I have had several engagements on Twitter with various people concerning the juvenile goings on in Belfast City Council. It was ever thus. I wrote about the general tenor of Belfast City Council earlier.

During one of these engagements I pointed out that the red saltire on the Union Flag referred to as the Cross of St Patrick has little connection with this island and is in fact an English creation.

It is frequently trotted out as the ‘Irish’ part of the Union flag, but the St Patrick’s Cross itself was invented by George III in 1783, following his establishment of the Chivalric Order of St Patrick. It is as Irish in origin as St Patrick himself. He was by various accounts Cornish or Welsh. He also drove the snakes out of Ireland according to legend. Were there any here in the first place I dare ask?

One of my correspondents on Twitter, a DUP Councillor called Lee Henderson very helpfully advised me that the St Patrick’s Cross was used earlier on Coinage Maps to do with Ireland ergo it is an Irish symbol. A red cross on a white background? Surely some genius prior to 1783 may have already used this device to signify something. I beg to differ.

This is a DUP man arguing with me over the Irish or non-Irishness of a symbol. In the action of making this assertion is he asserting his own Irishness? In denying that it is an Irish symbol am I undermining my own Irishness? In my mind all the time is a-rattling around Seamus Heaney’s ‘Be advised my passport’s green. . .’.

But there is a particular obsession in these parts with flags. In Portstewart this summer past, the local tribe asserted their territory by hoisting a very large Union Flag right in the middle of the Diamond.

It was unnecessarily large. It was a statement. It was a “look at this big flag and take it down if you dare” Statement. There it fluttered and flew proudly all through the marching season. The flag of their Union.

A few people mumbled about that bloody flag and threatened to make a few calls to ask could it be removed when the marching season had come and long gone. Still it flew, billowing out, telling all and sundry, all the golfers and tourists and day trippers, that this was a red white and blue town. I’m sure a few of them stopped and wondered. But sure what the hell matter a few tourists, especially if they’re from the South. Don’t want them back anyway even with their Euros.

Then along came a good autumn storm from in off the sea. The sort that can blow a man off his bike; wreak havoc with the washing line; hurl your flowerpots and shrubs up the street and send bins slewing across the road.

The flag in the diamond already slightly bedraggled from the long damp summer had a bad time with the storm. It slipped one of its bindings and flew crazily in the wind, no longer flag-like but denuded, tattered, like a dishcloth on a clothesline attached with only the one peg. The edges frayed and tattered as it jerked and shuddered in the Atlantic wind. And then, when the wind died, there it hung, limp, demoralised. Spent.

The people that put it up were concerned about the statement made when erected, but when the standard fell it made an even stronger statement. There was no-one there to save its blushes. It was a frayed and torn shadow of its former self.

Eventually it disappeared. Perhaps it was put out of its misery.

And no doubt another one will appear next time, perhaps bigger and stronger. And it will billow and dip and flutter all summer. And maybe if the owners care about the flag as much as they claim to, they will take it down a bit earlier. Before it becomes nothing more than a ragged dishcloth and a symbol of dis-Union.

If you remember the eighties in Belfast, you probably wish you weren’t there. We slummed it up in Student Land in South Belfast drinking, throwing beds out the window, and chasing women with varying degrees of success.

But the real craic was down town in what Mairtin O Muilleoir memorably termed the Dome of Delight. Post Anglo-Irish Agreement Belfast was a bitter oul bastard of a place. The bitterness in fact was palpable. These were the days. Through the late eighties and into the early nineties, when the Troubles were literally in their Death throes. Increasingly desperate tit for tat shooting and bombings. It was shite.

I remember well the aftermath of the Gibraltar shootings and a subsequent public meeting in Queen’s Union. One of the IRA personnel who had been shot was Mairead Farrell, a former prisoner at Armagh during the first Hunger Strike and at the time of her death a first year student at Queen’s. The atmosphere was electric. And poisonous.

Bit like things down at the City Hall where the central characters were boys like Herbie Ditty, Jim Rodgers, Mairtin O Muilleoir, Tommy Patton, George Seawright and co. Mayoral stints by the likes of Sammy Wilson brought great colour to the place. It was round this time that photographs of Sammy emerged cavorting round some field with a young lady, naked as the day he was born. The facial hair is still the same, dunno about elsewhere. God help her wit my mother remarked at the time disgusted not so much that the young lady was naked but that she was with Sammy.

O Muilleoir was one of the first Sinn Fein Councillors to sit on the council and there was none of the détente of later years. When he went to speak his DUP opponents including Rhonda Paisley, once Belfast’s Mayoral Consort would gulder No Surrender, howl abuse and sing various tribal ditties.

Herbie for his part rather bewilderingly found himself Mayor of Belfast for a year. It was a great Norn Iron joke at the expense of all the industrialists and business tycoons queuing up to invest here. Not. Anyone who turned up would have wondered why the Village idiot was in charge of the Asylum. Herbie drew great praise in some quarters but mostly head shaking and despair when he refused to meet the Mayor of Dublin. This was a man who once claimed to have gone into public life to stop Catholics getting jobs.

In the early nineties my job meant that I attended a fair few receptions in the City Hall. To say it was a cold house for Catholics/Nationalists would be an understatement. It was positively Arctic. The marble halls were choc full of Unionist hagiography bedecked in the Union Flag with life size oil paintings of every Unionist Mayor. At that stage there hadn’t been many nationalist or republican mayors so the hue was distinctly red white and blue.

As a citizen of the city, and one who was in employment attracting overseas and particularly North American visitors on historical and heritage visits, it was embarrassing and intimidating. Hanging limply out the back was the famous Belfast Says No sign. Looking back, what a fucking moronic signal that was to the solitary Martian that would have landed in Donegall Place and quickly left again for the friendlier climes of a Siberian Gulag, North Korea or Pinochet’s Chile.

If you want to catch up on reminiscences from this time, read O Muilleoir’s book. You’ll think it is a work of fiction. But it’s not. Mairtin himself recently returned to the Dome of Delight after a period of absence doing something better with his time.

He must have felt it was just like the old days when the Unionists walked out the other day in objection to a sign in Irish that said Nollaig Shona Duit. That’s Happy Christmas as gaeilge for all you non-speakers of the leprechaun language. The exodus happened during a debate on diversity. Not being an avid City Council watcher (we have enough rarified discussions in our local chamber) I came to this one late. But, as one Twitter correspondent observed:

“the union jack flies all year round and an irish language Christmas greeting is met with small minded bigotry.”

I remember during the debate at Queen’s after Gibraltar, a guy in a Fairport Convention tee shirt with an English accent stood up and said “why can’t we all just get along with one another.” He nearly got lynched by both sides.

Without wishing to sound like him, and I don’t really like Fairport Convention either, surely it is time a few people wised the f*** up here. There are plenty of other things to be getting on with in Belfast and elsewhere rather than revisit the dark, blackly humorous, but still dark days of the Dome of Delight.

Otherwise lads, let’s break out the old Belfast Says No sign and just go for it.

This weekend Derry becomes the Halloween capital of Ireland.

Ironically in a City best known as the epitome of the Gerrymander, the home of the civil rights movement, Bloody Sunday, and two Nobel Laureates it is in the bacchanalian celebration of the ancient Celtic Festival of Samhain that it has gained most renown. The Festival is a City Marketing dream.

My brother in law acerbically referred to it as the largest underage drinking festival in Ireland and, a proud Derry man himself, observed how the majority of the male population of Derry appear to relish in dressing up in women’s clothes come Halloween. He also remarked, that not any old thing will do – they all seem to have something stylish that fits, with a nice comfortable fitting bra to underwire the whole affair. Maybe it is all those years of having two names, the city dwellers are in touch with both their feminine sides.

Some of the sights you see in the City in Fancy Dress are eyeboggling not to say jaw dropping. Others very funny. A couple of years ago as we made our way back up towards the car, the students of Magee were making their way down to the fleshpots of the city, plastered they were, to man and woman. One particularly hefty doll lumbered towards us, dressed not so much as Tinkerbell as Tinker Big Ben.

Strapped to her back were a pair of ludicrously small wings. As she passed stocious I remarked to her you’ll need a bigger pair of wings than that if you want to get off the ground. She mumbled incoherently and staggered on. No doubt she found warm and penetrative embrace in the arms of some young Derry fella dressed as a big nurse called Wendy with matching bra.

The city puts on a great show for Halloween. Yesterday for example with Cáit, Leo and Peter, I attended a show where a character called Ron Airhead inserted himself fully into a large orange balloon. My son Peter was greatly agitated that he wouldn’t be able to get out. He did of course, but it is great that in the forthcoming City of Culture one can watch such vacuous but entertaining nonsense.

Tomorrow night the City Council will detonate thousands of pounds worth of fireworks from barges in the middle of the Foyle, watched by thousands of Fancily dressed folks perched along the banks of the River, standing on the new Peace Bridge and hanging around Guildhall Square. After, the families will disperse home leaving the party people to drink on into the night.

Angela’s friend Elaine once hooked up with a fella on Halloween night whilst dressed as a petite red devil. She had to make her way home early in the morning still dressed in red carrying her little fork with which perhaps she snared her prey. A passing street cleaner laughed when he saw her totter along high heeled and red devilish-sheepish and started to sing ‘After the Ball is Over’.

After the weekend finishes, and the ball is indeed over, it will be back to normal in Derry, whatever that is. To the outsider like myself, married into the city and its people it is never normal. But that is part of its charm and attraction. And that has made all the difference.

According to figures in the Irish Independent this morning, the turn out for the election of Uachtarán na hÉireann was less than 50%. We will get the exact figure later today when the votes are counted.

That means that one in two people registered to vote don’t care sufficiently about the role of Head of State or who fulfills that position to actually exercise their franchise. Given that a proportion of the population of the Irish people will not have been registered to vote through address changes, failure to re enrol on the electoral register, it means that less than one in two people will have voted for the President. What does that tell you?

The ‘winner’ therefore will likely be elected on say optimistically 35% of that vote. That is in fact a fairly paltry mandate when you extrapolate that out to include the entire population.

In countries such as the Republic of Ireland, the impact of a low turn out is ameliorated slightly by the use of the Proportional Representation Single Transferable Vote. The downside of this electoral system is that many people do not understand that they should vote down the card in order that transfers work properly.

In regards to the election result unfolding today, after all the vitriol, abuse and muck raking, the reality is that after a short period, few people will be in the slightest bit interested what the President does. He/she will make their regular appearances at Rugby internationals and All Ireland Finals. There may be the occasional pronouncement or other but in reality the position of Uachtarán na hÉireann whilst constitutionally relevant is largely irrelevant.

In a country where politicians have suffered from a serious loss of credibility through fault of their own, the Republic of Ireland has completed a Presidential election that has highlighted all that is bad about the country.

It has allowed all sorts of pustules to burst open releasing an infectious and disgusting torrent of poison and invective.

At the end of the process the country will get the person that most of the minority vote for. Then, they will all move on to the next moment of national soul searching.

I for one can’t wait.

Celtic Tiger Penis Soup anyone? I hear it is recuperative and much sought after in the East. It certainly puts some fire in your balls.

As the Celtic Tiger ceased to prowl and instead lay emasculated and humiliated, we were forced to take on board the truly awful implications of gombeenery, corruption, bankruptcy and poverty.

Everyone has been burned.

I myself did some work for a guy who had been declared bankrupt and left tradesmen unpaid. Guess what, in my naivety, I now remain partially unpaid. Stupide fucker me, serves me right. I won’t pursue the matter. As with many things in life I have ended up the sadder and wiser fool.

The recent election campaign has shown the contempt in parts of the Southern media for the people in the North. We have more in common with the local unionists who must be taken aback at the vitriol and abuse from the forty shades of green towards Martin McGuinness.

This version of revisionism states categorically, confidently and ultimately wrongly that the Provisionals were at the root of the mayhem we experienced here. It absolves the British Establishment of responsibility, likewise the RUC and UDR, loyalist paramilitaries and the cheerleaders and godfathers who sent people out to do their bidding costing lives in the process.

One positive thing that the so called peace process has brought to the surface is an increasing accepting of responsibility across the Islands as more and more people have the humility and sense to say I accept my share of the blame.

Not so in the South. Where commentators have forgotten their own antecedents. Where Gay Mitchell, self-styled tormentor in chief of McGuinness, has forgotten the genesis of his own party. Micheal Collins, one of the greatest ever Irishmen, up to his elbows in blood, a hero of Old Ireland.

We have had a succession of them. The media pundits, the ordinary people, the vitriol and ignorance is shocking. I reserve the right of people to have their voice but when it is offensive I say no.

What has emerged is that the population voted for the Anglo Irish Agreement through the referendum, but they didn’t really know what they were enacting. So Martin McGuinness might be good enough for us up here, but not for the people down there.

So now, a shame on both your houses. James Joyce was right. As are the thousands of young people forced away from Ireland in what is our inevitable national condition.

Exile is good. Who in their right mind would want to live in this God forsaken place? No country for old men.

Let the she-pig at it.

Reactoblog

I don’t know whether there is such a thing as block but certainly in a creative sense it can be hard to constantly invent something to write about. Having said that, I nailed on a Christmas campaign theme for a fashion client today. Myself and Fehin are probably more on the same wavelength than ever before. It is a strange alchemy but it works. If the client runs with it, I’ll maybe post it here. And fuck it, I think it’s good. But in the case of this particular client I can’t get inside their head in the same way as others.

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Working also on an old long standing job. My kitchens, I have been working with Lairdo for BA for several years now. And again we seem to get the stuff right almost by second nature. Primarily I suppose because they are a very good client to work with, open to ideas, there’s a good relationship there. We have done some very creative work and they like the approach we bring to design and copy. I get a free reign to throw copy ideas at them and they mostly are happy to run with them. Just now I’m chasing my tail on one big job, trying to produce a patchwork based on what I have already done. It looks like I’ll have to put it in the ditch and start again.

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Reading. I was amused to read that the book club I attended for while had taken on poetry as the assignment for a particular month. The book selected was a collection of the usual suspects and indeed one of my erstwhile colleagues was peddling the virtues of Gerald Manley Hopkins to some of the younger girls of our camogie team during one of our road trips. Firstly I wouldn’t inflict Hopkins on anyone, there are more accessible poets around even moving beyond the Seamus Heaney et al set of Irish writers. In the last year I have discovered Norman MacCaig, Paul Durcan and Charles Bukowksi. That in addition to rereading the likes of Yeats, primarily for work purposes, Derek Mahon and Wordsworth. I find that for writing, poetry is by far the best stimulus along with music. I dread however to think what might emerge were I relying on a diet of Hopkins. Note to self to read Omeros by Derek Walcott. Note to others try it also, great stuff. Put that in your book club!

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I watched a documentary about U2 the other night. I admit to having gone form being a fan of their music to finding it tiresome. I put that down almost entirely to the pomposity and self importance of Bono (or Bonio as my former boss used to call him) The Edge and Larry Mullan Jr. Certainly they put on one hell of a show and if playing in Flowerfield or the Crescent I might go down to watch, but otherwise I’ll gently pass.

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Finally for this particular episode, I have watched and listened dismayed at the response of commentators and pundits in the south to the entry in the presidential race of Martin McGuinness. I don’t think Martin has handled his campaign that well – more attention should have been given to prepping him for the incessant and inevitable questions he would face. But no-one perhaps could have envisioned the non stop vitriol coming from every quarter, much of it not so much anti Sinn Fein as anti Northern and highly subjective. When probed many southern commentators and mouthpieces have little or no understanding about affairs up here. Therefore as empty vessels, the noise is deafening.

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