From a scream to a whisper

When you are watching the news from the Middle East and feeling as low as Tony Blair’s moral standing, David Rovics may be the only medicine, man. A secular shaman with hard-hitting songs for hard-hit people.

One night only at Sandino’s, wide open amidst the smothering warmth to balmy breezes’ blow.  
Kovics isn’t a singer of political songs but an activist whose activity is political singing. He’s recently played Jenin and Nablus.  
I was watching CNN a few weeks back and saw people marching in millions along the canyons of the crystal cities of America, demanding the right to live frugally where their work generates wealth, and the song ringing out on the soundtrack was Rovics’.
Will we open up the borders
Tear down the prison walls
Declare that no one is illegal
Watch the giant as it falls.
Andy Kershaw said: “If Phil Ochs came back to life today, people would say he was the new David Rovics.”
Ochs was the last man deported from Ireland for political reasons, which everyone will agree is a considerable accolade. That was in 1968. Rovics had been born the previous year so as to be ready to take over, in New York City, whence he moved to Berkeley, named after Bishop Berkeley, Dean of Derry, 1724 to 1734, which I’d say entitles him to dual-citizenship of California and Carnhill.
He writes from close-up to the causes he chronicles. Rachel Corrie died under an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in March 2003.
As your Caterpillar tracks
Upon her body pressed
With twenty tons of deadly force
Crushed the bones within her chest,
Could you feel the contours of her face?
He has made it his mission to appear at every summit mobilisation since Seattle. I last heard him on the road outside the Gleneagles Hotel, on the day in July ‘05 when, on the inside, Sir Geldof and Lord Bono were serenading the parasites of the earth as they planned their next murder assault on places where children swallow shrapnel for the crime of throwing rocks.
“David Rovics – just listen,” advises Pete Seeger.
Rovics’ latest CD For The Moment is in all full-hearted record stores now. Else you can download it for free from the ‘net, he won’t mind, davidrovics.com. Savour the voluptuousness of ‘Every Minute Of The Day,’ or the unmediated passion of ‘Falluja’. Salve your anger, shire your brain, save the days ahead.
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Tuned-in folk don’t need to be told that Friel’s Fancy, Radio Ulster, Thursday nights, is where choice music chooses to strut. A Mozart quartet meets a Clash B-side and double-jigs with Dinny McLaughlin. All the same sort of stuff. Nothing unbrilliant admitted. Unless there’s something so interesting we really have to know.
Presenter Eamon Friel also writes lovely songs. And now he’s written a classic. 35 years of violence has left us a legacy of maybe a dozen decent songs. Which isn’t a bad average. Bap Kennedy’s ‘The Shankill And the Falls’, Francie Brolly’s ‘Nor Meekly Serve My Time’, Tommy Sands’ ‘There Were Roses’, Henry McCullough’s ‘Failed Christian’, SLF’s ‘Alternative Ulster’, the ‘Tones’ ‘Happens All The Time’. ‘
But nobody’s ever crafted the likes of ‘Here Is The River’, the title track on Friel’s deeply affecting, unaffected new album.
It’s a post-war song, if you will. About the days after excitement, when the passions which drove the most urgent and fuelled our fierce senses of identity have faded. It’s an anthem for people shaped by the war, shaping up for the amnesiac peace.   
It’s a very common condition in these parts. Never heard it mentioned in song, though. Hardly hear it mentioned at all.
“Older than the ones we walk among,
We’re not old, but darlin’ we’re not young.
Most of them are on a longer lease.
They’ve all grown up, the children of the peace,
And they refuse to recognise the call
Of the faded slogans on the wall.”
I hear it suggested that one reason Friel’s never had major impact has to do with his delivery. ‘Delivery’ may be too strong. He sometimes shrugs and sighs his way through songs which you have to strain your ears to listen to again before it strikes home that no other presentation would work, as well or at all.
There are ten Friel songs on the album, warm, wry, reflective, gentle, words that run with deft balance along the edge of romance, melodies that ache with distinctive simplicity, all swathed in attitudes steeped in humanity.
The ‘King & Queen’ are mountains in Barna, reflecting on the things they’ve seen: Wolfe Tone, Vikings, Amelia Earhart in her frail ‘plane, coffin ships headed west.
“There they are, the King and Queen,
In the place they’ve always been.
They survey the passing scene.
They’re looking on.”
‘The Western Wind’ celebrates the breeze that blows across the land from Mayo, when he spent much of his childhood, to perfume Derry (he can be fanciful) where he lives now and forever.
He looks ‘From My Window’ and contemplates a life:
“Tell me that the dreams are dead too soon,
Tell me that the times are out of tune.
Say I’ve lost my way.
I can only say,
From my window I can see the moon.”
Inner life, outer world, in the end, as the big man from Strabane observed and accepted, there’s always just the two of us.
“Up the street a ragged flag still pinned
On a lamp post flounders in the wind.
No salutes are given or returned,
Burn them all. When all the flags are burned,
All the emblems and the anthems, too,
Then I’ll salute the flag of me and you.”
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The acquittal of Det. John White at Letterkenny Circuit Court on July 27 may have enormous repercussions for Garda chiefs and politicians.
White had been charged with planting a shotgun at a Travellers’ site at Burnfoot in 1998. It took three and a half weeks for the case to be heard, 50 minutes for the jury to throw it out.
But this wasn’t a botched prosecution. If Sgt. White is innocent, it follows there was a conspiracy, involving senior gardai and others, to frame him.
White said afterwards that he had questioned the genuineness of the 1996 ‘confession’ made by Frank McBrearty Jr. to the supposed murder of Richie Barron; that he had told garda investigators sent to probe the McBrearty scandal that confidential solicitor/client meetings in Letterkenny garda station had been bugged; that intelligence which he’d passed on and which could have prevented the Omagh bombing had been ignored for political reasons; that he was framed to prevent all this coming out.
These are allegations as serious as any which prompted the establishment of the Morris Tribunal.
Morris would seem now to have no option but to call Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty, who headed the investigation into the McBrearty case, and Commissioner Noel Conroy, in overall charge of crime investigation and security matters from 1996 to 2003.
Gardai already ‘convicted’ by Morris say they would now welcome an opportunity to throw light on the real extent of wrong-doing in the Donegal Division.
This scandal, if pursued, will lead into political and judical areas.
Has Morris got the stomach for it? Has anyone?b