Storming the gate of the G8

Saturday's G8 demonstration in Belfast proclaimed an alternative message. 

I’m heading off to Enniskillen shortly for the G8 summit where I will be an unwelcome guest at the rich men’s table. Not that I am likely to come within an ass’s roar of that overladen spread through the tangles of razor wire, armed land and water patrols, roadblocks and other emplacements that constitute the security cordon around the usually idyllic retreat on the shores of Lower Lough Erne.

With police predicting that there will only be 1,999 others along with me on the demonstration, I fear my actual presence will be as glossed over as the empty shops in the island town that have facsimile images pasted over their façades to give the impression of a vibrant local economy.

That is why I want to let you know in advance that I will be there to protest against the entire concept of this rich club of eight of the world’s ‘wealthiest economies’.

I want to draw attention to the fact that it is stacking the deck for the restoration of the same failed capitalist system that has brought us austerity, hardship, ruin and service cutbacks affecting the most vulnerable.

I want to notify you that this is the gathering that bestows a blessing on those who are forcing us to pay for the reckless gambling of corporate speculators.

The G8 is the public face of the supreme think-tank of western decadence and among those not deemed suitable to attend are China, India and Brazil or, indeed, any representative of the entire southern hemisphere of Earth.

This is the annual get-together of the forum that has brought us the outworkings of the neoliberal doctrines of rampant greed and the self-righteous imperialist interference that led to bloodbaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and that is now casting its beady eyes elsewhere for rich pickings in the ruins of war.

Bearing along the banner of the Derry NUJ branch.

It would be unforgivable to miss such a gathering almost on my own doorstep. So with a few colleagues, I’ll be hoisting the banner of the Derry and North West Branch of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) at the Enniskillen demonstration.

Our presence, with representatives of other unions and local trades councils, should provide those world leaders with an unwelcome echo of the once mighty union movement that brought working people such benefits as statutory working hours, minimum wages, weekends, paid holidays, sick leave, pensions and other tolerable working conditions.

These are the benefits now being eroded by corporate and state cutbacks and hardship and, perhaps most of all, by a campaign of villification that casts unions as the greedy ‘bad guys’. It surely is no coincidence that since the establishment of the G8 group (as the ‘Group of Six’ or G6) in 1975, the onslaught against organised labour has been relentless and, with strategic buy-offs to promote individualism, the collective power of the majority has been bartered for the interests of the least deserving few.

I’ll be saying all this by my participation in the Enniskillen protest this evening because:

• I’m going there to cause trouble for the conscience of those who think it is acceptable to continue the ways of grab-all greed;

• I am going there to draw attention to the plight of the most vulnerable and the most needy here and around the globe;

• I’m going there to help stir up a wider debate against the cosy consensus that guides our collective thinking on the issues that most affect our lives.

So if you don’t hear from me in the next day to two, look for me among the guys in the orange boiler-suits in the specially erected confinement cells at St Lucia Barracks in Omagh. For the next few days, at least, that will be Northern Ireland’s Guantanamo Bay holding centre!

Tibetan 'troublemaker' walked to Enniskillen to deliver message.

And with thousands of extra police, armed forces and other security personnel drafted in from across the water, a huge security operation around both sides of the border, and the courts geared up for special sittings just to proffer criminal charges against those excercising their democratic right to protest, the scene is set for a showdown. Even so, ‘we few, we happy few’ will be in Enniskillen this evening to challenge the idea that those at the table are the honourable brokers on the fate of this planet and we, corralled outside and as far away as possible, are the ‘troublemakers’!

New hospital opens old wound

The new £276-million hospital outside Enniskillen has opened with all the bells and whistles of a modern health care facility. And along with en-suite rooms for every one of its 300-plus patient beds, the new hospital embeds a geographical anomaly that seems to hold mighty sway with officialdom in this part of Ireland.   

That’s because the new facility is officially known as the South West Acute Hospital, a name that most residents of Fermanagh and Tyrone probably think would be better suited to a facility in Limerick or Kerry.

South West's West Tyrone campus in the north west at Omagh.

But the name does join a growing pantheon of illustrious institutions centred on those northern counties. This includes South West College – with campuses in Omagh, Enniskillen, Dungannon and Cookstown.

There is also BT’s ubiquitous telephone directory for the ‘south west’ region, representing a terrible annual waste of trees for an early twentieth-century form of communications from the company that dominates telecommunications here. The scope of the ‘south-west’ phone directory extends from Belleek as far as Lurgan in the north east corner of Armagh. Those in the know will note that Lurgan is comfortably east of the River Bann.

So apart from being struck by the woeful lack of imagination in naming public institutions and services, here at the Frontier Post we have been wondering what the name of the new hospital signifies. That is, in terms of its location – beside Wolf Lough, which is between Enniskillen town and Trory Roundabout on the Irvinestown road – where exactly is it ‘south west’ of?

Where exactly in the North is south, much less south west?

Such a fixation on place (with precise SatNav directions) could be required when the new facility will incorporate its planned teaching facilities. We are told that, apart from Queen’s University Belfast, this might also include link-ups with the medical faculty in NUI Galway. This raises the prospect that medics dispatched to the South West Acute Hospital might head off south in the direction of Ennis instead of north to the Border and Enniskillen unless provided with precise details.

In our search for a fixed point to determine the south-west nature of the new hospital, naturally we thought of Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, seat of governance and administration. That seemed the natural place to look because it is where matters such as naming hospitals, further education colleges and phonebooks would undergo much high-powered deliberation and intensive examination before a final decision.

But no, Enniskillen town sits at 54.34 degrees latitude, against Belfast’s 54.37. By our reckoning, that puts the new facility on Wolf Lough at 54.35 – almost exactly west of Belfast Lough on the same line of latitude.

So could it be Derry city? No, the new hospital lies almost directly south of the historic centre for those living west of the Bann.

Then it struck us. The new hospital is perched almost on an exact southwest radiant from Omagh (latitude 54.596) in the projected catchment area for its patients. Omagh is actually where many argued – and still believe – the new hospital should have been located all along.

‘South West Acute Hospital’ – talk about rubbing salt in the wound!

Mixing sport and geography

Omagh schoolchildren greet the Olympic flame on its passage through Ireland.

It was probably no more than a slip of the tongue but it spoiled my breakfast… and it has been niggling since. The fact that it was a ‘good news story’ on RTÉ Radio One’s Morning Ireland hardly alleviated the inexplicable feeling of being slighted once more.

Brother boxers keep her lit on the Border.

I didn’t even catch the name of the reporter who informed listeners that the Olympic flame was ‘now in Ireland, if only for a few hours’ after the symbolic handover between fellow Irish Olympians Wayne McCollough and Michael Carruth at the Border on the Newry to Dundalk road.

It jarred because, by no coincidence, I was actually in Ireland yesterday morning to witness the same Olympic flame making its passage through Omagh, having come from Derry City via Strabane before heading off out the Dromore Road towards Enniskillen and a string of other Irish towns and villages.

The feeling of euphoria I had felt since about the passage of the Olympic flame on a symbolic course that included both parts of Ireland was dissipated by the carelessness of yet another ‘professional’ news reporter who can’t even be bothered to look at a map and know the difference between a country and a state.

Jack Kennedy, 15, carries the flame through Omagh.

‘A few hours’ indeed, I thought, my mind tracing the earlier path of the flame from Belfast through Antrim, along the north coast and through each of these six Irish counties in Northern Ireland before its brief interlude in the Republic of Ireland.

Yet such geographical dismissal should be like water off a duck’s back by now, one would think.

For all of my life, I have listened to unionist politicians talk of ‘Ulster’ and the ‘Ulster people’ in a way that pointedly excluded me and all those in Northern Ireland who espoused Irish reunification, not to mention one-third of the actual province of Ulster. Such geographical and social selectivity was always deliberate, however, a contrived formula to bestow historical pedigree and political legitimacy on the partition of Ireland.

It was anathema to news reporting in most of Ireland, of course. Reporters were reminded forcibly by editors, who were sticklers for ‘House Style’ back then, that there were very precise rules on these matters.

Standards appear have slipped since the Good Friday Agreement (or ‘Belfast Agreement’ in Irish Times house style). And I blame soccer for that.

For just as we prepare to root for the Irish Olympians at the London games, the hype is reaching a crescendo for the European Football Championships. Notwithstanding that the Irish team taking part includes (controversially for some) players from throughout the island, it travels to Poland under the auspices of the breakaway Football Association of Ireland, one of the two bodies that persisted in fielding teams under the name ‘Ireland’ until the 1950s.

Representing Ireland against Brazil at Landesdowne Road in July 1973 were the Shamrock Rovers XI (from back left) Miah Dennehy, Tommy Criag, Paddy Mulligan, Martin O'Neill, Derek Dougan, Alan Hunter, Liam O'Kane and (front from left) Bryan Hamilton, Pat Jennings, Tommy Carroll, Johnny Giles, Don Givens, Terry Conroy and Mick Martin.

Fab Four – Don Givens. Johnny Giles,
Martin O'Neill and Pat Jennings .

It hardly mattered so much at a time when there was little prospect of playing on the world stage, but then the 1970s came along with the Troubles and possibly the best crop of home-grown soccer talent we ever produced. From this, a team was put together in 1973 by the two serving captains of Northern Ireland and the Republic – Derek Dougan and Johnny Giles. With no official backing from the ‘representative’ bodies, they engineered a match with the mighty Brazil in Dublin and, with no official sanction, they had to field as the Shamrock Rovers XI. That didn’t stop them racking up three goals against the world champions’ four.

Despite the continuous efforts of the great Dougan to unite the Irish soccer teams, the divide continues, bolstered by marginal success for Northern Ireland in 1982 and for the Republic on occasions since then. It has become firmly institutionalised with many professional reporters persisting in the belief that rugby’s adherence to an all-Ireland selection is the exception, rather than the rule. Indeed, soccer is the exception.

So as the FAI side heads off for the European finals with a team of varied pedigree, the Irish Football Association and its supporters resort to irony and self-derision. Their favourite chant in recent years is the refrain, ‘We’re not Brazil, we’re Norn Iron’.

As if we need to be reminded.

So as credit union accounts are raided for the road to Poznan, I’ll be looking forward to the Olympics and lamenting that the last outing for the Ireland soccer team was in July 1973 – a glorious sporting occasion ‘if only for a few hours’.