Normally when I meet cases of distress or frustration I feel sympathy. Rabbits in snares, birds with broken wing, Orange marchers who want to get home. But today I see a case of frustration which I’m afraid brings out the old schadenfreude in me.
It seems David Cameron and his NI Secretary Theresa Villiers have barred two officials from giving evidence to a House of Commons inquiry today. The inquiry is into letters telling republicans that they weren’t wanted for prosecution. The inquiry committee is lepping with rage, apparently. Sylvia Hermon says what Cameron and Villiers have done is “absolutely indefensible”. DUP MP Ian (“I’m a historian”) Paisley said rows between parliament and the executive go back to the sixteenth century and usually end “with the king losing his head”. Whether this is a veiled threat that Ian Jr has plans to decapitate Her Maj if the officials are not made available I have no way of knowing, just as I’ve no idea why he said this other than to make a historical reference.
No, I find myself quietly pleased not because I want things covered up. Quite the reverse, in fact. Maybe now Sylvia Hermon knows something of the frustration of Geraldine Finucane and her family, who’ve spent more than twenty years trying to get the British government to cough up papers relating to the killing of her husband as he had dinner with his family. And maybe Ian “I’m a historian” Paisley knows something of the frustration of the Families of the Forgotten, relatives of those who died in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings. They’ve been trying to get Britain to release original documents on the day in 1974 when thirty-three innocent people were killed, and have been frustrated at every turn. And there are dozens of other families who believe their loved ones were killed by British armed forces here who have carried the same kind of frustration for decades.
Compared to that pain, letters to on-the-runs look like small beer. Still, it’s nice to see Sylvia and Ian get an opportunity to empathise with those less fortunate than themselves. As Bob Dylan sang in his own inimitable way: “How does it feeeeel?”
Was this entry to your blog so good that you had to repeat it? ; )
Not sure what you mean, neill – have I duplicated it or sumpin?
Oh sheeee-it. Thanks for heads-up, neill – much appreciated. (Although of course it deserved multiple copies…)
The British state is not about to give up its dirty secrets about the North anytime soon. And a Paddy is still a Paddy whether of the nationalist or unionist variety. A pity that political unionism refuses to recognise its expendability and start to make peace with the other occupants of the island of Ireland. They would have a much more stable and honourable future there.
Thanks to neill for pointing out my dumb duplication of this blog. I’ve erased it and am here reproducing comment thereon from paddykool:
paddykool
paddykool@tiscali.co.uk
85.210.216.157
Submitted on 2015/01/07 at 11:04 am
Yes Jude , His Bobness , the One True Mr Robert Zimmerman and his alter egos Bob Dylan , Blind Boy Grunt, the Voice of a Generation,the Master of Protest, Zimmy , Bobby, Zimbo and so on… has a quip and a line for every occasion. There’s ….“Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that’s exactly the way we want it to be.”….. or “No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.”
The more I live, the more the true nature of the human being and life in general is revealed.
“Schadenfreude” is one hell of a great word too. It’s the ….I told you so ,of words…. , really.Behind the scenes there must be a raft of Yes Ministers constantly balancing the Scales of Pain. This week the boot will be put into one lot and next week we’ll make their opposite numbers squeal.Pavlov’s wee doggies all barking from one week to the next…all right on cue as that bell rings.
The Establishment thrives on this kind of censorship The Royal Family are pushing back too with their privacy deals . They think they are a special case and not public property .No one has told them that we own them now.The establishment think this all holds back anarchy and chaos .I say let it all burn…Or as Jack Nicolson emoted …”Some people can’t handle the truth”.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave/when first we practice to deceive…” Walter Scott (1808)
The British establishment does not take allegations of killings and ill-treatment seriously. Evidence? Professionals in the International Criminal Court regularly complain about unacceptable delays associated with investigations. Procrastination is a feature of investigations in Ireland and there are thousands of cases of ill-treatment and torture outstanding against the British Army in Iraq.
Military sources tend to respond by reporting that there is no evidence of fundamental flaws in the army’s approach to preparing for and conducting operations. Abuses are perpetrated by a few bad apples in the barrel. Citizens in Ballymurphy, Derry and Iraq would not concur with the sentiment.
Tony Booth, the father-in-law of Tony Blair participated in an interview with Robert Chalmers in ‘Newsweek’ 26.12.14. In the interview he makes reference to locking himself out of a flat in London. He was with a group of SAS men.
“While he was attempting to climb into the first floor loft, using three drums of paraffin as a ladder, the soldiers set fire to a door immediately below him, explaining that this was “what we do to the Paddies.” The article states that Booth was pronounced clinically dead three times and spent six months in hospital (p40). With friends like that who needs enemies?
Spot on Jude. This is another case of unionisms myopic view of the troubles. One side good the other bad, no overlap. Sometimes I feel like I’m reading Orwells Animal farm with different character names.
Richard Haas was so right.
Not only Wise One from West speak of Empathy and Schadenfreude, but Wise One from East too:
Confucius say: Empathy Vessels make most noise.
Down here in the South we are not unfamiliar with this particular reality. That is why it is always refreshing to look North for a healthy overdose of Schadenfreude.
Confucius say: Ulster Schadenfleude best in world. Heartless attack on a prate.
As regards the Empathy Vessels on this side of the Black P’s D, so far the likes of Dame Dosh Finucane and Joe ‘The Dough’ Duffy of RTE are the top decibel-ringers. The latest challenger to their pre-eminence in the Donnybrook Sound is Ray the Arse, who wheelbarrows a paltry enough 10 K home at the weekend.
To listen to them going through their E-routine even as their paymasters (Jill and Jack McTaxpayer ) ring in to bemoan their meagre linoleum lot in Deprivation, Dublin 17 is to hear a subdued humming of Albinoni’s lugubrious Adagio in the background of the Axministered studio.
Not that the Empathy Vessels don’t have their odd bad moments, occasional enough though they may be. Like waking up in the small wee hours, bathed in cold sweat, screaming after enduring what is known in RTE as ‘Eine kleine Nachtmare’. Based, seemingly, on the Hyperinflation which devastated Deutschland back in the Plenties Twenties.
When it took 10,000,000 marks to buy a bottle of milch and when one hausfrau famously left her wheelbarrow loaded with millions of marks outside her frontdoor, intending to wheel it down to the local grocer for the daily provisions. When she returned after making sure she had turned off the gas, it was to discover that the hillock of dosh had been dumped and – her wheelbarrow stolen.
So far, alas, the only Hyperventilation visible in RTE is in the egos of the Empathy Vessels.
The one downside of the Schadenfreude involving that pair of Paisley shawlies, Lord and Lady Harmony is that duty demands one puts aside one’s reading of the Booed Bishop and to turn to another collection of short stories, namely, The Decameron.
The author of this latter satirical collection double jobs as the British PM and also operates under the pseudonym ‘Buster Eaton’.His style is slapstick which does not go up or down too well with his objectionable subjects in the annexed anorexic Ulster.
The contrast between the reactions on the two sides of the B.Pig’s D. to stories with a similar twist is instructive. While a mixture of umbrage and schadenfreude greeted the Decarmeron story in the North it fell to a Trappist choir’s version of ‘The Sound of Silence’ to salute the latest revelations of the Westminster State Papers from 85 in the South.
To the effect that the Special Branch of the Garda Siochana were playing footsie with their counterparts of the RUC. That they were doing so was already well known; what is new is that they derived such delight from the ‘clandestine’ exercise’.
Ta an diabhal, as usual in the detail of these State Papers. The SB of the Gardai showed itself to be dab feet at the art and craft of playing footsie: ‘They indicated that footsie is a gentle and playful way of flirting. By lightly running their stockinged feet up the other person’s calf and knee.And massaging the other’s ankles with the sole of one’s own flat foot.Locking ankles was another favourite ploy.Not to mention the making of eye contact and the swopping of sly smiles’.
The crucial point here is that the SB. of the Gardai called this project, with tongue in cheek, ‘Operation Calf’. This was a post-modern reference to the Brown Bull of Cooley territory.
And how has FOT of TUT reacted to this revelatation of Footsie ? By keeping his inner Trappist shut and to staying schtum.
But, to return briefly to the short story from Decameron which has raised dudgeon to its highest level in a least two days north of the B.P’s Dyke.
There is a general agreement now that the story untold is the one involving ‘Andetto of Ye Olde Yorkie who feighneth himself dumb and becameth gardener to a convent of women, who all did flock to him’..
Leaving aside the ‘feighneth himself dumb’ tautology for the nonce, it would appear that those who are devoted to the religion of The Rotund One, aka, Fat Harry, harbour a particular fascination for the females who inhabit the interior spaces enclosed by the high,forbidding walls of a convent.
And not just a fascination, but even a hunger to learn more, even unto gluttonous,Famine-sized proportions.
As this is an unholy family blog one must needs be circumspect where quoting from this story of Decameron is concerned, but this might give a hint. Andetto says this to another character called Nutto (not inappropriately, Nutto represents Every Spin Doctor): ‘Egad, Nutto, though didst well to come away. How is a man to live with women? He were better abide with devils.Six times out of seven they know not what they would have themselves’.
That this is all spoken tongue in cheek, even as Andetto plays Footsie with Nutto, hardly needs mentioning. The Black Pig’s Dyke is no barrier to the F-practice.
And now one must get hurriedly back to booing the bishop, the collection which has a character with one of the great nicknames (‘Presumer’) and one of the best last lines in a first story. (If not the best).
Yes, even better than the last line in the first story of Decameron.
Of course the likes of Geraldine Finucane and others like the Reavey and O’Dowd families aren’t considered victims by Unionism in general. The “they didn’t get it for nothing” mentality is well and truly alive within Unionism today as it was back when the troubles just begun, whether that be innocent people murdered by loyalist paramilitaries or innocent people shot dead by the British Army (including children).
Unionism has its own hierarchy of victims and innocent Catholics/Nationalists/Republicans are at the bottom of it (if their lucky to be in it at all). So it does seem appropriate for the likes of Ian Paisley Jnr and other Unionists to get a sense of how victims of the British state have felt for decades.
Ryan I would submit that Unionism does have a hierarchy of victims but nationalists/catholics are not on it anywhere.