Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

Pat Magee

In 1974 when Pat Magee was interned in Cage Two, Long Kesh, he can remember reading Jack Higgins' thriller, 'The Savage Day'. It was much later before he realised that the novel fell into the category of what came to be termed, 'Troubles fiction'.

When next he was in jail, from 1985 until his release under the Belfast Agreement in 1999, having served fourteen years out of five life sentences for the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, he took an Open University degree in politics and modern literature.

In 1994 Pat was transferred from England to Maghaberry Prison in County Antrim where he studied as a postgraduate student, attached to the University of Ulster. He produced the first draft of his doctoral thesis on the subject of 'Troubles fiction', ironically, in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, a prison which had undergone much change in the interim, and had been at the epicentre of a showdown between republicans and the British government. It was here that ten Irish republicans died in a seven-month long hunger strike in 1981, an event which Pat argues had an impact beyond the defeat of Britain's criminalisation policy and the subsequent resurgence in support for the Republican Movement.

Pat's forensic analyses of the texts under review (a representative 150 out of some 700 published since 1969) reveals that in the use of language, staple plots, the stereotypical depictions of the various protagonists (IRA baddies/SAS goodies), most of the authors are actually witting or unwitting 'players' in the propaganda war. Pulp fiction PROs for the British establishment or - as he ingeniously puts it, they represent 'the paraliterary wing of Brit propaganda'.

And so we have a gallery of caricatures almost unchanged since the 'Punch' magazine depictions of the mad, fighting, drinking, dangerous Oirish of the nineteenth century. A nation incapable of running their own affairs and in need of a civilising agent. This notion, successfully planted in the English psyche, was to become the seedbed of racist attitudes for subsequent generations and facilitates the belief that British imperialist involvement in Ireland is a noble enterprise.

The Irish get their madness from their mother's milk or while sitting on their granny's knee. Read about the mad bombers sporting tattoos of the Sacred Heart on their arms, with names like, The Skull or Kevin 'Machine-gun' McNally of Kilkenny, 'one of the hardest and most fanatically anti-British of all the IRA hardliners.' At their meetings, at which they are inevitably drinking bottles of stout, the chairman says, 'I now call this special meeting of the Breakaway Branch of the Unofficial IRA to order.' Or, a Mulholland says, 'Do you know that, Rory, to cleanse ourselves we'll be needing a whole river of blood.'

Of course, none of these novels were planned as immortal literature or would-be masterpieces so, one could argue, why waste time on them? Such pap novels might be laughable or dismissible if it were not for their insidious perpetuation of ignorance, their glorification of British violence and their demonising of Irish nationalists and republicans. Pat Magee quite persuasively argues that, whilst such works are open to ridicule, the influence of popular fiction should not be underestimated in their capacity to form and influence attitudes and opinions, or in perpetuating prejudice, even if that is not how they were conceived. Best-selling novels by writers like Gerald Seymour and Tom Clancy have been powerful in shaping public perceptions of republicans and, more favourably, their British counterparts.

In the way that they offer British readers the assurances that their government's role in Ireland is as a peacekeeper they perform an ideological and political function of cosseting the establishment from domestic criticism and allowing it a free hand. They work almost in the same way as the tabloid press has done in defending 'our boys' in the British army after every state killing. They function in the same way as the 'unofficial' censorship and later the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fein did by suppressing the discrepant voice whilst supporting the dominant ideology on the causes of the conflict.

His research examines the cultural and political circumstances in which these works were composed/manufactured, published, marketed and distributed. He makes the telling point that, for example, a Seymour novel which had the IRA Volunteer as hero and a denouement concluding that it was time for a British withdrawal would receive a markedly different, and quite negative, reception because of its oppositional position to the established norms.

Few writers can escape being influenced by their milieu; and the role of the serious writer in society - with social, moral and/or political responsibilities - is one that has been debated and contested through many periods and fashions. 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,' wrote Shelley, rather grandiosely. 'Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged,' said Hemingway, though later, he wrote, 'There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.' Cyril Connolly was quite clear on the subject: 'The artist should keep himself free from all creed, from all dogma, from all opinion.'

Many of the books under review were written by Irish writers, including Ben Kiely, Bernard McLaverty, Frances Molloy, Mary Beckett, Ronan Bennett, Seamus Deane, Edna O'Brien, Eoin McNamee, Patrick McCabe, Robert McLiam Wilson and Glen Patterson, to name but some, most of who consider themselves, or are considered, as serious and successful literary authors. Many of them have been writing post-1981. Pat's favourite book of the period, with a 'troubles' theme, is Dermot Healey's 'A Goat's Song'. In my opinion, one of the worst books to be written about Belfast and the IRA was Brian Moore's 'Lies of Silence', an anti-Catholic, anti-republican diatribe, whose plot - which included an IRA Volunteer with a pimply face and his uncle, an IRA messenger-priest - was preposterous. Needless-to-say, it was nominated for the Booker Prize.

Pat argues that the sacrifices of the hunger strikers occasioned an identifiable, though not extensive, discursive shift in the fictional depiction of the conflict which has continued to the present. In other words, as Britain's role as a protagonist and not a neutral party emerged, as stories of state collusion with loyalist paramilitaries were established as fact, the standard black and white, simplistic presentation of the conflict was becoming untenable, and this shift may be increasingly reflected in emergent fiction.

The provenance of this critical study, Pat's doctoral thesis, is clear but it will appeal not just to students of politics and literature but to the general reader, particularly his reminders of how ridiculous and stupid - I would argue, wanton - some writers could be.

Finally, the person who defies the stereotype most, the cipher known simply as 'The Brighton Bomber', as if he sprung up out of nowhere, without family or history or authentic experience, is the author himself, Pat Magee. I first met Pat in Long Kesh internment camp in the early 1970s. In the 1980s, when I was the editor of 'An Phoblacht/Republican News', Pat also worked on the paper (and, in fact, was shot and wounded in our Dublin office by a loyalist gunman in 1981 whilst producing the paper). He was quiet, intelligent, thoughtful and assiduous.

A loyal republican and a supporter of the peace process, he has now established Causeway29, a peace and reconciliation project based around victims and relatives of the victims of the Brighton bombing. This book is the product of his diligence, of a fine mind at work, out to understand and reveal one of the many levels at which war was fought, in most of the cases by individuals - I will not say intellectuals - at their desks, far from the discrimination, the suffering and oppression, and the bombs that followed.

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