The Hypocrisy of Poppy Day

Starts earlier every year. The poppy blooms before the clocks change. And no British or northern Irish television performer is allowed on screen without a crimson splodge on the lapel.

Belfast City Hall glimmers in scarlet light, consecrating the city to reverent memory of the millions flung to futile deaths. To voice objection is to be marked as an enemy of peace.
All the more encouraging, then, that UK singers, actors, visual artists and others have gotten together to organise alternative events in the centenary year of 2014, “to remember that this was a war that was driven by big powers’ competition for influence around the globe, and caused a degree of suffering all too clear in the statistical record of 16 million people dead and 20 million wounded”.
The “official” programme announced by David Cameron, says the group, “will be run at least in part by former generals and ex-defence secretaries, (which) reveals just how misconceived these plans are”.
Among those promoting the initiative are Jude Law, Brian Eno, Simon Callow, Carol Ann Duffy, Anthony Gormley, Patrick Stewart, Ken Loach, Vivienne Westwood, Terry Jones, Robert Wyatt, Tony Benn, Vanessa Redgrave, Ken Livingstone, Mike Westbrook, Pete Brown, Alan Rickman and many more.
In the Republic, Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore are to head up dewy-eyed commemoration of the 200,000 Irishmen who were fooled into fighting, 27,000 of them lured to their deaths. All in the interests of “reconciliation”.
Are not pity, revulsion and anger more appropriate to the occasion? Should our slogan not be – Never Again!
Are there singers, actors, visual artists and others willing to get together here to emulate the efforts of their counterparts across the water?

The best drama on television at the moment is the Roy/Hayley thread on Coronation Street. Delicately written, beautifully acted and telling profound truths through a compelling human story.
Hayley first appeared in January 1998 as something of an oddity, even in soap-land. She was a pre-op transexual, “real” name Harold. The audience took her to its heart from the outset.
She had reassignment surgery in the Netherlands. Roy realised he loved her. They married in the caff and have lived happily ever after, until now. She has terminal cancer and a few weeks to live.
We don’t think of soaps as being ahead of the curve when it comes to liberation from sexual stereotypes. But Hayley and Roy were a couple two years before Queer as Folk aired, eight years before UK civil partnership law. She remains the only transgendered stock character in any long-running TV series anywhere.
One of the reasons the story-line has lasted is the acting of Julie Hesmondhalgh, suggestive of tentativeness, strength of will and pure decency. She can convey all this with a half-smile and a shine in her eyes.
She wants to decide for herself when to die and wants Roy to support her, but he cannot. She knows that when the drugs drench her brain in the final days her mind will meander back to the time she was a school-boy in turmoil, and then along the years of constant pressure to pretend. She wouldn’t be herself when it matters more than ever.
Roy takes her to Blackpool, where she had had the best times ever. Magically, they have the fabled, ornate, bright-lit, gold-leafed Tower Ballroom to themselves, to swirl in a widening circle, Bacharach/David’s “Close to You” pumping from the Wurlitzer organ as it rises from its recess.
Later, Roy even takes off his socks and rolls up his trousers to join Hayley paddling in the shallows of the beach as a pale sun fades. “Doesn’t the tide come in fast?” she murmurs.
Even if your default attitude to soaps is scorn, take a look, ignore all else, focus on Roy and Hayley. This is brilliant British drama, uplifting of the spirit, ineffably sad.
“On the day that you were born the angels got together/And decided to create a dream come true/So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair/And golden starlight in your eyes of blue…”

The Association of Catholic Priests complains that the Murphy Report was unfair to the Church.
Whatever about that, priests might reasonably feel bitter nobody cut them the slack enjoyed by Gerry Adams, who failed to report the rape of his niece by his brother.
It’s a remarkable fact that no member of Sinn Fein anywhere appears to have expressed concern about Adams’s handling of the issue. Instead, those who have signalled concern are denounced as being driven by sheer hatred of Adams and SF. The same account is peddled everywhere – that the abuse was reported but the RUC used the complaint to target Gerry, that the brothers were estranged for years so Gerry can’t have known Liam was working with children, that Gerry did everything he could…
Anybody who wants to know how credible this is should read the verbatim transcript of Eilis McDermott’s cross-examination of Adams at his brother’s trial earlier this year. It’s been published in full by both the BBC and the Belfast Telegraph. Google “Gerry Adams evidence Liam Adams trial.”
Adams’s tale is left in tatters, not by anti-SF activists but by his own sworn, public testimony.
Many members of the Catholic Church spoke out against their leaders’ behaviour. But no member of the party Adams presides over has thought it proper to follow their example. Go figure.