Keeping It In The Family

I wonder if Martin McGuinness managed to have a shufti at Fintan O’Toole’s “A History of Ireland in 100 Objects” in the Irish Times on October 8th before addressing a conference of potential foreign investors at Hillsborough Castle two days later?

Martin earned chuckles and applause from the global gathering of profit-hunters when he recalled an overnight stay at the Castle during negotiations on policing and parades in 2010 when he was allocated the Queen’s bedroom - well, the room reserved for Her Majesty on visits to her official Northern Ireland residence.
Much was made in subsequent coverage of the improbability of the sleep-over arrangement, given the vast gulf between Martin’s and Her Maj’s backgrounds.
But how vast is the gulf, really?
Fintan’s latest Object was a rough-hewn chair located just north of Dungannon in the shade of Slieve Gullion, the Leac na Riogh, Flagstone of the Kings, used since the 10th century in the inauguration of chiefs of the O’Neills, destroyed in September 1602 nine months after the Battle of Kinsale by Tudor vandals under the command of the notorious despoiler of the verdant Irish countryside, Lord Mountjoy.
Five years after the smashing of the Leac na Riogh, Hugh O’Neill, Rory O’Donnell and a raft of other Gaelic grandees left Ireland forever in the Flight of the Earls. But that wasn’t the end of the line.
O’Neill’s eldest legitimate daughter, Sorcha (Sarah), was married to Arthur Magennis, the first Viscount Iveagh. The pair remained in Ireland after the Flight, enjoying a civilised relationship with the colonial oppressor. They had five children. Their descendants prospered. One, Scottish politician John Lyon, married Mary Eleanor Bowes in 1767.
One of their descendants in turn, Claude George Bowes-Lyon - a highly eccentric and most remarkable fellow - married Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck in July 1881. When he inherited his father’s lands and titles in 1884, she became, among other honorifics, Lady Glamis. In 1900, Claude George and Cecilia had a daughter, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who in 1925 married Prince Albert: he, upon the abdication of his brother Edward in 1936, became George VI, father of the Queen in whose bed Martin last month had a snooze.
Not such an outlandish event, then. Not such a wide gulf as might have been imagined. The Royals are essentially Magennises, Martin and Her Maj near enough cousins.
Lady Macbeth is said to have been based on an earlier, perhaps the original, Lady Glamis. Macbeth himself was Thane of Glamis. As the First Witch remarked: “All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!” This exchange (Act 1, Scene 3) marks the only occasion as far as I am aware of Shakespeare expressing an opinion on the Pro-Life Movement: “What are these/So wither’d and so wild in their attire/That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth/And yet are on’t?”
It’s a tangled genealogical weave that has produced the fabric of the complex lives we live and which we celebrate annually in the ritual of The Auld Glamis Fair.

At a time when home-grown rock superstars are maintaining their grim attitude of dumb insolence towards glaring examples of injustice in the world – and finding no shortage of home-grown defenders in so doing – Roger Waters’ brief visit for presentation of The Wall at Lansdowne Road came as an intoxicating gust of bracing fresh air.
It isn’t that musicians or celebrities have a particular moral duty to speak out. But when they are shouting at the top of their voices in support of “solutions” to global problems endorsed by the very elite which has caused them, it’s reasonable to ask if they would they utter a whisper about what’s happening, for example, on the West Bank. But that would alienate the aforementioned global elite.
Waters took time out to launch a new educational resource for Irish schools, Palestine & Israel - How will there be a Just Peace? co-produced by Sadaka - the Ireland Palestine Alliance and the Curriculum Development Unit. It provides a history and analysis of the Palestine problem in the context of human rights law and UN resolutions.
The Pink Floyd man urged students: “Get as many facts as you can, then check them to find out that they are facts…All we can do is encourage our young people to approach life with open minds and to nurture the kernel that they all have within their hearts, of feelings for their fellow man.”
Waters’ gesture was acknowledged by former Israeli army officer and Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy in the course of comment on a gig on stolen Palestinian land on the West Bank last month: “Throngs of people will be coming to Sussia this evening. Some will be people who have poisoned Palestinians’ wells, attacked Palestinian shepherds, and uprooted their trees and burned their fields…A popular singer will be performing in this violent no-man’s-land, this apartheid district.
“We don’t have a single brave and honest performer like Waters. Not one,” lamented Levy.
None of the relevant Irish superstars will say anything remotely approaching this declaration by an Israeli war hero. Put whatever spin you like on their personal motives, it is pathetic.

I didn’t reckon Colm Toibin’s Booker-nominated 81-page novel/novella Testament of Mary. But I totally liked his instant tweeted response to the award of the prize to Eleanor Catton for her 825-page “The Luminaries”: “Bullshit result. And the food here is terrible. I’m going home.”