Part of “blogging” is thinking up a good, catchy headline. After all blogging is not a serious business.
I have a bad cold today. Mrs FitzjamesHorse went off to work today at about 7.30am. I waved her off as usual……at the risk of sounding “corny”, the last thing we always say is “I love you”. Sometimes I feel guilty at retirement. I am of course older than Mrs FJH. Indeed she would say that I am much much much older. She has a few years to go before she gets to retire.
So as usual she left for work….7.30am. And I went back to bed to sleep off the cold.
I didnt get up until around 11.15am……..switched on the BBC News. Maybe find something to blog about……Manchester United, Jimmy Savile, whatever.
And there was a familiar stretch of the M1 Motorway, where a prison officer had been murdered………..at around the same place and time when my wife was going on to the motorway.
As it turns out, Mrs FJH knew nothing about this until she got to work. She will of course have a detour coming home.
Depressing. The murderers car was found abandoned in Lurgan. A helicopter is overhead. And there is something depressingly familiar likely to happen. Arrests….low scale rioting….People will be charged. Or released. Or detained in custody. And then (months later) released. Or acquiited. Or found guilty. And in a nihilistic way they will see it all as an occupational hazard.
Depressing. Very depressing.
Keeping An Eye On the Czar of Russia 
It is indeed depressing. And futile. It also emphasises why it is important to provide a forum in which to discuss things rather than to resort to what is ultimately self defeating stupidity. Well said Mr Fitz
I’ve been feeling strange about this all day. I’m sure my reaction is very different to those 20 or so years younger than I. Mine is a reaction, or underreacton, that is conditioned by 30 years of abnormality that’s so corrupted that a late night police warning has the perverse comforting effect that a sherbert dip has.
The usual tired reaction has begun, the same pointless tones and syntax that echoed around my parent’s TV as I played in the living room as a child. In all honesty, I cannot feel the outrage that I am fully aware that I should and I cannot even project myself in to the mind of those younger people who have been blessed to have missed those dark decades.
I remember being in the pub with my friends and then girlfriend. She was from Laois and just happened to be a clinical psychologist and we were discussing events in our youth in W Belfast and as we laughed about riots, shootings and bombings we were caught up in, she declared that our heads were screwed. Feeling what I do today, she may well have been right.
My condolences to Mr Black’s family and friends. It sounds like he was a genuinely nice man. I hope they find comfort in whichever way they seek it,
This is a brilliant comment and brave..It says the “unsayable”. It is about a coping mechanism. Certainly at the height of the Troubles when News bulettins on the radio began with “a man was shot dead..” or “a bomb has exploded….” by coping mechanism was that it could not have been me….I was not in British Army, UDR, RUC, IRA etc and I did not drink so rarely in bars and never likely to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It is both coping mechanism and de-humanising……and yes a part of me (the de-humanising part) rationalises that this was a prison officer…and the hurt was limited.
Thats the people we became.
And thats what I hate most about the Troubles.
Seconded. Sharp, truthful, brave and pointed. I can add nothing.
Part of the problem with not having any reconcilliation with the past is that we dont know what, on reflection the republican movement SF/IRA(I use the term descriptively nor pejoratively) feels about the killing of prison guards during the non-ceasefire period – when they were ‘legitimate targets’.
Assuming that their view today is in line with their view then (and nothing said by SF would suggest otherwise) it puts SF in a somewhat difficult position in relation to their condemnation of these type of political killings.
Looking at SF statements after such killings I think reveals their difficulty in two ways. Firstly they always speak of mircogroups(suggesting lack of support/mandate) therby differentiating the new IRAs (the version 3s) from the Provos (version 2.1s) and secondly there is always the insistence that these actions by the version 3s – dont work or are futile – rather than (understandably) condemning from a moral perspective the shooting of prison officers becuause your members are subject to alleged ill-treatment.
We must also rembemer that the version 2.1s have the support of the majority of Nats (including myself) even though they killed many prison officers – and to be fair to Unionists this must be quite difficult to come to terms with – particulalry as they see no disticnction between the version 2.1s and the version 3s.
I think these are very fair points Sammy.
I think that no strand of political thinking wants to …or maybe just incapable…..of coming to terms with “dissidents”.
I tend to think of the “dissidents” as being the IRA of 1956-1962…..and modern Sinn Féin as being Fianna Fáil of the same period.
SF today and FF then have prominent members who were in the armed struggle but somehow see it as “different”.
The peculiarity is maybe that so called “liberal unionists” have more difficulty understanding it than DUP types.
Curiously some even blame the SDLP.
Obviously, we will all point out that the provos killed warders too but on a broader point, they may need reminding that they too were dissidents. Also, as with today’s dissidents, there was an arguable period when the were needed but the time of their usefulness had passed.
That said, I am not removing the absolute responsiblity of the British and NI governements, unionist politicians and loyalists in their part in prolonging the ‘troubles’.
This is true also.
Arguably the 1916 leaders were dissidents. And perhaps modern dissidents think wrongly that they are in some way the same kinda people.
As regards Sinn Féin…and the (particuarly early 1970s) IRA I have tended to acknowledge that the only truthful answer for a person living in West Belfast to “did you support them?” is “sometimes”.
A simple “Yes” or “No” would be dishonest. But arguably in 1970 at the time of the Falls Curfew or St Matthews they were “mainstream” in peoples minds and probably with the Fall of Stormont (spring 1972) they became increasingly dissident (support decreasing) right upto the Hunger Strikes.
That would be my honest assessment.
Agreed FJH. I saw the provos and their supporting group in the early 70’s and how they helped and protected people in vunerable areas, including my own. I well recall how they organised assistance for the ‘refugee; Catholics that were put out of Rathcoole and how they took on the tartan gang in my area.
But then, there were responses that begat responses, that fed rather than starved the fire and then came the mire that have never seen anyone adequately account. There again how could they when so much was fabrication and dark magic which is only beginning to hit he light, emerging from castigations of myth and heresay?
Oh…..re 1916. It always reminds me off Táin bó Chuailgné, where Ireland was asleep. It would be hard to think of how such a sacrfice but the subservience in the greater part of today’s Ireland to the banking crisis maybe gives a clue. Hell, look at the savagery which the new sate visited upon those men of true conviction who who would not accept the treaty.
I think there’s a song about that 🙂