Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

Let's Not Talk

A week ago I was phoned by a BBC television producer: would I take part in their monthly discussion programme, ‘Let’s Talk’. Now, I would prefer to take part on any of their arts programmes, but never receive invitations, and am bracketed solely as a political commentator. I asked who else was on the panel. At that stage the only confirmed guest was my old buddy, Kevin Myers, who writes A Confused Irishman’s Diary in the ‘Irish Times’.

Oh good! says I. Kevin and I bare wrestling live on TV! But I predicted to the producer that he would not appear. On two occasions he was invited to speak by Feile an Phobail at our annual prestigious event, ‘West Belfast Talks Back’. And on each occasion, at short notice, he pulled out, citing one time that his wife had organised a garden barbecue and hadn’t told him. Now whether it was because he heard that he would be breathing the same oxygen molecules as me or that last Thursday night he and his missus were having a winter barbecue is anybody’s guess because on Monday, after he was told that I was to appear, he pulled out. I am not saying he is a cowardly custard but he might be a chocolate éclair which equally wilts in the heat. Someone should ask him.

Mark Carruthers chaired the discussion. On the programme was Arlene Foster, an anti-Agreement Ulster Unionist; Ivan Cooper, former Assembly Member of the SDLP, who is depicted by the actor James Nesbitt in one of the films about Bloody Sunday; and David Adams, former member of the now-defunct Ulster Democratic Party, which was considered to be the political wing of the UDA. David is now a commentator and has a weekly slot on BBC’s ‘Talkback’. (When the BBC decides that a republican like former Sinn Fein councillor Mairtin O Muilleior’s period of ‘quarantine’ has expired, perhaps he will be given a regular slot. Or be invited to review the morning papers, like Andy Wood, former press officer at the Northern Ireland Office, who got over the mumps a week after he left the NIO.)

The first question to the panel was a complaint about why it is that it is always the nationalist cause that is portrayed in films. This was in reference to the two recent films about Bloody Sunday (made by English men). It is incredible that unionists still do not realise how they are perceived across the world.

How could a film maker romanticise or portray as heroic the loyalist cause? How could the Ulster Workers Council strike of 1974 be adopted as having been a revolutionary uprising with noble aims, given that it was against equality, justice and power-sharing and was all about bullying and intimidation for the sake of sectarian dominance? A film about the Orange Order - even a sympathetic one - would have Dennis Hopper, a Ku Klux Klan character camped out on Hill Drumcree throwing live toads into the pot as he recites the names Sean, Mary, Seamus, Dermot, Cathleen…

How could you make a presentable film, set in Glenbryn, about Billy who wakens to his alarm clock at five to nine, goes to the bathroom, sits on the toilet, collects his excrement in a plastic bag, goes up to the corner and tosses it at six-year-old schoolgirls? Incidentally, when I referred to that on ‘Let’s Talk’ a unionist member of the audience replied, ‘I don’t know what Danny Morrison’s complaining about, didn’t republican prisoners smear excrement on the walls of their cells.’

The mentality.

It’s true that republicans smeared excrement on the walls of their cells. They were protesting at being held in naked, solitary confinement, being beaten, being refused their own clothes, refused visits and letters and exercise. They didn’t throw their excrement at innocent school children. And when objective film makers, writers or foreign journalists come to Ireland they show more interest in the nationalist cause, be it an important historical incident such as Bloody Sunday, or republican hunger strikers or IRA escapees or the electoral rise of Sinn Fein, not because Sinn Fein spokespersons are great, persuasive propagandists (as some unionist members of the audience claimed and believe) but because films about such causes and such people struggling against injustice are more relevant, interesting and engaging than stories about backward-thinking, toad-cooking, Yaba Dabby-Doo, Any Teague’ll Do, sectarian supremacists.

Bobby Sands’ story is more compelling than Billy Wright’s. You can not make a saint or martyr out of child-killer Billy Wright, no matter if you resurrected and employed the services in committee of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Enid Blyton. Even Rudyard Kipling could not produce such a miracle.

Yet there could be moving portrayals of the suffering of the unionist people, for example, a film about Remembrance Sunday in Enniskillen when the IRA slaughtered members of that community. But if a film was made it probably would have to be made around Gordon Wilson who forgave the killers of his daughter Marie and called for no retaliation.

But it would also have to include how that man was snubbed and ridiculed by many in his own community because of his humility and Christianity and because he held out his hand in friendship and understanding.

But let’s not talk about that.

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