Black is the colour

I’ll be wearing shamrock next weekend for the first time in more years than I hope you’d believe possible.

The last time I allowed the lapel of any of my exquisitely-cut suits to be ruffled and stained by a clump of pathriotic greenery was back in the days I wore exquisitely-cut suits. Or school uniforms, as us cool dudes called them.
Now I see people with every appearance of sanity through the year scampering in the streets on March 17, shouting ‘Bejaysus!’ and announcing they have a shilleleagh under their arum and a twinkle in their oye and sporting a verdant efflorescence such as would provide a decent habitat for a medium-sized species of marsupial. Truly amazing, the citizens who indulge this demeaning tomfoolery with no sign of saving embarrassment.
But this year I’ll be flaunting – and you are hereby invited to join in the flaunt – a Black Shamrock badge.
March 18 marks the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq which detonated the horror still deepening by the day. The bright prospect advertised by supporters of the war has proven entirely illusory. The dire predictions of anti-war campaigners have been dismayingly vindicated. Not that this turn of events has cooled the ardour of the pro-war commentariat by a Fahrenheit fraction.
The point of the Black Shamrock is to commemorate all who have died in Iraq as a result of Irish collaboration with the US military machine.
There’s another Irish link to reinforce the relevance. Three years ago, final preparations for the assault on Iraq under way, US political and military chiefs availed of the hooley in the White House for rest and recreation. At one point, Secretary of State Colin Powell broke off conversation with a Northern Nationalist leader and briefly left the room to tie up some detail or other. Checking they’d packed enough phosphorous to burn the flesh off a salutary number of Fallujans, perhaps.
Irish leaders stood in line to listen as Bush appealed to them to forswear violence and embrace peace. A moment to render sarcasm, much less satire, redundant..
The Black Shamrock badges, produced by the Derry Anti War Coalition, are set to become the nonpareil fashion accessories of the age. Anybody who wants one – or ten or a hundred or a thousand – check out www.irishantiwar.org or www.chekov.org/shamrock/.
Or make your own.

We discussed the widening gap between Catholics and Protestants as we marched up the Shankill and down the Falls the other week.
I’d say we had a more enthusiastic reception on the Shankill. One shop had Diana Ross’s ‘Mr. Postman’ at blast volume through an outside p.a.
Most of the marchers were post workers on strike. The Shankill was where the stoppage had started. A sorter had been suspended on the spot for a trivial alleged offence. Within hours, there were 800 out across the city.
Predictions that it would all speedily fall apart along communal lines proved unfounded. So, a week in, we processed in rowdy array from the city centre picket-line up the one road, across the peaceline at Lanark Way and back down by the other route.
Readers will have heard in recent weeks of the gloomy prospect facing the North as the communities move apart. True enough, as far as issues arising from the Agreement are concerned. But you’d think that academics and analysts who agonise over the division and affect concern that it should be healed would be hailing the unity of the strikers’ march and examining its anatomy to identity the factors which had dissolved thoughts of difference and melded the marchers together?
But not at all.
Lanark Way may not ring loud bells. But you’ve probably seen it. It’s the interface which launched a thousand riotous assemblies, the boundary-line which the Orange Order perennially wants to cross to walk down the Springfield Road. When the PSNI weighed in to prevent the Order forcing its way through last September, something approaching an uprising erupted in Protestant areas.
So here we were at Lanark Way, indiscriminatingly applauding speakers from the Communications Workers’ Union, Sinn Fein and the Progressive Unionists, not to mention, although I will, myself.
The lesson is that the alternative to communal division lies in people coming together not in a dreamy sense of fuzzy oneness but in a conscious fight for clear shared objectives.
The academics and commentators, the entirety of the ‘The Agreement is the only show in town’ crowd, want a settlement based on both sides settling down. But the best way of securing peace is for all to rise up together.
No need to be starry-eyed, of course. It would be wrong to pretend there wasn’t the odd anxious moment. I made much in my Lanark Way remarks of the arrogance of the Royal Mail manager on the Shankill who had presumed to confiscate a worker’s diary to check what he’d been writing. As I finished, a sizable chap with an ominous tattoo approached:
‘A wee word, McCann...’ Sniff. ‘It’s not a diary. It’s a Londondiary.’

There’s a fellow on the RTE News saying that most of the hooligans who disgraced the nation by rioting in Dublin on the day of Willie’s Frazer’s march will be tracked down and brought to book, because so many are easily identifiable on video footage.
Oh, I don’t know. I recall the last major riot in Dublin city centre, on May Day a couple of years back, when film as well as video footage appeared clearly to identify men in garda uniforms out of control and beating seven varieties of shit out of cowering citizens. Ministers and TDs took turns on the television to tell us that all this evidence would be assiduously examined and charges brought where appropriate against the ruffians responsible. Everybody equal before the law and all that.
But then, astonishingly, it emerged that the evidence gatherers could identify only a handful of hooligans from the sharp-focused pictures. And no guard on duty on the day was able to help with any information regarding this handful of hooligans. Not one of scores of gardai who’d been on the spot responded to an appeal from the garda complaints body. None had seen anything untoward.
If they couldn’t recognise one another then, how are they going to identify strangers now?
The riot was the main item on Questions and Answers two days later. Jeffrey Donaldson, Susan McKay, Jack O’Connor of Siptu, some nondescript from the Murdoch press and a couple of clown TDs made a show of disagreeing over this or that aspect of the event, then lined up in succession to say the same thing on the main matter .
Disgraceful events, sectarian thugs, blah, gardai not to blame, freedom of speech, blah, rigour of law, true Republicanism a tolerant creed, bah, blah, blah.
What a neat and simple world these people inhabit. It’s never occurred to them that their outlook, put into practice by authority, is at the root of the problem they pontificate about.
Complex, contradictory things, riots. But I follow Orwell, who chanced into Barcelona as Communist Party police battled for control of the streets with young workers and knew instantly what side he was on. Me, too.