The Politics of THE TWELVE

In recent days I have been answering questions about the politics of THE TWELVE. I suppose that was inevitable, given the nature of the story, its setting, and its characters. As I stated in an earlier post, I never intended THE TWELVE as a polemic. It was just a thriller that happened to be set against Northern Ireland's peace process. But everything in Northern Ireland is political, so there's no escaping the issues that have dogged this country since its inception.

I won't go into the background of the novel's setting; there's plenty of material out there on the Troubles. A lot of the information online is inaccurate, substituting fact for opinion, speculation and omitted truth. One only need read a few pages on Wikipedia to see how distorted some of the truth is, but if you read enough, you should get an idea. Revisionism is something we'll have to live with here, as people on all sides cherry pick history to present the version best suited to their own agendas.

Many will use these narrow windows on the past to justify the actions of certain individuals and organisations, whether they are politicians, security force personnel or paramilitaries. If there's a political thrust to THE TWELVE, it's this: the violence was never justifiable. Republicans may argue that armed struggle was the only way to achieve change in an unjust society. I would argue that the use of violence held back societal reform by decades, while the republican leadership used the blood of this country to grease its way to power. Loyalists may argue that their actions were necessary to protect their people from the aggression of insurgents and a hostile neighbour state. I would argue that the greatest threat to ordinary loyalist people is those same loyalist paramilitaries who to this day continue to leech off their own communities.

What I fear history will overlook is that whatever social conditions provided the kindling for the Troubles, it was the personal agendas of individuals on both sides of the divide that made the spark to ignite the conflict. Those individuals created and perpetuated a war to satisfy their greed for power, status and wealth, and when the war became untenable, they reaped the rewards of the peace process that followed. I don't think that's news to anybody here in Northern Ireland, yet we go out and vote for them election after election anyway.

A point that was raised by two of my beta readers when they reviewed early drafts of the novel was this: why did the ghosts (if they are indeed ghosts, rather than figments of the protagonist's guilt-driven imagination) have no names? The reason for this was simple. The victims of the Troubles, mostly civilians despite what paramilitary apologists would have you believe, are by and large nameless. I'm sure most of us can recall some names, perhaps from particularly notorious cases, or maybe people we actually knew who were caught up in the conflict. I would struggle to name more than a handful of people who lost their lives here. The rest have been washed away by time to become just numbers, lost among more than 3500 such people, now remembered only by those who loved them. Sadly, that number continues to grow in our supposedly peaceful utopia.

A line from John Hewitt's The Bloody Brae is quoted by one of THE TWELVE's characters: God forgives all soldiers. Perhaps that's true. This society certainly seems to have done so, but more out of political expediency than compassion for those who were manipulated into committing terrible sins by the politicians of all hues now dividing up the cake at Stormont. And I, like everybody else, can live with that. It seems a price worth paying if it means my children, should I ever have any, can grow up in a happier place than I did. It doesn't mean it's without pain, though.

Like I said, THE TWELVE was not written to make any political point. It was written as an entertainment, a thriller that will hopefully keep you turning pages into the small hours. If it achieves that simple purpose, then I will be very happy. But all fiction has themes, whether overtly expressed or not. And whether I like it or not, these themes are present in the novel. You can make of them what you will, because really, I just want to scare the crap out of you.

Recent Events in Northern Ireland

I've just returned from a fantastic trip to New York, a city so far removed from where I grew up in every conceivable way that it seemed like some make-believe place when I was a kid. I met some wonderful people, ate food whose names I can't remember, and felt like Jimmy the Biscuit because I gave a pretty waitress a stupidly generous tip (there was drink taken, you understand, and she flirted very well).

In all this splendour, I checked the news from home. Two soldiers shot dead over the weekend as they took delivery of pizza, and the Polish immigrant workers who delivered the pizza were injured (the Real IRA, who carried out the attack, claim justification because the delivery men were servicing agents of the British state - you couldn't make it up). On arriving back in my home town I heard further news that a police officer had been murdered last night as he attended an emergency call from a distressed woman.

Quite a come down.

Gerard Brennan expressed it very well here. And that feeling is shared by the vast majority of people here. But the vast majority isn't enough. There has been much debate over whether or not the actions of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, republican or loyalist, could be understood (or even condoned) given the social, political and historical context of the times. I won't go into that other than to say I know where I stand, and anyone who reads THE TWELVE/THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST will be left in little doubt of my feelings on the issue.

But today, this week, this month, this year, this decade, this century, there can be no case argued for this kind of mindless killing. And if somehow you can make a case for it, then you are a sad, twisted individual, and you have my pity.

The Glorious, and Sometimes Inglorious, Twelfth

This rather lengthy post was inspired by one at Crime Scene NI.

One day in the Northern Irish calendar is more divisive than any other. A few words of explanation for my American friends: The 12th of July is a national holiday in Northern Ireland that commemorates the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic forces of King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Yep, more than three hundred years have passed, and we still haven't let it go.

The day is marked by parades throughout Northern Ireland, organised by Orange Lodges, featuring marching bands, much flag waving, and general bluster. When I was a little boy, the Twelfth was one of the highlights of the year, bettered only by Christmas and Easter. It's hard to describe the feeling of a big bass drum being hammered to within an inch of destruction, the way it pounds your chest, along with the crackle of side drums, and the piercing melodies of dozens of not-quite-in-tune flutes. If you're walking along, you can't help but fall into step with the music.

My grandfather was a proud Orangeman. We would stand by the roadside, waiting for my Granda to march along, all decked out in his best black suit, his bowler hat, and his orange sash. When he finally appeared, striding crisply in step with his brethren, we would wave and shout. He would give us a nod and a wink, and we would cheer.

As a small boy, I had no notion of the politics behind any of this. It was simply a day out with my family. It was about noise and spectacle, bags of sweets bought from the stalls, and if I was very, very lucky, a can of Coke. And maybe a plastic toy drum so me and my mates could make our own parade around the council estate I grew up on.

A few years later, things began to change. As I became more aware of the world around me, I started to understand the politics of this annual event. Sometimes the big day, and the smaller parades leading up to it, ended in violence. Sometimes a parade's drunken hangers-on would go on the rampage, sometimes the parade would come under attack from others. My grandfather got caught up in a scuffle at The Tunnel area of Portadown. In Armagh, my older sister found herself sheltering in a phone box while the police baton-charged a parade's supporters.

Quite abruptly, what I saw as a time of family celebration turned into something else entirely. Something much less wholesome. Looking back, I don't know if the change was internal or external. Did the nature of the holiday itself change, or was it my perception of it? Either way, by the time I was in my teens I had no interest in the Twelfth, in parades, or Orangeism. I was too busy playing in a rock band and dealing with general teen angst (acne and social awkwardness, in other words) to bother with any of that old guff - though my band was allowed to use the local Orange hall to practice.

There was a brief window of a couple of years where kids my age just didn't care about the old sectarian divisions. We mixed freely, Protestant and Catholic, going to the same bars and hangouts. Religion didn't matter much at all. We were all born around the same time as the Troubles (I entered the world just a few days after Bloody Sunday), we had never known peace, and we were all sick of it. It was someone else's war, and they could piss off with their guns and their bombs and their hate.

Strangely, it was the peace process of the 90s that seemed to reverse that. By around 1995, when I was in my early twenties, I was acutely aware that kids then in their mid-to-late teens had reverted to the old hatreds. While ceasefires came and went, and came again, and politicians wrestled with an intransigent electorate and each other, people on the streets ran back to the trenches. As soon as there was meaning to the conflict, that there was some sort of end in sight, the stakes were suddenly raised, and it showed itself most clearly during marching season.

In a nutshell, for the benefit of my American friends who have read this far, the whole issue of Orangeism and parades became a hot potato in the 90s. Unfortunately, the Orange Order and the leaders of Unionism had the media and political savvy of a pissed off chimpanzee. As elements on both sides of the divide sought to exploit tensions, pushing their own violent agendas, the grey men of Protestant politics stumbled and blundered into every trap. With deep dismay, we watched Northern Ireland slip into near anarchy for several days one summer, not unlike the LA riots sparked by the Rodney King incident. And what caused all this? The Twelfth. Some saw the marching season as a celebration of Protestant culture in Ireland, a demonstration of faith and civil liberty. Others saw it as triumphalism, a public display of sectarian hatred, an imposition of an outdated tradition on the very communities that organisation excluded, and not much better than the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses.

As is the way with life, the truth is somewhere in between. There is sectarianism involved, to claim otherwise is foolish. Sectarianism is part of the fabric of Northern Ireland, always has been, always will be. It's also present in the annual St. Patrick's Day celebrations, and the trappings of the Gaelic Athletic Association. But a mindset we must move away from here is the one that sees the expression of someone else's culture as a threat. If an institution is pro-Protestant, must it follow that it is anti-Catholic? Should Protestant people feel uncomfortable with the GAA's stridently nationalistic Irish dogma? Can the Twelfth or St. Patrick's Day ever shake off their political aspects, and be seen as simple celebrations of Britishness or Irishness? Truthfully, I don't think so. It's human nature to see the world in terms of Them-and-Us; it's a hard-wired survival instinct that dates back to when we depended on our tribe for survival. Rightly or wrongly, we will always regard anything that benefits Them as being harmful to Us.

But things are changing. There were minor riots in Portadown and Belfast last night, and there will doubtless be more tonight, but by-and-large it has been a peaceful marching season. The Orange Order are genuinely trying to bring the Twelfth back to its former glory as a family day of celebration. There will always be some who object to the Order's very existence, that can't get past their own prejudices about their neighbours (and still believe such ridiculous myths as an Orangeman can be expelled for attending a Catholic religious ceremony, as Wikipedia wrongly states), and will never view the Twelfth as anything other than a bigot's holiday. These entrenched views on either side of the community will never be erased, though perhaps bitter Protestants and Catholics will unite against those pesky Polish and Lithuanian immigrants who keep taking all the low-paying manual labour we can't be arsed doing ourselves.

But, back to the point: As things improve here, and our tolerance for each other, if not our new arrivals, continues to evolve, perhaps the Twelfth will indeed return to the big day out I knew as a little boy. Maybe some day, when I have children of my own, I will be able to take them to a parade so they can feel that big bass drum pound their chests. Perhaps there won't be any hatred in it, or directed towards it. And perhaps I won't feel ashamed of the awful things that have happened because of it in the past. Perhaps it'll just be noise and spectacle, and bags of sweets bought from stalls, and toy plastic drums. I really hope so.

A Risky Strategy - Word Count 57,406 (wp) 71,000 (pr)

I took a bit of a chance with my work in progress. So far, the entire novel has been told from two points of view, and as described in my last post, both those characters have been to the extremes and we've finally seen their true nature. A couple of events have occured which prettly clearly signalled the end of Act 2 and I wanted to start Act 3 with a distinct shift.

So, 300 pages into the manuscript, I introduced a new POV character.

Hmmm. He gets a whole chapter to himself, in his own world, away from the rest of the plot (up until its last few paragraphs, that is). Now, he's not an unknown character. Other characters have spoken of him, mostly in fearful tones. He's kind of become a bogey man and he was always going to be introduced into the action at this stage, but it was only really when I sat down to write this chapter that I decided to put him front and centre.

I hope it works in the overall arc of the plot. I hope it gives things a kick in the arse just when the reader thought they'd been to the limit. The chapter starts in a pretty gruesome way, and it would almost work as a stand alone short story. I really like it. I just hope it works.

In other news ...

News indeed. It was a big day here in Norn Iron. To quote Vince Vaughn in Swingers, "Baby's all growed up." Yep, our overpaid leeches finally got their arses in gear and formed a government. This is good news, so long as it sticks. It also adds greater weight to some of the themes in my work in progress. When this draft is done, I'll be going back to make some tweaks that reflect our interesting times.

And I got some other good news, but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to mention it...