gained from it. He blithely welcorned the defeat of Glasgow Rangers, heroes of the Shankill, by Glasgow Celtic, heroes of the Falls, shortly after his own Westminster defeat of the sitting Unionist MP for West Belfast. "We beat them in politics, now we've beaten them in football", he told the Catholics who had come onto the Falls Road after the match. The Belfast Telegraph ran an editorial criticising him for being sectarian. "The editorial was a joke to us", Paddy Kennedy recalled. "We'd never heard of sectarianism or ecumenism in those days. There were bigoted Protestants. in Belfast as top dogs, and poor wee Catholics as under dogs. The only time the Catholics won anything was when Gerry was elected and the night Celtic beat Rangers. I rang him down at the pub to tell him and it didn't mean a thing to him, because he backed horses, not football teams but I said they were out celebrating on the Falls and he'd better come up. He was up like a flash and they carried him along the street, since they couldn't carry the football team. Fans meant votes, and if football teams kept their spirits up, Gerry identified with the football team. It was just another way to keep the fight going against the Unionists. " In Westminster, Gerry dispensed with football teams and flags. He thought the facts would suffice. The Queen's speech, outlining the priorities for Wilson's incoming government, had lain heavy emphasis on the Rhodesian problem, where Ian Smith's white government had just declared independence from a Britain that had been considering reforms for Rhodesia's black majority. There was an exact parallel to Ireland, Fitt argued where a minority had used guns in 1912 to subjugate the majority and Nor-

them Ireland had resulted. As with so many of his subsequent speeches, he did not tease out the difficult abstract problem any further, but relapsed into telling stories. His stories were wonderful and vivid that day, about the 2,000 couples he knew in Dungannon who couldn't get a house, the intricate saga of why Derry didn't get the University and Coleraine did, and the "468 telegrams, 700 letters and 1,000 phone calls", from people who opposed him in religion but supported him in his new approach to politics. Unionists he finished "cannot believe that 3 ,000 Protestants voted for me". Sir Douglas Glover, Conservative member from Ormskirk, followed him. "Whatever we may think about the arguments put forward, we like people who speak with sincerity and fire in their bellies." He praised Fitt's "descriptive turn of phrase" and smoothly dismissed the complaints about Stormont. "In any parliament that is always the view of the minority about the actions of the majority." Why, he too was about to spend five years watching the majority Labour Party members go through the lobbies like fodder, "used by whips in carrying. through legislation in which they do not believe". Captain L.S. Orr, Unionist member at Westminster for South Down said smoothly that Mr Fitt had made no complaints to the police upon his election, that the University had been sited in Coleraine following recommendations by an independent board that included many prominent and eminent British academics, that the Northern Ireland Labour Party should confirm that religion was never mentioned when the NILP fought elections, and he finished with a quotation from the Irish Independent editorial. "Captain O'Neill has a new respect from the Catholics of

Belfast who cannot remember a time when the police were more fair or more efficient than they were last Sunday, when two rival parades were taking place in the city." But still Gerry Fitt had faith that when Harold Wilson's government knew the facts, they would take corrective action in Northern Ireland. One hundred Labour MPs had come together in a caucus called "Campaign for Democracy in Ulster", and in Ulster itself a dossier of irrefutable information was being painstakingly compiled by Campaign for Social Justice, fore-runner of the Civil Rights Movement. It was just a matter of presenting it to the Wilson government and getting them to move. The British government did not want to know the facts. In 1967, a party of Stormont Nationalist MPs were received in Westminster by Roy Jenkins, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. After they had presented their case and left, a horrified aide said to Jenkins "something will have to be done". Jenkins replied that nothing would be done because any Englishman who set foot in Northern Ireland affairs would be setting a foot in his political grave.

I 'I ARY HOLLAND, A JOURNALIST IN THE OBSERVER AT THAT TIME, heard the story from the aide after she ~ad been persuaded by Gerry Fitt to break the paper wall on Northern Ireland that existed in the British media at that time.
I

In the summer of 1968 she had been writing a series of articles entitled "Them and Us", in which she detailed cases of discrimination against individuals. "A lot of it had to do with the difficulties experienced by black people, whose problems in England were then attracting a lot of attention. I got a phone call from Gerry Fitt, saying Catholics were undergoing the same discrimination in Northern Ireland. It's a measure of our ignorance in England at that time that I asked him if he was sure he could prove his case. I'd had a lot of difficulty establishing actual discrimination against black people, given the subtleties of bureaucracy, and I was about to drop the series and accept promotion to a position as arts columnist on the Observer." Fitt was insistent and she agreed to meet him for lunch. "I named a restaurant in Soho, Wheeler's, and then there was something about his accent and his way of talking that made me add by way of caution 'It's very fashionable and it only serves fish dishes'. 'Ah, Jaysus, Mary', he said, 'I want a real dinner. We'll go to the Irish Club and eat meat'." When she arrived there, Gerry Fitt ordered drinks and opened a suitcase of documents and cuttings from the Irish News, gospel of Belfast Catholics, and the Skibbereen Eagle of everything Unionists had ever done anywhere in the North against the nationalist population. He held her spellbound for several hours. "I couldn't believe it", she says

simply of the things she heard that afternoon. He cajoled and charmed and bullied and lured her across the Irish sea. Three days later, on Tuesday October 1,1968; the reluctant would-be arts columnist found herself in the Fitt home on the Antrim Road. "It was a complete culture shock. I sat in the room he uses as a clinic on the ground floor. The basement underneath was the kitchen where his family spent their time. He had a wife and five daughters. Every time he wanted a cup of tea he'd stamp three times on the floor, and up from the basement beneath would come a woman with a tray. I sat there and listened to him and the stream of constituents who called into the room to see him. They were still calling well after midnight." Next day she hired a car and drove him to Dungannon to see Austin Currie, Stormont Nationalist MP. Fitt didn't know the way and it took them ages. Fitt's lifelong refusal to learn how to drive, which made him dependent on someone who could, and his ignorance of areas west of the Bann were to be major factors in his later political career. "When he first started operating out of Dock, the Falls Road was Outer Mongolia to him", Paddy Kennedy said. Politically, Dungannon must have seemed beyond Mongolia to Mary Holland. Austin Currie told her of the house allocated to the single unmarried female secretary of the local Unionist party branch, and the dozens of large Catholic

families on the waiting list. Currie had squatted in the house in protest and the police had evicted him. Fitt whirled her onto Derry that evening. She was worried that they hadn't made appointments. "Ah, not at all", he said, "you just arrive in the City Hotel and it all happens". They arrived, she ordered tea and sandwiches, he went out into the street for a few minutes and returned with Eamonn McCann, Ivan Cooper, and the future brigade staff of the Official IRA, Provisional IRA and the INLA. On that night though, they were no more than what they represented themselves to be, young militant civil rights activists. Ivan Cooper was the radical mascot, a Protestant who had defected from the Unionist Party. They were going to march in Derry that coming weekend. Mary Holland flew back to England on Wednesday. Her story "John Bull's Political Slum" was scheduled as a major feature on the inside pages of the Observer of Sunday 6. Gerry Fitt came on the phone again pleading with her to return to Derry for October 5,just to see,just to see. Three Labour Party MPs had agreed to come. Ah come on Mary, for Jaysus sake. The Observer agreed, and sent over a photographer as well. He was the only photographer from a British newspaper. The picture he took of Gerry Fitt being batoned on the

head by the police and the blood spurting down his shirt went all over the world accompanied by RTE film. Mary Holland phoned the story in from a fish and chip shop in Duke Street, dictating amid the screams and shouting and standing in a crush of bodies drenched with water from the cannons and blood from their wounds. The proprietor handed her his card hoping for a mention. There was a sense that the North was about to attract journalists on expense accounts. Was she frightened? "I was outraged. This was a part of Britain and the police were hitting a Westminster MP over the head." That night she flew back to London and rang all the journalists she knew. She was crying with vexation, frustration, anger, outrage and pity. She rang Bernard Levin. He rang David Frost. The Observer front-paged her story 01 the October 5 march, and directed readers to the background expose on the inside page. David Frost came to Northern Ireland within days to do a live programme. The media wall burst to flood Britain with the facts.

I' 'I ERRYFITTHAD DONE WHAT HE SET OUT TO DO. HE HAD TURNED the spotlight on Northern Ireland, though he was run off his feet in the process. The Irish News recorded proudly that on one historic day he attended Belfast Corporation as Councillor, in the morning, Stormont as MP for Dock in the afternoon, and Westminster as MP for West Belfast in the evening. To Unionist protests that the whole civil rights thing was a plot by communists, republicans intent on overthrowing the Crown, murdering gunmen standing in the wings etcetera, Gerry would say across the floor of Stormont, "when I was on the Murmansk convoy ... " He then reminisced about the dangers of the merchant seaman's lot in World War Two when he had helped defend Britain and the Free World. The titled peers and majors on the Stormont government benches, most of whom had never fought in the war, chewed their lips. The reasonable response from the reasonable members of Westminster, by which he had set such store, came in the Cameron Report. The Labour government had commissioned Lord Cameron to report on the events and marches preceding and following October 5, and assign reasons. This Report, which Harold Wilson and the entire Commons accepted, stated that Gerry Fitt "must clearly have envisaged the possibility of a violent clash with the police as providing the publicity he so ardently sought. His conduct, in our judgement, was reckless and wholly irresponsible in a person occupying his public position." From that moment on Gerry Fitt was effectively rendered impotent at Westminster. Back in the North the high terrain of anti-unionism was about to be occupied by a whole new batch of articulate, pragmatic political operators who swept into Stormont in the spring of '69, on a civil rights wave which had drowned out the old Nationalist party. Hume, Cooper, O'Hanlon and Paddy Devlin waved no flags and did not gaze hope-

lessly into the Celtic mist. Austin Currie had long abandoned green fields for street smarts. Gerry Fitt abandoned his own party. He had been campaigning for a republican Labour councillor from Belfast who wanted a run at a seat - any seat - and Gerry had sent him off to fight in mid-Ulster. They addressed a small crowd after the ten o'clock mass, and hung around to see how their opponent Ivan Cooper would do after the eleven o'clock mass. Cooper attracted a massive crowd to his Independent Civil Rights tag. Gerry got up on the truck and spoke in support of Cooper. These civil rights guys wanted to slug it out toe to toe with the Unionists and they were men after Gerry's involved gurrier heart. He was no longer alone. He was in fact, surrounded and obscured, as they marched people all over the areas west of the Bann, in Newry, Armagh, MidUlster, Fermanagh and Derry. Besides which, Bernadette had arrived at Westminster. Together they should have made a colourful picture, the sailor home from the sea and the maiden in from the hills. The Irish Times went mad over Gerry with "his sailor's roll, his malapropisms, his Belfast turn of phrase which makes stiff upper lips wince, his yea-saying to life", but oh, Bernadette! Starting sonorously with "youngest MP ever elected to Westminster", journalists trundled down the Thesaurus runway and took off into the wild blue yonder. She arrived, an orphan in a miniskirt, a real live Left winger, a megastar, in the Commons, on her birthday, April 22, 1969. "That made me 22, which spoiled the script so nobody mentioned it", she recalls tartly. She represented the newly militant civil rights movement, no longer prepared to turn the other cheek to batons, if Britain was going to turn a blind eye to the facts. It was one thing being beaten from Belfast to Burntollet, quite another to be pursued on arrival all the way into Bogside which the police now frequently did. Sammy Devenney had been beaten by them in his home, in front of his family, on April 19 and he died from injuries. A Scotland Yard enquiry subsequently found a conspiracy of silence among the RUC and no one was charged. The barricades were going up. "The Devenney death was being raised at Westminster and Gerry wanted me over for it. I had won the by-election only a few days before and I hadn't a penny. He gave me fifty pounds for the fare and to buy myself something to wear. Things went wrong right from the start. I had decided that the youngest MP should be introduced by the oldest MP, Manny Shinwell of Labour, and of course Gerry. Gerry had decided I should be introduced by himself and Paul Rose, one of the leaders of the Campaign for Democracy. We hadn't consulted on it, and Gerry found himself having to withdraw the invitation to Rose." The slight and unintended erosion of Gerry Fitt's authority was compounded by the events of the day. "The publicity was unbelievable. He had booked me into the Irish Club, and I sat there in my mini-skirt and the press just drooled. If I had been older or wiser or just more thoughtful or even courteous or machiavellian, I would have ended every remark with a reference to Gerry who was sitting ignored, in the room." The alliance in any case was doomed from the start, she says. "It was a matter of emphasis. Gerry would plead for reform, saying the police and later the soldiers were only making martyrs by their handling of what was called security. I would stand there saying you've tried everything

down the centuries. from hanging drawing and quartering to straight bullets and the Croppy will never lie down." There was also the acute difference of the socialist approach. "I appeared on every left-wing platform in England. speaking on gypsies rights. defending the Dagenham strikers against Wilson. and I spoke in Trafalgar square in defence of the PLO. Paul Rose took the Israeli side and wrote me a letter criticising my stand. I released it to the papers and the split with Labour widened. There was them and Gerry: and there was me."

I' 'iND THEN THERE WAS THE BATTLE OF THE BOGSIDE IN AUGust 1969, which brought the British Army into Northern Ireland, with a resultant quagmire of political and armed struggle into which Gerry Fitt was to hopelessly flounder. There had been increasing ambiguity among all shades of nationalist opinion about how best to defend Catholics against attacks from the RUC and loyalists, especially in Belfast. Whole shifts of population were occurring there as Catholics and Protestants retreated into the safety of the ghettoes, but Gerry Fitt warned on August 7 at a meeting in Trinity College, Dublin that the swopping of houses was not a mutually polite arrangement. Catholics were being forced out of their homes, he said, and "the people" (whom he did not specify) did not like it. "The time is coming when they will change their tactics and instead of moving people elsewhere under these circumstances they will have to protect them in their homes. The RUC are messenger boys of the UVF." More was needed than a telephone network against the arrival of the RUC and the UVF in the area, he warned, but he did not specify what. In Derry that August the Citizens Defence Committee had been set up alongside the Civil Rights Association, with overlapping Executive membership, and community halls were used to store petrol bombs. No elected representative shouted stop. On August 12 Orangemen marched in the city centre, a few desultory stones were thrown at them, and the RUC and Bogsiders reacted as to a referee's whistle starting tl1e match, both sides running onto the pitch under the High Flats, in the heart of Catholic territory. The set piece battle lasted three days and Belfast street fighters came out in support in an effort to siphon off RUC strength. Guns were used on both sides in Belfast. People died there. Jack Lynch moved his troops up to the border, four miles from Derry, and Harold Wilson moved British soldiers onto Northern streets. Gerry Fitt in Belfast welcomed the army, and Bernadette in Derry opposed them. The RUC were removed, and eventually disarmed, but, says Derryman Michael Canavan, now SDLP spokesman on security, the first mistake had already been made by Britain. "Control of the Army was left in the hands of Stormont." Effectively the Unionists had been handed an even more powerful weapon with which to assert their authority. That authority was copperfastened by the removal of

the agreed name and we started drawing up policy. Around three in the morning Paddy Devlin sat straight up arid said 'Jesus Christ, the LSD Party, they'll think we're spaced out capitalists'." This was in pre-decimal currency days.

Harold Wilson and his replacement as Prime Minister by Edward Heath of the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in June 1970. Bernadette Devlin and Gerry Fitt were both returned in that election. Fitt went over to England to sit in even more obscurity, on the opposition benches behind Labour. Bernadette, upon re-election, went straight into Armagh jail to serve a six month sentence for her part in the Battle of Bogside. Derry rioted for three more days. Two weeks later on July 3, a rifle was discovered in a house off the Falls Road and British soldiers sealed off the entire surrounding area, put residents under curfew for the weekend and killed three men. Captain John Brooke, a Stormont Minister, arrived in a truck with the media horde and the Army escorted them on a televised tour of the suppressed area. While Republicans formulated their own disorganised and poorly armed response to these matters (starting with a split in January 1970), the Civil Rights MPs came together in a broad political front. "We met in Donegal and Toome", (always west of the Bann) said Austin Currie, "and John Hume favoured the Social Democratic approach, because he was into the European perspective, and Paddy Devlin and Gerry Fitt favoured the Labour approach. Fitt had the senior political experience so Labour was given priority. The Labour and Social Democratic Party was'

I' 'I HE SDLP WAS BORN IN AUGUST 1970 WITH FITT AS TITULAR head, and his political currency still shrinking in value, from Republican Labour to Social Democratic Labour, to a party identified more by initials than policy. Paddy Devlin and Ivan Cooper visited Bernadette in jail and informed her that, among other things, reform not resistance was to be the future order of the day. If she did not fall in step with SDLP policy they would oppose her in future elections, splitting the vote rather than let a unity candidate take the seat. Her Westminster colleague, Gerry Fitt, did not come to see her in Armagh. "It's a miracle that a party which includes elements from west of the Bann and the Falls Road should come together", Gerry Fitt had said when the SDLP was launched. While he became embedded in the stable body politic of Westminster, the political and military landmines detonating all over the North caused the SDLP to step in, step out again of Stormont and the moves they took were indeed dictated by the areas in which they lived. With violence breaking out on all sides in Belfast, Fitt called in February 1971 on the British Army to raid the homes of Protestants as well as Catholics, so that it would not be seen as an agent of Stormont. But when in July, in a stone throwing riot, the first two Derrymen were shot dead by the soldiers John Hume insisted that the party withdraw from Stormont in protest. Fitt, never a man for abstention, disagreed. Hume won and went a step further, setting up an alternative Parliament in Dungiven, so far west of the Bann that the Glenshane Pass had to be negotiated to get to it. Fitt had no car, couldn't drive, and they wanted him down there to consider abstractions. In August 1971 internment was introduced and hundreds of Belfast Catholics were lifted from their beds. Fitt endorsed the SDLP decision to not even discuss things with the British government and flew off to America to counteract the propaganda being put about by a Tory Minister who had gone over to disinform. A soldier was shot on the Louth/Armagh border while both were over there, and Gerry Fitt said of this on TV that it was "one more regrettable and tragic incident which we have to expect while the Border exists and the British troops continue to carry out the sectarian will of the Unionist government." He raised funds among Irish Americans for the campaign of civil disobedience, including the withholding of rent and rates, upon which the entire nationalist community had launched, with the united backing of both Republicans and the SDLP. Then came Bloody Sunday, January 1972. "It's a United Ireland now or nothing", John Hume raised the first green flag. Bernadette punched Reginald Maudling in the fact on the floor of Westminster and nationalist politicians with-

drew even from the lowest form of political engagement, local government in the North. It was all too much for Gerry, the political in-fighter, to bear. Never an electoral pacifist, he hated seeing Unionists step into uncontested city council seats as one by one the anti-unionist councillors withdrew from the ring or were counted out for non-attendance. He dashed down to City Hall, signed the attendance sheet, made a token attendance and dashed home. Paddy Devlin, a gut-fighter himself, persuaded the SDLP to ignore this breach of the rules, but even he had to restrain Gerry publicly when Unionist jeers about Fitt's token presence in City Hall provoked Gerry to throw down a challenge that he could resign altogether, fight as an abstentionist and still beat them.

up along the Antrim Road in which he lived, that every time he opened his front door, or his newspaper, somebody was dead. Whatever sympathetic links had ever existed between him and "the people" who defended the area where he lived - "the vigilantes only ever stood in my front garden with big sticks, in 1969 and 1970" - were well and truly broken. 1973 opened with a British white paper that suggested the formation of an Assembly to which power would be devolved if it was shared between Protestants and Catholics. An election was called for June and exactly one week before polling day Gerry Fitt received a phone call from Assistant Chief Constable Sam Bradley. "He asked me if I had thirty pounds, and I said I had, and he said he was sending a detective up right away with a gun and a permit. 'It won't stop the loyalists killing you, Gerry', he said, 'but if you fire it in the air when they come at you they'll have to put a bullet through you. They won't get close enough to cut your throat'."

I' II HEN THE OTHER DOCK SEAT FELL VACANT, WITH THE PROSpect of a Unionist setting foot in Gerry's political birthplace he "went mad with frustration altogether and walked that floor like a lion", his wife Anne recalled. "He and [Stormont] Senator Paddy Wilson set off down town to scour the pubs. Gerry swore he'd find somebody to fight the seat before the night was out. Towards closing time I got a call from him. 'I've found someone, Anne', he said. 'Great', I said. 'It's a woman, Anne', he said. 'Even better', I said. 'It's you Anne', he said." Unable to wriggle out of the party bonds that tied him down, Fitt watched with delight while Anne toured the streets handing out the election address which she wrote herself. "When elected I will not be attending City Hall but I will be preventing a bigoted Unionist from doing so in your name". She won by 2,536 to 288, obtaining a larger vote than Gerry ever did in that ward. On March 24, 1972 Stormont was prorogued to the sound of guns and bombs as Northern Ireland was engulfed in the cross fire between the British Army, the UDR, the RUC, UVF, UDA, UFF, Official IRA and Provisional IRA. Gerry Fitt and Bernadette Devlin were the only two antiunionists left with political status, and even they were forbidden from negotiating with anybody. While the politicians chaffed at redundancy, people who were in jail as a result of the war chaffed at their criminalisation. A hunger strike was called and Gerry Fitt was instrumental in persuading Northern Secretary Willie Whitelaw to grant in June special category status to prisoners convicted of political offences. This, coupled with a mass release of internees, and the famous talks in London with IRA leaders, who included Gerry Adams, (specially released from internment for the talks) broke the political deadlock. The IRA declared a cease fire and the way was open for the SDLP to return to .constitutional politics. The IRA ceasefire lasted nine days. Within a month of the granting of special category status, the Provos were responsible for the bombing of Belfast on Bloody Friday and the bombing of the village of Claudy. Many civilians died. The Shan kill butchers were also out that July with knives and many Catholics died. It seemed to Gerry Fitt, who lived in the murder mile that stretched from Carlisle Circus

GOT THE GUN ON FRIDAY NIGHT AND SET OFF FROM BELfast with Senator Paddy Wilson for a tour, as leader, of the SDLP country constituencies. "I paid 28 for the hire of a car and Paddy drove me round. A police sergeant in Cushendall, a pal of mine, took me up into a quarry and taught me how to fire it. We came back to Belfast on Monday night. Paddy met a bird in a pub and went off up the Cave Hill in a car. The butchers followed him into a quarry." Both bodies were stabbed and mutilated from top to bottom. Gerry Fitt identified them in the morgue. The Assembly was formed and though more votes were cast for the dissident Unionist parties of Paisley and Craig than were cast for the unionist party of Brian Faulkner, the former Stormont premier went off to Sunningdale to engage in talks with the SDLP and the Alliance parties. Between them these three parties cobbled out a power sharing agreement, under the direction of Edward Heath. They returned to Northern Ireland to form an Executive which took office on January I, 1974. The British Government this time kept control of the army and police. Heath, however, lost office that January, brought down by a miner's strike which resulted in the return of a Labour government with a tiny majority of three. Bernadette Devlin too bowed out, as the SDLP split the mid-Ulster vote. Gerry Fitt, Deputy Chief Executive under Brian Faulkner, had no specific portfolio as did John Hume in Commerce or Austin Currie in Housing. SDLP sources said at the time that he had not the intellectual capacity or discipline to handle a department, but Ben Caraher, policy adviser to the SDLP, captured the raison d'etre of the man perhaps more accurately. Fitt told Caraher then that he hated not being' able to represent his constituents properly, in his capacity as dole lawyer, arguing at tribunals on their behalf
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against the government of the day. He did, however, manage to civilise the austere house on the hill, persuading teetotaller Faulkner to install a drinks cupboard and ignoring Faulkner's ordinance against smoking during Executive business sessions. Gerry Fitt's rough charm, cigarette in one hand, glass in the other, helped enormously in bridging the gap between men separated by centuries of cultural, religious and political tradition. The gap between his house on the Antrim Road and Stormont, four miles away, was bridged by the RUC which provided him with a car and armed driver. Paddy Devlin, too, was given an armed escort for travel through loyalist areas on his way to Stormont but he always drove his own car, and was followed by the police in theirs. "I kept my distance from them in all ways", Devlin said. "Once you step into a police car you have to surrender a bit of yourself." Austin Currie had policemen living in his garage in midUlster, but he criticised the force when he thought necessary, leading the Police Federation at their annual general conference to speak bitterly against him. The Executive and the Assembly lasted a mere five months. It was brought down by the Protestant workforce who held key positions in energy, transport and engineering, and who paralysed the Province by withdrawing their labour in unofficial action. Frantic calls to Wilson to order the Army to step in yielded only the sour televised response from London that Northerners were "spongers". "The Labour Government were afraid to shoot the Prods, which is what it would have amounted to", Fitt said of that period. "They told me that if they established the precedent of using the Army against workers, they'd be handing the Tories a stick to break the unions with next

time the Tories got in. Heath was just waiting to get back at the miners." The collapsed Assembly was replaced by a six month Convention in 1975, when the same political factions were elected to a talking shop whose brief was to come up with another power sharing plan or be banished to the wilderness. The Convention could not agree and was abolished. Gerry Fitt was now the only anti-unionist with a parliamentary seat, and he snuggled further into Westminster. Always, when he came home to Belfast, the police provided a car and an armed companion-driver. The two men became good friends. From 1975 until the 1983 Westminster election, says Michael Canavan, "the SDLP was left with no constitutional place to go. Only a revolutionary party could have continued to operate without status, or office or pay." Those were the years when the British government withdrew political status from even the prisoners and sought a military solution to the North. Those were the years when the Provos, through the prisoners, emerged as a political force in the North.

HOSE WERE THE YEARS WHEN THE SDLP ABANDONED THE search for an internal solution and said the North could

only be solved in an all-Ireland context. Those were the years when Gerry Fitt, from 1975 until he resigned from the party in November 1979, and John Hume, Euro MP from June 1979 onwards, were the only SDLP politicians with a seat and a salary. While Hume operated from Brussels, Washington and west of the Bann, Gerry Fitt operated almost exclusively from Westminster and his perspective on the North was formed from that distant point. He could have forged, but didn't, links with such as the Socialist International to which the SDLP was affiliated. His entire temperament went against formal relationships of any kind - "I hate being in parties, they keep trying to tell you what to do, passing resolutions on every little thing" - and it was his proud boast that the SDLP never had a branch in his West Belfast constituency. He was a saloon man and his saloon was Westminster, and he liked wandering in and out of hotels and bars, seeing people when he came home. Since the fall of the Executive, he spent more and more time in the Europa Hotel in Belfast. The bars were dangerous places now for him and his very home was unsafe. He was under attack from his own constituents. When the Executive collapsed they were left with internment, punitive repayment of the rent they had withheld during the years of protest against it, replacement of internment in 1975 by non-jury courts, and army camps and police stations all over West Belfast. Their sole representative upheld British rule as an alternative, he said, to civil war and they turned on him. In 1976 on the eve of the anniversary of internment they petrol-bombed his home, burst down the door and mobbed up the stairs to his bedroom. Gerry Fitt fired a shot over their heads. The experience made him rely more and more on the army and police for protection, as the mob returned again and again and again. His home had to be protected by floodlights, wire netting and a direct two way radio link to police headquarters. There was little link with the SDLP, most of whose members were turning, in those wilderness years, to drink or business affairs or home life. Paddy Devlin, the left-wing voice of the party, turned to Trade Union affairs, saying in his resigrtation statement that the SDLP made not even a pretence of uniting the workers, never mind uniting Ireland. Austin Currie remembers Gerry Fitt turning up at his home

in a police car, and asking Currie tOdrive him the rest of the way to his boat moored on the Shannon, where he was going on holiday. The RUC, said Currie, were worried about going over the border. Gerry Fitt says Michael Canavan "hardly ever turned up at SDLP Executive meetings" (most of which were held in Donegal, west of the Bann, think-tanks). There was, of course, little to turn up for. The only political action, and it was little enough, was at Westminster. In the North, in November 1977, Gerry Fitt was to exclaim, there was Roy Mason "a colonial administrator, always dressed in a safari suit, walking down the main street in Belfast, with the natives holed up in substandard wigwams on the Falls and Shankill reservations." There wasn't even much the politicians could do about the wigwams. The Housing Executive, established as an independent body because of the way politicians had exercised discrimination when they had control of housing, was "treating politicians with contempt", Fitt snarled in 1979. He was "beginning to regret the decision to set it up at all." His political base, ward heeling, which he had assiduously tended since first becoming a councillor was being cut from under him. In lesser wigwams, in the cells of Long Kesh, men wrapped only in blankets had spent the years since 1976 signalling with excrement smeared on the walls that life was unbearable. "I remain convinced to this day that some of the men sentenced were absolutely innocent", says Michael Canavan. "Confessions had been tortured out of them by the RUC in Castlereagh. There was a definite breakdown in the administration of law and order. That only increased the alienation between the Catholic population and them, and reinforced the support for the Provos. I had difficulty in persuading the SDLP that brutality and corruption was going on. Reluctance to admit that things were so was reinforced by the knowledge that every time you criticised the police you were strengthening the hand of the IRA. I issued a detailed statement one morning, criticising the UDR, and a few hours later a UDR man and his young daughter were blown up in their car. I was physically sick all day but I stood over my statement." Gerry Fitt, he said, "always got things just slightly wrong" on the issue of law and order, highlighting the activities of the IRA and the loyalists and never totally appreciating the more covert activities of the security forces. Paddy Kennedy, erstwhile colleague of Fitt, had a meeting with him in Dublin around that time. "Gerry had raised the wrongful imprisonment of Giuseppe Conlon in Westminster and I mentioned to him the framing of an IRA man well known to us both. 'I know he's innocent of that particular charge, but he's guilty of plenty of other things', Fitt replied." He refused to pursue the matter.

HE ETHICS OF HANDLING LAW AND ORDER WAS SOMETHING that was to puzzle Fitt always. "When the Shankill butchers

were caught and charged", he says, "I was over the moon. Then in walks Paschal O'Hare", an SDLP councillor, "and announces that he's defending them. I refused to drink with him. A Catholic defending Prods that cut Catholic throats. I've heard of ethics but that was just ridiculous." The breakdown of ethics in police and army behaviour was revealed in the Bennet report in 1979 and the Labour government refused time to discuss it in Westminster. They were by now a minority government and were holding onto power by means of a deal with Unionist MPs at the House of Commons. If the Unionists abstained from any vote against them, Labour would increase Northern Ireland representation at Westminster from twelve seats to seventeen. A vote of confidence was called and Gerry Fitt held the balance of power. "This will be the unhappiest speech I have ever made in the House", he began, and he explained that he would abstain from voting for Labour, citing the Bennet report, the deal with the Unionists and Roy Mason's behaviour in Northern Ireland as his reasons for standing aside while Labour fell'. "The Labour government", he finished bitterly, "are not the best government to grapple with the Irish problem ... I respect the Conservative government of 1970-74 which tried courageously to reach a settlement in Northern Ireland." He left the Chamber without hearing the vote. "I saw a Tory when I finished speaking", he said later, "a real bloated Tory. You could have identified him anywhere as a Tory. He was sneering at the Labour government side. If I'd stayed on, I'd have had to vote against anything he was voting for." The SDLP, which did not know how Gerry was going to vote over there, heaved a sigh of relief. Gerry Fitt was returned for West Belfast, for the last

time, in the May 1979 general election which followed. Michael Foot, who had negotiated the deal with the Unionists, paid glowing quoted tribute in Fitt's election literature. Frank Cluskey, leader of the Irish Labour Party signed himself "deeply impressed by your unrelenting opposition to social injustice and sectarianism". Joe Gormley, President of the Mineworkers Union was quoted too, as was Ray Buckton, General Secretary of ASLEF. The SDLP got the vote out for him. They did not attempt to get the vote out in FerrnanaghTyrone, that peculiar seat west of the Bann, where Frank Maguire was returned as a Unity candidate. Austin Currie resigned as chief whip of the party to fight Maguire as independent SDLP and he lost. In June, John Hume won a northern Euro seat without the help of Gerry Fitt, who went to Dublin to campaign for the Irish Labour Party. In September the Pope came. In November the SDLP annual conference barely rejected a motion from the mid-Ulster branch calling for talks with the Provos and suppressed motions critical of Gerry Fitt. Later that November, Humphrey Atkins, with the approval of Margaret Thatcher, published a white paper suggesting yet another Assembly to which, if etcetera, and everybody being agreed of course, but there was to be no mention of an Irish dimension. Fitt urged acceptance of the paper in Belfast. "An Irish dimension will always be there while the six counties exist on the island of Ireland", he said. The party rejected the paper in Dungannon, west of the Bann. Fitt supported their stand and flew back to Westminster from where, one day later, faced with a government that was fast losing patience with the Irish, he resigned from the SDLP.

ERRY FITTWAS A MAN AT THE END OF HIS TETHER. THE IRA wouldn't listen to the Pope. The SDLP wouldn't listen to him. He had the ear only of the RUC and the House of Commons. And he had his gun. "I had only had it for protection", he said. "The IRA never protected anybody. The Army was there to protect people. At least they had to follow the rules of the Yellow Card. The IRA never used a Yellow Card." "Gerry could never figure out the Republicans." Paddy Kennedy recalled the very early days. "When he was out fighting World War Two, the IRA killed a policeman on the Springfield Road". Thomas Williams was hung for that in 1943. "Gerry called the Republicans wimps and gimps and hunchies, running round with their coat collars turned up. The trouble was he was very funny about it. He can slander more wittily than anybody you'd know, and you'd be laughing without realising the damage he was causing and the real hurt he was doing to people's feelings." For all that, Gerry manned a polling station for Sinn Fein in 1958, in the middle of their 1956-62 armed campaign against the B specials and the RUC. It was a comparatively minor campaign though, and few people died, and Sean South was regarded as a broth of a boy, though a bit of an eejit, rolling up to the Barracks door like that to get shot dead. There was no television then. "I would have worked with anybody that got up and after the Unionists", he explained his liaison with Sinn Fein. "Sinn Fein then wasn't like it is now, and I agreed to man a polling station for them in the Belfast Corporation elections. A woman came into personate for the Unionists. I spotted her straight away and challenged her and she stood her ground so I called the police over to arrest her. 'You can't do that' says the Sinn Fein man'. 'Why not', says I. 'Because you'l1 have to testify in court against her, and we don't recognise the courts', says he. 'Fucks sake, ye bunch of cunts', says I and I tore up my agent's card and walked away." Twenty two years later, Sinn Fein weren't even recognising the prisons. In November 1980 blanket prisoners went on hunger strike in pursuit of political status. Gerry Fitt sat in the House of Commons, opposite Margaret Thatcher, on Monday November 10 and listened to speeches about unemployment. 35,900 people had been thrown on the dole in Wales in one year. A computer company had just closed shedding fifteen hundred workers. The British Steel workforce had been reduced by 826 that week. The Broadcasting Bill for a fourth television channel was discussed, plus plans for Welsh language programmes. At 8pm the Commons moved onto Northern Ireland, Remanded Persons, and Humphrey Atkins assured the House that the current industrial strike by prison officers in the North, in support of the strike taken by prison officers on the mainland, was not affecting the security situation in Long Kesh. "In the province we do not have the rapid turnover in and out of prisons that occurs in England and Wales." Prisoners in the province were serving

much longer sentences, you see. Some of those prisoners were on hunger strike this two weeks now, but Mr Atkins scarcely discussed that. Jim Molyneux did. He spent eleven minutes explaining that "the IRA hunger-strikers" were "beasts". He urged the government not even to concede civilian clothing to them. He sat down and Gerry Fitt rose up. It was 8.39. He recalled having successfully pleaded for political status in 1972, and said "I bitterly regret having made those representations". Then he told stories, and the stories were littered with the bodies of people who died in the North over the decade. Three soldiers killed by an IRA landmine. Two soldiers and seven civilians killed by an IRA bomb on Bloody Friday. Six civilians killed by an IRA bomb in Claudy. A woman twenty yards from his home, with no legs, because the loyalist bomb went off in a pub as she passed by. Ten Protestant workmen killed in Armagh, their lunch boxes still in their hands. Three Catholics killed in retaliation. Ten Catholics killed on July 5 by loyalists, and a "mixture of Catholics and Protestants" killed on July 8 and 9. John Turnley, Miriam Daly, Ronnie Bunting and Joe Little assassinated by loyalists. His friend Davy Walsh, with no leg, "never able to live with the fact that his leg was blown off for no known or understandable reason". No deaths caused by the RUC or the British Army or the UDR were mentioned. He could only say with some regret, of Cardinal 0 Fiach's involvement in the hunger strike, that the Cardinal "did not avail of an invitation to visit other people on the mattress", the maimed with no arms or legs. An Irish newspaper had remarked that "if a person was imprisoned then that should be sufficient retribution, that once in prison a person should be able to do other things. I do not believe that taking away a man's liberty because he has committed a heinous crime is enough. There are certain conditions that must be fulfilled in prison." He sat down at 9 .18pm. The House moved on to the Avoidable Destruction of Wildlife Bill. Janet Fookes, member for Plymouth-Drake rose to speak of birds "dying of starvation induced by lead poisoning oftheir environment". Unable and unwilling to eat, the birds suffered from "anaemia, convulsion, paralysis of the muscles, general lethargy, internal lesions and loss of weight". The House agreed to an extension beyond the 1Opm deadline to let her speak fully of this crisis. Moles, she said were dying "painfully, underground, where we cannot see them. Out of sight ought not to mean out of mind." On June 10, 1983, Gerry Fitt lost his seat to Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein. John Hume, benefitting from the deal which Labour did with the Unionists, won the restructured seat in Foyle and set off himself to be the lone voice in Westminster. The Housing Executive announced that they were pulling down Gerry Fitt's house as part of their modernisation programme. Gerry Fitt said he was moving out his furniture anyway before the Provos came to celebrate their victory. He would consider his future in England, he said. If he took a peerage, he might not be able to contest next year's Euro elections, he said, and there were all those "Prod votes". If he does take a peerage - if a seat is offered in the House of Lords - the man who sought one man one vote in the North will not be allowed a commoner's vote ever again. Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamus.

MOROCCO offers the discerning traveller something different. Land of stunning contrasts, visually a startling colourful experience. The atmosphere mysterious, exciting and completely different from the normal holiday. The sun is there of course, but the atmosphere is something else, offering such wide contrasts as skiing in the snow covered mountains to the sun soaked beaches on the Atlantic coast. Morocco is the epitome of everything that one conjures up when thinking of North Africa. The colourful market "Souks", exotic foods like "Couscous" and "Tagine". Beautiful uncluttered beaches, the fascination of the Berber tribesmen, with their culture still intact, unaffected by the pace of modem life. Mosques and palaces, brass and leather, vivid carpets, its all there enhanced by the warmth and hospitality of the people. AGADIR is an ideal place to stay. On the Atlantic coast "where the temperature is just right. Its very, very, hot inland! Built on a crescent shaped beach 16 miles long! Just 10 minutes from the airport. There's lots to do, ride a camel or \ more conventionally a horse, play tennis or try any of the many watersports available. The beauty of Agadlr is that the beaches are uncrowded even in the high season. It is one of Morocco's most important fishing resorts. The Kasbah overlooks the harbour. This is the old part of the town and well worth a stroll. You can indulge in some haggling for traditional goods it's expected that you bargain and it can be great fun. Get some genuine bargains, particularly leather and those magnificent persian carpets. Buy yourself a "djellaba" - an arab style robe. You will be delighted with its coolness and comfort. . There are trips to Marrakech from Agadir, right in the heart of Morocco, its well worth seeing, fascinating, old, full of Mosques and palaces, set against the stark mountain range of the Atlas mountains. Another must is a trip to the village of Tofreoute through the "Valley of Paradise" and on to the waterfall at Imouzzer. Let yourself go at the genuine Berber evenings available and join in their local dances. Your holiday in Morocco will leave you with memories of more than just beach and sunshine, you will have a glimpse of another age, another culture, unforgettable. J.W.T. fly to Agadir every Friday up to and including October 21st this year. Accommodation at Igoudar or Hotel 'I'agadirt, The complex blends with the landscape only 500 yards from the beach and close to the town centre. Plenty of shopping and nightlife nearby. Built in the traditional Moroccan style, with a large pool, children's pool, poolside bar and snack service, choice of several restaurants. The Igoudar has its own shopping complex with some good boutiques and supermarkets. In the hotel all rooms are twin bedded with private bathroom and balcony. Studios and one bedroom apartments have self catering facilities for two to four people. All with balcony. Cost high season: Hotel-445 for two weeks; Apartment-323, also for two weeks. Both are based on two people sharing.

tickets were so scarce. Further down there's a gathering of radio people who failed to get tickets for the night before. Most are wearing their latest gifts from the record companies - tee-shirts and shoulder-bags. "Darling, I hope it won't be as dreary as last night", moans one of them 'who's appropriately clad in a tee-shirt that proclaims "Take That Situation". Perhaps it's because of some negative critical reaction to Thursday's first night that there's an air of calm anticipation pervading the cavernous arena. e take our seats, a trendy couple in designer jeans to our left, a pair of brash youths in ragged denim shorts to our right. The row in front offers a fashion line of leather, see-through vests, pin-stripes, luminous jackets, and garish make-up, and that's only the men. All human life is here, so to speak. Half an hour late, at 8.30pm, the house lights go down. There's no support band, which makes sense. The ten-piece backing band pick their way with torches in their hands onto the vast stage. The stage lights come up on enormous columns of green, red and yellow light streams. Guitars are strapped on. Drum sticks are wielded. Saxaphones are poised for playing. To the right of the stage hangs a huge silver halfmoon. A voice booms over the PA: "Welcome to the Serious Moonlight Tour '83". And he-ee-ee-er's David! The Thin White Duke bounces onto the stage, grins, and tears into "The Jean Genie". It's been five years since the last tour and the Duke's not too thin anymore. The former gaunt androgyne has turned 36 as a dapper, tanned, blonde symbol of survival and success. The crowd's on its feet. A ten-second breather and before the applause even peaks it's straight into "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide". This is Bowie's time-eapsule show of his career to date, and the hits keep pumping out "Heroes" , "Golden Years",

a sublime "Life on Mars". The sound isn't great - it rarely is at Wembley - but it improves. But any other of Thursday's teething problems appear to have been solved.

he star dances round the stage in his baggy

"Let's dance for fear tonight is all", he sings, the hot backing band pounding out the funk, and the audience erupts. A frenetic rendition of Lou Reed's "White Light White Heat" brings the first half of the show to a throbbing crescendo. There's an interval be-

wouldn't believe what I've been through". The first set was solid, tight and slick. The second is magnificent, moving backwards and forwards in time from "Rebel Rebel" to "China Girl" to "Scary Monsters" on to an absolutely stunning performance of "Young Americans". He steps off stage, then re-appears encaged in one of the gleaming tubes of light for "Ashes to Ashes", the sequel to "Space Oddity" which comes next. For this he stands playing his acoustic guitar bathed in a flood of white light. His other prop is the glowing globe from the "Ashes to Ashes" video. He kicks it into the eager crowd and it's passed between him and the audience until he tires of the routine. owie reminds us of his mime training when he indulges in some mock-Hamlet theatrics with his boisterous snazzily-dressed backing singers, the brothers Frank and George Simms, during "Cracked Actor". "Hang on to Yourself", a power-house treatment of "Fame", the hits keep coming, and then, it's over. Well, not quite. There's the encores to come. There has to be an encore because the house lights haven't come up yet, so the audience are reasonably restrained as they ask for more. The torches twinkle on the dark stage again and Bowie and band are back for a surprising reprise of "The Jean Genie". Off again. No house lights yet. Sparing shouts for more. Then back again and off again. Still no house lights, but there's a greater urgency in the calls for a third encore. Bowie's back, singing "I'm standing in the wind but I never wave bye bye" for a tremendous finale of "Modern Love" that's far superior to the album version, and the most blase are dancing in their seats. He waves bye bye, and the house lights come up. The audience stamps, shouts, screams for more. No reply. 10,000 smiling faces and sweaty bodies stream out of Wembley.

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cream suit during "Fashion"; not one of his better songs. But it's there for a purpose. During the instrumental break in "Fashion" the band slips into the spine-tingling intro to "Let's Dance", the song that restored Bowie at the top of the charts this year.

cause it's time for Bowie to change his clothes. He's back in blue for a blistering version of his "Cat People" theme, taken several times faster than in the movie or on the "Let's Dance" album. "Just be still with me", he croons while the sax sears. "You

UGH LEONARD'S PLAY, DA, currently running at the Abbey, opens with an episode which is conducted without words. The central character, Charlie, is burning his father's papers and other rubbish in the cottage in Dalkey , having just come back from the funeral. He botches the job, through indecision, interruption, uncertainty; and out of that emerges the play. But just for those opening moments we witness, in dumb show, one of the cruellest and most painful occasions in life, the reading and the shredding of the evidence in a case that has finally been closed. It is a case involving the crime of failure, and the detection of the reasons why. It is a case in which criminal and victim are interchangeable, depending on how one reads the clues. It is a case in which emotions like hate and love can be present. It is a case on the grand scale, where lesser emotions are ruled out by virtue of the fact that the com bat is one locked between father and son. Like Hugh Leonard, my father was a gardener. Like him, my father died when I was not with him. Like Leonard, the ghost-like form of my father lay across me, haunted me, until I was forced to put him into print, and attempt to exorcise him.

It did not work. He is still there. All the rest have vanished. The places, the other people, the remembered events, the nostalgic evoking of the past, all gone. But he is still there. And with Leonard it is the same: Da is still there. That is the beginning of the story, only. Those damned papers! Everybody who dies leaves papers. My father's "papers", as I euphemistically describe them, were the evidence, mainly of a life gone wrong. Letters that told of relationships which had failed, diaries which contained the agonising vacuums of loneliness or of self-doubt, lists of bets placed on horses and the money won, the tinsel and wrapping paper of far-distant gifts. I sorted his papers, and tried to understand his life. I did not wish to reconstruct it, only to come to terms with it, so that we might be at peace with one another. But it did not work. Vital clues were missing, perhaps never to be discovered. And not being able to come to terms with his life, how could I ever write an end to it? N HUGH LEONARD'S CASE, there is an added dimension to those opening moments: the father whose spirit he seeks to still, whose ghost he wants to lay, is his adoptive'

father only. What might have been a straightforward piece of detective work, in which blood samples, habit, appearance, colour of eyes, relations, and certain basic documents like birth certificates, are set aside in favour of a plot that would have attracted a Wilkie Collins. Instead of the iron bracket forged out of blood, we are dealing with stretched threads the ends of which vanish in past time. The magnifying glass, and all the other accoutrements of pursuit, are thrown away in favour of pure guesswork and speculation. My heart went out to him. Leonard was working outside the rules. He was inventing in a dimension which, by comparison with my own, was intolerable. And if mine had been difficult, what then of his? At the level of theatre, of course, it is robust, earthy stuff. Gardeners can be passionate men, wild men, fullblooded men. They are inescapably more rounded and more real than writers. And Leonard is honest about this uneven division of appeal between himself and the Da, putting the old artificer through his paces, to the noisy delight of another generation of 'Da-enthusiasts at the Abbey Theatre. But as a father-obsessed son, sitting in the audience, I could not escape the strange thought that the laughter had nothing to do with the case. Those who were laughing were identifying with a common denominator, or reflecting their own domestic roots, or a bit of both, with greater emphasis on the latter of the two. And if this is the stuff of success, then so be it, and good luck to the man himself. But the case lies elsewhere. There is a moment in 'Da' when the cruelty and neglect, by the son, of his father, becomes dominant. The money sent back to Dalkey from London, the invitations to visit, the expressions of affection, hang smokey and stale in the emotionless atmosphere. And it is the nobility of the father, whose "words had forked no lightning", which transcends completely the fame and success of the son. And, oh, the pity of it! There is a brutality there. And I am familiar with that brutality. There is a feeding by the son off the substance of his father, and I am familiar with that as well. It is not nice. But it is real. Writing is about what is real, rather than what is nice. And nothing in all the world is more real to us than our fathers and sons, our mothers and daughters. So real, indeed, that some would say they are not the stuff of which story books and plays are made. But if story books and plays are also the stuff of one's reality, what choice is there?

a time when it is popular to r-l consider the realms of government and commerce to be largely administered and to a lesser extent controlled by computers, there are many who view the whole field with fearful disdain. Images of big heaps of machinery and electronic circuitry managing the military destiny of the world, and robots replacing humans as the basic unit of production, serve to compound the more obvious problems such as the lack of basic computing knowledge which stimulate this attitude. But with computers entering what may be called the 'popular' stage of their life-span, many misconceptions and problems are being tackled and laid to rest. Of particular concern has been the integration of computing technology into the office situation. What distinguishes computers from other technological developments such as the typewriter is their enormous flexibility and their capacity for work at speeds hitherto unknown. And as this multiplicity of function leads to changes relating to the structure, operations, and personnel of the companies into which the computers are introduced, it is vital to consider how the company can forecast and accommodate for the transition from office procedures based on manual skills to a system based on computing skills. Looking initially at human engineering factors (i.e. those factors relating to the compatibility of the computer and its functions to the skills, attitudes, etc. of the user), it is important that the computer presents the tasks to be performed in familiar ways. As interaction with most office computers occurs by means of a keyboard, which is based on the conventional typewriter, and a visual display unit, which approximates to a conventional television set, no great psychological problems arise with regard to familiarity with the equipment. However, where interaction isn't facilitated in this way, the user may experience disorientation, caused by having to adjust to a new way of assimilating information. Some computer firms are taking the familiarity idea a step beyond making the computer look like conventional utilities. They are producing computers for office procedures which presume no computing knowledge on the part of the user. The Xerox 8010 Star, for example, displays a number of 'icons' on the screen which represent familiar office objects such as files, file cabinets, and 'In' and 'Out' trays. The operator manipulates these

nT

symbols and the functions they represent by means of touch control. Besides the operating compatibility of machine and user, the environment in which the work takes place is worthy of note. Lighting and air conditioning needs, for example, change with the introduction of computers. The company must react to these needs by situating the user in an environment which is conducive to both successful task performance and job satisfaction. It is also imperative that operators have a good understanding of the technology or the process with which they are involved. A not unfamiliar scenario is one in which the operator refuses to continue using the computer because "the stupid machine doesn't understand my instructions". Where the operator has no idea why faults occur or how they can be rectified, boredom, carelessness and apathy become prevalent. These effects also arise where the reorganisation of work around new computers has lessened the control of the operator over output, despite increased physical manipulation abilities. The introduction of computers into an office brings new pressures to bear on the wider job satisfaction of users and beneficiaries (i.e. managers) alike. The acquisition of a word processor may result in operators working more on their own, with less liaison with colleagues. The operator may then become socially isolated during working hours and this will be reflected in the flagging performance of the individual. The

ideal situation is one where the word processor replaces the conventional typing and data management tasks, but doesn't interfere with other aspects of the job such as physical and social setting. But when one considers the reasons why computing technology may be useful in the first place, it becomes apparent that the fundamental nature of office work will be affected by its introduction. Desires for increased productivity, the lessening of human intervention in information processing (e.g. handling accounts), and an in--' crease in control over operations for management, suggest the need for a new role for the office worker. Where the company wishes to foster interest and loyalty among employees, a redelegation of responsibility in certain areas may provide this new role. For the office manager the use of computers means that the decisionmaking process will be markedly accelerated, bringing more timepressure into the job. Coupled with this is the information-overload dilemma whereby the decision maker finds an abundance of information at his/her disposal and subsequently cannot arrive at a clear-cut decision. These negative effects are, however, far outweighed by the information processing and time-saving capabilities of computers which endow the manager with the ability to perform with a speed and comprehension otherwise impossible. Although the type and range of computer products on the market are changing rapidly, companies should adopt a strategy in the changeover from manual to computer-based office operations. If the computing technology is acquired as new products are seen to be useful or attractive, then the situation arises where the computers create their own work demands and structures, rather than fulfilling existing needs. The needs of the company should dictate the type of technological change which takes place, and all employees who will be affected by this change should be involved in deciding on same. While computers represent a great challenge to individuals and organisations, their increasing importance in employment and leisure activities suggest that soon everyone will be computer users to greater or lesser extents. The success of individuals in their usage of computers depends not only on computing knowledge, but on how they can integrate computing phenomena into their existing lifestyle with a minimum of cognitive strain.

here I was, February 1973. A young man in a world of infinite promise. A bit worried about some of the things in that world, but confident enough that it would all come right in the final reel. And we all had a chance to make sure it did. Here came an election. My first general election. The first election in which the kids of the Sixties could vote (they wouldn't let us vote in '69, you had to be 21). The first generation of Irish TV kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wanna hold your Mursheen, Durcan. Old enough to remember where we were when Kennedy was topped - the President has been rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital and it's not yet known if - old enough to remember when John F and Nikita went to Red Alert over Cuba and a hard rain was gonna fall and hey, sir, if there's an atomic war, sir, do we get the day off skoowell, sir? And marching down O'Connell Street chanting free Dennis Dennehy! because they - would you believe this - had put a homeless man in jail for squatting. 'Sixty-eight: Tet, Paris, Grosvenor Square, Czechoslovakia and Derry. Background music. This was the most worldly-wise Irish electorate ever to cast a vote. We knew that "Off the pigs" didn't mean a quarter pound of rashers. The older crowd might moan about "Ms", but for us it wasn't an awkward term to learn (what does the Irish centre forward do when he's got the ball and there's an open goal in front of him? Mrs). Okay, when we started off in school we'd been putting pennies in the box for the Black Babies, but by now we knew the score in Watts and Harlem and the black babies had grown up to be Malcolm X and George Jackson. (Older people thought it was bad manners when Bernie Devlin went to New York, was presented with the key of the city - and promptly gave it to the Black Panthers. We didn't expect anything less.) Okay, so there was a tradition about voting. You took account of how your family voted, you listened to what the nice man on the doorstep promised you, you half-believed that when a politician said something he (those days it was always he) meant it. But there was another tradition being born - of putting what was happening here in the context of everything else you knew about the

world; and we knew an awful lot more than any other generation had known. In the late Sixties I'd leave work near eleven at night and go around into O'Connell Street and most nights the remnants of the 8pm political meeting were clustered in groups in front of the GPO or, more likely, down at Abbey Street corner, and you could get an argument on anything from Vietnam to folk music, from the Irish language to black separatism (connections, connections). I broke down laughing one night when a guy began arguing fiercely that the Keep Dublin Tidy campaign was a capitalist plot to do the roadsweepers out of jobs. I still run into the guy around the pubs every now and then. He selling civil rights bulletins, me drinking. He had more stamina. (I still think he was a bit over the top about the roadsweepers, though.) Bows and flows of angel hair, you gotta friend and the seventies will be socialist. Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground. ianna Fail or Coalition? That was the choice, and when the votes were counted we'd chosen the road least travelled by. There wasn't much of a choice, truth to tell. The Labour Party candidate in my

area was my trade union official. I'd known the guy for nearly ten years and had long got over the illusion that trade union leaders are working class heroes. This guy's members got sold out quicker than ice cream in a heat wave. However, it was my first vote, I'd been saving it up for so long and I was damned if I was going to wait another five years to see what the inside of a polling station looked like. And on the ballot paper Labour was the nearest thing to what I felt at the time. So .... So, I helped elect the government that put Nicky Kelly away. After all the stuff that had gone down, with all the things we thought we knew - to hand a vote over, just like that, to give someone unaccountable power. Stupid. I remember one night in 1976, I went to see a friend. She was upset, angry. She'd just been to see someone she knew, a guy I'd never heard of. There had been a crime, he knew one of the people involved, had been pulled in, now he was out. No charge, no nothing, he hadn't done anything, it never made the papers. He was, she said, unrecognisable. That's how you knew there was a Heavy Gang at work, things like that. It was around that time that someone, probably the Provos, robbed a train at Sallins. Forty members of the IRSP were pulled in. Those days, if a leaf went missing from a tree the IRSP was pulled in. Speak up, (wallop) the sergeant' can't hear you. The thing about Heavy Gangs, from a taxpayer's point of view - and I've been paying taxes for nearly twenty years - is that they're not very efficient. They get confessions, but they don't get the people who pull the jobs. The Sallins money was never recovered, the train robbers were never caught. Thirty-nine of the IRSP people walked free, eventually, proven innocent at enormous cost. They're still holding Nicky Kelly. He's the prize, the proof that emergency legislation, Heavy Gangs, juryless courts, get the job done. Me, I don't believe it. And I wish to Christ I hadn't helped elect the government that extracted a confession. from him. My only excuse is that I didn't know it would work out that way. In February 1973, they didn't ask for a mandate for the Heavy Gang.

Ollie Campbell: Asking fortnore O

llie Campbell has built up such a reputation as a goalkicker that he had the New Zealand forwards in fear and trembling when they played against the British and Irish Lions in the first test in Christchurch. The All-Blacks were so transfixed by the certainty that every time they transgressed the laws of rugby fottball, a thunderclap named Campbell would punish them with three points that they hardly dare contest a lineout. This state of affairs has brought balm and comfort to the hearts of all those 1959 Lions who will carry to their graves the memory of the test match in which they scored four tries to NCL against the All-Blacks and lost by a single point, thanks, if that is the word, to six penalty goals kicked by Don Clarke. The sad thing is that Campbell's kicking in 1983 has been fronted by nothing like the same forward effort that New Zealand made on Don Clarke's behalf in 1959, and as a .consequence, Campbell's playas a flyhalf has had some observers wondering what all the fuss has been about. The same deprecations have been levelled at the Lions' loose forwards, and at their serum-halves, but everyone who has played and has suffered in those positions knows that if the front five of the pack are not truly tight forwards, and are not able to establish control, then everyone else behind them is on a hiding to nothing. What is more, the further back you go, the worse that hiding becomes. The loose forwards are castigated because they are not making any play, and are not putting any pressure on the opposition, the serum-halves are derided for being caught in possession, for never being able to cross the gain line and for shovelling on hospital passes to their fly-halves, the flyhalves, meanwhile, have a little notice hung around their necks saying "The Buck Stops Here". Ollie Campbell is a sensible and mature man and he is realistic about this. "Since I have been in New Zealand, I have come to appreciate the truth of Barry John's remark that anyone going to play fly-half in New Zealand wants to keep his passport

in his pocket",.he smiles. "I am reasonably happy with the way I am playing, but no fly-half can play without quick loose ball, and for most of the time on this tour, we just haven't been getting any. Halfbacks depend totally on their forwards and the way they present the ball to them, and this dependence increases with every year that passes because the organisation of defences improves all the time.

'ThiS

tour suggests to me that in Europe we have become far too conscious of the set piece in recent years. We try to make all our playoff serums and lineouts, which makes back play terribly predictable and formal. In New Zealand these days, they make all their playoff the loose ball. Serums and lineouts are just ways of starting the game again and initiating the process of creating loose ball. "In that respect, the wheel may have come full circle, because all the history books you have ever read tell you that New Zealand forwards and South African forwards were the kings of the set piece and British and Irish backs had to live off the crumbs of possession which fell off their table. "This forced backs in Europe to become more ambitious, more inventive. They saw so little of the ball that they became excited when they did get a bit of possession, and they tried things that they would not have dreamed of attempting if they had been living off a glut of the ball. I know it happened to me in my own club in Ireland. For a long time our forwards struggled for possession, and I think that made us better backs. We had to be. "But for the last twelve years or so, British and Irish forwards have taken over from the All-Blacks and the Springboks as kings of the setpiece. That has made European backs much more complacent, and it has made backs in New Zealand and South Africa much more inventive.

sive systems. Queensland adopted this system of moving the blind wing into the centre of the field as a third centre in defence at lineouts, and moving the full-back wider, and it is a terrible job to break that down. You can really only kick the ball back into the box on the blind side wing. "Again, the New Zealanders have resurrected the flying machine type of open side wing forward. Early in the tour, against Wanganui and Auckland, we came across a couple who got into the middle so fast it was unbelievable. They did not come for me, or for John Rutherford. Instead they ran a line to split us away from the inside centre, to force us to turn back inside. There we ran into the wall of support coming up. Oddly enough, Scotland did that to me last season. So set play is becoming harder and harder." Campbell is a loyal fellow and he does not say that his task has been made even harder by the appalling work of the Lions' tight forwards. Jim Telfer, the Lions' coach, arrived in New Zealand with some commendable ambitions of turning his forwards into a rucking unit, instead of a mixture of TUckers and maulers, but you cannot teach old dogs new tricks, or at any rate, you cannot do it in four weeks, and you cannot do it if your reserve locks are as loose as Steve Bainbridge and Steve Boyle, of England .

'In

Australia too, they have produced some absolutely marvellous backs at a time when their forwards have struggled in the serum and the line out the world over. So they have concentrated on the loose ball, the quick loose ball, and they have concentrated on moving it like lightning. So they have the Ella Broohers, and Campesi, and Michael Hawker and number eights scoring four tries in a test match against New Zealand. "They have also evolved new defen-

ut that is the penalty of bad selection. Lions selectors have been making the same mistakes for thirty years now, and you just cannot afford to leave front jumpers of the hardness and the tightness and the quality of Tom Syddall and John Perkins at home. If they had been on this tour, and Maurice Colclough had been used as a middle jumper, as he was in South Africa in 1980, I am quite certain that Ollie Camp bell's career as a fly-half would have flourished, as well as the legend of his goalkicking. The lack of loose ball has forced Campbell into tactical kicking which he knows is less than penetrating. He is trying to do things from set play which are impossible, and is coming back inside too often for his own safety or for the good of the team. "I am trying to guard against that", he says. "I know I must get back outside if I can." And Campbell admits that he was glad of the support of John Rutherford as a centre against North Auckland last week. "It took a lot of pressure off me." -

seemed to be not so much a reminder or a revival, but rather a continuation of battles long ago, that was so spellbinding. Raw courage and will to win were shared equally. So a moment of inspiration such as springs only from genius was fated to decide it. And Jimmy Barry Murphy is a Corkman. The hurling was better the first day. The teams concentrated on keeping the ball moving and the play open, and there were passages of unforgettable first time hurling. Of course this standard was not maintained throughout; each team went through a distinct trough, and Limerick, as their rally gathered momentum found room for picking and carrying. On Sunday both teams seemed largely intent on avoiding such risks as attend the first time whip, and the rigour of the tackling that ensued upon their handling deterred them not a whit. Indeed the players relished the kind of macho confrontation that the game evolved into. And the glory of it all was that there were only a very few moments of dirt. Limerick's tacticians have much to rue. The team was quite obviously instructed to feed Joe McKenna - and never got it right. Balls were regularly overhit and drifted wide, or hit too weakly and O'Grady's superior pace told in the race out to them. And on a significant few of these occasions points might at least have been essayed. None of which should be allowed to diminish O'Grady's credit: he played a fine game and showed a real depth of steadiness, anticipation and, twice at least, almost arrogant cuteness. It is a rare thing for Cork to be facing into a Munster final with a team that hasn't even a semblance of being settled. Six players - Cunningham, Brian Murphy, O'Grady, Bertie Murphy, Tim Crowley and JBM are holding down secure and probably their best positions. The others are kept switching about like cannoning snooker balls. The selectors have, in very large measure, brought their troubles upon themselves. Discarding Blake was simply recklessness. The elev-

enth hour effort to make an intercounty centre forward out of a rather ordinary club mid fielder was an act of faith - and little else. It means that Mulcahy, who had shown terrific form in the Under 21 championships and is clearly the best prospect available, will 'probably fill the position for the later stages of the championship without the 'blooding' which the Limerick matches would have given him so superbly. Pat Horgan has proven, yet again, that the half backline is the place where he plays best. Indeed he has gone further. He has proven that it is the only place where he will bother to play at all. So with McCurtain contending for his natural No 7 spot, that luckless pair John Buckley and Francie Collins vying for the other wing position, and the selectors continuing reluctance to play Tom Cashman at left wing forward where his accuracy would greatly augment the team's scoring potential, we may have seen the last of John Crowley as a centre back. And Blake is still the best No 4 they have.

evin Hennessy and Eamonn O'Donoghue had satisfactory games on Sunday; and whatever about Sean O'Leary's injuries - and they seem never-ending - the old heart beats as mightily as ever. And there's always Jimmy. But Cork's greatest strength this year is likely to be of the spirit. They have lived through a barrage of socalled criticism that bordered on scurrility. Scribblers amateur and professional imputed cowardice to half

the team without themselves having the courage to name names. All of this because of a perfectly understandable lapse the first day against Limerick and, of course, the fiasco of last September. Now, who ever heard of Cork playing to full capacity on their first championship outing? And as for that famous fiasco, a good starting point for one of the many books that are certain to be written about it might be the fact that Cork shot fifteen wides in each of their two previous games and this grew to nineteen in the final. Which tells something about the preparation of the team. And it is to that very subject that a deal more of the, still rabid, theorising and "analysis" would be better directed. Some of the whining that went on was tantamount to appealing for dirty play. That players and mentors rejected such speciosity, and came up with a display that was heartwarming in its unity of spirit and adhesion to purpose, is to their eternal credit. And the thought that in doing so they preserved the splendid cleanness of their own senior club competitions is a reward in itself. Which is more than can be said for Waterford. Through the first half of their game with Tipp they perpetrated a succession of malevolent strokes and tackles which was clearly designed to intimidate and slow down Tipp's green young players. They succeeded in the cases of Nicholas English and Bobby Ryan. Tipp's only forward and second best defender. No blame attaches to the referee. This stuff will go on happening until the day when a penalty shot can be awarded against dirty offenders no matter where on the pitch they transgress.

ut Tipp have no real excuses. They just slung it away. Their mentors cracked. A fine centre field and half back line was absolutely pouring ball forward: and the most vapid, anodyne, purposeless, h urlingless forwards that ever besmirched a blue and gold jersey were footling and frittering away their chances

and the lives of their supporters. And the selectors changed the backs. And then left an injured man on the field long enough for Waterford to channel their saving goal through him. The Tipp forwards struck seven or eight ground balls during the brief period when they seemed actually aware that their job was to get scores. In the remainder of the game, when they reverted to their beloved ring-a-ring-arosy they struck one or two. The best that may be said of Waterford is that they occasionally achieved mediocrity. Their goals were all gifts, and the only real penetration and creativity amongst their forwards resides in Jim Greene. The full back line will probably be their bulwark against Cork, for all three - assuming Galvin to be fit - are solid defensive hurlers. Curley in the half line is reliable and Ryan sometimes brilliant; but McGrath between them is in sad decline, as is Mossy Walsh in front of him. But Waterford have one good thing going for them: a sense of thoroughgoing realism that was daftly absent last year. That and their zeal for redemption should help make a fair match of it - if they keep it clean. Would the Cork County Board please, please stop fouling up their great occasions with that uniquely otiose officiousness of theirs which moves them to print tickets at even the rumour of a match. Last Sunday patrons who arrived early were frequently allocated the very worst seats. It all depends on which turnstile you happen to go to. So, naturally and rightly many people simply ignored the ticket fatuity and sat where they chose. Which, of course, irritated some latecomers with tickets for the choicest seats and the few amadauns amongst the stewards who set out to enforce the absurd and unenforceable. It was and is all so unnecessary and brought the only touch of rancour to a lovely occasion. And the hurlers soon dispelled that. Goodbye, Limerick. It's never the same without you.

RICHARD G. Tennant, FMII, is the newly elected President of The Association of Trustee Savings Banks in Ireland. Mr Tennant has been a Trustee of the Dublin Bank since 1966 and has represented the Bank in Europe and South America. In 1979 he was elected Joint Vice-Chairman of Trustee Savings Bank Dublin (a position he still holds). Mr Tennant is also Chairman and Managing Director of Tennant & Ruttle Ltd and a Director of James Crean Ltd; D.J. Thompson & Son Ltd, Belfast; J.V. McDaniel Ltd and H.G. Ritchie Ltd.

TIVOLI Spinners Limited - a Member of the Youghal Carpets Holdings Group - have announced details of a major export order for Knitting Wool to Libya. Tivoli's General Manager, Mr John Cashell, has announced the successful completion of negotiations for an order worth over 400,000. The first consignment will be dispatched in early June and will include yarns from the total Tivoli range. The company is extremely confident that the order - won in the face of intense international competition represents the first of many contracts with the Libyan Government's Buying Agency (The National Company for Fabric and Clothing Marketing). John Cashell attributes this significant success to two vital factors. The investment made by the company over the last three years in quality control and improved efficiencies - which ensured that Tivoli could quote at extremely competitive prices. Secondly, the constant liaison with Coras

Mr. John Cashell, General Manager, Tivoli Spinners Limited Trachtala - and especially Mr Michael Bevan - meant that Tivoli had the strongest possible back up in negotiations with the Libyan Agency initial contacts having been established over three years ago. Tivoli Spinners are Ireland's largest hand knitting yarn spinners. Their hand knitting worsted plant was established in 1972 and can take the natural fibre from its raw state to finished balls of yarn. In 1974 Tivoli acquired the business of Mahony's of Blarney and the take-over has been so successful that all brands - pure new wool Killowen, (the market leader) pure

new wool Blarney Bainin, pure new wool Aranmore, pure new wool Killowen Chunky - are now automatically associated with Tivoli. The company (part of the Youghal Carpets Holdings Group) is based at Tivoli in Cork and employs 50 people. The General Manager John Cashell joined Tivoli from the Ford Motor Company. Since his appointment in 1976 he has been instrumental in opening up and increasing export sales to countries such as the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and also the USA and Canada. "But this new market is an extremely exciting development" says Cashell. And it's due in no small way to the determined efforts of everyone at the Tivoli plant. Efforts which I'm

confident will see us winning more and more sales on export markets.

EXCLUSIVE to Brown Thomas is the Return of the Jedi Exhibition. It has certainly boosted business for BT's and obviously not only children are into the Jedi. Peak times have been between 1 and 2pm when adults by the score are visiting the exhibition. The favourite is of course CP30 who visited the store on June I to sign autographs for the many children who came to see him. Pictured are Managing Director of Brown Thomas, George McCullough and CP30

POOR Colm 0 hEocha. Not alone does he have the responsibility of building a New Ireland at the Forum, but things are not going too well at the day job, either. Dr 0 hEocha is President of the Governing Body of UCG. This body is elected every three years. Following the election last November two candidates who failed to win one of the seats voted for by graduates, Cathal Guiomard and Brendan Smith, complained about alleged irregularities in the election. It was said that the list of graduates, sold to candidates at 10 per thousand names, had been used by one candidate several days before any other - giving him an advantage. It was said that the election "~~J::::)iterature of faculty member Bobby "Curran arrived in envelopes postmarked November 24, when the day for release of the list of graduates was November 29. Bobby Curran says his literature was sent out after the close of nominations, that there was nothing irregular. He told Wigmore, "it's a small matter, really". Bobby Curran is director of UCG's computer department. The college didn't seem to take the matter seriously at first. 0 hEocha then mounted an interminable investigation. For three months running he refused to allow the matter onto the Governing Body's monthly agenda as his investigation wasn't finished. Suddenly, last month, the matter went onto the agenda and the Governing Body decided to call in computer experts from outside the college to investigate how the list of graduates names, which is kept on computer, might have been misused. TODA Y TONIGHT is under attack for its programme on Central American politics. RTE in general is under attack from such as the Knights of Columban us. In such circumstances we hesitate before drawing attention to certain standards ... however. Something will have to be done about Today Tonight. The political slant in certain programmes is em barrassing. They are now using a moodmusic soundtrack in some programmes. It has long been recognised that the combination of image and music is a very powerful trick of the cinematic trade. Using such methods to subliminally arouse emotions in a current - affairs programme is unforgivable. 'What next - canned laughter, canned applause?

This is not a case for outside in terference. This points to the need for RTE journalists and producers to clean up their own back yard. Otherwise you'll have the like of the Knights rushing in with their mufflers. And none of us want that. WIGMORE, helpful as ever, has applied its mind to a method of increasing the pay of TDs - and without stretching the national purse. Self-financing increases, as Charlie Haughey used to put it in his bloom and boom days. First, the Constitution says that we will have one TD for every 20,000 to 30,000 of the population. At present we have 166 TDs, which is one for every 20,481 of the population. It would be no trouble at all to increase the ratio, within the Constitutionallimits, to one TD per 30,000. Out here in the real world this kind of thing happens every day. It's known as a productivity deal. Work practices are rearranged in order to make them most cost-effective. Indirectly, as the Pro-Life people might put it, some people lose their jobs. In the case of the TDs, changing the ratio to one per 30,000 would bring the number of TDs down to 114, shedding 52. This would be a saving in salary of 717,704 per year. (There's another happy by-product: TDs are forever complaining about the cramped office conditions in Leinster House. Shedding 52 TDs would help that no end.) Let us say that half of the salary saving goes into the state coffers, and we share out the other half among the remaining TDs, as is common with productivity deals. This would be an increase for each of the 114 TDs of 3,147 per year, an increase of 22%.

Can't say fairer than that. If the British House of Commons was to be staffed on a ratio of one MP per 20,000 of population they'd have something like 2,500 MPs. They are more sensible over there. We are grossly overstaffed. Feather-bedding, I think it's called. THE JUDGES of the Benson and Hedges Press Awards refused to give an award in the humour category for 1982, claiming that standards were too low. Kevin Marron, who entered his Evening Herald column in the game, has complained about the judges' decision, about the standard of judging and about the way the whole thing is run. Proper order. Marron risked being accused of sour grapes. In fact, his column is often very funny, far funnier than some of the tired old crap that has often won in the past in any category (but not as funny as the decision, a couple of years back, to give the Journalist of the Year Award to Thumbsucker Divine). Marron is quite right that there is snobbery at work here. And that the structure and running of the competition is imbecilic. Where he is wrong is in entering the thing in the first place. The competition lacks credibility. Those good journalists who enter it - win or lose - merely help to give some credibility to an affair which does nothing to raise journalistic standards and which encourages mediocrity. Benson and Hedges would be well advised to look again at how their sponsorship money is being squandered. And, for the record: no, Magill didn't enter, and won't.

THE Haughey/Cooney "row" about neutrality is a sham. Both know that they are in no position to resist a serious demand from NATO forces for facilities. Our "allies" would simply take whatever measures they consider necessary in an emergency. The Russians, knowing this, will already have a few 88-20s programmed for Operation Paddy. In the meantime, military components for NATO use are being produced in Ireland with official sanction. Our photos show the production and packaging of microchips at Analog Devices, an American firm based at Raheen Industrial Estate in Limerick. There are two processes in the factory, one "commercial", the other clearly labelled "military". The latter process being of a higher standard. The microchips are designed for sophisticated electronic equipment, some used in F-16 fighter planes. The firm also produces components for the British Ministry of Defence. Analog Devices has a certificate from the Defence Quality Assurance Board of the MOD stating that the firm is registered as complying with requirements specified in "Defence Standard 05-21 and Defcon 2H". The production of such components requires standards of a very high level and such standards are constantly checked. For instance, IBM, which uses some of Analog's components, sends inspectors to the factory about every six weeks. The inspection on behalf of the British MOD is carried out by. the Institute of Industrial Research and Standards, according to a senior technician. Now, what we'd like to know is this: is this a question of Principle or Expe~iency? Let's be having you, Charlie. "THIS is the birthday of George Orwell, who predicted the end of the world in 1984. Was Orwell right? Let's stick around another year and find out." - Laurence John, DJ, Radio Nova, 4.45am. Come back Ted Nealon, all is forgiven. THE Irish June 13 carried a profile of Colm 0 Briain, who jacked up his job as director of the Arts Council to become General Secretary of the Labour Party. Therein it is revealed that "although not a member of the Labour Party, he has long admired it, and worked for it

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in 'backroom' jobs during the last few elections" . Oh,yeah? This, finally, could be the answer to the question that has been exercising the minds of our arty types over the past few years. That question being: exactly why has Charlie Haughey always hated Colm 0 Briain's guts? There was never any obvious answer. There didn't seem, in the past of either men, the material for a feud. Could it be that Charlie Hawkeye knew of this moonlighting by 0 Briain? Could it be that he thought it inappropriate that the director of a semistate body should be licking envelopes

in the back room of an anti-Fianna Fail party? Could this be why Charlie invariably refers to 0 Briain as "that little bollocks"? Or, perhaps the antagonism stems from some slight disagreement on artistic matters. WHAT was the best TV moment in the British election? No doubt. It was Pat Cox passing among the Britishers, doing a vox pop, sticking his microphone in people's faces and asking who they'd vote for. And one lovely red-faced guy looking Pat dead in the eye and answering, "Flanna Fail".

Gene Kerrigan