There is a certain class of Sri Lankan who is never happier than when denigrating Sri Lanka and other Sri Lankans. They are proud of the fact that Sri Lankan politicians are (allegedly), by leagues, the most corrupt in the universe and all that surrounds it. The Sri Lankan economy is the worst managed on this benighted globe. When an English animal rights activist came to Sri Lanka and was shocked by the number of stray dogs on the streets, Sri Lankan editors were more than willing to give her space to call Sri Lankans inveterate animal abusers. Her public messaging relied on shocking depictions of Sri Lanka as a uniquely “appalling” or “barbaric” place for animals. She tried taking some Sri Lankan street dogs back to the UK. She hit the headlines when one of them bit her in England and it was found to have rabies. Kudos to her for introducing rabies to a previously rabies-free country. Only recently, a Sri Lankan friend was bewailing the “fact” that Sri Lankans are uniquely cruel to animals.

Over the past few weeks, we have been spending a lot of time at our local pet hospital getting treatment for our dog. She has been with us since some cruel Sri Lankan left her on the street near a temple when she was a puppy, twelve years ago. We have become part of the club at the pet hospital. One man we see regularly at the hospital called out to me that we are Premium Members. I responded that we are Lifetime Members. He is caring for innumerable rescued cats and dogs as well as a 96-year-old mother with dementia.

Our Cutie has become a favourite with the doctors and nurses (she is contributing generously to their pension plan).

We have seen plenty of evidence that not all Sri Lankans are cruel to animals. The pet hospital is daily full at any time of day with worried animal custodians who clearly care deeply about animals. In all fairness, one could argue that far too many of them bring large pedigree dogs with gargantuan bollocks. The owners have great difficulty managing these huge creatures, lifting them on to the weighing scale, placing them on the examination table. One might question the motives of some of these owners: are the dogs for love or prestige or profit? Are they pedigree breeding machines? Some animals, clearly not pedigree, were brought in by people who were clearly not rich and who claimed to have found them injured on the street. One man brought in a baby monkey. I was horrified at first, thinking this was some inappropriate fetish. The man said he had rescued the monkey after it had been injured in a big clan fight. The baby was clinging to him with affection and terror.

A Dog’s Life

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,“ wrote Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 book, Walden. The same goes for dogs, even pampered pedigree dogs. Many years ago in the New York Review of Books, Catherine Schine reviewed an animated film based on JR Ackerley’s memoir My Dog Tulip: “What strained and anxious lives dogs must lead, so emotionally involved in the world of men, whose affections they strive endlessly to secure, whose authority they are expected unquestionably to obey, and whose mind they never can do more than imperfectly reach and comprehend. Stupidly loved, stupidly hated, acquired without thought, reared and ruled without understanding, passed on or ‘put to sleep’ without care, did they, I wondered, these descendants of the creatures who, thousands of years ago in the primeval forests, laid siege to the heart of man, took him under their protection, tried to tame him, and failed—did they suffer from headaches?’

How much more anxious must be the lives of creatures in the wild? In front of our house, little palm squirrels are ceaselessly chasing each other about and making chickabitty kind of noises. I call them the Chakrabattys. These funambuli palmarum seem quite neurotic. For all such rodents, and birds also, it is a struggle minute by minute to find food for themselves and their young. They can’t go to a supermarket or send for an Uber Eats.

As Bob Dylan sang in “Ballad in Plain D”:

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
‘How good, how good does it feel to be free?’
And I answer them most mysteriously
Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?

Did You Do It?

Which brings me to the Vanellus indicus, also known as the red-wattled lapwing. This bird is commonly known in Sri Lanka as the Did You Do It? because of its cry. Their characteristic loud alarm calls are warnings of human or animal movements.

There has been a continuity of generations of these creatures occupying the territory in front of our house. We live in a gated community of 100 houses in the Western Province of Sri Lanka. This is a built-up area in the outer suburbs of Greater Colombo, about 40 minutes (on a good day) drive to the city centre. Despite a lot of urban development, there are many unspoiled wetlands close by with an abundance of wildlife. Although our complex looks like suburbia we have a park and a lake just outside our front door. Every evening masses of egrets gather in the trees around the lake and make a lot of noise. Throughout the day a gang of villainous looking cormorants gather on the small pier ( what Joyce called a “disappointed bridge”) swooping into the water from time to time to catch them some fish, of which the lake holds an abundance. There are many turtles under the water. Three outside pelicans frequently visit the lake, separately or together, and sit on the pier intimidating the cormorants. The pelicans glide elegantly across the lake to catch fish.

Monitor

A number of monitor lizards live in and around the lake. One of them is huge and threatening like a crocodile. The Asian water monitor (Varanus salvator) is one of the largest living lizards. Adults can measure 4 to 7 feet in length and weigh between 40 and 90 pounds. They do venture into gardens and we found one in our drain. I was following one along the road trying to take photographs and it made a very threatening rattling noise at me and thrashed its tail about. They lack vocal cords so cannot vocalise or make complex sounds like barking, chirping, or growling. Their sounds are the mechanical results of air movement. The hiss has been compared to the deep, heavy sound of air rapidly escaping from a large tire.

The Asian water monitor is carnivorous and omnivorous and eats fish, frogs, rodents, birds and their eggs, crabs, mollusks, insects, other lizards and snakes. It also eats turtles, young crocodiles, crocodile eggs, monkeys and small deer. Your monitor is not a faddy eater. They have been known to feed on human corpes and human faeces. They can be forensically useful but the downside is that they can inflict further injuries to a corpse. The marks made by a monitor’s sharp claws look like wounds made by bladed weapons. In Sri Lanka, the presence of eight dead water monitors near the corpse of a partially scavenged 51-year-old man prompted investigation that revealed the possibility that the man died from poisoning after ingesting a bottle of Carbosulfan pesticide, which then poisoned the water monitors that scavenged on the body. There is an ongoing scientific debate about the possibility of Varanus salvator being venomous themselves.

The tail has a sharp, ridge-like top edge that can slice through human skin like a whip, causing deep cuts. A direct strike can cause instant, painful bruising and significant soft-tissue damage. A tail whip directed at the face can cause severe trauma or permanent damage to the eyes. Monitor lizards carry bacteria in their environment and mouths; tail-whip cuts can easily become infected if not immediately cleaned. In the immortal words of Ian Dury, Lord Upminster, “Imagine finding one in your laundry basket!” Some idiots do try to make household pets of these leviathans.

Eggs

Observing the habits of red-wattled lapwing over a long time I have often been puzzled by their behaviour. They lay their eggs just once a year. A female typical lays a batch of three to four heavily camouflaged eggs, which she drops at intervals of 24 to 48 hours until the batch is complete. Both parents share the duty of incubating the eggs. The incubation period lasts about a month before the chicks hatch. There are many security concerns here because they lay their eggs on the road. I wondered why experience had not taught them that this is a bad idea.

They do not build nests as we know nests. Their nest is just a bare scrape on the open ground. At most, the parents will casually line or ring the perimeter of the scrape with small pebbles, debris, dry grass, or dried animal dung. Lapwings are physically incapable of perching on tree branches. Evolution has left them without a hallux, the adaptable, functional hind toe. True perching birds possess an anisodactyl foot structure—meaning they have three slender toes pointing forward and one strong, opposing hallux pointing backward—which locks onto branches mechanically.

I wondered why they were subjecting themselves to such anxiety by laying their eggs on the ground and then raising their chicks on a road inhabited by other aggressive birds, cats, dogs, monitor lizards (who just love eggs and cadavers). I wondered if they were just stupid but they seemed intelligent, brave and resourceful in other ways. Has evolution dealt them a bum hand and are they making the best of it? Anatomically, lapwings belong to the charadriid family (plovers and waders). Their long, slender yellow legs lack the physical structures required for perching. Their foot structure and long legs are optimized for walking, running, and foraging on soil, mud, and gravel. They physically lack the machinery to build elevated nests. This could be a positive. A bulky nest in a tree or bush would present a highly visible target for for crows or monkeys, which we have here in abundance. We also have visits from birds of prey like black eagles and shrikes. Trees block a bird’s line of sight. By nesting on wide-open, flat ground, lapwings have an unobstructed view of their surroundings. Weaving a nest takes up a lot of metabolic energy which they redirect to chasing off predators.

One defence strategy that I have not observed but have read about is the “injury-feigning distraction display”. When a potential predator walks too close to the nest, the parent lapwing deliberately moves a safe distance away from the eggs. The adult then drops to the ground and fans its tail, screaming in feigned agony , limping and stumbling. The predator abandons its original target to pursue the “easy prey”. The lapwing then leads the predator away and flies off. Research shows that this trick has independently evolved in nearly 300 bird species.

Our neighbours who live along the lane the lapwings favour for their egg laying keep an eye out for them, placing highly visible sturdy red clay curd pots around the incubating area. This usually works well but recently an outside SUV ran over the pots. Luckily, the eggs survived. The lapwings are comfortable with some humans and come to our houses to share the rice put out for ducks.

The chicks of altricial tree-dwelling birds hatch naked and helpless. Lapwing chicks are precocial and hatch already well-developed, covered in downy feathers, with open eyes. The chicks are immediately able to walk. We have seen the new-born chicks straying far from the nest and exploring the entire complex. The parents keep a watchful eye on them and chaperone them everywhere. Because the nest is already on the ground, the chicks can instantly run, forage for insects and dive into nearby cover when necessary. The parents become quite aggressive chasing away palm squirrels and cats and dive bombing lizards and crows like Stukas.

I have even seen a lapwing chasing away the monstrous Asian water monitor. Who would have thought that this nervy creature skittering about on its slender, brittle-looking, spindly, yellow legs would be tough enough to repulse this monster of the deep?

Soon after I posted my Substack review (https://moleary.substack.com/p/prophet-song-by-paul-lynch) of Paul Lynch’s “dystopian fantasy” about Ireland descending into fascist hell, Belfast descended into fascist hell.

A 30-year-old Sudanese national, Hadi Alodid, was arrested and charged with attempted murder, possession of a bladed article, and making threats to kill. He is due to appear in court via videolink on 8 July 2026. The victim is Stephen Ogilvie, a 44-year-old vulnerable adult with learning difficulties. He had been tortured by loyalist paramilitaries back in 2001. Some accounts describe the recent attack as an attempted beheading. Mr Ogilvie has lost one eye. Ogilvie’s father confirmed that he is out of intensive care, talking more each day, and taking major steps forward on his long road to recovery.

Stephen Ogilvie and the suspect, Hadi Alodid, lived in the same apartment block on Kinnaird Avenue in North Belfast. According to local accounts and community group reports, Mr Ogilvie actually helped Alodid move into his apartment four days before the brutal assault.

Most media reports describe Mr Ogilvie’s rescuer as Maitiu Mag Tighearnan, aged 32. In fact, the first to intervene was Mag Tighearnan’s friend, a Portuguese immigrant called Andre, who had lived and worked in Belfast for a decade. A fundraising page set up by stranger Niall Donnan to buy Mag Tighearnan a pint has attracted almost £30,000 in donations, which will be shared with Ogilvy and his family.

The attack sparked heavy anti-immigration rioting across Belfast. In response, Mr Ogilvie’s parents released a statement through the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) strongly condemning the violence. They emphasized that “Northern Ireland has many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution” and pleaded that their son’s tragedy not be used to fuel racial hostility or division. PSNI continues to make arrests. A 29-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and arson after a Belfast Glider transit bus was firebombed.

It is very disheartening that even liberal-left media like the Guardian are referring to the disturbances as “protests” when they would be more accurately described as fascist “pogroms”. In the House of Lords, Labour peer Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick described the violence as a “pogrom of people of colour”. Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent said “People went door-to-door to try and target foreign nationals to burn them out of their homes.” There is strong evidence that the disruption is organised from outside Ireland, with Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson pouring fuel on the flames. It is probable that local loyalist paramilitaries will be happy to assist if outside fascists are short-handed.

When Jeffrey Donaldson was found guilty by a unanimous jury on 18 counts of child sexual abuse, including rape, Belfast was quiet. Róisín Lanigan wrote in the Observer:

“There were no riots on the streets of the city, no raging about a culture of violence against women and girls by Elon Musk or Tommy Robinson, who were only too happy to whip tempers up to a frenzy just a fortnight ago after a knife attack for which a Sudanese man has been charged with attempted murder. The loyalist gangs who took to the streets then, burning buses and houses under the guise of “protecting children” from abuse by dangerous men, do not appear to be bothered that the former head of the DUP has turned out to be one of those men.

One of Northern Ireland’s most powerful men was able to abuse children with impunity. Why doesn’t that inspire anger from Northern Ireland’s angriest men?”

My Take on Prophet Song

I am always late to the party. The party in question here is the NAP (National Alliance Party). Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize in 2023 for his novel Prophet Song. I have only just got around to reading it. Apologies to Paul and whoever else for that. The NAP is a fictional fascist party which has formed a government in the Republic of Ireland and is taking ever more repressive measures, using emergency powers.

I have a number of issues with the novel.

The standard description of the book is that it is a dystopian novel set in “a version” of present-day Ireland that is slowly descending into totalitarianism. I find this idea of “a version” unsatisfactory on many levels. I have never been a fan of counterfactual history. Making things up about what is really happening today is even less appealing to me. We live in the post-truth era. Today, there are alternative truths – what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness”. The author himself disputes the word “dystopian”. Obviously, you and me is on the side of the good guys. Who are the good guys? We want to kick the motherfucking shit out of them fascist bastards. Who but bad people would like fascists?

Which fascist bastards are we talking about here?

What is the real Ireland’s acquaintance with totalitarianism?

Plot Summary

I am going to perpetrate many spoilers here. Watch out!

The central character of the novel is Eilish Stack, whose husband, Larry, a teacher, is arrested for organising a protest rally. Eilish is a highly qualified microbiologist whose job in the state health sector would in normal times be very secure. With her husband disappeared, she is left with sole responsibility for her four children and a father who slips in and out of dementia. She is not the first person narrator of the story, which is structured around a third-person, limited point of view that focuses on her thoughts and experiences. She loses her job because of her connection to her husband, who is targeted by the regime because he is a prominent trade union leader, and because her eldest son, Mark, has his name published in the media identifying him as a rebel. Mark received a conscription notice to do national service (which probably means fighting for the regime) and goes into hiding.

The political crisis descends into an all-out civil war between government forces and a rebel insurgency. Lynch deliberately avoids explaining the motives and composition of the rebel force, as he has avoided explaining the philosophy and political strategy of the fascists. Dublin becomes a militarized combat zone. Eilish’s neighbourhood is cut off from food, water, power, and medical supplies. The insurgents are by no means good guys. They match the brutality of the state forces, relishing the humiliation of civilians. They establish their own checkpoints and bring street warfare, sniper fire, and car bombs into civilian neighborhoods. Their advances across Dublin do not bring liberation; instead, they trigger devastating state airstrikes and artillery bombardments. Mark apparently joins the rebels and disappears from the narrative. Eilish’s second son, Bailey, is severely wounded in a mortar attack and dies in a collapsed hospital. As in Ukraine, hospitals are targets. Bailey’s body disappears after Eilish sees evidence of torture on his corpse. Her father slips further into cognitive decline.

With her home destroyed and the city reduced to rubble, Eilish finally gives up hope and decides to leave Dublin. Left with only her daughter, Molly, and her infant son, Ben, she pays human smugglers to help them escape. The family is smuggled north through the Sperrin Mountains, which places them on the northern coastline of Northern Ireland. The closest landmass across that stretch of sea would be Scotland, but the book does not specify where they are. The novel ends with the refugees stepping onto a packed raft headed for an unknown destination or death.

My Problems with the Novel

After working out my irritations with the book, I, of course, discovered that many others had the same thoughts as I did and that Paul Lynch had an answer to all our misgivings and petty quibbles.

Esi Edugyan, chair of the 2023 Booker judges, claimed that Prophet Song “forces us out of our complacency” and “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment”. Readers, she added, “will not soon forget its warnings”. Really?! This is what Lynch himself believes. Lynch noted that when Western audiences watch cities being levelled or citizens queueing at borders on the news, they do so from the safety of their TV room. There is an implicit, comfortable assumption that “this happens there, to those people, but it could never happen in a stable, progressive Western democracy”. By choosing Ireland—a country universally perceived as a modern, safe, and wealthy European state—he intentionally provokes the reader by asking: What if the world ends for you, right where you feel safest?

Do not forget that Sinclair Lewis had this idea back in 1935. He wrote It Can’t Happen Here over a feverish four-month period, alarmed by the rise of Adolf Hitler in Europe and the creeping threat of authoritarianism in America.

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/can-it-happen-there-part-one/

Lynch rejects the “dystopian” label, calling the book a work of social realism. A favourite phrase of Myles na Gopaleen springs to my mind. “In yer porridge!” Lynch seems to be trying to have it both ways. There are grim descriptions of extreme violence and torture even of children. How can it be social realism if the causes and context of this are not examined? Lynch is not being brave or grown up in writing about these imaginary horrors. There is no risk or cost to him. In fact, he has made a fair amount money from his description of proxy horrors. The Booker Prize is worth £50,000 and historically results in a massive surge in international publicity, prestige, and book sales. Is this empathy or pornography and opportunism?

What about the Real Ireland?

https://groundviews.org/2012/03/17/martyrology-martyrdom-rebellion-terrorism/

The real Ireland DID endure totalitarian oppression under the Catholic church. The alliance between Eamon de Valera and Archbishop Charles McQuaid began at Blackrock College, where de Valera was a past pupil and McQuaid was the college president. McQuaid became a close family friend and a regular visitor to the de Valera household. When de Valera was drafting Bunreacht na hÉireann (the 1937 Constitution of Ireland), he relied heavily on McQuaid. McQuaid provided extensive documentation on papal encyclicals, family structures, marriage, and Catholic social principles, which directly shaped the document. Article 44 famously recognized the “special position” of the Catholic Church alongside other recognized denominations.

The totalitarian reach of the Irish Catholic church spread to the English cathedral city of Gloucester where I was brought up as part of the Catholic minority. The local priests were not the most educated or cultured of men but brooked no disagreement.

Redemptorist fathers gave hell fire sermons like the delivered by Father Arnall in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man.

Scary Sister Theresa struck terror into my soul and controlled my thinking. She was quite lethal with a ruler. Every year she told her class that they were pathetic compared to the paragons she had the privilege of teaching in the previous year. Uncharacteristically, Sister Theresa is smiling in this photograph. I do not believe I witnessed that phenomenon in real life.

Our parish priest, Monsignor Matthew Roche is also in the picture. He was not a bad man and he respected my father, which is a point in his favour. He seemed to like me. However, he was fatally flawed with that toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance that had priests from rural Ireland floundering in a changing Britain and doing great harm. He was the precipitate cause of me giving up on “the faith”. He gave a sermon one Christmas Midnight Mass defending apartheid.

Sister Theresa would press her bony fingers into you and say, “the only thing certain in this life is that you are going to die.” It was only recently that I noticed that the school photo taken at St Peter’s in 1955 was posed in front of a graveyard.

The industrial schools and Magdalen laundries were the gulags of the church’s dictatorship in Ireland itself. Bodies of surplus children were buried in a unmarked graves and septic tanks like the one in in Tuam. Those who did not die were shipped abroad for adoption which brought profit to some people. There is a real story here which has been addressed in fiction by novelists such as John Banville and Claire Keegan. There were many decades of censorship and oppression by the church, with de Valera in league with McQuaid.

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2021/02/03/irelands-shame/

Nun of That

Claire Keegan’s brief 2021 novella Small Things Like These is set in 1985 Ireland during the weeks leading up to Christmas. Bill Furlong, a family man and coal merchant, discovers a dark secret at the local convent. I recently watched the 2024 film adaptation with Cillian Murphy as Bill. Bill witnesses a young woman, kicking and screaming, being dragged by her mother and a few nuns into the church. He meets Sarah, an unwed mother, freezing in a coal shed just outside the church. The scene where the softly spoken, emollient Mother Superior confronts Bill and subtly warns him against meddling is truly terrifying.

She was outwardly less threatening than Sister Theresa. Even before I encountered nuns as teachers, I used to start screaming when I saw them in the street. They looked like black, evil birds of prey. Emily Watson’s Sister Mary casually mentions the matter of the education of Bill’s daughters and their potentially bright futures. She uses the tactics of a mob boss. She never raises her voice but she is as scary as a Gestapo officer or a a Stalinist bureaucrat. She is forcing Bill to deny the evidence of his own eyes in deference to the party line. Bill isn’t just fighting a nasty nun; he is a lone man trying to withstand an entire oppressive political system. He silently watches the girls in their grey uniforms marching in file through the snow like inmates of a maximum security penitentiary.

The film beautifully captures the tension between survival and activism, complicity and resistance. What would it be like to live in Nazi Germany? It takes great courage to resist a totalitarian dictatorship. It even takes courage to withhold enthusiastic support.

As John McGahern wrote in his memoir, “By 1950, against the whole spirit of the 1916 Proclamation, the State had become a theocracy in all but name. The Church controlled nearly all of education, the hospitals, the orphanages, the juvenile prison systems, the parish halls. Church and State worked hand in hand.”

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/complicity-part-one/

Ireland Today

Today’s Ireland has legal abortion, same sex marriage and recently had a gay, half-Indian prime minister. It also has homelessness and unaffordable housing and tax breaks for corrupt global corporations. Lynch offers no link between the regime and powerful corporations, no link between money and power. Eilish and Larry are well-meaning left liberals but both, in their own ways, are complicit in the coming to power of the NAP through their detachment from politics and their denial of the true situation.

There are real tensions in Ireland about immigration. When I visited Ireland as a child in the 1940s and 1950s, black faces were rare. Today, approximately 23.3% of the 5,458,600 population of the Republic of Ireland was born outside the state, according to official data released by Eurostat. Research by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) highlights that residential segregation is relatively low in Ireland compared to other European nations, meaning new communities generally live alongside native Irish citizens rather than in isolated ghettos.

Despite historically high levels of public tolerance, Ireland has experienced a sharp increase in societal friction and localized unrest. A severe, long-standing housing shortage has created intense resentments. Far-right movements have successfully capitalized on this scarcity, using the slogan “Ireland is full” (the state has, in actuality, since the famine, suffered severe rural depopulation) to blame asylum seekers and immigrants for public service deficits. Dublin and several rural towns have seen highly visible, recurring anti-immigration protests and riots. Major street violence broke out in central Dublin and around the Citywest migrant accommodation facility following high-profile criminal incidents involving foreign nationals, which triggered widespread anti-immigrant mobilizations. I witnessed a racist incident suffered by a family member in the late 90s in the village of Lisgoold. I wrote a poem about it.

https://taxonomiesblog.wordpress.com/2025/11/29/cead-mile-failte/

The Real Right in Ireland

The Irish far-right has failed to achieve electoral success and remains fragmented among various micro-parties and independent influencers. In a notable ideological shift, certain far-right actors in the Republic have actively linked up with loyalist, anti-immigrant organizations in Belfast, establishing a coordinated, cross-border anti-migration front. Prominent groups include the Irish Freedom Party, National Party, Clann Éireann, and the National Alliance.

On 15 May, department store security guards overpowered Yves Sakila, 35, a Congolese man suspected of shoplifting. Video footage showed him pinned to the pavement on Henry Street for about five minutes, with one man kneeling on his neck. When police arrived they briefly handcuffed Sakila before realising he was unresponsive and took him to hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Shoplifting is not a capital offence.

Gerry ‘the monk’ Hutch won fans in a north Dublin byelection campaign with anti-immigrant rhetoric. Hutch has been a notorious figure for decades. A court named him as the leader of an organised crime group. Hutch has called for “illegal immigrants” to be detained in camps. “They should be all interned,” he said, and singled out east Africans. “The ones that are Somalians and them type of people, no way. Interned.”

Escape Clause

Lynch evades criticisms by saying he did not want to write a political tract or a specific commentary on actual Irish politics. Lynch has stated that the initial spark for the book came around 2018, as he watched the news from Syria and the ensuing migrant crisis. He felt that Western nations viewed the plight of Syrian refugees with cold, bureaucratic indifference. Because he could not write authentically about Syria, he decided to run a simulation and transfer the plight of Syria to Ireland. To me, he falls between two stools. He admits he cannot write authentically about Syria but does not want to write authentically about the real Ireland.

It seems to me that he has grafted on to Ireland the events in Syria and Ukraine to no good purpose.

Virtue Signalling

I do not think I need Paul Lynch to teach me empathy about civil unrest, refugees, exploitation, terrorism. As the son of a Catholic Irish immigrant in England, I was brought up on the oppression of the Irish. I remember watching a dramatisation on BBC TV of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. I was brought up as a Catholic. The scenes of the Gordon Riots against Catholics disturbed me enough to give me bad dreams. One dream featured football stadiums full of political prisoners on their way to torture and death. In Chile, in 1973, that dream became reality. I lived in Manchester and London in the 70s and 80s and was constantly aware of the threat of violence from the IRA and the UVF and also the anti-Irish feeling caused by the IRA. I was sitting in the Irish Club in Gloucester with my sainted Aunt Peggy, who was over on a visit from Cobh, when a brick came through the window. There was much anti-Irish feeling at that time. A work colleague refused to buy Kerry Gold butter because of the IRA.

I am now an Irish citizen who has lived in Sri Lanka for 24 years. For seven of those years, Sri Lanka was still engulfed in a thirty-year-long brutal civil war. I was constantly on the look out for death delivered by the Tamil Tigers. A favourite tactic of the Tigers was to sneak into a Sinhalese village in the night and chop the heads off all the babies. The Kattankudy mosque massacre took place on August 3, 1990. Around 30 armed cadres raided two mosques and opened fire and threw grenades at over 300 worshippers who were prostrating during the evening Isha prayers. Over 147 men and boys were killed. The attack was part of a broader, aggressive ethnic cleansing campaign by the Tigers to forcibly expel or eliminate Muslim populations from the Northern and Eastern Provinces.

One could not travel anywhere in Sri Lanka without being stopped by army or police. Road blocks were such a normal part of life that they were sponsored by advertisers. When I wanted to buy a new printer, I had to get permission from the Ministry of Defence. One could not buy maps because of the possibility they might fall into the hands of the Tigers and assist their war effort.

I had lunch in the Cinnamon Grand in Colombo the Sunday before the Easter Sunday bombing in 2019. One of the people who served us was killed in the blast. The head of the state security service is accused of planning the bombings to ensure the election of Gotabaya Rajapaksa as president.

Unearned

Many critics found Prophet Song politically shallow because it denudes the fictional fascist regime and the rebel opposition of any ideology. Lynch excuses himself from dealing with the reality of fascism in a real country by saying he is interested in the universality of human suffering. Universality of human suffering my arse. Because there are no specific political causes, the violence in the narrative can feel unearned. People are presented as powerless victims of dark forces that are not explained or contextualised. Critics argue that graphically describing the torture and deaths of children without explaining the systemic failures that caused them is misappropriation. Lynch is purloining or borrowing suffering by proxy. The fictional NAP won power democratically in a landslide election victory. The NAP has no clear ideology or manifesto. There is no account of the context that led to their landslide victory. The rise of the NAP, the protests and the civil war just happen, not because of forces in society or the world.

Real Oppression

Ireland has had associations with fascism in its history. Yeats was briefly sympathetic to Eoin O’Duffy’s Blue Shirts, but they disappointed the noble bard because they did not go far enough. O’Duffy became the first leader of Fine Gael, which became a mainstream party. When I was a very small child, my father explained to me how de Valera of Fianna Fáil imprisoned and executed his former comrades. Six IRA members were executed under de Valera’s administration during the wartime period (rferred to as ‘the emergency’ in Ireland), establishing a definitive precedent that the state would kill its own former revolutionary allies to survive. He used emergency wartime legislation to bypass standard courts and convict dissidents via military tribunals. While de Valera spent the 1920s as a radical anti-Treaty republican, his transition to constitutional politics with Fianna Fáil forced a hard break with his former militant comrades. These days Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are mainstream parties cooperating with each other to keep Sinn Fein out of government.

Trauma Porn

It is pointless to accuse Prophet Song of being emotionally manipulative. That is what novels and films, and even music do. The novel gives readers an easy path to a sense of tragedy and moral self righteousness – not as self righteous as the author. The sun shines on the self righteous. Parul Sehgal wrote an essay in the New Yorker on the “Trauma Plot”. “The enshrinement of testimony in all its guises—in memoirs, confessional poetry, survivor narratives, talk shows— trauma has been elevated elevated from a sign of moral defect to a source of moral authority, even a kind of expertise.”

In bypassing the realities of contemporary and historic Ireland it to write a fable about an imaginary, vague fascism that targets trade unionists instead of minorities, Lynch avoided the messy realities of contemporary Irish politics. Lynch pretended to be taking risks but he is instead producing a commodified product designed to appeal to international literary juries. We are all, (some of us anyway) against sin. Writing a book that says “war and fascism are bad” is a safe position. It costs the author nothing, upsets no real-world political factions.

Some reviews claim that Lynch’s intention was to attack the complacency of Western readers. This is in itself a luxury of complacently western liberals.

Following the formation of his band Ekaya in the 1980s, Ibrahim became mostly based out of Germany for recording and touring. His partner, Dr Marina Umari, issued the official statement on behalf of the family, saying that he “passed away peacefully with South Africa and its people in his heart”.

I was fortunate to see Abdullah Ibrahim perform live on several occasions. I saw him in the early days of the Jazz Café, in June 1991. That performance featured his Ekaya line-up which had Carlos Ward on alto sax and flute. I only just discovered that Ward died in January this year. I recently acquired a recording of Ward with John Coltrane. AB Spellman wrote: “This was the first time I’d heard Panamanian altoist Ward. He seemed to be neither a screamer nor a singer, but a talker. He seemed to be engaged in some kind of a dialog with himself, playing a rapid series of terse, self-contained, but related phrases. I liked Ward; his ear is different. I couldn’t sort out his influences in this cauldron, however, and I look forward to hearing him in a smaller group.” I loved Ward’s sound. He made a dozen albums with Abdullah Ibrahim and also worked with Don Cherry, David Murray and Cecil Taylor.

I was familiar with Ekaya’s work from CDs. Melodies like “The Wedding” from 1978 and “Water From an Ancient Well” from 1986 still play in my head. “Mannenberg” featuring tenor player Basil Coetzee became a liberation anthem for anti-Apartheid activists.

Graham Lock noted “Mannenberg was actually recorded during a break in a studio session when Ibrahim began playing around on an old upright piano whose honky tonk sound he liked. When no record company wanted to release that particular tape, Ibrahim made some acetates himself and played the disk in a little record shop near the Johannesburg bus terminal. Within a week, he’d sold 5000 copies over the counter and the LP, whose appearance had coincided with the 1976 uprisings, became synonymous with the freedom struggle.”

Blackheath

I saw Abdullah Ibrahim in a more austere mood in autumn 1994 (I cannot provide a precise date as Google AI is confessing to hallucinations) at Blackheath Concert Halls. This was a solo piano performance consisting of one single uninterrupted piece made up of compositions from throughout his career, plus themes by influencers such as Ellington and Monk. The concert took place just months after South Africa had held its first fully democratic election. Ibrahim had returned from decades of political exile to perform at Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration. Nelson Mandela once called him “our Mozart.” On that night, Ibrahim walked onto the stage at Blackheath Concert Halls, sat at the piano without saying a word, and began playing a quiet, low-register drone, with sombre left-hand rumbles. One song faded into the next without pause, creating a meditative, cyclical journey that only concluded when he finally lifted his hands from the keys at the very end of the set.

A 21-year-old Nikki Yeoh provided a solo support performance on that drew widespread praise from London jazz critics and solidified her reputation as one of the most exciting new contemporary piano talents in the country.

Barbican

I saw him again when he was 88 at the Barbican Centre on Saturday 15 July 2023, with a drumless trio format- Cleave Guyton on flute, piccolo, saxophone and Noah Jackson on bass, cello. Reviewers noted that in London Ibrahim is always received rapturously and accorded a reverence reserved for few jazz musicians. He had been unhappy actually living in London, which he remembered as a time of too little work (‘I think we got three gigs in six months, two pounds ten shillings a time!’) and too much drink (‘Oh, man, that was a foggy time. The fog was inside my head, right? I had a problem then, too much liquid!’).

The concert opened with interpretations of Duke Ellington’s ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ and John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’. Kevin Le Gendre wrote of the concert in JazzWise “it is Ibrahim’s originals that take pride of place, showing how, since the ‘60s, he has been creating standards of his own that vividly capture the poised dignity of African culture and customs.“

The performance was issued on two CDs by Gearbox records. CD1 was recorded in the afternoon without an audience. CD 2 was recorded in the evening with me in attendance. If you try hard enough you can hear me clapping. This is what they played in my presence:

In a Sentimental Mood (Duke Ellington cover)
8Giant Steps (John Coltrane cover)
Reprise 1
Water from an Ancient Well
Nisa
The Wedding
Tuang Guru
Reprise 2
15. Dreamtime
Skippy (Thelonious Monk cover)
Blue Bolero
Mindif
Trance-mission (Concludes with an intimate, raw vocal solo by Ibrahim)

Biography

In 1960, Bessie Head wrote of the 26-year-old Dollar Brand “a powerful, vitally alive and creative man” who stood out like “a complete and perfect flower in this desert”: “He hurls a challenge at you; disturbs you; teaches and expects perfection from you.”

Abdullah Ibrahim was born Adolf Johannes Brand in 1934 and grew up in Kensington, a working-class neighborhood on the northern edge of Cape Town’s inner city inhabited largely by “coloureds”. These were descendants of enslaved people from Southeast Africa and the Indian Ocean; people born of mixed relationships between whites and blacks; aboriginal peoples like the Khoi, San, and Griqua; and anyone that the racist regimes could not fit into their toxic taxonomy. Ibrahim’s music is of a mongrel nature drawing from a strong genetic pool. Ibrahim’s work carries the echoes of church hymns, Islamic devotional chants, and township dance rhythms: goema, marabi, kwela.

He made his professional debut at the age of fifteen playing and later recording with the Tuxedo Slickers, big band in Cape Town. He also played piano with the local Cape Town dance bands, vocal groups and saxophone with the Minstrel Carnival.

In 1958 he created his own “Dollar Brand Trio” showcasing his original compositions as well as those of Jazz Masters. He formed the Jazz Epistles, formed in 1959 in Johannesburg with co-leader: Kippie Moeketsi, the brilliant classically trained clarinetist and jazz saxophone player as well as Hugh Masekela (trumpet), Jonas Gwangwa (trombone), Johnny Gertze (bass), and Makaya Ntshoko (drums).

Graham Lock interviewed Abdullah Ibrahim for The Wire in 1983 and got the impression of “a man of great dignity, authority and charm.”

https://leguesswho.com/news/lgw22-abdullah-ibrahim-interview

He told Lock, “If you become a commercial success in South Africa, they’re going to try and use you, make you pay homage to the system. The moment you become visible, you have no choice. The system drives you into the arms of the revolution: either that or you stop playing. You leave the country or you stop playing. There’s no other way to deal with it.”

Ibrahim found refuge in Switzerland, taking up a three-year contract at Zurich’s Club Africana. It was there that he met several visiting American jazz musicians, including Max Roach, John Coltrane, Abbey Lincoln and the Duke. As the legend goes, it was Ibrahim’s then wife Bea Benjamin who persuaded Ellington to listen to the Dollar Brand Trio at the Africana, which led to the now famous ‘Duke Ellington presents the Dollar Brand Trio’ recording. Under Ellington’s patronage he recorded for Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label. Ellington invited him to perform with his band and convinced the promoter George Wein to include him in the programme of the 1965 Newport jazz festival. He moved to New York City in 1965 and befriended the likes of Coltrane, Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman.

He recorded with the Munich Symphony Orchestra (African Symphony, 2001) and the orchestras of the German radio stations NDR in Hamburg and WDR in Cologne. He composed the soundtracks for films by the French director Claire Denis (Chocolat, 1988, and S’en Fout la Mort, 1990), and one by the Burkino Faso director Idrissa Ouédraogo (Tilaï, 1990).

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/06/07/songs-of-liberation-abdullah-ibrahim/

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jun/16/abdullah-ibrahim-obituary

I am always late to the party. The party in question here is the NAP (National Alliance Party). Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize in 2023 for his novel Prophet Song. I have only just got around to reading it. Apologies to Paul and whoever else for that. The NAP is a fictional fascist party which has formed a government in the Republic of Ireland and is taking ever more repressive measures, using emergency powers.

I have a number of issues with the novel.

The standard description of the book is that it is a dystopian novel set in “a version” of present-day Ireland that is slowly descending into totalitarianism. I find this unsatisfactory on many levels. I have never been a fan of counterfactual history. Making things up about what is really happening today is even less appealing to me. We live in the post-truth era. Today there are alternative truths – what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness”. The author himself disputes the word “dystopian”. Obviously, you and me is on the side of the good guys. Who are the good guys? We want to kick the motherfucking shit out of them fascist bastards. Who but bad people would like fascists?

Which fascist bastards are we talking about here?

What is the real Ireland’s acquaintance with totalitarianism?

Plot Summary

I am going to perpetrate many spoilers here. Watch out!

The central character of the novel is Eilish Stack, whose husband, Larry, a teacher, is arrested for organising a protest rally. Eilish is a highly qualified microbiologist whose job in the state health sector would in normal times be very secure. With her husband disappeared, she is left with sole responsibility for her four children and a father who slips in and out of dementia. She is not the first person narrator of the story, which is structured around a third-person, limited point of view that focuses on her thoughts and experiences. She loses her job because of her connection to her husband, who is targeted by the regime as a prominent trade union leader, and because her eldest son, Mark, has his name published as a rebel. Mark received a conscription notice to do national service (which probably means fighting for the regime) and goes into hiding.

The political crisis descends into an all-out civil war between government forces and a rebel insurgency. Lynch deliberately avoids explaining the motives and composition of the rebel force, as he has avoided explaining the philosophy and political strategy of the fascists. Dublin becomes a militarised combat zone. Eilish’s neighbourhood is cut off from food, water, power, and medical supplies. The insurgents are by no means the good guys. They match the brutality of the state forces, relishing the humiliation of civilians. They establish their own checkpoints and bring street warfare, sniper fire, and car bombs into civilian neighborhoods. Their advances across Dublin do not bring liberation; instead, they trigger devastating state airstrikes and artillery bombardments. Mark apparently joins the rebels and disappears from the narrative. Eilish’s second son, Bailey, is severely wounded in a mortar attack and dies in a collapsed hospital. As in Ukraine, hospitals are targets. Bailey’s body disappears after Eilish sees evidence of torture on his corpse. Her father slips further into cognitive decline.

With her home destroyed and the city reduced to rubble, Eilish finally gives up hope and decides to leave Dublin. Left with only her daughter, Molly, and her infant son, Ben, she pays human smugglers to help them escape. The family is smuggled north through the Sperrin Mountains, which places them on the northern coastline of Northern Ireland. The closest landmass across that stretch of sea would be Scotland, but the book does not specify where they are. The novel ends with the refugees stepping onto a packed raft headed for an unknown destination or death.

My Problems with the Novel

After working out my irritations with the book, I, of course, discovered that many others had the same thoughts as I did and that Paul Lynch had an answer to all our misgivings and petty quibbles.

Esi Edugyan, chair of the 2023 Booker judges, claimed that Prophet Song “forces us out of our complacency” and “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment”. Readers, she added, “will not soon forget its warnings”. Really?! This is what Lynch himself believes. Lynch noted that when Western audiences watch cities being levelled or citizens queueing at borders on the news, they do so from the safety of their comfortable living rooms. There is an assumption that “this happens there, to those people, but it could never happen in a stable, progressive Western democracy”. By choosing Ireland—a country universally perceived as a modern, safe, and wealthy European state—he intentionally provokes the reader by asking: What if the world ends for you, right where you feel safest?

Lynch rejects the “dystopian” label, calling the book a work of social realism. A favourite phrase of Myles na Gopaleen springs to my mind. “In yer porridge!” Lynch seems to be trying to have it both ways. There are grim descriptions of extreme violence and torture, even of children. How can it be social realism if the causes of this are not explained? Lynch is not being brave or grown up in writing about these imaginary horrors. There is no risk or cost to him. In fact, he has made a fair amount money from his description of proxy horrors. The Booker Prize is worth £50,000 and historically results in a massive surge in international publicity, prestige, and book sales. Is this empathy or pornography and opportunism?

What about the Real Ireland?

https://groundviews.org/2012/03/17/martyrology-martyrdom-rebellion-terrorism/

The real Ireland DID endure totalitarian oppression under the Catholic church. The alliance between Eamon de Valera and Archbishop Charles McQuaid began at Blackrock College, where de Valera was a past pupil and McQuaid was the college president. McQuaid became a close family friend and a regular visitor to the de Valera household. When de Valera was drafting Bunreacht na hÉireann (the 1937 Constitution of Ireland), he relied heavily on McQuaid. McQuaid provided extensive documentation on papal encyclicals, family structures, marriage, and Catholic social principles, which directly shaped the document. Article 44 famously recognized the “special position” of the Catholic Church alongside other recognized denominations. The totalitarian reach of the Irish Catholic church spread to the English cathedral city of Gloucester, where I was brought up as part of the Catholic minority. The local priests and visiting Redemptorist fathers and scary Sister Theresa struck terror into my soul and controlled my thinking.

The industrial schools and Magdalen laundries were the gulags of the church’s dictatorship in Ireland itself. Bodies of surplus children were buried in a unmarked graves and septic tanks like the one in in Tuam. Those who did not die were shipped abroad for adoption which brought profit to some people. There is a real story here which has been addressed in fiction by novelists such as John Banville and Claire Keegan. There were many decades of censorship and oppression by the church, with de Valera in league with McQuaid.

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2021/02/03/irelands-shame/

Today’s Ireland has a vibrant cultural scene, legal abortion, same sex marriage and recently had a gay, half Indian prime minister. It also has homelessness and unaffordable housing and tax breaks for corrupt global corporations. Lynch offers no link between the regime and powerful corporations, no link between money and power. Eilish and Larry are well-meaning left liberals but both, in their own ways, are complicit in the coming to power of the NAP through their detachment from politics and their denial of the true situation.

There are real world tensions in Ireland today about immigration. When I visited Ireland as a child in the 1940s and 1950s, black faces were rare. Today, approximately 23.3% of the 5,458,600 population of the Republic of Ireland was born outside the state, according to official data released by Eurostat. Research by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) highlights that residential segregation is relatively low in Ireland compared to other European nations, meaning new communities generally live alongside native Irish citizens rather than in isolated ghettos.

Despite historically high levels of public tolerance, Ireland has experienced a sharp increase in societal friction and localized unrest. A severe, long-standing housing shortage has created intense conflict. Far-right movements have successfully capitalized on this scarcity, using the slogan “Ireland is full” (the state has in actuality, since the famine, suffered severe rural depopulation) to blame asylum seekers and immigrants for public service deficits. Dublin and several rural towns have seen highly visible, recurring anti-immigration protests and riots. Major street violence broke out in central Dublin and around the Citywest migrant accommodation facility following high-profile criminal incidents involving foreign nationals, which triggered widespread anti-immigrant mobilizations. I witnessed a racist incident suffered by a family member in the late 90s in the village of Lisgoold. I wrote a poem about it.

https://taxonomiesblog.wordpress.com/2025/11/29/cead-mile-failte/

The Irish far-right has failed to achieve electoral success and remains fragmented among various micro-parties and independent influencers. In a notable ideological shift, certain far-right actors in the Republic have actively linked up with loyalist, anti-immigrant organizations in Belfast, Northern Ireland, establishing a coordinated, cross-border anti-migration front. Prominent groups include the Irish Freedom Party, National Party, Clann Éireann, and the National Alliance.

On 15 May, department store security guards overpowered Yves Sakila, 35, a Congolese man suspected of shoplifting. Video footage showed him pinned to the pavement on Henry Street for about five minutes, with one man kneeling on his neck. When police arrived they briefly handcuffed Sakila before realising he was unresponsive and took him to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Gerry ‘the monk’ Hutch won fans in a north Dublin byelection campaign with anti-immigrant rhetoric (although he lost). Hutch has been a notorious figure for decades. A court named him as the leader of an organised crime group. Hutch has called for “illegal immigrants” to be detained in camps. “They should be all interned,” he said, and singled out east Africans. “The ones that are Somalians and them type of people, no way. Interned.”

Escape Clause

Lynch evades criticisms by saying he did not want to write a political tract or a specific commentary on actual Irish politics. Lynch has stated that the initial spark for the book came around 2018, as he watched the news from Syria and the ensuing migrant crisis. He felt that Western nations viewed the plight of Syrian refugees with cold, bureaucratic indifference. Because he could not write authentically about Syria, he decided to run a simulation and transfer the plight of Syria to Ireland. To me, he falls between two stools. He admits he cannot write authentically about Syria but does not want to write authentically about the real Ireland.

It seems to me that he has grafted on to Ireland the events in Syria and Ukraine to no good purpose.

Virtue Signalling

I do not think I need Paul Lynch to teach me empathy about civil unrest, refugees, exploitation, terrorism. As the son of a Catholic Irish immigrant in England, I was brought up on the oppression of the Irish. I remember watching a dramatisation on BBC TV of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. I was brought up as a Catholic. The scenes of the Gordon Riots against Catholics disturbed me enough to give me bad dreams. One dream featured football stadiums full of political prisoners on their way to torture and death. In Chile, in 1973, that dream became reality. I lived in Manchester and London in the 70s and 80s and was constantly aware of the threat of violence from the IRA and the UVF and also the ant-Irish feeling caused by the IRA. I was sitting in the Irish Club in Gloucester with my sainted Aunt Peggy, who was over on a visit from Cobh, when a brick came through the window. There was much anti-Irish feeling at that time. A work colleague refused to buy Kerry Gold butter because of the IRA.

I am now an Irish citizen who has lived in Sri Lanka for 24 years. For seven of those years, Sri Lanka was still engulfed in a thirty-year-long brutal civil war. I was constantly on the look out for death delivered by the Tamil Tigers. A favourite tactic of the Tigers was to sneak into a Sinhalese village in the night and chop of the heads of all the babies. The Kattankudy mosque massacre took place on August 3, 1990. Around 30 armed cadres raided two mosques and opened fire and threw grenades at over 300 worshippers who were prostrating during the evening Isha prayers. Over 147 men and boys were killed. The attack was part of a broader, aggressive ethnic cleansing campaign by the Tigers to forcibly expel or eliminate Muslim populations from the Northern and Eastern Provinces.

One could not travel anywhere in Sri Lanka without being stopped by army or police. Road blocks were such a normal part of life that they were sponsored by advertisers. When I wanted to buy a new printer, I had to get permission from the Ministry of Defence. One could not buy maps because of the possibility they might fall into the hands of the Tigers and assist their war effort.

I had lunch in the Cinnamon Grand in Colombo the Sunday before the Easter Sunday bombing in 2019. One of the people who served us was killed in the blast. The head of the state security service is accused of planning the bombings to ensure the election of Gotabaya Rajapaksa as president.

Unearned

Many critics found Prophet Song politically shallow because it denudes the fascist regime and the rebel opposition of any ideology. Lynch excuses himself from dealing with the reality of fascism in a real country by saying he is interested in the universality of human suffering. Universality of human suffering my arse. Because there are no specific political causes, the violence in the narrative can feel unearned. People are presented as powerless victims of dark forces that are not explained or contextualised. Critics argue that graphically describing the torture and deaths of children without explaining the systemic failures that caused them is misappropriation. Lynch is purloining or borrowing suffering by proxy. The fictional NAP won power democratically in a landslide election victory. The NAP has no clear ideology or manifesto. There is no account of the context that led to their landslide victory. The rise of the NAP, the protests and the civil war just happen, not because of forces in society or the world.

Real Oppression

Ireland has had associations with fascism in its history. Yeats was briefly sympathetic to Eoin O’Duffy’s Blue Shirts, but they disappointed the noble bard because they did not go far enough. O’Duffy became the first leader of Fine Gael, which became a mainstream party. When I was a very small child, my father explained to me how de Valera of Fianna Fáil imprisoned and executed his former comrades. Six IRA members were executed under de Valera’s administration during the wartime period, establishing a definitive precedent that the state would kill its own former revolutionary allies to survive. He used emergency wartime legislation to bypass standard courts and convict dissidents via military tribunals. While de Valera spent the 1920s as a radical anti-Treaty republican, his transition to constitutional politics with Fianna Fáil forced a hard break with his former militant comrades. These days Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are mainstream parties cooperating with each other to keep Sinn Fein out of government.

Trauma Porn

It is pointless to accuse Prophet Song of being emotionally manipulative. That is what novels and films, and even music do. The novel gives readers an easy path to a sense of tragedy and moral self righteousness – not as self righteous as the author. The sun shines on the self righteous. Parul Sehgal wrote an essay in the New Yorker on the “Trauma Plot”. “The enshrinement of testimony in all its guises—in memoirs, confessional poetry, survivor narratives, talk shows— trauma has been elevated from a sign of moral defect to a source of moral authority, even a kind of expertise.”

In bypassing the realities of contemporary and historic Ireland to write a fable about an imaginary, vague fascism that targets trade unionists instead of minorities, Lynch avoided the messy realities of contemporary Irish politics. Lynch pretended to be taking risks but he is instead producing a commodified product designed to appeal to international literary juries. We are all, (some of us anyway) against sin. Writing a book that says “war and fascism are bad” is a safe position. It costs the author nothing, upsets no real-world political factions.

Some reviews claim that Lynch’s intention was to attack the complacency of Western readers. This is in itself a luxury of complacently western liberals.

This year we are celebrating the centennial of the remarkable Miles Davis. Miles was only 65 when he died. Louis Armstrong was 69 when he died. Duke Ellington was 75. I just heard that Sonny Rollins has died at the age of 95. I had the privilege of seeing him perform live many times.

I am coming up to 80 with little to recommend me.

On May 25 2026, the incredible Marshall Allen was102.

I saw Marshall Allen perform live when he was a mere boy of 98. He was amazing. He was leading the Sun Ra Arkestra with great vigour. Unfortunately, John Gilmore passed on some time ago. I was pleased to see a guest sitting in with the Arkestra. Young Gary Bartz, a stripling of 82, was there on the same stage where I had seen him in 1971 in the band of Miles Davis.

https://meself652939566.wordpress.com/2022/07/17/space-is-the-place/

Marshall Belford Allen, alto saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, bandleader, and arranger, was born May 25, 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky.

During the Second World War he enlisted in the 92nd Infantry Division, known as the Buffalo Soldiers Division and was stationed in France. Marshall studied alto saxophone in Paris and played in Europe with pianist Art Simmons and saxophonist James Moody.

Critic Scott Yanow described Allen’s playing as “Johnny Hodges from another dimension”.

Allen joined the Sun Ra Arkestra in 1958 and led its reed section for decades. Following the deaths of Sun Ra and John Gilmore, Allen assumed leadership of the ensemble in the mid-1990s.

On October 4, 2024, he released his first single “African Sunset” from his debut album as a solo artist which was recorded a few days after his 100th birthday. The album New Dawn was released on February 14, 2025. He is the oldest person to release a debut album and the oldest person to release an album of entirely new material.

At 102, he is till the active leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra, a role he took on in 1995. While he no longer takes long-distance international flights, he continues to play live frequently and direct the Sun Ra Arkestra. On January 10, 2026, the Sun Ra Arkestra delivered a sold-out performance in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. This was a finale wrap party for artist Rashid Johnson’s acclaimed exhibition, A Poem for Deep Thinkers. Labelle legend Nona Hendryx joined the band mid-set from the audience to recite a powerful poem, backed by the Arkestra’s soaring arrangements.

Since 1968, Allen has lived in the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra in Germantown, Philadelphia. He maintains a continuous presence in his hometown of Philadelphia with regular live gigs.

In April 2025, he received the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Jazz Masters Fellowship, which is the highest honour bestowed upon jazz artists in the United States.

Sallay’s detention followed long-standing allegations, which suggested state complicity in the Easter 2019 bombings of churches and hotels.

On April 11, 2019, the Indian Intelligence Services had warned the Sri Lankan government that suicide bombers affiliated with NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath) planned to attack prominent churches and the Indian embassy in Colombo. No action was taken by the Sri Lankan authorities and 279 people died.

Udaya Gammanpila’s Book

The book Pasku Praharaye Mahamolakaru Soyayema or Searching for the Mastermind of the Easter Attack by Udaya Gammanpila, former Minister and current leader of the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya party, was launched on 31 March 2026 at the Sri Sambuddhatva Jayanti Mandiraya in Colombo. The main thesis of Gammanpila’s book is that the Easter bombings were the work of NTJ leader Zahran Hashim and, despite what Cardinal Ranjith and others might allege, no Sri Lankan politicians had anything to do with the atrocities.

The event was attended by high-profile Sri Lankan figures, including Sajith Premadasa, the leader of the main parliamentary opposition party the SJB (Samagi Jana Balawegay). Premadasa’s presence was controversial within his own party. Former MP Navin Dissanayake was among those who took to social media to say that the book launch was a stunt to “whitewash the Rajapaksas”. He stated that it was not a revelation to name Zahran Hashim who had already been named. “Stating the bleeding obvious”, as Basil Fawlty might say. “This should have been held on April Fool’s Day”, said the former MP.

Also present were former Presidents Maithripala Sirisena, and Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Gammanpila argues that Zahran Hashim, the leader of the NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath) who died in the Shangri-La Hotel bombing, was the sole mastermind of the bombings. Gammanpila dismisses theories of an “invisible hand” or external political masterminds as misleading. As Mandy Rice-Davis might have said, “He would say that, wouldn’t he?” On the other hand, Gammanpila claims former CID Director Shani Abeysekara “paved the way” for the attacks, citing 11 specific reasons for this allegation.

Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith has been the leading proponent of the view that the bombings were part of a “grand political plot” rather than the work of isolated extremists, and described Gammanpila's book as an attempt to mislead the public. His Eminence has specifically suggested that the attacks were used to create chaos and fear in order to improve the electoral prospects of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the 2019 presidential election. The Church has raised specific, unresolved issues that Gammanpila’s book does not adequately address.

Zahran had been attacking Buddhists and Muslims who did not share his views. He changed his tactics to take on “the Christian West” to ingratiate himself with ISIS. Christian churches and luxury hotels catering mainly to Western tourists were selected as targets. He referred to Christians as siluvai vanangihal (worshippers of the cross) and Hindus and Buddhists as silai vanangihal (worshippers of statues). Zahran called for the destruction of Kaffirs. Kaffir is the the name of a specific ethnic group in Sri Lanka—descendants of African slaves and soldiers. Zahran used the term to describe any non-believers. Anyone who did not follow his restricted interpretation of the Koran was a legitimate target. He said that even if the Kaffirs were good people who were friendly and helpful towards Muslims, they had to be destroyed when necessary.

MP Mujibur Rahman argued the book lacks credibility because Gammanpila previously served as a lawyer for former intelligence chief Suresh Sallay, who is currently under investigation for “conspiracy and aiding and abetting” the bombings. A senior government official said there is a clear attempt by Gammanpila to distract from the investigations by making various allegations. He hinted that the former MP could himself be investigated soon.

Wider Implications

Shani Abeysekara was appointed Director CID in 2017 and served in that capacity till he was transferred on 21 November 2019, following the election to the presidency of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He received a commendation from the Secretary-General of INTERPOL for his support to the Response Team that dealt with the Easter Sunday attacks.

He had been the key prosecution witness in over 100 trials including over 20 murder trials that led to convictions. Abeysekara investigated many high-profile crimes including the attempted assassination of President Kumaratunga in 1999; the LTTE attack on Bandaranaike Airport attack in 2001; the Udathalawinna massacre in 2001, in which Lohan Ratwatte, subsequently a loose cannon of a minister in the governments of both Rajapaksas, was involved; the Royal Park murder in 2005 (the convicted culprit was pardoned by then president Sirisena, a pardon which was condemned as “illegal and unjustifiable” by current president Dissanayake; the attempted assassination of General Sarath Fonseka; the Angulana double murder; the disappearance of Prageeth Eknaligoda; the brutal assassination of editor Lasantha Wickrematunge.

The Government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa accused Abeysekara of carrying out a political agenda. In January 2020, he was suspended from the police because of leaked telephone conversations with Ranjan Ramanayake, a popular Sri Lankan actor, film director, singer, and politician. The Nugegoda Magistrate’s Court, following a request made by the Colombo Crimes Division, issued an injunction preventing Shani Abeysekara from traveling abroad. Abeysekara was arrested on July 31, 2020, by the Colombo Crimes Division and produced before the Gampaha Magistrate’s Court on suspicion of fabricating evidence against suspects in the murder of businessman Mohamad Siyam in Bambalapitiya in 2013. Human rights organisations expressed concerns that these charges were politically motivated. He was released on bail in June 2021 after nearly a year in detention. The Court of Appeal issued a scathing critique of the case against him, stating the allegations were a “result of falsification and embellishment” and a “blatant attempt to frame allegations through fabrication of false evidence”.

He initially returned to the police force in October 2024 on a contractual basis as the Director of the Central Criminal Intelligence Analysis Bureau before his eventual permanent reinstatement.

It surely can be no coincidence that there were delays in the investigation of the Easter bombings just as there was no conclusion to the investigations into the assassination of Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge. It looks very much as though Shani Abeysekara was impeded in both investigations. He was known for his professionalism and experience. Other officers who had been closely involved were also transferred or marginalised. Complex cases need continuity and institutional knowledge.

Sallay and Lasantha

As well as the Easter bombings, Sallay has also been summoned to court in connection with the 2009 murder of Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge and the 2010 disappearance of cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda and the attempted murder of journalist Upali Thennakoon. The fact that he is also under scrutiny for those attacks, indicates that the current government is looking at a a wider cleanup of the intelligence apparatus.

Investigations previously suggested that a specialized military intelligence unit known as the Tripoli Platoon, which Sallay reportedly oversaw or was closely associated with as Director of Military Intelligence (DMI), was responsible for the extended surveillance and eventual hit on Lasantha in 2009.

Lasantha’s daughter Ahimsa has consistently linked high-ranking officials from the Rajapaksa era to her father’s murder and subsequent cover-ups. She tried to prevent Gota from contesting the presidency in 2019. She has condemned the promotion and retention of individuals like Suresh Sallay within the intelligence apparatus. In public letters and statements, she has accused successive governments of protecting intelligence officers, including Sallay, from accountability. She wrote a strongly worded letter to the President in 2018 against the transfer of CID investigator Nishantha Silva, which she saw as an attempt to undermine investigations into the military and intelligence services.

Sallay, who was promoted to SIS chief in 2019 after Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Gota) became president, is accused of involvement in organising the suicide bombings, a charge he denies. A whistleblower Azad Maulana told Channel 4 in 2023 that Sallay had expected the attack to influence the 2019 presidential election in favour of Gota. Maulana was a former member of the jihadist group who said in 2019 that they were originally funded by a military intelligence unit to propagate a fundamentalist ideology in Sri Lanka’s multi-ethnic eastern province. Sallay was employed in the intelligence unit that funded the jihadists, and the government at the time admitted the military was behind the radical group. Two days after the bombings, Rajapaksa declared his candidacy and went on to win the November vote in a landslide after promising to stamp out Islamist extremism.

Sallay is described by some as efficient, capable, and knowledgeable. His selection for the Military Intelligence Corps in 1993 was specifically because of his language skills, which allowed him to handle complex intelligence tasks across different ethnic communities.

It is noticeable that many of the critics of Sallay’s detention and of the notion of a hidden hand beyond the jihadists were complicit in the Rajapaksa governments: Ali Sabry , Wimal Weerawansa, Udaya Gammanpila. How on earth could Lasantha’s brutal slaying remain unsolved after 17 years? How could the guilty parties be kept secret? Loose lips usually betray such secrets. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe someone has been hiding something.

Colombo Fort Magistrate Isuru Neththikumara also rejected a request made by Mr Sallay’s lawyers to remove the Easter Sunday attack investigation from the supervision of CID Director Shani Abeysekara.

The Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court has ordered the CID to produce Sallay in court on 22 April 2026.

Easter 2019 Part Three

Major General (Retired) Suresh Sallay, the former head of the Sri Lanka State Intelligence Service (SIS), is currently detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). Sallay is being investigated for conspiracy and aiding and abetting the 2019 Easter bomb attacks.

Inquiries and Investigations

On April 11, 2019, the Indian Intelligence Services had warned the Sri Lankan government that suicide bombers affiliated with NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath) planned to attack prominent churches and the Indian embassy in Colombo. No action was taken by the Sri Lankan authorities and 279 people died. This security lapse formed part of the remit of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry on the Easter Attacks which was appointed by President Maithripala Sirisena on 21 April 2019, tasked with investigating the causes and background for the bombings. The commission submitted an interim report two weeks after the attack. Its term was extended to until 31 May to complete its final report.

On the basis of the interim report, the Attorney General Dappula de Livera instructed the Criminal Investigation Department to carry out a criminal investigation against former Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando

and IGP (Inspector General of Police) Pujith Jayasundera

to determine if they failed to act on intelligence warnings about the attack.

The commission, which heard from 440 witnesses and handed over its final report to Parliament on Tuesday, February 2021, said the attorney-general should “consider instituting criminal proceedings against [former] president Sirisena under any suitable provision in the Penal Code”. The report said the “balance of probability” was that Sirisena was told by his intelligence chief about the warnings before the attacks

While Sirisena was heavily implicated, the report also faulted former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe for his “soft approach” toward extremism but did not recommend criminal action against him.

In May, 2019, a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) was established by by the Speaker of Parliament. The PSC was headed by the Deputy Speaker Ananda Kumarasiri and included seven MPs. The SLFP and the UPFA decided not to participate in the PSC. On 7 June 2019, President Sirisena called an emergency Cabinet meeting and protested at the PSC probe. He ordered that the PSC be terminated. He was critical of the PSC for summoning intelligence and police officers. He had ordered that no public officer appear for summons issued by the PSC.

Sisira Mendis was Chief of National Intelligence (CNI) from July 2015 to June 2019. This is a high-level oversight role that coordinates multiple intelligence agencies, including the SIS, the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), and others. When CNI Sisira Mendis made a statement at the PSC that President Sirisena knew about the warnings of an impending attack, Sirisena sacked him.

During Mendis’s tenure as CNI, the SIS (State Intelligence Service) was led by Nilantha Jayawardena (appointed in March 2015). Operating under the Ministry of Defence, the main goal of the SIS is to gather and analyse information to protect national security and support government policy. The PSC noted the failure on the part of the SIS to act upon the subsequent intelligence information received after an explosion on 16th April 2019 in Kattankudy. The PSC noted that the Director SIS bears the greatest responsibility. A full one year before the incident, he had requested the end of investigations by others into Zahran Hashim, who was already known for attacks against Buddhists and Sufis. This resulted in the SIS becoming the sole body investigating Zahran.

The PSC also noted that several politicians made comments after the Easter bombings which were inflammatory and irresponsible.

Incompetence and Compensation

On 12 January 2023, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka ruled that Maithripala Sirisena, who was president at the time of the bombings, and several other government authorities at the time failed to act on intelligence, and were ordered to pay compensation to victims. Sirisena fully settled the 100 million rupee compensation payment in August 2024. Pujith Jayasundera (Inspector General of Police) was ordered to pay 75 million LKR; Nilantha Jayawardene (State Intelligence Chief) 75 million LKR; Hemasiri Fernando (Defence Secretary 50 million LKR); Sirira Mendis (Chief of National Intelligence) 10 million LKR.

While the civil compensation has been settled, victims and the Catholic Church of Sri Lanka continued to demand criminal investigations into a potential larger conspiracy.

It was not until November 2021 that the main trial involving the criminal prosecution of 25 men began. Prosecutors filed more than 23,000 charges against these suspects, including alleged mastermind Mohamed Naufar (also known as Naufar Moulavi) who is alleged to have ISIS links. He has been identified by US prosecutors as the “second emir” of a group of supporters who called themselves “ISIS in Sri Lanka”. Sri Lankan officials claim that Naufar was responsible for bringing ISIS ideology to the country as early as 2014.

The trial involves over 1,200 witnesses. Although indictments were served in October 2021, there have been many postponements because of the large number of charges. There have also been “practical issues” like a shortage of Tamil-speaking lawyers and translated documents.

Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan (commonly known as Pillayan) was arrested on April 8, 2025. Pillayan was born on 18 August 1975 in Pethalai, Batticaloa District. He joined the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) in 1990 when he was 15. In 2004, he broke away from Prabakharan’s northern-based LTTE alongside Karuna Amman to form the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP). They both gave their support to the Mahinda Rajapaksa government and fought against Prabakharan’s Tigers. Both became ministers in Rajapaksa’s government. Pillayan ousted Karuna to become the undisputed leader of the TMVP in April 2007. Pillayan made history in May 2008 by becoming the first Chief Minister of the Eastern Province. Elected as an MP for Batticaloa in 2020 while in prison ,(detained for five years (2015–2020) for the 2005 murder of MP Joseph Pararajasingham but was acquitted in 2021) polling the highest number of preferential votes in the district. He served as the State Minister of Rural Road Development starting in April 2022. He lost his parliamentary seat in the 2024 general election.

Pillayan was was arrested on 8 April 2025 primarily in connection with the 2006 abduction and enforced disappearance of Professor Sivasubramaniam Ravindranath, a former Vice-Chancellor of Eastern University. He was detained under a 90-day detention order issued under the PTA. Government sources suggest there is also substantial information linking him to the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings. Allegations from whistleblowers suggest that Pillayan had prior knowledge and acted as a facilitator between intelligence officers and the bombers. Though initially detained on other charges, the government informed Parliament that new evidence links Pillayan’s paramilitary network directly to the 2019 attacks, specifically in recruiting and supporting the bombers. Pillayan’s former aide Hanzeer Azad Maulana, told Channel 4 that Pillayan met with members of the NTJ and arranged a 2018 meeting in Puttalam between the bombers and a top intelligence official (later identified as Suresh Sallay). It is alleged that these meetings were part of a plot to orchestrate a “national security crisis” to benefit the 2019 presidential campaign of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Current Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala says that investigations have revealed that Pillayan had prior knowledge of the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks.

Similarly, Lt Gen Hendavitharana, former Head of Military Intelligence, is being investigated for alleged strategic oversight and suspicious communications around the time of the attacks.

Catholic Church

Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith claimed collusion. “The Parliament Select Committee report makes recommendations against the former President, former inspector general of police, former defence secretary, former chief of intelligence and other top-level officials, for not having prevented the attacks.“ His Eminence quoted excerpts from the report that indicate that the Government may have been motivated by electoral gain to collude in the atrocities.

Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the head of Sri Lanka’s Catholic Church, alleged that the massacre wasn’t purely the work of a few Islamic extremists but was part of a grand political plot and that the attacks were conducted intentionally to win votes. He alleged that the guilty parties were still engaged in political activities, held positions in the police and that the government covered up the investigations in order to protect the real culprits. The cardinal called on the UN to investigate the bombings.

An Ecumenical Matter

Ven. Omalpe Sobitha Thera, a prominent Buddhist monk, alleged that “selfish politicians directed the blind rage of religious extremists to achieve political ends,” and appealed to all religious leaders to support the struggle for justice led by the Cardinal, stating that justice should be sought in the International Court of Justice if it’s not found domestically. In March 2024, spokesman of the Catholic Church Fr. Cyril Gamini Fernando claimed that Gotabaya Rajapaksa was the mastermind behind the bombings and the subsequent cover-up.

Developments in 2026

The current Dissanayake administration has officially reopened investigations, alleging the attacks were a conspiracy by a “certain group” to seize political power. A previous presidential inquiry report has been handed to the CID for further action.

On Wednesday, 25 February 2026, Major General Suresh Sallay, the former head of the State Intelligence Service (SIS), was was taken into custody at dawn from a Colombo suburb. He is currently held under a 90-day detention order for questioning under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). He is being investigated for conspiracy and aiding and abetting the 2019 attacks. While initially held for 72 hours, a court later granted a 90-day detention order to allow for extensive interrogation. Investigators have officially named him as the third suspect in a broadening probe that links the Easter bombings to prior incidents, including the 2018 murder of police officers in Vavunativu. As is customary with high-profile detainees in Sri Lanka, Sallay has been admitted to hospital with a sudden illness. There will probably be a “fast unto death.”

Sallay has also been summoned to court in connection with the 2009 murder of Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge and the 2010 disappearance of cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda and the attempted murder of journalist Upali Thennakoon. The fact that he is also under scrutiny for those attacks, indicates a wider cleanup of the intelligence apparatus.

Previous investigations suggested that a specialized military intelligence unit (the Tripoli Platoon), which Sallay reportedly oversaw or was closely associated with as Director of Military Intelligence (DMI), was responsible for the surveillance and eventual hit on Lasantha in 2009.

Sallay, who was promoted to State Intelligence Service (SIS) chief in 2019 after Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Gota) became president, is accused of involvement in organising the suicide bombings, a charge he denies. A whistleblower Azad Maulana told Channel 4 in 2023 that Sallay had expected the attack to influence the 2019 presidential election in favour of Gota. Maulana was a former member of the jihadist group who said in 2019 that they were originally funded by a military intelligence unit to propagate a fundamentalist ideology in Sri Lanka’s multi-ethnic eastern province.

Sallay was employed in the intelligence unit that allegedly funded the jihadists. Two days after the bombings, Gotabaya Rajapaksa declared his candidacy and went on to win the November election in a landslide after promising to stamp out Islamist extremism.

Sallay is described by some as efficient, capable, and knowledgeable. His selection for the Military Intelligence Corps in 1993 was specifically due to his multilingual abilities, which allowed him to handle complex intelligence tasks across different linguistic communities.

Critics of Sallay’s Arrest

Gota’s then-justice minister Ali Sabry defended Sallay, saying he had contributed to the dismantling of the Tamil Tiger guerrilla network in 2009. “Undermining officers who once safeguarded the country may offer temporary political advantage, but it weakens morale within the armed forces.”

Sinhala Nationalist leader Wimal Weerawansa has alleged that the arrest is a “staged” event intended to appease the Tamil diaspora. Weerawansa argued that the ultimate goal of the investigation is to implicate former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He has alleged that efforts are underway to arrest former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Weerawansa defended Sallay’s actions, noting that intelligence work naturally requires contact with extremist elements and should not be treated as a crime. “Would someone like Easter attacks mastermind Zahran Hashim sacrifice his life to make Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who is known as a staunch Sinhala Buddhist, President? What is this nonsense?” he queried.

MP Dilith Jayaweera of the Sarvajana Balaya party warns that if the arrest is driven by “narrow political objectives” rather than credible evidence, it will severely damage the morale of Sri Lanka’s armed forces. Former SLPP MP Sanjeewa Edirimanna claimed the NPP government was creating a drama to divert attention from other controversies.

Sallay’s supporters, including some Buddhist clergy and leaders of the New People’s Front, have launched a 100,000-signature petition protesting at the arrest. They allege the government is attempting to use Sallay to implicate former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa has publicly defended Sallay, stating he “should not be imprisoned, but he should be appreciated” for his service.

Some argue that targeting high-ranking intelligence officers who “safeguarded the country” during the civil war weakens the integrity of national security institutions. Supporters of Sallay point out that extensive previous inquiries, including the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI) that recorded 457 testimonies, did not originally name Sallay as a primary suspect or person of interest. A petition challenging the legality of Sallay’s arrest and detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) was filed in the Supreme Court by a retired Air Force officer, Shantha Jayathilake, to challenge the legality of Sallay’s detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). Jayathilake argues that the PTA is intended for actions like those of the LTTE—which sought to overthrow the government—rather than the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, which he characterizes as being based on religious extremism. He has requested that the CID be directed to present specific charges or release Sallay if sufficient evidence does not exist. Jayathilake was noted as the Commanding Officer of the SLAF Disaster Management Training School in Digana in late 2024 A three-judge bench ed by Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena, has fixed the petition for support on September 25. Sallay’s wife has indicated that her husband might be at risk of contracting Leptospirosis while in custody.

Sallay’s legal defense team following his February 2026 arrest includes several lawyers who have represented him before: Asith Siriwardene who said that he had encountered difficulties in gaining access to his client in detention. Sanjeewa Samarawickrama has held media briefings to provide evidence that Sallay was in India at Easter 2019, and his presence the National Defence College could be verified. Pasan Weerasinghe previously represented Sallay in civil litigation, suing Yasmin Sooka of the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) for allegedly defamatory remarks.

Salley’s arrest was welcomed by the Catholic church. “What we need is the truth behind the Easter attacks,” church spokesman Father Cyril Gamini Fernando told AFP. “We want to see justice for all the victims.” The church has accused successive governments of failing to identify the masterminds.

Watch this Space

The allegations of Sallay’s involvement in the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks have further fuelled suspicions about the role of military intelligence in the wider political and security landscape of Sri Lanka.

Sallay had been previously removed from a posting due to links with military-backed gangs causing unrest in Jaffna, before he was appointed the head of SIS by Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He held the post of Sri Lanka’s Director of Military Intelligence (DMI) when a wave of unrest swept through the Jaffna peninsula in 2016, which authorities blamed on the ‘Aava gang’.

The presidential Rajapaksa brothers are at this time living in Sri Lanka. Gotabaya Rajapaksa appeared before the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) on 17 March 2026. He recorded a statement regarding an ongoing investigation into the unlawful allocation of housing units in a residential complex. The probe concerns his time as Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, specifically allegations that he facilitated the allocation of Urban Development Authority (UDA) housing to ineligible individuals. He arrived at the Commission premises in the morning and spent over two and a half hours providing testimony before departing.

CIABOC is also bothering big brother Mahinda Rajapaksa. Former Sri Lankan Airlines CEO Kapila Chandrasena has given them a statement alleging that Rajapaksa received Rs. 60 million in bribes linked to a 2016 Airbus aircraft procurement deal. Mahinda has publicly stated that he has only “temporarily stepped away” and has not retired from politics. His family has frequently had to dismiss online rumours regarding his deteriorating health, consistently maintaining that the 80-year-old leader is fit and continuing his political engagements.

Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa has publicly defended Sallay, stating he “should not be imprisoned, but he should be appreciated for his service”.

Cinnamon Grand

On April 14, 2019, I had a very pleasant buffet lunch with family and friends in the Taprobane Restaurant at the Cinnamon Grand, a premiere five-star hotel, in Kollupitiya, Colombo. Originally opened in 1975 as the Hotel Lanka Oberoi, it was the first Oberoi property outside India. It became the Cinnamon Grand in 2005. The hotel was built in 1975 on land that was formerly the residence of the Bishop of the Church of Ceylon. The hotel has eight restaurants and bars, including an all-day dining restaurant called Plates, a seafood restaurant called Lagoon, a restaurant called Nuga Gama offering Sri Lankan cuisine; plus the London Grill, a steakhouse; Cheers Pub; the Coffee Stop serving freshly baked cakes and snacks; the Breeze Bar at the poolside and the Tea Lounge in the lobby. Other amenities include, two gyms, two pools, one outside, one on the rooftop; and saunas.

A Dutch visitor described the Cinnamon Grand, “Here you have 14 restaurants, you have a laundry service, a fitness service. It’s almost an entire ecosystem that you walk into.”

On Sunday 21 April 2019, at 8.50, a blast ripped through the Taprobane Restaurant.

A few weeks later, I was strolling through Colombo when a young man approached me and engaged me in conversation. He asked me if I had been to the Cinnamon Grand. I said that I was on my way to the Gallery Café. He said, “I mean, you were there. You ate at the Cinnamon Grand a few weeks ago. I served at your table.” I realised that this young man had been one of our friendly waiters on April 14. He told me that another of our waiters on the 14^th had been killed on the 21^st. Four Sri Lankan employees were killed while working at the restaurant on that day: Shantha, Sanjeewani, Ibrahim and Nisthar. Times had been hard since then, with rebuilding to be done, trauma to be dealt with, tourists reluctant to come.

Nimal Shantha, aged 50, was a Sinhalese Catholic (Catholics were targeted on that day) and an experienced member of the Food & Beverage team who served during the breakfast buffet. Disna Sanjeewani was aged 36. She was a Sinhalese Buddhist and single mother of a young son and daughter. She specialised in Sri Lankan cuisine and often made hoppers to order. She had come into work on her day off to stand in for a colleague who had gone to Easter Mass. Imran Ibrahim was also known for standing in for colleagues so they could spend time with their families. He was a Muslim waiter who had been with the hotel for nearly two years. He was 23 and was the sole breadwinner for his family. The youngest of the staff members killed in the blast was 21-year-old Naleer Nisthar, a Muslim from the Tamil area of Vavuniya. Arshad Yaheya, aged 36, was also killed but he was not on duty. He was celebrating his birthday with his wife and two small daughters, who were with him at the breakfast table. The wife and daughters survived their injuries. I heard that the bomber gestured to the wife to get out because she was wearing the hijab. I think Arshad is the one I met.

The suicide bomber who struck at the Taprobane Restaurant had checked into the hotel with a false name the night before - Mohamed Mubarak Mohamed Azzam. The bomber joined the breakfast buffet queue the next morning and detonated explosives strapped to his back as he was about to be served. One of the hotel’s managers who was welcoming guests was among those killed. The suicide bomber was later identified as one of the sons of a wealthy Colombo spice trader. His real name was Inshaf Ahmed Ibrahim.

Other Bombings

On 21 April 2019, Easter Sunday, three churches in Sri Lanka and three luxury hotels in Colombo, were subjected to a series of coordinated (allegedly) ISIS-related suicide bombings. Later that day, there were two smaller explosions at a housing complex in Dematagoda and a guest house in Dehiwala. Easter Sunday is Christianity’s holiest day and church attendance in Sri Lanka is very high on this day. This was the first time since 2009, the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War, that the country had experienced a major terrorist attack.

The bomber who killed two people at the Tropical Inn at Dehiwala had originally planned to set off his bombs at the Taj Samudra Hotel in Colombo. CCTV footage shows the bomber trying to detonate his backpack three times in the dining area, failing, and leaving the premises at 8.49 a.m.

The attacks were blamed on a homegrown jihadist group. According to Sri Lankan government officials, all eight suicide bombers involved in the attacks were Sri Lankan citizens associated with National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ), a local Islamist militant group with suspected foreign ties, founded by one Zahran Hashim, and already known for attacks against Buddhists and Sufis.

Shantha Mayadunne, a Sri Lankan celebrity chef and TV personality, known for her cookbooks and culinary school, and her daughter, Nisanga, were killed while having breakfast at the Shangri-La Hotel.

Danish billionaire, clothing magnate Anders Holch Povlsen was staying at the Shangri-La. Povlsen is the owner of Bestseller and a major shareholder in Asos. Three of his four children—Alma, Agnes, and Alfred were killed at the Shangri-La.

Zayan Chowdhary, the eight-year-old grandson of prominent Bangladeshi politician Sheikh Fazlul Karim Selim died in an explosion at a hotel where his family was vacationing. Seven members of the Janata Dal political party from Karnataka, India, including KG Hanumantharayappa and M Rangappa, were killed at the Shangri-La. An 11-year-old student called Kieran Shafritz de Zoysa was killed at the Cinnamon Grand. He had attended the school attended by Barack Obama’s daughters.

Churches

Negombo, a beach town about 22 miles north of Colombo, known as “Little Rome,” is dotted with Catholic churches. Officials reported at least 104 dead there.

At the Zion church in In Batticaloa, a 40-year-old local contractor and father of two called Ramesh Raju was suspicious about a man carrying a large backpack at the church entrance. When the man claimed to have a video camera, Raju insisted he get permission and prevented him from entering the main hall where nearly 600 people were worshipping. Ramesh died and saved hundreds of lives. The bomber detonated his device outside in the courtyard, killing 29 people, including Raju. It was the latest in a series of tragic losses for Raju’s wife, Rukshika, both of her parents were killed during the bloody civil war and an aunt died in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

Ganeshamoorthy Thirukumaran, one of the pastors at the Zion, also lost a child. Pastor Kumaran’s son was among the children who died in the explosion. Pastor Kumaran had spoken to the bomber. “I noticed a person standing near the pastor’s office, with a bag on his shoulder and clutching another bag to his chest. I asked him who he was, and why he was standing there. He replied that he had just come to observe what was happening at the church and asked me details about the church.” Upon further questioning, the man, who looked in his 30s and was of medium height, had identified himself as ‘Umar’ from the nearby Oddamaavadi Town, Pastor Kumaran said. “I then invited him into the church, as I thought he was like the many new people who come to our church. So I didn’t have any doubts or suspicions about him.” Pastor Kumaran had then told Brother Stanley, to speak to the man, and had left with his wife and youngest daughter to lead mass in another church in Karavatti.

Residents said a suspicious character had first gone to the St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral and made inquiries about the mass there. A Catholic priest said the suspect had been seen lurking around the Cathedral the previous day as well. “The priest in charge had called the Easter Service early, and began at 7 am instead of 7.30 am. By 8.30 am most of the congregation had left.” Nearly 1000 people had been at Catholic mass on Easter Sunday.

Many Casualties

The number killed on the day was 279 (one person died of her injuries later, making 270). At least 45 children, including nine who were foreigners, were killed. At least 45 foreign nationals, three police officers, and eight suicide bombers died. The great majority of the victims were Sri Lankan citizens. There were 500 injured. The church bombings were carried out during Easter services in Negombo, Batticaloa and Colombo; the hotels bombed included the Shangri-La, Cinnamon Grand, Kingsbury and Tropical Inn. The State Intelligence Service believed a second wave of attacks was planned, but was prevented by government raids. Ilham Ahmed Ibrahim, the younger brother of the Taprobane bomber, was the suicide bomber who simultaneously attacked the Shangri-La Hotel. He was a factory owner, nine of whose employees were arrested. He was accompanied by Zahran Hashim , a radical Islamist preacher who founded the local militant group National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ). Mohamed Azzam Mubarak was the bomber responsible for the Kingsbury Hotel attack.

A search operation in Sainthamaruthu led to further deaths among the plotters’ families. Hashim’s father and two brothers (Zainee and Rilwan) were killed during a fierce gun battle and suicide detonation at a safe house in the town. A house with a stock of more than 150 gelignite sticks, IS uniforms and flags, 100,000 metal balls, a drone, a van and a laptop was raided.

Yusuf Mohamed Ibrahim is the father of Ilham and Imsath Ibrahim, two of the suicide bombers who carried out the Easter Sunday attacks. On November 23, 2021, Ibrahim went on trial with 24 other men accused of organising the bombings.

Who Were the Bombers?

Most of the suicide bombers were well-educated and from wealthy families. Some had law degrees. Two brothers at the centre of the plot were the sons of a wealthy spice merchant Mohamed Ibrahim. Mr Ibrahim, a pillar of the business community, had six sons and three daughters. He was admired by many who knew him. “He was famous in the area for helping the poor with food and money. It’s unthinkable his children could have done that.”

Their sprawling white house is one of the most ostentatious in the suburb where they lived.

One of the brothers, Inshaf Ahmed Ibrahim, was a copper factory owner aged 33, who targeted the restaurant at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel. He was married to the daughter of a wealthy jewellery manufacturer. Inshaf, was outwardly more moderate in his views than brother Ilham, and was known to be generous with donations to his staff and struggling local households.

It is said that he was radicalised by his younger brother, 31-year-old Ilham Ahmed Ibrahim, who detonated his explosives at the Shangri-La Hotel alongside Zahran Hashim. Ilham’s wife, Fatima Ibrahim, died by detonating explosives at their home during a police raid, killing herself, her three children, unborn child and three police officers.

Abdul Lathief Jameel Mohamed failed in his attempt on the Taj Samudra hotel and went to the more downmarket Tropical Inn in Dehiwela where he killed himself and two guests. Jameel was 36 and had been radicalised in Australia. He came from a wealthy family in the tea trade. He had studied aeronautical engineering at Kingston University in London and later completed postgraduate studies at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. His family said he had changed utterly.

Zahran Hashim founded the NTJ and is considered the main jihadist mastermind. He blew himself up at the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo. He seems to be of a lower social class than the other bombers. His family has been described as “poor”. His father, Mohammed Hashim, was a street vendor known in their hometown of Kattankudy as “Kallan Hashim” (Thief Hashim) because of his reputation for petty theft and low-level crime. The father is said to have sold food packets on the street. Zahran was initially seen as “very intelligent” and “studious” when he entered the Jamiathul Falah seminary at age 12. He was expelled in 2005 for holding views deemed too radical for the school’s moderate curriculum.

Zahran’s radicalism often manifested through delinquent, aggressive, law-breaking behavior. He brandished a sword during a violent clash with local Sufi Muslims in Kattankudy in 2017. He mentored the youths who defaced Buddhist statues in Mawanella in 2018. Following the 2017 violence, most of his hardcore followers were arrested, and Zahran became a fugitive, continuing his campaign on social media.

I will deal with the consequences of the bombings in my next article.

Sallay is under investigation for his possible role in the bombings that horrified the world on Easter Sunday 2019. Many innocent people were killed on that day, including children, foreign tourists and Christian worshippers.

The allegation is that Sallay facilitated the mayhem in order to get Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Gota) elected as president of Sri Lanka. Sallay was not the head of any intelligence agency at the time of the Easter 2019 attack. After the bombings, in December 2019, the newly elected president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, appointed Sallay as the head of the SIS. Sallay was a Brigadier in the SLA (Sri Lanka Army) at the time of the bombings. Gota promoted him to Major-General.

Allegations made in a 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches documentary suggested Sallay had met prior to the bombing with members of NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath) the extremist group responsible for the Easter Bombings. The alleged aim was to create chaos in Sri Lanka so that Gota could restore order.

On 21 April 2019, a series of coordinated suicide bombings targeted three churches and three luxury hotels across Sri Lanka, killing 279 and injuring 500. The air force said an improvised explosive device - a 6ft-long plastic pipe packed with explosives - had been found near the Bandaranaike International Airport.

Sallay joined the army in 1987. From 2006 to 2009, he was First Secretary at the Sri Lankan Embassy in Paris. Military officials have given him the credit for intelligence operations that targeted Tamil Tiger positions in the final phase of the civil war which ended in May 2009.

Sallay was officially in Paris when Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge was brutally killed but his role in that crime is being scrutinised. Investigations by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) linked members of the Tripoli Platoon, a unit of Sri Lanka’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, to the 8 January 2009 killing. The platoon operated under the command of then-Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Allegations suggest the unit was used for extrajudicial operations against journalists critical of the government.

At the time of Lasantha’s killing, Sallay was classed as a Military Intelligence Officer (on diplomatic secondment). While his official role was diplomatic, he remained an active military intelligence officer during this period.

Responding to the Channel 4 programme in 2023, Gota said that to claim that a group of Islamic extremists launched suicide attacks in order to make him President, is absurd.

I will go into a great deal of further detail about the Easter bombings in future articles.

Watch this space.

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2019/07/25/behind-the-sofa/

I often try in my columns to comfort Sri Lankans who despair at the condition of their polity. Sri Lankans might wonder in horror what antics their leaders will get up to next but UK citizens contemplate having Boris Johnson as their prime minister sometime soon. Sri Lankans might be uncomfortable at the loss of sovereignty involved in handing over ports to the Chinese and the submission to the US implied by SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) but Britons are horrified at the notion that President Trump decides who is suitable to be UK ambassador to Washington.

SOFA

The Status of Forces Agreement which the US is keen to force on Sri Lanka seems to many Sri Lankans to be a step too far in bending over and being submissive to the US. The main points of SOFA are:

• All American personnel based in Sri Lanka will have the equivalent of diplomatic immunity. US troops and contractors will be able to enter and leave Sri Lanka without Passports or Visas.

• US personnel can wear uniforms and carry arms while on duty in Sri Lanka.

• Sri Lankan laws will not apply to them. The US Government will exercise criminal jurisdiction over US personnel in Sri Lanka.

• The GOSL will protect US assets in Sri Lanka but the US government will not pay anything.

• US vessels and vehicles may enter and leave Sri Lanka freely without payment of tolls or taxes, navigation, overflight, terminal or similar charges. Aircraft and vessels of the US Government will not be boarded or inspected.

• US contractors will not be liable to pay any tax or similar charges and will be exempt from any licence, or other restrictions, customs duties, taxes or any other charges.

• The US will be allowed to operate its own telecommunication systems.

• Claims relating to damage or loss shall be resolved by the US Government in accordance with US laws and regulations.

SOFA so Good

President Sirisena has decided he does not like this but he might change his mind (This was back in 2019). The US defended SOFA saying they had no intention of setting up military bases in Sri Lanka. Wouldn’t dream of it! The US maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries. Sri Lankans must be paranoid if they think the US wants to use Sri Lanka as a base for keeping an eye on China. Of course, the US does not covet Trincomalee harbor! The SOFA with Sri Lanka would give reciprocal rights to Sri Lanka’s Army, Navy, Air Force or Coast Guard to use US facilities. However, Sri Lanka’s main concern is internal security. It has no global enemies (apart from the Tamil diaspora) and has no resources to pay for using military facilities in the US.

There are 38 US military facilities on Okinawa. They account for up 30% of the land mass of the island. The US military bases on Okinawa also cover over 40% of the arable soil, once some of the best agricultural land in Japan. Figures up to 1998, show that since 1972, 4,905 crimes were committed against Japanese people by US military personnel, their dependents and US civilian contractors and employees. More than 10% of these were serious crimes – murder, robbery or rape. In most cases, the Japanese authorities were not allowed to arrest or even question the alleged perpetrators.

Special Relationship

Britain has long deluded itself that it has a special relationship with the US. When Charles de Gaulle wrote to LBJ in 1966 ordering that all US troops be removed from French soil within 12 months, Britain offered a warm welcome and during the Cold War, the UK became one of the USA’s “unsinkable aircraft carriers”. In the 1990s, the number of US-manned military facilities in Britain reached 100. By 2014, this had fallen to 13, ranging from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk – one of the largest air bases outside the US – to a joint GCHQ and National Security Agency satellite station at Morwenstow in Cornwall. There were still 24,000 US personnel, civilian staff and family members on British soil.

Lindis Percy, a veteran peace activist who has protested outside US bases since 1979, said: “The thread … through everything to do with these facilities is an almost total lack of accountability. Even now, new by-laws are being introduced to deter people from going near bases already protected by draconian legislation. Assurances made by the US to the UK that ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights had never landed on British territory were later shown to be false when official US records proved that such flights had landed at Diego Garcia repeatedly. (in 2026, Iran is bombing Diego Garcia.)

The UK ambassador to Washington, Kim Darroch, was reviled by Donald Trump, when Darroch’s unflattering confidential memos about the president were leaked to the press. When the Foreign Office permanent secretary, Simon McDonald, (who has cropped up again in 2026 to comment on Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador) appeared before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee on July 10, the chair asked what precedent there was for the head of state of a friendly government to do what Donald Trump did and made it impossible for Britain’s ambassador do his job? McDonald said there was no precedent. “Nothing like this has ever happened before,” McDonald told another MP. “There must be consequences. What they are in detail I can’t tell you this afternoon.”

Boris Johnson, probably the UK’s next prime minister, knowingly refused to express confidence in Darroch during the leadership hustings with Jeremy Hunt. It was Johnson’s action that led directly to Darroch’s inevitable resignation. Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan said that by six times refusing to back the ambassador, Johnson had thrown him under a bus. Tugendhat, a former army officer said: “Leaders stand up for their men. They encourage them to try and defend them when they fail.”

Trump’s actions were a crude assertion of power over a country that wants desperately to be the friend of the US. This is not a special relationship, it is sado-masochist one. The rest of the world, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, will be watching. For Britain, as Martin Kettle put it in The Guardian: “it is a stake through the heart of its entire postwar self-image.”

Sri Lanka’s friend Liam Fox has failed miserably to gain trade deals to replace what will be lost when the UK is out of the EU. The only hope left was the US who threatened to bombard the sceptic isle with chlorinated chickens. It looks as though the special relationship will entail the US bullying the UK.

The USA sank a warship 19 nautical miles off the coast of Sri Lanka and expected Sri Lanka to allow the US to operate from Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka demurred.

Thanks to Trump, the US Empire must crumble soon.

On Friday, the Iranians targeted the US military base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, firing two long-range missiles; one was shot down, the other landing in the sea. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake had hardly got back home after making a statement to Parliament outlining the Government’s neutrality in the war between the US-Israel axis and Iran, pointing to how he acted when an Iranian warship was sunk off Galle and did not allow US aircraft to use Hambantota as a staging post for military action. These incidents bring home the message, if indeed any further emphasis is needed, that the oft-quoted saying “This is not our war” is not correct, as it really is.

US President Donald Trump, who started the war which he called an ‘adventure’ clearly at the behest of Israel, seems to have caught a ‘tiger by the tail’, the idiom describing a situation difficult to control, dangerous to handle and risky to abandon. The equivalent local proverb may be that of the woodpecker that pecks on a banana trunk getting its beak stuck in the fibrous bark, unable to extricate it in a hurry.

In Sri Lanka, as if the coal fiasco wasn’t enough, the Government now has to contend with the very real risk of power cuts after April, should it fail to secure diesel and furnace oil in sufficient stocks to run the Ceylon Electricity Board’s oil-fired plants. With the Lakvijaya plant unable to generate optimum electricity from recently procured coal stocks, the only way to meet night peak demand is to burn diesel and furnace oil.

It used to be that the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation would follow a structured procurement process and firm up its supplies – including ships and schedules – in advance, thereby ensuring sufficient supplies for transport, power generation and other needs at regular intervals. The war in West Asia has turned that formula on its head, forcing Sri Lanka, like other countries, to suspend the tender procedure.

This week, the President announced that the Government would purchase fuel outside of the usual procurement process. Even so, getting hands on available global stocks (priced at a premium now, not even counting shipping and insurance) will be increasingly difficult. And with force majeure, the contractual clause that frees parties from liability at times of war, declared by several suppliers, the goods are likely to be diverted to the highest bidder – something Sri Lanka will not be able to compete with.

Aviation fuel is in such short supply that international carriers are cutting flights. The International Energy Agency has set out guidelines, including working from home, cutting vehicle speeds and avoiding flying. The situation will get much worse, much faster, before it gets better, and the public will need to brace itself for anything but “not our war”.

And imagine the consequences had this country agreed to entertain foreign military bases.

Maritime affairs: Lanka’s passive neutrality not an option

The world is at war, and the North Koreans seem to be missing the action. Provoked by the US Pacific Command doing joint military exercises under its nose, the North Koreans, who say these are ‘dress rehearsals’ for an invasion of their country, fired multiple ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan, just outside Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). It prompted a protest by Tokyo, saying the North Korean actions “threaten the peace and security of Japan, the region and the international community”. But who is listening these days?

If Japan’s complaint is that the North Korean missiles fell ‘close to’ its EEZ and that even so, they were a danger to its shipping and air routes and fishing industry, how much more is the case for Sri Lanka when a warship is sunk inside its EEZ?

While local authorities are still studying the environmental impact, such as oil leaks from the sinking of the warship only 19 nautical miles off the southern coast of Galle, marine biologists have expressed concern over the safety of the whales that frequent this location as a result of the intensity of the after-effects of the explosion.

The dynamics of the two situations – one inside Sri Lanka’s EEZ between two external states, and the other in the Sea of Japan outside Japan’s EEZ and framed as a direct risk to Japan – are very different. In Sri Lanka’s case, there was no direct risk as a neutral third party. However, the fact is that its ‘Exclusive’ Economic Zone was transformed into an Active Conflict Zone without its prior knowledge. Friday’s firing of the two long-range missiles at the US base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, not far from Sri Lanka and its EEZ, catapults this country right into the eye of the militarised storm. On Friday, the Secretary General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN’s maritime ‘waterdog’ – at its landmark Extraordinary Session – highlighted the risks that ‘geopolitical conflicts impose…on the global community that depends on essential trade transported by sea’.

UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas), one of the international laws that Sri Lanka was at the forefront in drafting years past, is quoted liberally by the Government to stay neutral in the ongoing conflict in West Asia. But the country also chose to remain silent on the rights afforded to states by international laws even in the face of a complete breakdown in the old rules-based international order. Treaty provisions put in to protect the interests of countries like Sri Lanka will be worthless, even as these same conventions and treaties are liberally used against Sri Lanka by the big superpowers, or parties at war, when it suits them. Freedom and safety of navigation, marine environmental protection, limits of military activities, and ‘due regard’ obligations are all relevant to the rights of neutral coastal states with respect to the EEZ under international law.

At the IMO session in London this week, a historic declaration co-sponsored by 113 countries condemned Iran and the closure of the Straits of Hormuz; upheld safety and freedom of navigation and the marine environment; and decided on the establishment of a temporary and urgent safe maritime corridor to evacuate ships in the Persian Gulf through the Straits, as proposed by Japan and the UAE. Like at the UN Security Council, Sri Lanka seems not to have signed the resolution claiming ‘neutrality’ but made a brief statement ‘remaining hopeful that navigation routes will soon return to normalcy’, even if these UN declarations at times of war are ‘mere scraps of paper’.

Sri Lanka’s neutrality need not be a ‘passive’ neutrality. Non-alignment does not mean always ‘sitting on the fence’. It was an active player on the world stage, especially in maritime affairs, and it must continue to play that role.

I have just received the sad news of the death of a friend from a long time ago. Chris Breen was a big influence on me in my long-departed youth. The news of Chris’s death has led me to think about what it was like growing up as a Catholic in Gloucester and to think about friendship, culture, class, education, nostalgia and mortality – and just about everything else. Death concentrates the mind, especially the prospect of one’s own. This will be about me as well as Chris. Chris was born on June 24 1946. I was born on 24 October 1946.

Chris Breen’s father, Mr JP Breen, was the headmaster of St Peter’s school in Gloucester in the 1950s. He was originally from County Wexford, Ireland and was a graduate of University College Dublin (UCD). I started at St Peter’s mixed infants in 1951. Mr Breen is recognized as a key figure in the school’s history and the development of the Gloucester Catholic community during this period. I remember him as a good man.

The Breen family lived in a large and elegant but somewhat shambolic house in Kingsholm Square, Gloucester, not far from the ground of Gloucester Rugby Football Club. My researches indicate that the Breen home was located at Number 13, Kingsholm Square. I am told that the Breen home was on a conservation area which is the site of a late-18th-century farmhouse. However, Google AI has often lied to me before and continues to do so.

Kingsholm Square was laid out in the 1850s on what were formerly orchards and fields. It was intended to be a high-end, early-Victorian suburb, but it was not immediately successful, leaving the central green spaces undeveloped. In the 1960s when I often visited it had something of a Bloomsbury air about it.

Basement College

In the early 60s, a group of us would gather in the basement of number 13 and advance our musical education. To my shame, I never managed any first hand musical accomplishments apart from playing the opening of the Moody Blues’ version of Go Now on the piano and picking out The Water Is Wide on the guitar. I recall Chris producing a tenor saxophone. He handed it to me and encouraged me to try it. I could not get a sound out of it. I was not going to be competition for Sonny Rollins. Chris Breen studied classical violin and piano and, accompanied by John Roberts on viola, could whip up some fierce Irish traditional music.

Chris and I were part of a band of brothers that travelled to Birmingham Town Hall on April 22, 1963 to see the Kingston Trio (Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds and – the later legendary – John Stewart of California Bloodlines fame). On May 5, 1965, we travelled to Birmingham Town Hall once again. This time we saw Bob Dylan alone with his acoustic guitar and mouth harp. He sang a lot of songs we did not recognise. These, including ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, cropped up, with electric backing, two days later, with the UK release of the album Bringing It All Back Home, on May 7 1965.

Cosmopolitan Catholics

From 1951 to 1958 I was a pupil at St Peter’s Catholic mixed infant and junior schools. I was the child of an Irish immigrant and St Peter’s had a cosmopolitan student body. I recall being friends with children from Poland, Ukraine, (girls called Danuta and the like) Italy, Austria, Belgium and, of course, Ireland. The Corcoran twins were unholy terrors. An American passed through and I was fascinated that he ate his food from a fork held in his left hand rather than using a knife and fork like the rest of us. There was a pair of stunningly beautiful Roma twins. Jude O’Halloran was, mystifyingly considering his name, from the Indian sub continent and his father was in the RAF. There were posh kids and kids from welfare families. St Peter’s pupils saved up money for the black babies who were being saved by the White Fathers.

I started at St Peter’s infant school on London Road in 1951. Before I started at school, I was terrified of nuns. Whenever I saw one in the street, I would have screaming panic attacks. In those days, nuns dressed in long black robes and looked like ISIS suicide cadres or giant killer penguins. My feelings about them changed in my first year. Sister Lomond was my first teacher. She had a rather severe and austere manner but was not scary. Sister Maria was young and pretty.

In 1953, I moved to the new infant school on Horton Road, which was opposite a mental hospital. The headmistress at Horton Road infant school was a scary dragon called Miss Callaghan. Miss Callaghan terrified me even more than nuns had done before I started school. She was all cords and ligaments and cartilage and sharp Norman nose and thin lips. She looked as though she subsisted on lemons and vinegar, and, possibly, the bones and flesh of mixed infants. I developed the notion that she was mentally unhinged and, in her derangement, had strayed from the establishment across the road. There were anxiety-filled lessons where she would bark out mental arithmetic puzzles and expected an instant and correct answer from the poor creatures she targeted. I sat in a pool of cold sweat and prayed that she would not notice me. I escaped. Sometimes, I felt that God was listening to me.

I would then have transferred back to the junior school at London Road under the more benign leadership of Mr Breen. The junior school itself then moved to Horton Road in 1957 and I passed my 11 plus exam there under the stern tutelage of Sister Theresa, who reminded us on a daily basis that the only thing certain in this life is that we were going to die. I moved on to Sir Thomas Rich’s Grammar School in 1958. Chris Breen moved to Tommy’s in 1957.

Class and Catholic Community

One day at London Road, Mr Breen called me into his office and I wondered what I had done wrong. He said that I was going to be awarded a school prize and would I choose a book from those spread out on his desk. I had heard of the Just William books but I thought that they were too middle class for the likes of me. There were certain things that were not appropriate for our kind of people. Things that meant you were getting above yourself, things like mushrooms and garlic and telephones and cars and foreign holidays. I chose the William book anyway and have been enjoying them ever since. William’s family had servants.

My father had received very little in the way of formal education. He had to leave school at 14 to work as a butcher’s boy, but had educated himself and was very well read. When I started at St Peter’s in 1951, my father was doing shift work at the gas works as a stoker. We did not have a car, a phone or a TV and did not holiday abroad. We lived in a rented council house with cold bedrooms and condensation dripping from the walls. My toes were often bleeding from chilblains. It was clear that Mr Breen came from a higher social class than my father and, to be the headmaster of a school in the UK in the 1950s, he would need to have better educational qualifications than my father. The social distance separating Chris’s father and mine was bridged to some degree by St Peter’s church.

The parish priest was Canon Mathew Roche, who later became Monsignor Roche. He served as parish priest from 1934 until his retirement in 1983. I recall that Canon Roche seemed to respect my father and as a result looked kindly upon me. My father helped out with pastoral duties and therefore interacted with Canon Roche and Mr Breen. Being Catholic had a levelling effect.

Sister Theresa, Canon Roche and Mr Breen front and centre

The first parish school for Roman Catholic children in Gloucester was founded in 1835 in a loft above the sacristy of St Peter’s Church; it later moved to premises near the Black Dog Inn and in 1851 to larger premises in Northgate Street. In the early 1860s a new St Peter’s church and school were built, and the school opened in 1864 next to the church in London Road. The school was reorganised into separate mixed and infant departments in 1893, and it was the only school in Gloucester to remain an all-age school when the city schools were reorganised in 1931. Following the Education Act 1944, which required the division of all-age schools into separate primary and secondary schools, a new infants’ school was opened for St Peter’s on a site at Horton Road in 1953. A new junior school opened on the same site in 1957 and the London Road site became a secondary modern school at which Stewart Lee’s wife was once a pupil.

Education in the Basement

I have been inspired by the Substack of Joe Hagan. Record Lung.

https://substack.com/@joehagan1971?utm_source=global-search

My musical education advanced swiftly in the basement of number 13. Chris, who started calling himself ‘Topher’ around this time, was well schooled in classical and folk music and had a very open mind about any interesting kinds of music. I was already a fan of Charles Mingus after borrowing The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady from Gloucester Public Library, where I earned a small amount of money working weekends and vacations. Earning money to buy records. I remember listening to a lot of Charlie Parker in the basement. Chris was into that bebop vibe and had the aura of a Cool Dude. I was somewhat shy and withdrawn in those days and reluctant to speak out. I had a tendency to go red when spoken to. I was rather intimidated by Chris’s confidence and unconventionality. He was obviously highly intelligent and funny but insouciant about academic or material success. I was cautious and usually near the top of the class but still not cut out for material success.

The bebop thing led on to Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and, more abstruse possibly, King Pleasure (Clarence Beeks). He sang words to well-known instrumental solos.

King Pleasure and bebopper Cecil Payne sat next to each other on my record shelf. Pleasure and Payne.

Chris introduced me to some West Coast jazzers that my later friends at University did not approve of. I remember Bob Cooper for being one of the first to introduce the oboe into jazz. We also listened to Bud Shank and sometimes Shank and Cooper together.

Combinations of unusual instruments to create surprising textures appealed to us in the work of Gil Evans with Miles Davis. We listened to Birth of the Cool, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain, although I do remember Chris saying in later years that he did not listen to Porgy and Bess any more as he was “tired of brass.” He was very enthusiastic about In a Silent Way when I played it to him in 1969.

We listened to a lot of MJQ. This one led off into other directions:

Being a fiddlist Chris was particularly fond of Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt.

He was open to music other than jazz and classical. He was very impressed when I played Pet Sounds to him in 1966.

Chris’s mother was beautiful. He had an older brother, Paddy, who is now in South Australia and has been known to play the trumpet. He had two lovely sisters, Anne and Marian (Mooge). There was a party in the basement attended by Anne Breen’s German pen friend who was a statuesque girl who was reputed to have three kidneys which enabled her to drink anyone under the table.

Tommy Catholics

I do not recall much interaction with Chris at St Peter’s because he was in the year above me, although he was only five months older than me That meant that he moved on to Tommy’s a year before me. I went to Tommy's in 1958 and left in 1966. Throughout my time there, I had friendships with people in different years. I mixed socially with some of Chris’s contemporaries.

We Catholics were in a special situation at Tommy's. There was no Catholic grammar school in Gloucester, so when we Papists passed the 11plus we had to go to a heathen school. We had to get permission from the Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Rudderham. One of the conditions for getting permission was that we had to opt out of religious functions at the Proddy school and had to attend religious instruction at St Peter’s once a week on a Friday afternoon. This might seem like an imposition but it was a boon for our social life. After the classes we would hang around the café next door listening to the juke box.

Our teacher at the London Road Friday sessions was an interesting young Scot called Iain Davidson. He had a friend called John Blackburn who was a published novelist. It was refreshing that Iain Davidson fostered discussion and introduced us to to contemporary Catholic thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and Hans Küng. There was a disastrous Friday session when Father Leo Crowley from St Peter’s church took over the session in Iain’s absence and thought he could tell us what to think. Father Crowley nearly got punched when he insulted my friend Charles’s girlfriend. Leo soon left the parish after a relationship with a woman was discovered. The Friday sessions with Iain Davidson were a welcome change from the fire and brimstone and eternal damnation served up by the Redemptorist Fathers at St Peter’s Church.

Iain Davidson lived in lodgings at a rural cottage on Sandhurst Lane. We often visited him on Sunday afternoons cavorting along the country lanes carrying musical instruments, which some people could play. I just mimed and got photographed. Iain had a caravan outside the cottage full of books which he would encourage us to borrow or keep. I still have some frayed old Penguins with the signature Iain FWK Davidson inside. He helped us build a library for the Friday afternoon instruction sessions. Around this time, we developed an interest in Aquinas and GK Chesterton.

After the Friday sessions some of us would gather at the coffee bar next to St Peter’s and listen to the juke box, Iain also helped us to organise a youth club based on our Friday afternoon sessions. The “religious instruction” sessions were attended by Cathoilc pupils from the boys’ schools – Tommy’s, Crypt and Central- and the girls’ schools Denmark Road - and Ribston Hall. For the Thursday evening youth club sessions the Catholic pupils would bring their non-Catholic friends along and we got quite a social circle going. There was music and darts and shove h‘apenny. This was the time of the early glory of the Beatles and Rolling Stones and Kinks. There was a day out in London which, for us lads, included a visit to St Martin’s Theatre to see Stephen D, the play adapted by Hugh Leonard from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man/Stephen Hero. Great performances from Norman Rodway and TP McKenna. The sermon about hell delivered by Father Arnall played by Gerard Healy reminded us of the Redemptorist Fathers.

Strawberry Hill Forever

Chris went away to Strawberry Hill College in Twickenham. This was originally founded in 1850 as a college for training Catholic schoolmasters. It was built on land previously attached to Strawberry Hill House, which was originally a small cottage on three acres of land by the River Thames. Horace Walpole, son of politician Robert Walpole, rented the cottage in 1747 and subsequently bought it. He reconstructed the house and added to the land, which now amounts to approximately 35 acres. The college that Chris went to is now St Mary’s University.

I went to visit Chris there while I was still at Sir Thomas Rich’s school. We had a very entertaining time with his friend Hugh Mullarkey. Mullarkey by name, Mullarkey by nature. Hugh and Chris were a dynamic duo of merry madcaps. Hue and cry. Hugh was a large hirsute and shambling fellow – a caricature of a drunken roistering Irish poet. On a Saturday evening when the pubs were shut, the duo would break into the sacristy and steal a bottle of altar wine. Chris claimed that the priests knew what they were up to and left out a bottle of inferior quality. I kept one of their empty altar wine bottles and decorated my room at Manchester University with it as a container for a plastic tulip. My strict Irish Catholic landlord, Mr Cleary quietly removed it without saying anything. I managed to trace Hugh Mullarkey at the first attempt online. He died in 2022 after a very long illness (Leukaemia). He will be remembered for his writing and directing of dramatic productions and poetry; performing in amateur dramatics with the occasional jazz piano!”

On that trip we enjoyed a session of lunchtime jazz in nearby Richmond. We saw the great Dick Morrissey and orthopaedic surgeon and part-time saxophonist Art Themen at the Crown pub in St Margarets.

Chris took me to see Jacques Tati in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. That instantly became my favourite film and I have to watch it every year. When I recommended the film to my friends at university they scoffed at me and thought I had gone mad.

After I had moved to Manchester, I had the chance to see many jazz giants. One of those was literally a giant. Dexter Gordon was 6’6”. On October 15, 1966 I saw Dexter Gordon play at Club 43, Amber Street, Shudehill Manchester. It was a small club and I was up very close to him and made frequent eye contact. I was in a euphoric mood on the 143 Fallowfield bus home to my hall of residence Owens Park. I was astounded to see Chris Breen climbing the stairs of the bus. I had no idea he was in Manchester. He had been to see Dexter Gordon the night before.

Uncle Sid

This picture was taken at the wedding of Robert and Christine. I met Robert in 1951 on my firs day at St Peter's infant school. Chris Breen is second from the right,

When we went to Birmingham Town Hall, we stayed at the Birmingham home of Robert’s Auntie Clare and Uncle Sid. I was best man at Robert and Christine’s wedding. I made a terrible hames of it. I didn’t prepare a proper speech and I had too much to drink in my nervousness. Because they are lovely people, the blessed couple are still speaking to me 56 years later. I still cringe with shame. There was a distraction from my poor performance. After I had got my excuse for a speech out of the way, I was standing on the fringe, observing passing humanity with Chris. He said “Uncle Sid’s looking a bit peaky.” There was a flurry of activity. Curtains were place around Uncle Sid. Eventually, Uncle Sid was wheeled past us on a gurney covered in a blanket which left his feet exposed. Chris murmured to me: “He died with his boots on.”

Chris was best man at John and Liz Roberts's wedding in 1969.

Special Needs

Letters from Chris to John Roberts reveal that he spent most of his life, since I last saw him, in education. In 1994, Chris wrote about “career lurches”. A biographical note on the publication of his St Margaret’s Suite in 1996 said that after leaving college, he helped to construct the M4 Motorway.

Other career lurches included: “Junior teaching (Strood), lead refining (Northfleet), Secondary teaching (Gravesend, Junior, Rat Island), Behavioural unit Gravesend and Chatham and now mainstream Junior (music) teacher Chatham. Along the way, Special Educational Needs qualifications. Which is where I am now in a brick built Victorian school in the middle of a deprived council estate without a blade of grass to be seen.” It sounds as though he did some good work there in a depressing environment. He retired from teaching in 2010. “After 35 years of work in Kent I retired from a SEN advisory teachers job April 1st …” SEN teachers create individualized learning plans, adapt curricula, manage behavior, and foster independence for children with autism, physical disabilities, or emotional challenges in mainstream or special schools.

In a letter that I found moving, Chris describes the fear at his workplace anticipating an OFSTED inspection. It was like me and Miss Callaghan. “Last week Glencoe Junior School was subject to an OFSTED inspection, somehow, to defend myself against the prevailing hysteria (real tears, insomnia etc) I assumed a detached stance, allowing me to marvel at the effects produced in members of a social system, or organisation when attenuated/squeezed by external threat.”

Musical Life Continued

Chris wrote to John: “I’ve played in Marxist/Leninist rock groups, blues/folk groups and ‘what name shall we call ourselves groups?’ – No money of course, but an opportunity to exercise the exhibitionist side of my ego.” Even in his youth, there was a flamboyant side to him and he enjoyed gestures and identity creation which he proselytysed to me.

St Margaret’s Suite (for three recorders) was written in in 1991 and published in 1996.

In Herefordshire he continued his musical activities, playing fiddle in a five-piece band, Alive And Pickin’.

Examining Lives

Writing this piece sent me off in unexpected directions. I used Google AI to piece together the fragments of memory that were lurking around unresolved from 70 plus years ago. I was often presented with exciting information which sent me chasing off and getting confused and lost down rabbit holes. Subsequent information often contradicted what I thought I had solidly established. I was confidently told by Google AI that a prominent Benedictine intellectual called Rev. JD Breen also lived in Kingsholm Square Gloucester, and was probably related to the Breen family that I knew. I was later told that JD lived in a square in Cheltenham and I was foolish to think that he had lived in Kingsholm Square. In addition, JD’s celibacy made it unlikely that he was related to my Breens.

AI’s polite acknowledgement of my persistent corrections led me to some kind of confidence that I was eventually getting a full and true picture. However, it got to the stage where AI was giving me back my own version of things and not giving me the external corroboration I was looking for.

What did intrigue me was that I could see a theme developing from the AI responses. This was to do with the Breens and the O’Learys being part of a “community of others” in a potentially hostile Gloucester. Mr Breen and his children were respected as representatives – of ‘The Irish’ and of Catholics. We Irish Catholics were a band of brothers (and sisters and Sisters and Fathers) making our way in a foreign land populated by sometimes hostile hosts. The Faith helped us survive and the likes of Canon Roche and Sister Theresa watched over us and bullied us into keeping to the path. It is a long time since I thought of myself as a Catholic and I have to say that Canon Roche played a big part in driving me away from the Church. After I went off to Manchester University, I never went to mass again. I never saw the inside of the Church of the Holy Name, even though it was just opposite the Students’ Union.

I also had some thoughts about nostalgia. There is a great deal of nostalgia on the internet, nostalgia that has morphed into melancholy.

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2021/03/12/nostalgia-and-melancholy/

Learning of the death of one’s friends and contemporaries reminds one yet again of one’s own transience. It sends me back to examine my own past. I find this helpful in a Socratic way – the examined life is worth living. I find it a positive exercise to review the past and discuss it with old friends. Rather than regretting that time has passed and wishing the impossible and wanting to be young again or resuscitate dead family and comrades. How great to have lived through these times, achieved these victories (however small), survived these setbacks, met such people.

As Yeats wrote:

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

Thanks to John Roberts for contributing memories and photographs.

The estimable Katy Phang has been complaining on Substack about having protein thrust down her throat from all quarters. “Why am I seeing ‘protein’ this and that everywhere I look now? Even my popcorn I got the other day was ‘protein popcorn’ and then at DD this morning, they were selling ‘protein refreshers’! Did I miss the memo?”

The Oxford Circus Billboard

This brought to my mind the man I used to see outside Oxford Street tube station trying to persuade people to give up protein. That man was was Stanley Green (1915–1993), often known as the “Protein Man” or “The Human Billboard”.

I do not know if Stanley Green was consciously influenced by Pythagoras. Pythagoras, as well as being famous for telling us that, “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides”, avoided eating beans, especially Vicia faba, fava beans (my particular favourite). Aristotle, Diogenes, Iamblichus and Varro gave different explanations for their ban on beans. Diogenes was very averse to fava beans but was OK with masturbating in public and pissing on passers by. Go figure!

Did these ancient Greek philosophers avoid beans because they contained the souls of the dead? Is that why the late, great Hannibal Lecter put them on the menu when he had a friend for dinner? Some say that Pythagoreans thought fava beans resembled human flesh/genitalia/foetuses, or acted as gateways to the underworld.

Perhaps it was just the flatulence that gave beans a bad rep. A fart was interpreted as the release of a trapped soul. As James Joyce put it: “did an angel speak?”

Ubiquitous and Anonymous

Lynne Truss (fortunately for her, no relation to 44-day prime minister, Liz Truss) is an English author, journalist, novelist, radio broadcaster and dramatist. She champions correctness and aesthetics in the English language, which is the subject of her 2003 book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. She described Stanley Green as “the most famous non-famous person in London”. Green was a constant, recognizable fixture in everyday London life, seen in countless photos taken by people who did not know who he was.

Green was born in Harringay, North London, (Haringey is the name of the larger London Borough) the youngest of four boys, to May Green and her husband, Richard Green, a clerk for a bottle stopper manufacturer. After attending Wood Green County School, a mixed grammar school, Stanley joined the Royal Navy in 1938.

No Sex Please, I’m a Pythagorean

Stanley was shocked while in the Navy by his colleagues’ obsession with sex. “I was astonished when things were said quite openly—what a husband would say to his wife when home on leave”, he told The Sunday Times “A Life in the Day” column in 1985. “I’ve always been a moral sort of person.”

Green served in the Navy through the war and was demobbed in September 1945. For a while, he worked for the Fine Art Society and failed the entrance exam for the University of London. In March 1946. He worked for Selfridges and the civil service, and as a storeman for Ealing Borough Council. He claimed that he lost two jobs because he refused to be dishonest. In 1962, he worked for the Post Office, then worked as a self-employed gardener until 1968. He lived with his parents until they died, after which he got a council flat in Northolt, West London.

For 25 years, from 1968 until his death in 1993, Green was a well-known London eccentric who patrolled Oxford Street (and Leicester Square) with a large sign, arguing that people should consume less protein to reduce “passion” and “lust”. He started doing his ‘protein man’ work in 1968, and from then on it seems to have been his entire life. He took his own advice and he lived on bread, porridge and barley water.

Mission Creep

Green began his mission in June 1968, at the age of 53, initially in Harrow on Saturdays, becoming a full-time human billboard six months later on Oxford Street. He cycled there from Northolt with a sandwich board attached to his bicycle. The journey could take up to two hours. He rose early, and after porridge for breakfast, made bread that would rise at home while he was out on patrol, ready for his evening meal. Otherwise his diet consisted of steamed vegetables and pulses, (are pulses not unadjacent to protein, M’Lud?) and a pound of apples a day. Lunch was prepared on a Bunsen burner and eaten at 2:30 p.m. in a “warm and secret place” - a bench at the far end of one of the platforms at Oxford Circus station, where he would sit after turning his placard upside down to face the wall.

He walked up and down Oxford Street from Monday to Saturday until 6:30 pm. Saturday evenings were spent with the cinema queues in Leicester Square. He would go to bed at 12:30 a.m. after saying a prayer. “Quite a good prayer, unselfish too”, he told The Sunday Times in 1985. “It is a sort of acknowledgment of God, just in case there happens to be one.” He spent Sundays at home producing his leaflet Eight Passion Proteins on his printing press. After his death, the printing press was on show at the Serpentine Gallery. Waldemar Januszczak said it was “an extraordinary home-made contraption worthy of Heath Robinson”. The noise pollution produced by the printing process - “terrific sounds of thumping and crashing” – caused frequent trouble between Green and his neighbours.

Passion and Protein

He sold 87,000 copies of his self-published 14-page pamphlet, Eight Passion Proteins with Care, which he printed in his own home. Eight Passion Proteins went through 84 editions, 52 of them between 1973 and 1993. Green carried copies of it in his satchel, selling around 20 on weekdays and up to 50 on Saturdays, for 10 pence in 1980 and later 12 pence. By February 1993 he had sold 87,000 copies. He also sent it to public figures, including five British prime ministers, Prince Charles, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Paul VI. His pamphlet warns us about the perils of the mass media: “BEWARE of the fun of indecent suggestions; of the amusement from the titillating scandal of private lives; of the diversion of the undress of low journalism etcetera. These things erode our morals and twist young minds.”

Legacy

His letters, diaries, pamphlets and placards were given to the Museum of London, which held 36 of the 84 editions of Eight Passion Proteins with Care. Other artefacts went to the Gunnersbury Park Museum. His printing press was included in Cornelia Parker’s exhibition The Maybe (1995) at the Serpentine Gallery, featuring Tilda Swinton in a glass box, as well as a cushion and carpet apparently from Freud’s couch and one of Winston Churchill’s cigars.

Green left several unpublished manuscripts, including a novel, Behind the Veil: More than Just a Tale; a 67-page text, Passion and Protein; and a 392-page edition of Eight Passion Proteins, which was rejected by Oxford University Press in 1971.

My visual memory of him is of someone with an ascetic face, sharp nose, thin lips. I am not sure if this is true, but I cannot banish the image of someone with hair sprouting from his nostrils and ears. He was obviously a serious man dedicated to his ideas, to his mission. Whatever about that, I remember seeing him being jovial and pleasant. Ascetic and driven but pleasant and bright-eyed.

As I prepare myself for my annual reassessment by the Diabetes Nurse at my GP surgery, I see this in The Guardian: “Dr Anjali Amin, an endocrinologist at Imperial College healthcare NHS trust, has researched the effect of protein on appetite regulation and says that a high protein diet may be helpful in the control of our appetites: ‘It is not going to boost metabolism but, from an appetite and energy perspective, it is the macronutrient that makes people feel most full.’”

Protein is good for blood sugar control, helping slow down the digestion of carbohydrates, preventing rapid blood sugar spikes. Protein is crucial for preserving lean body mass, especially during weight loss. It keeps you feeling full longer, helping weight management. People with diabetic kidney disease (nephropathy) may need to moderate protein intake.

I am fortunate in that I love eating beans and nuts and fruit, hate Big Macs and KFC, can live without meat (although I have decided that bacon is a vegetable). I dislike fizzy drinks and seem to be losing my taste for alcohol. I am rarely tempted to snack between meals and can live with hunger. Like a Buddhist Bhikkhu, I do not like to eat in the evening. I could live forever, or you might say that it will just seem like forever.

A Kinder, Less Sedentary and Unruly World

Green believed that eating too much protein created excess passion, leading to unruly behavior, and that reducing it would make people calmer and kinder. He also warned against the dangers of ‘SITTING’. those who “sit about” or do not work hard with their limbs would “store up their protein for passion”. Green believed this stored protein gravitated toward the reproductive system, where it “enflamed things” and fueled uncontrollable sexual desire (lust), which he saw as a source of moral decline and social disorder. He recommended vigorous exercise, such as digging in a garden, as a way to counteract this build-up of lust and to suppress sexual urges. I am in my 80^th year and gravity is dragging everything southward towards hades. I am too old for passion, but I do feel better if I do not sit for too long.

Green was arrested for public obstruction twice, in 1980 and 1985. “The injustice of it upsets me,” he said, “because I’m doing such a good job.” He took to wearing overalls to protect himself from spit, which he found several times on his hat at the end of the day.

Say no to Hippyshitwashing of the Bard.

If each should show his bleeding limbs unhealed,

Pierced, lopt and maimed, ‘twere nothing, nothing whatever

To that ghast sight in the ninth bowge revealed.

No cask stove in by cant or middle ever

So gaped as one I saw there, from the chin

Down to the farthole split as by a cleaver.

His tripes hung by his heels;the pluck and spleen

Showed with the livermand the sordid sack

That turns to dung the food it swallows in.

Full English breakfast anyone?

There is a lot more like this.

I was alarmed when I thought I detected in one of my nephews a potentially unhealthy interest in Nazi Germany. Was his fascination with tanks on a par with his interest in Jeremy Clarkson and boy racers, or was it a symptom of something more sinister? I passed on to him a couple of books about life under the Third Reich that I had picked up from The Works discount bookshop chain in the Whitgift Centre. Why does that chain have so many books about Nazis and concentration camps?

The Nephew informed me that he was studying modern German history for his ‘A’ Levels. I promised to pass on to him some books I owned. Now that I am in the post-Apocalyptic winter of my days, I am not interested in accumulating treasures; I am engaged in the major project of shedding attachments. I am giving stuff away. It is all about rapid throughput. Principally, I was thinking of Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler. There was also Peter Longerigg’s biography of Goebbels. I picked up AJP Taylor’s The Course of German History in a bookshop in Colombo in the dear dead days before all the Colombo bookshops were turned into nail spas and mobile phone shops.

Godwin’s Law

Godwin’s Law was promulgated by American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states that if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will bring up Hitler or Nazism.

Some commentators have suggested that Godwin’s Law should be put in abeyance now that we have Trump to contemplate. In December 2015, Godwin himself commented on the Nazi and fascist comparisons being made in several articles about The Donald, saying that, “If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.”

Let us not forget that Hitler, like Trump, was a demagogue with no experience of governing. It is a fallacy to claim that Hitler was democratically elected Chancellor in 1933 by an overwhelming popular vote. The National Socialist Party was indeed the largest party in the Reichstag, having won 37% of the vote in a general election, but, not having a working majority, Hitler’s party were members of a coalition. Hitler became all-powerful because von Papen and other conservatives disastrously thought they could control him.

Ian Kershaw

I read Kershaw’s biography of Hitler many years ago, round about the time it was published. It came out in two volumes: Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris in 1998 and Hitler: 1936–1945: Nemesis in 2000. I annotated the two volumes heavily with my Ikea pencil the first time I read them. I have just re-read them and made further annotations with Trump in mind. A single-volume abridged version was released in 2008.

Here are some selected quotations from Ian Kershaw’s monumental and exceedingly readable work. Actually, Hitler often comes better out of comparisons.

“…the question of how Hitler was possible: not just how this initially most unlikely pretender to high state office could gain power; but how he was able to extend that power until it became absolute, until field marshalls were prepared to obey without question the orders of a former corporal, until highly skilled ‘professionals’ and clever minds in all walks of life were ready to pay uncritical obeisance to an autodidact whose only indisputable talent was one for stirring up the base emotions of the masses.”

Try substituting the name ‘Trump’ for the name ‘Hitler’. It is difficult to describe Trump as an ‘autodidact’, because he never reads anything and never learns anything.

“…it showed how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into barbarity, culminating in ideological war, conquest of scarcely imaginable brutality and rapaciousness, and genocide such as the world had never previously witnessed. Hitler’s dictatorship amounted to the collapse of modern civilisation – a form of nuclear blow-out within modern society. It showed what we are capable of.”

Of what are we capable?

“… why a complex society would be prepared to follow someone who was mentally deranged, a ‘pathological case, into the abyss.”

Complicity was essential to the Nazi project. Hitler did not need to order every particular atrocity. Kershaw throughout this biography uses the phrase, “Working towards the Führer.” (The phrase was taken from a 1934 speech by the Prussian civil servant Werner Willikens.) By nudges and winks Hitler made clear what he wanted while maintaining plausible deniability.

“… it was the duty of each person in the Third Reich ‘to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish’ without awaiting instructions from above. … Hitler’s authority was, of course, decisive. But the initiatives he sanctioned derived more often than not from others.”

“The brutality of the concentration camps, the murder in 1934 of the SA leaders, and the mounting discrimination against the Jews had brought no official protests or opposition. Similarly in a Protestant Church divided within itself, unease, criticism, or dissent over Nazi high-handedness towards the Church and interference in its affairs, practices, structures, and doctrine coexisted- apart from the examples of a few exceptional individuals – with official avowals of loyalty and a great deal of genuine approval for what Hitler was doing.”

More than in Nazi Germany, many in the USA are prepared to protest but what good is it doing?

“In a mere three years, Hitler appeared to have rescued Germany from the miseries and divisions of Weimar democracy, and to have paved the way for a grandiose future for the German people. The demagogue and political firebrand had apparently been transformed into a statesman and national leader of a stature to match that of Bismarck. That the national revival had been accompanied by rigid authoritarianism, loss of civil rights, brutal repression of the Left and intensifying discrimination against Jews and others tought unfit to belong to the ‘national community’ was seen by most as at least a price worth paying – by many as positively welcome.”

In the USA, not many are fooled by Trump’s claims to have sorted out “Biden’s economic mess” but will his claims of foreign triumphs distract people from their economic misery?

“He was able as no one else to give voice to popular hatreds, resentments, hopes, and expectations. He spoke more stridently, more vehemently, more expressively and appealingly than any of those with a similar ideological message. He was the mouthpiece of the nationalist masses at a decisive time of all-embracing national crisis.”

Trump gained power by stoking grievances that large numbers of people could relate to, but, increasingly, he is picking away at his own scabs.

“But not only the politically naïve had been attracted. The deep cultural pessimism widespread in neo-conservative and intellectual circles could also find appeal in the idea of ‘national rebirth’, however much the vulgarity of Hitler and his followers might be disparaged….Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, with its melancholy prognosis of unstoppable cultural decay, was highly influential. Abstract art and modern theatre could be vilified as ‘Jewish’ and not truly German. Syncopated hot jazz-labelled ‘nigger music’- seemed to epitomise the inevitable coming Americanisation of not only music, but of all walks of life, in the land of Bach and Beethoven.”

There is no shortage of vulgarity and racism in Trump.

“Most ordinary Germans - like most ordinary people anywhere and at most times - looked forward to peace and prosperity. Hitler appeared to have established the basis for these. He had restored order to government. Law and order had been re-established. Few were concerned if civil liberties had been destroyed in the process. There was work again. The economy was booming. What a contrast this was to the mass unemployment and economic failure of Weimar democracy. Of course, there was still much to do. And many grievances remained. Not least, the conflict with the Churches was the source of great bitterness. But Hitler was largely exempted from blame…The negative features of daily life, most imagined, were not of the Führer’s making. They were the fault of his underlings, who frequently kept him in the dark about what was happening.”

Trump has overthrown law and order and used its absence to promote authoritarianism. I have personally heard US residents saying that all the bad things we hear about Trump are fake news or not down to him personally but the fault of those working for him.

“The compliance of all sections of the regime in the growth of the Führer cult, the exemption made for Hitler himself even by vehement internal critics of the party or Gestapo, and the full awareness of the immense popularity of the ‘great Leader’, all contributed to making it extraordinarily difficult by summer 1938 – the first time that deep anxieties about the course of his leadership surfaced – now to contemplate withdrawing support, let alone take oppositional action of any kind.”

“Hitler’s technique of throwing out a torrent of statistics – correct, fabricated, or embellished – to support an argument made countering it extremely difficult. Adam, struck - so he later claimed by Hitler’s ‘lack of education (Unbildung)’, [General Wilhelm Adam ,1877–1949, a high-ranking officer in the Reichswehr and early Wehrmacht] inability to confront reality, and willingness to resort to lies to get his way, retorted provocatively that if that was the case, there was not any point worrying any longer about the western front. After a tense few moments, during which those present braced themselves for a further violent outburst, Hitler calmed himself, and the inspection continued without any further incident.”

Trump also is uneducated and distracts with a dysentery of lies and obfuscation.

“Popular backing for war had to be manufactured, since war and expansion were irrevocably bound up with the survival of the regime. Successes, unending triumphs, were indispensable for the regime, and for Hitler’s own popularity and prestige on which, ultimately, the regime depended. Only through expansion - itself impossible without war – could Germany, and the National Socialist regime, survive. This was Hitler’s thinking. The gamble for expansion was inescapable. It was not a matter of personal choice.”

Trump’s reckless gambles are inescapable, he believes, if he is to keep out of jail.

“Hitler showed no interest in the details of economic difficulties pouring in from every part of the Reich. He was sensitive, as he had been in the mid-1930s, to the impact on morale, refusing in 1938 to entertain any rise in food prices. But he had become increasingly preoccupied with foreign policy. Domestic issues were largely pushed to one side. Decisions were left untaken; much business was postponed or neglected; access to him was difficult.”

Trump, the failed businessman, does not have a clue how to manage the economy, so he is distracting with foreign adventures. Unfortunately, he does not understand geopolitics either.

“… a key feature of Hitler’s thinking: war as panacea. Whatever the difficulties, they would be - and could only be – resolved by war. He was certainly alert to the dangers of a collapse in his popularity, and the likely domestic crisis which would then occur.”

Although he claims to have ended numerous wars, Trump has actually got to the point where he sees war as helping him.

“The years of spectacular successes – all attributed by Hitler to the ’triumph of the will’ – and the undiluted adulation and sycophancy which surrounded him at every turn, the Führer cult on which the ‘system’ was built, had now completely erased in him what little sense of his own limitations had been present. This led him to a calamitous over-estimation of his own abilities, coupled with an extreme denigration of those - particularly in the military – who argued more rationally for greater caution. It went hand in hand with an equally disastrous refusal to contemplate compromise, let alone retreat, as other than a sign of weakness.”

Trump’s delusions show no signs of waning. He continues to denigrate anyone who is not himself. However, the cult seems to be crumbling.

“As Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht Hitler could do nothing unlawful.”

The Supreme Court has given Trump immunity.

“Guerrilla fighters were to be peremptorily shot. Collective reprisals against whole village communities were ordered in cases where individual perpetrators could not be rapidly identified. Actions by members of the Wehrmacht against civilians would not be automatically subject to disciplinary measures, even if normally coming under the heading of a crime.”

“The subordination of the army to a Leader whose political programme had for long served its own ends had turned inexorably into subservience to a Leader whose high-risk gambles were courting disaster and whose ideological goals were implicating the army in outright criminality.”

The US military will have been compromised by illegal acts in relation to Venezuela. There may be a reckoning one day.

“While the tumultuous developments on the eastern front unfolded, the Reich was gradually turning into a Führer state with an absentee Führer … Whereas Churchill was concerned to speak to the British people and let himself be seen as often as was practicable, Hitler practically disappeared from the public eye.”

“Daily concerns dominated the mood, alongside fears for loved ones at the front. Reports from cities highlighted the catastrophic state of provisions and anger at food shortages and high prices. Industrial workers were becoming increasingly alienated by working conditions and wage levels.. The ‘little man’ was again the stupid one… He was having to work hard at great sacrifice, as had always been the case, to benefit the big noises (Bonzen), plutocrats, toffee-nosed (Standesdünkel), and war profiteers.”

“Talking was like a drug for him. He told one of his doctors two years later that he had to talk – about more or less anything other than military issues -to divert him from sleepless nights pondering troop dispositions and seeing in his mind where every division was at Stalingrad.”

Michael Wolff and others have testified that Trump never stops talking, never listens, never reads, never takes advice.

“The absence of strong, consistent leadership from the top on the home front produced what Goebbels lamented as a ‘complete lack of direction in German domestic policy.’ It axiomatically ruled out coherent, well-organized, and clearly-coordinated planning – and with that any illusions that the Propaganda Minister might have had that he would be given a free hand in domestic affairs. When , eventually, Hitler did become prepared to appoint Goebbels ‘Plenipotentiary for Total War Deployment,’ on 20 July 1944, it was very late in the day and, in any, case even then the powers granted were heavily circumscribed.”

“To his own staff, the Propaganda Minister laconically remarked that it takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see reason.”

“What they did not fully grasp was that the shapeless ‘system’ of governance that had emerged was both the inexorable product of Hitler’s personalized rule and the guarantee of his power.”

TACO Trump. Trump’s shapeless ‘governance’ seems to be the guarantee of his power. For how long? Hitler did not rule forever. His rule ended after just twelve years.

“Changing the ‘system’ without changing its focal point was impossible. Hitler was incapable of reforming his Reich, nor in any case, could he have any interest in doing so. He continued, as ever, to intervene willfully and arbitrarily in a wide array of matters, often of a trivial nature, undermining as he did so any semblance of governmental order or rationality.”

“All vital measures, both in military and in domestic affairs, needed his authorisation. There were no overriding coordinating bodies – no war cabinet, no politburo. But Hitler, forced entirely on to the defensive in running the war, was now often almost paralysed in his thinking, and often in his actions. And in matters relating to the ‘home front’, while refusing to concede an inch of his authority he was, as Goebbels interminably bemoaned, nevertheless incapable of more than sporadic, unsystematic intervention or prevaricating inaction.”

Think of Trump's fluctuations on tariffs.

“Only those who moved in the corridors of power had any possibility of removing Hitler…The bitter rivalries of the subordinate leaders, the absence of any centralised forum (equivalent to the Fascist Grand Council in Italy) from which an internal coup could be launched, the shapelessness of the structures of Nazi rule yet the indispensability of Hitler’s authority to every facet of that rule, and, not least, the fact that the regime’s leaders had burnt their boats with the Dictator in the regime’s genocide and other untold acts of inhumanity, ruled out any further possibility of overthrow. With that, the regime had only its own collective suicide in an inexorably lost war to contemplate.”

“By 1944, the individual military crises were accumulating into one almighty, life-or-death crisis for the regime itself. Hitler’s political adroitness was by this time long gone. He dismissed out of hand all contemplation of a possible attempt to reach a political solution. Bridges had been burnt (as he had indicated on several occasions); there was no way back. And, since he refused any notion of negotiating from a position other than one of strength, from which all his earlier successes had derived, there was in any case no opportunity to seek a peace settlement.

…The innate self-destructive tendency which had been implicit in his all-or-nothing stance at such times now conveyed itself, catastrophically, to military leadership.

… Refusal to obey was not only an act of military insubordination; it was a treasonable act of political resistance.”

Trump called for the execution of Senators who warned the military to think about whether their orders were legal.

“Collectively, the inhabitants of a highly sophisticated, pluralistic society which, following a lost war, was experiencing deep-seated national humiliation, economic bankruptcy, acute social, political, and ideological polarization, and a generally perceived – both by those with power and by the overwhelming mass of the population – complete failure of a discredited political system, had been prepared in increasing numbers to place their trust in the chiliastic vision of a self-professed political saviour.”

“The extreme form of personal rule which an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac, self-styled national saviour was allowed to acquire and exercise in a modern, economically advanced, and cultured land known for its philosophers and poets, was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years.”

In Kershaw’s opinion, Stalin’s power corresponded to Max Weber’s category of bureaucratic authority, whereas Hitler’s power corresponded to Weber’s category of charismatic authority. Trump falls into the undisciplined charismatic category.

AJP Taylor

The Course of German History by AJP Taylor was first published in the United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton in July 1945, two months after the war with Germany had ended. The book was written during the later stages of World War II and reflects Taylor’s attempt to explain the rise of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist movement within the broader context of German history. Taylor argued: “The history of the Germans is a history of extremes. It contains everything except moderation, and in the course of a thousand years the Germans have experienced everything except normality”.

In The Habsburg Monarchy, Taylor stated that the Habsburgs saw their realms entirely as a tool for foreign policy and thus could never build a genuine nation-state. To hold their realm together, they resorted to playing one ethnic group off against another and promoted German and Magyar hegemony over the other ethnic groups in Austria-Hungary.

Taylor portrayed Hitler as a grasping opportunist with no beliefs other than the pursuit of power and anti-Semitism. Taylor argued that Hitler did not possess any sort of programme and his foreign policy was one of drift and seizing chances as they offered themselves. He did not consider Hitler’s anti-Semitism unique: he argued that millions of Germans were just as ferociously anti-Semitic as Hitler and there was no reason to single out Hitler for sharing the beliefs of millions of others.

Who could possibly describe Trump as a grasping opportunist?!

Excerpts from Taylor

AJP Taylor achieved great popular fame for the history lectures that he broadcast on Granada and BBC TV. He was legendary for his ability to deliver these talks entirely unscripted and without notes or autocue, concluding precisely at the 30-minute mark to fit a standard half-hour broadcast slot.

Some of the things he wrote in The Course of German History probably would not get published today. Even in 1945 there was a somewhat sniffy reaction. The American Historical Review remarked: “The profound is mixed with the wisecrack.” In the journal International Affairs, the reviewer praised what the book had to say about the period up to 1919 but criticised Taylor’s chapters on the interwar years: “It is too facile an attempt to discover some continuity in German history which can compare Charlemagne with Hitler in their attempts to unite Europe.” In the Times Literary Supplement, Lewis Namier approved of Taylor’s thesis but criticised his style: “His combination of ruggedness and impressionable vivacity renders him also impatient of the careful labour of perfecting and polishing - he discovers precious stones by the handful, and puts them half-cut into circulation.... The basic ideas of Mr. Taylor’s book are sound, but would have profited by further careful examination and unfolding... the book should prove of high value in the study of the German problem” The German conservative historian Gerhard Ritter was outraged by the book.

Taylor made some rather brutal generalisations about the German (and other) character. “Most of the people of Europe have, at one time or another, been exterminators. The French exterminated the Albigensians in the thirteenth century and the Huguenots in the seventeenth; the Spaniards exterminated the Moors; the English exterminated the North American Indians and attempted to exterminate the Irish. But no other people has pursued extermination as a permanent policy from generation to generation for a thousand years; and it is foolish to suppose that they have done so without adding something to their national traditions. No one can understand the Germans who does not appreciate their their anxiety to learn from, and to imitate, the West; but equally no one can understand Germans who does not appreciate their determination to exterminate the East.”

“If a natural cataclysm had placed a broad sea between the Germans and the French, the German character would not have been dominated by militarism. If – a more conceivable possibility – the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbours, as the Anglo-Saxons had succeeded in exterminating the Indians, the effect would have been what it was on the Americans: the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and international reconciliation. Constant surroundings shaped a German national character strong enough to withstand the increasing changes in social circumstances which occurred in Germany in modern times.”

“For long enough, and particularly since time of the enlightenment, the western world had only seen the western face of Germany – the Germany of liberalism and scholarship, the Germany of peaceful industry. In 1870 Germany first turned to the west her eastern face, the face she wore towards the Slavs, the face of the intolerant exterminator and overlord.”

“The majority of liberals washed their hand of public affairs and withdrew into a liberalism of the spirit, as Luther had done three huindred years before. These were the men who convinced so many foreign observers that Germany was ‘liberal at heart’. Her liberalism was indeed buried deep in their hearts: with principles of the deepest liberal purity, none ever raised his voice against the course of German policy, and all silently acquiesced in its consequences.”

“…the suggestion that Poles and Czechs should rank as men…appeared to Germans so fantastic that even the representatives who signed the treaty made no attempt to conceal their attitude: they were signing so much waste paper, signing solely because the High Command was unable to resume the war. And so, too, the Weimar republic was maintained in being as scapegoat.”

“In the beginning, anti-Semitism was an easy outlet for the vague socialism of the National Socialist rank and file, the destruction of Jewish shops a showy substitute for social change. As always anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools. But it soon came to serve a more sinister purpose. The Jews became the helpless objects on which millions of Germans first exercised the brutality essential if Germany was to dominate all of Europe. They were the practising ground, the battle training school, for the Nordic virtues, which were later to find their full expression in Poland, in France, and in occupied Russia. The great pogrom of November 1938, following hard on the victory of Munich, was the test mobilisation of German morale. If the Germans could stomach that, they could stomach anything. No voice of protest was raised, in not one instance did a Christian Church, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, open its doors to the Jews in refuge, no German bishop put on the star of David. The Germans had passed the test with flying colours; they were indeed united.”

“They desired to undo the verdict of 1918, not merely to end reparations or to cancel the ‘war guilt’ clause, but to repudiate the equality with the peoples of eastern Europe which had then been forced upon them. During the preceding eighty years the Germans had sacrificed to the Reich all their liberties; they demanded as reward the enslavement of others. No German recognised the Czechs or Poles as equals. Therefore every German desired the achievement which only total war could give. By no other means could the Reich be held together. It had been made by conquest and for conquest; if it ever gave up its career of conquest, it would dissolve. Patriotic duty compelled even the best of Germans to support a policy which was leading Germany to disaster.”

“The National Socialists were not a party in any political sense, but a movement: they were action without thought, the union of all those who had lost their bearings and asked only a change of circumstances no matter what. At the heart of the National Socialists was the Free Corps, the wild mercenaries of the post war years whose ‘patriotism’ had taken the form of shooting German workers. The Munich rising in November 1923 had been the last splutter of their Free Corps days. Since then they had been taught discipline by a ruthless gangster leader, Hitler, a man bent on destruction, ‘the unknown soldier of the last war’’, but unfortunately not buried, expressing in every turn of his personality the bitter disillusionment of the trenches.”

Trump and the Proud Boys.

“He was at once everyone’s enemy and everyone’s friend: his programme of contradictory principles could succeed only in a community which had lost all unity and self confidence. To the workers he offered employment; to the lower middle-classes a new self-respect and importance; to the army leaders a great army; to all Germans German supremacy; to all the world peace. In reality it mattered little what he offered: to a Germany bewildered by defeat he offered action, success, undefined achievement, all the sensations of a revolution without the pains.”

I rarely write poetry these days. I went through a manic phase of entering competitions and submitting to small publications that don’t pay anything. Now that I have reached the age of 79, I no longer have the energy to cope with unforced disappointment and rejection. Life of its own free will offers enough pain and rejection, without me going out looking for it. Rather than seeking the buffetings of a cruel world , I will just look for the buffet. I will calmly potter about and write for my own amusement.

Some of the non-paying publications who rejected my pro bono offerings did offer some unconvincing explanations of their disdain for my work. I do know something about poetry. I have been studying and analysing the works of the generally accepted masters for over 60 years. I published (under my pseudonym of ‘Padraig Colman’) a series of articles about modern American poets for a Sri Lankan Sunday newspaper. I gave this series the working title of Mad Poets Society. I wrote about the lives and works of John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke.

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/the-brilliant-work-and-difficult-life-of-john-berrymanpart-one/

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/delmore-schwartz-part-1/

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/robert-lowell-part-1/

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/randall-jarrell-part-one/

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2014/11/30/theodore-roethke-part-1/

The articles on Roethke attracted the attention of William Barillas who invited me to review a volume he had edited called A Field Guide to Theodore Roethke. I did review the book but could not get my review published through the old channels. I posted the review on Substack.

Roethke crops up in the memoir of Irish poet Richard Murphy who lived in Sri Lanka. Murphy’s father was once mayor of Colombo. I was hoping to meet up in Kandy with Richard Murphy (who was not at all a small Murphy for which to be thankful. He was very tall, towering above Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin in a photograph.

Richard knew everybody who was anybody He was even cuckolded by the eminent Conor Cruise O’Brien.) I managed to get Murphy’s phone number from Bridget Halpé, a Facebook friend who was a Sri Lankan concert pianist and the widow of Ashley Halpé who had collaborated with Murphy on versions of poems inscribed on a long wall of polished plaster at Sigiriya. The book was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1989 and received the Poetry Book Society Translation Award. Unfortunately, Richard died before I could pluck up the courage to phone him. He did hang until the age of 90 while I hesitated.

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/richard-murphy-long-version/

My Collected Works

Rather than trying to get my poems printed and published, I am now going to put them online for everybody to read and enjoy, free of charge. They can be found on my WordPress blog.

https://taxonomiesblog.wordpress.com/

Here follows one with which I am quietly pleased.

Anosmia

It takes only the one match

For the paper and kindling to catch

And flicker into flame. Soon the peat,

Its underbelly glowing orange with heat,

Assaults my nose with wisps of smoke,

Evocative of atavistic bogs,

Preserving dead life. Now the logs

Go on. They blister and crack,

Fragrant resin that takes me back

To pine-clad hills of Poros. Trees cupped

To make retsina which can’t be supped

In these cold and sunless northern climes.

A round Pinotage is best for wintry times.

The Polish coal belches soot and smoke -

Recalling a hellish furnace, my father heaping coke.

I plunge the corkscrew my Grandfather brought

Back from Wipers, from the war that he thought

Would end them all. I pull the cork and smell

Blackcurrant and tannin and think that all is well.

Placing the wine to soften before the grate,

I move to the kitchen to create

A meal to bring the air of sunny shores

To my night-drenched foggy pores.

Odour of garlic sizzling in oil fills the place.

Chopped onions send tears down my face.

Fresh chilies hit the pan, their spiky fumes

Stab my nostrils. Adding to the mix, I fill the rooms

With aromas of balsamic, basil, cheese,

Mushrooms and olives. Serving these

On pasta doused in walnut oil, I go to the fire

And switch on the TV. Soldiers wading through mire

Of wrenched limbs and blood. Setting the food aside I stare.

My kitten, smelling like attar of roses, climbs on the chair.

Another rerun of The World at War. As I watch, tears

Spring again. My father, dead these thirty years,

Shown to me in his frail humanity as never before

Among those grey ghosts on the Normandy shore.

My father left his sense of smell on the Norman strand,

On 10^th July 1944. A shattered, bodiless hand

Was the last scent his nose remembered.

Did he leave part of himself with the dismembered?

He won no medal for being there. British forces fought

For five weeks to win that piece of sand. They bought

It at a price of thousands dead. My Irish father did not fight;

Showed no wounds but did he get off light?

The Pioneer Corps was the stuff of jokes.

A motley collection of ineffectual blokes

Dredged into the army by war’s hunger for bodies.

Clerks and light labourers, intellectuals and incapables.

Too short or too tall. Weak in the head, too modest,

Or bright to be an officer. Unfit to fight. Fit to clean stables.

Cleaning up after the proper soldiers. Tidying the war.

What litter now on that Normandy shore?

Do tourists relax on this beach manured with blood

And bone of boys and men? The smells are good,

Calvados and Normandy cider. The pork and tripes

A la Caen drip greasily from the tourists’ lips.

Before the war, my father mixed sand and cement,

Digging foundations. At 28 he was keening a lament,

Laying in pits rotting pieces of other young men.

This was what it was to be a Pioneer then.

At 28, I knew days of quiet desperation

In my lowly work, I dreaded the exasperation

Of elders who coped. I felt the shame

Of being inept at low aims but all the same

Had no talent to escape. In younger days

I fought with Da over his guarded ways.

Mocked him and his work-mates, old at heart,

For rejecting what then seemed so smart

And time proved so tawdry. Their jibes trite

And envious. The “University of Life” was right.

What did they care about Marcuse and Lacan?

A boy got a better schooling in the charnel of Caen.

At 28 my father walked with the dead, breathing the fetor

Of putrefaction. Mangled boys liquefied into the sand.

Did his brain tell his senses it would be better

To block this horror? Be blind, or cease to hear?

Might he have lost feeling in his hand?

Was he lucky then that he couldn’t smell his beer?

After the war he got another spade

From the South Western Gas Board. I was afraid

When he showed me the works. Men stripped to the waist.

The Irish as black as the Jamaicans,

A dying Empire’s godforsaken-

Straining with shovels, their bodies bast-

Ed like meat. A scene from a sermon on hell,

Men dwarfed by the furnaces they stoked,

Coughing in the fumes of coal and coke.

Did the gas board employ a man who couldn’t smell

As some kind of perverse joke?

My father was a chauvinist for gas. The stove at home

And even the fridge was powered by Mr Therm.

Mantles, if he could have had his way,

Would have been better than light bulbs any day.

With unsmiling face, he once told me

That gas board boffins had perfected a gas TV.

Even in the vegetarian precinct of my home

I sometimes wake to the smell of roasting lamb.

Is it a vestigial memory like an amputee’s twinge

In his missing foot? Do the blind have a memory of orange?

Did my Dad nurse in his head old smells good or rank?

Or was there just an absence, an olfactory blank?

I could have asked him but that was the last thing

I thought of. We steered away from talk of last things.

I recall we talked of football as I shaved his shrunken neck

Gently brushed and blew the hairs from his withered back.

England and Germany. England another feeble defeat then.

In July 1944 Germany lost sixty thousand men.

A smug and rubicund curate summoned to the ward,

God’s bully boy on earth, a gombeen man for the Lord,

Did not talk of last things. He proudly wore his Pioneer pin,

His badge of abstinence, an outward sign of one thing

At least he would say ‘no’ to. His soutane reeked of roast pork.

He exhaled stale cigar smoke and platitudes when he talked,

As if to a child failing at his catechism. My father, in better years,

Would resent and resist and command respect from this Pioneer.

The priest, rotund and pompous in the complacency of his ignorance,

His hands soft and pudgy, hands that had never known the chance

To grip the haft of a spade. The only digging this Pioneer had done

Would be in the drawers of an altar boy after compline.

A life of comfortable poverty, cosseted by mother

And presbytery housekeeper, one after another,

Masochistic matrons of the parish, widows bowled over

By his sermons on brimstone and his lust for their Pavlova.

His smells were Clonakilty pudding, colcannon, bacon fried

Crisp, exorcising incense and the stale dried

Dampness of the shiny Sunday suits of the massed

Peasantry, pious and deferential to the last.

This petty priest became the cynosure of my rage

Against God for taking my father at such a young age.

Did Caen teach my father the flimsiness of the flesh?

On that beach did he learn how fine the mesh

That binds muscle to bone, how temporary the breath?

I know he lived with the tinnitus of anxiety till death.

I know not to damn God for the evil of men

But the inexorable force of the evil visited then

On little men who had no voice or power to halt

It was more and less than human. No fault

Could make him complicit in the malignant force

That swept common people away with the cause

Instigated by ideologies and systems of terror.

If I blamed God for his death was that an error?

How else to assign blame for the malignant cells

That shrank his sturdy body, subverted his will,

Snuffed out his flame. He was ever a chronic worrier.

Did the rogue cells start their march amidst those warriors

Slain on the beach? Can God then claim this excuse?

The evil of men brought the horror that let the rogue cells loose.

Cowardly to give to the priest and God the blame.

Why not admit that some of the onus is mine to claim?

Thirty years on he still comes to me in dreams

So quick and vivid and intense that it seems

He will be there to talk to me tomorrow. If only then,

When I had the chance, had I shown

What I felt, it might have brought him ease

And halted the march of the evil disease.

Now I live in the land of his birth.

I walk the hills and till the earth.

No need of Pioneers to bury the dead

Sheep fallen in the boreen, its head

Gnawed. Stripped to the bones the carcass

Feeds families of flies and crows.

From the village to home I can find my way blind.

The turning off the main road the scent is watercress

From the Owenacurra gushing clean over rocks behind

The furze. Then the wind susurrating in the trees

Stops, and it’s right turn at the cross-roads. The black-

Berries’ smell guides me along to Mrs Fitz’s house

Where odour of dog precedes the licks and barks

Of Susie. The haw has a fragrance of anise

Or fennel and further along I wander

Past a peppery perfume. I know I have reached home

When I am greeted by chives, lovage and coriander

And earthy exhalation of freshly turned loam.

My father’s sister remarks how much

Like him I have become. The mutation is such

That I grow into his looks

I walk his walk, retell his jokes,

Looking into the mirror I feel scared.

Soon I will be older than my father if I am spared.

George Szirtes, said this about ‘Anosmia’: “Movingly evocative and elegantly written”. Christopher Reid (he edited the letters of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes and actually knew Borges) said of the same poem: ‘Remarkable! Covers a lot of ground and goes deep”.

I will keep adding to my poetry blog at

https://taxonomiesblog.wordpress.com/

Please check it out.

I was born on October 24, 1946 at Number 9, Stanway Road, Coney Hill, Gloucester, not far from the lunatic asylum. I lived at that address permanently until I was four years old and spent a lot of time there later during school holidays because both of my parents were at work. I have very early memories (two or three years old?) of a nightmare of neon animals crawling over me and eating me as I slept up in the attic. I also remember the taste of the free welfare orange juice at the clinic next to St Oswald’s church.

I was born in a large and sturdy red-brick 1930s council house which my Irish immigrant father had worked on as a builder’s labourer. When I was born, he had not found a house of his own and we lived with my mother’s family for my first four years on earth. As well as my mother’s parents, Sam and Fanny-Harriet King, there were numerous of my mother’s siblings (there were about eight or nine altogether, but some had married and moved on). Evelyn was the youngest – about 13 years younger than my mother. Evelyn referred to herself as an afterthought or accident. Rose was the next one up from Evelyn.

My memories of my life at 9, Stanway Road are as of a movie directed by Terence Davies.

The Beginnings of a Cineaste

Evelyn and Rose saw it as their mission in life to educate me in the matter of cinema and popular music. Here is a list of the films I remember seeing with them in the years 1950 to 1955:

Singin’ in the Rain (I was five-years-old when I saw this at the cinema in 1952.)

Trouble in Store (1953)

The Road to Bali (1952)

A Star is Born (1954)

The Quiet Man (1952)

Calamity Jane (1953)

Moulin Rouge (1952)

Son of Paleface (1952)

Ivanhoe (1952)

The Robe (1953)

Quo Vadis (1951)

The Ten Commandments (1956)

The Crimson Pirate ( 1952. I saw this again in 1985 at a hotel in Jehu Beach, Bombay.)

Jack and the Beanstalk (Abbott and Costello 1952)

Brigadoon (1954)

Where’s Charley? (1952)

April in Paris (1952)

Androcles and the Lion (1952)

An American in Paris (1951)

Hans Christian Andersen (1952)

Dangerous when Wet ( 1953. This child was traumatised when Esther Williams disappeared under the water and did not come back up again.)

Abbott and Costello meet Captain Kidd (1952)

Robin Hood (1952)

Rob Roy (1953)

The Sword and the Rose (1953)

Cinderella (1950)

Cage of Gold (1950)

Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951)

Treasure Island (1950)

The Band Wagon (1953)

The Black Shield of Falworth (1954)

I remember being somewhat puzzled by A Star Is Born. Why was James Mason walking into the sea and not coming back? My experience of the seaside was limited to Weston-super-Mare where the tide never came in and the beach was always muddy. Did James Mason get sucked down into the mud? Heavy stuff for an eight-year-old.

Portrait of the writer as a young maggot.

Introduction to Music

Rose and Evelyn were huge fans of Ruby Murray. They insisted on imposing their taste on me when I was a defenceless eight-year-old. They dragged the poor child around the country to see Ruby Murray, David Whitfield, Dickie Valentine and Cavan O’Connor.

Evelyn had some records in her collection which interested this child more than Ruby Murray or David Whitfield. There was Elvis’s first UK single, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, on a blue-label HMV 78. There was ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard, which I found pleasingly wild and anarchic. Even more surprising than this, Evelyn had actually bought Charlie Gracie’s ‘Wanderin’ Eyes’. I followed Gracie’s lengthy rock-a-billy career up to his death in 2022 at the age of 86. He was performing almost to the day Covid got him and on the way he influenced many such as George Harrison and Graham Nash. Evelyn also owned the only Cliff Richard record I ever liked, ‘Move It’.

Ruby Murray

Even as an eight-year-old, I had an instant antipathy to Ruby Murray’s music. My extensive life experience at that point indicated to me that she was not a comfortable performer. Mary Margaret O’Hara avant la letter. The eight-year-old sophisticate found her voice feeble and her songs trite. It seemed to be a great psychological effort to her to perform. She seemed painfully shy and nervous and unsure of herself.

Stage Fright

Watching documentaries about her today, I am surprised by how strong and clear her voice is and that she has a sense of humour and is quite an articulate speaker. Nonetheless, I think my eight-year-old instincts were sound. Like many insecure performers, and many who achieved some measure of attention as child performers, she turned to alcohol as a crutch. Ruby died of liver cancer at the age of 61. Many performers suffered from stage fright and their coping mechanisms worsened their problems: Judy Garland, Don Gibson, Adele, Barbra Streisand, Ozzy Osbourne, Stephen Fry, Donald Fagen.

Ruby Murray first appeared on television when she was 12. Even before that, she was getting public attention. She entered a public speaking contest run by Eglinton Young Farmers Club, Derry in March 1947 and won a special prize for the youngest competitor under 18. She received a wonderful reception for a performance at the Ballymena Variety Theatre in February 1948 and then toured Ireland. She replaced Joan Regan (I saw Joan Regan live as well) as the resident singer on the TV series Quite Contrary.

The TV series led to a recording contract with Columbia. her first single, “Heartbeat”, reached No. 3 in the UK Singles Chart in December 1954. “Softly, Softly”, her second single, reached number one in early 1955.

Annus Mirabilis

In1955, readers of the NME (New Musical Express) voted her Britain’s favourite female vocalist (she received over 1,000 votes more than her nearest rival Alma Cogan), Bernard Delfont signed her to co-star with Norman Wisdom at the London Palladium in the revue Painting the Town, and she appeared in the Royal Variety Show.

She scored ten hits in the UK Singles Chart between 1954 and 1959. She also made pop chart history in March 1955 by having five hits in the Top Twenty in a single week. Taylor Swift broke that record in 2022.

In 1956, she was heard on screen singing “You Are My First Love” in It’s Great to be Young, had an acting role as a chambermaid in the Frankie Howerd comedy A Touch of the Sun, and made the first of two successful tours of the United States.

Looking Back

I had never heard of Duke Special until the estimable Substacker Mathew Lyons brought him to my attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Special

In January 2011, Duke Special (Peter Wilson) presented a documentary on RTE on the life of Ruby Murray on and released Duke Special Sings the Songs of Ruby Murray.

I also watched an Ulster TV documentary.

The words vulnerable and shy keep coming up in relation to Ruby Murray. She had minimal management and no PR or production. She did not know how to move her hands or how to stand. Getting to the centre of the stage is an agony of awkward limbs, the epitome of gawky.

She married her first husband, Bernard Burgess, of the close harmony group the Four Jones Boys, in 1957, and in 1962 they started a year-long tour of Britain in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Her career was never to reach such a peak again as in her annus mirabilis of 1955. Problems in her personal life plus the stresses of her career caused addiction to both alcohol and valium.

Decline

When I was living in Manchester in the 1970s and 1980s, I had heard about Ruby Murray’s alcoholism. The story as I knew it was that she was living rent-free in the Rembrandt Hotel in the Canal Street gay quarter of Manchester. I had thought that Ruby Murray might appeal to the gay community. Google AI has scolded me for daring to suggest that Ruby Murray would appeal to the gay community or live at the Rembrandt. I understand that there is today a drag artist called ‘Ruby Murry’. I have asked the Rembrandt if the real Ruby graced their portals.

Ruby Murray’s affair with Belfast comedian Frank Carson began around 1962 and significantly affected her personal and professional life. The strain of the affair contributed heavily to the breakdown of her marriage to Bernie Burgess. Burgess eventually divorced her in the mid-1970s, alleging physical violence because of her alcoholism. He was awarded custody of their two children.

Despite the affair, Murray and Burgess eventually reconciled as friends; he visited her frequently in Asprey’s nursing home in Torquay before her death in 1996. Carson remained married to his wife until his death in 2012, while Murray married her longtime friend and former dancer/theatre manager, Ray Lamar, in 1991. Lamar, 18 years her senior, a former stage dancer, theatre impresario, and manager for Bernard Delfont. They remained married until her death in 1996, although there is evidence that she wanted a divorce. Lamar inherited her recording royalties after her death in 1996 and himself died in 2005

.Changed Utterly

The year in which Ruby Murray had her greatest success, 1955, was a pivotal year for popular culture. In essence, 1955 was the year the UK’s musical landscape fundamentally changed, raw rock and roll overwhelmed bland English pap, preparing the way for the export of British rock to the States. 1955 was special for UK pop because the UK discovered Bill Haley & His Comets, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis. The era’s traditional “parent’s music” gave way to British acts like Lonnie Donegan who took American blues and folk, made it British and exported it back into the US charts. The home-made music that was skiffle provided the foundation for the careers of Tommy Steele, Adam Faith, Billy Fury, The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks, Van Morrison. Proto-skifflers became mega-stars who launched the British Invasion. Every school, including mine, had at least one skiffle group. British music began to develop in the 1950s from insular and derivative forms to become the leading centre of popular music in the modern world.

There was room in Aunty Evelyn’s record collection for Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Charlie Gracie, Cliff Richard and Ruby Murray but there was not much room for Ruby Murray in an entertainment market where Teddy Boys were slashing seats (and each other) with razors.

I had very much enjoyed Michael Schmidt’s book, The Lives of the Poets. Carcanet Press is an excellent publisher. I had read his obituary of CB Cox. I submitted a few poems to PN Review and got a friendly response. I had told him that CB Cox had called me an idle bastard when I was at unviversity. “If you are an idle bastard, that idleness is manifested in your hiding your light under a bushel…”

Michael Schmidt said , “I am startled you have only had two poems published. The work has real formal intelligence and authority.” Mr Schmidt offered some practical criticisms of what I had submitted but left me dangling about any chance of publication. I was prepared to make changes but we did not come to any firm conclusion.

Meditation at Gougane Barra

My pen teases out taxonomies to tame the turmoil.

Does the road tame the forest, the house

Define the hill? Conformist conifers

March in ranks at the tarmac’s edge,

Striding towards Bealick. The map is pocked

With megalithic tombs, stone circles and mass rocks.

The mountain glowers on the works of man.

Like the road, the pines are planned by man,

Not nature’s children only, but the bastard

Offspring of Coillte Teoranta.

Streams whisper in the thickets,

Cutting natural paths as through centuries,

Hurrying to the lake in which shards of mountain

Shimmer. On the island, Finbarr’s stations endure.

Step from the paved road

Onto man-trodden paths into the undergrowth.

Step from those paths onto smaller tributaries;

Then to smaller still till you visit the domain

Of ants who have urgent work to conduct.

Stout roots lead to narrow, tapering to slender;

Diminuendo to hair-thin tendrils patiently

Decomposing teeming earth in alliance with worms.

Crumbling cottages sink into hills and fields,

Weeds grow through cracks in the roads.

At home I cook a meal in our new kitchen.

A swallow, locked into old co-ordinates,

Newly returned from Africa, panics, trapped

In a building not here last year.

In the garden newly hewn from meadow

Rests a gate bought from a traveller. A barrier

To deter errant sheep, a boundary to mark

What we have bought from nature,

Human purpose stamped on wild fecundity.

The gate has disappeared in the tangle

Of the bund. Thistles tall enough to look

Me in the eye. Yellow blossoms of bird’s foot

Trefoil, sun spurge and lesser celandine.

Purple shades into blue. Dog violet,

Tufted vetch , devil’s-bit scabious, speedwell.

A slug slides from the potato I am slicing.

Michael Schmidt wrote to me: “I particularly liked ‘Gougane Barra’, which is why I put the submission aside hoping for time to return to it…What didn’t work for me in ‘Gougane Barra’ was the slug at the end. It seemed – set off in its own line – there for ‘effect’. Up to that point, with the growing stanzas, it felt organic and whole and not ‘literary’, but that ‘arresting’ final image sort of let the poem down. It wouldn’t work, or would it, without the space, tacking it on to the previous verse paragraph?”

https://michaelschmidt.org.uk/

In 2001, I had a poem published in the Cork Literary Review alongside Paul Muldoon. That Séamus Heaney fellow was a frequent contributor to the CLR. He did quite well thereafter. Showed promise.

I still have the hand-written letter that the editor Sheila O’Hagan sent me dated May 26 2003. She also edited Under Brigid’s Cloak, an anthology of Kildare writers, in 1994. Her three collections were The Peacock’s Eye (1992), The Troubled House (1995) and Along The Liffey: Poems and Short Stories (2009) - all published by Salmon.

“Dear Michael O’Leary,

I have received from Liz Willows of Bradshaw Books , Cork, your poems, very late in the day, I regret for inclusion in Cork Literary Review Vol X.

However, I like ‘What Is Now?’ so much I am going to squeeze it in and am really sorry that it is the only one I can take.”

What Is Now?

Meditating at Dzogchen Beara.

What is now?

Where is it and how?

Focus on a fixed point. That glazed ochre rock

Seen through the glass of the shrine room.

Use that firm rooted stasis to unlock

The monkey mind from its gibbering. The Atlantic spume

Leaps from the slapped crags and strives to a height,

Dissipating, fading as it rises, merging into the cloudlight.

What is is and when

Does it become then?

Beyond in the bay the ocean masses its forces,

Marshals its energy to attack the shore.

An elemental cavalry of white flecked horses

Thunders to the rocks, stirs the swaying seaweed to furore,

Retreats and regroups and gathers for a new assault,

Centuries of patience to test the rock for frailty or fault.

For the rock is not timeless. Turning its stoic cheek

To the Atlantic’s blows, is it more fixed than the dispersing spray?

The unforgiving attrition of the relentless waves will wreak

Destruction upon the ancient stones until one day,

Powdered to grains of sand swirled by bullying waves

From new generations, they are washed into the caves.

That is no cavalry; the ocean, mindless, does not attack;

The waves have no patience. The deluding brain

Struggles to give purpose to chaos. The lack

Chills, isolates. In the time it takes to find

A word to bestow meaning, snare the phenomenon -

Does “wave” freeze the fading reality like a photo? - it’s gone.

As twilight comes the clouds flatten into bluish grey

Over the olive ocean. The sky is becoming a blank

When, creeping into the sight over the bay,

A rainbow arches across the mountains, one foot in the dank

Fields, the other dipping into the sea.

Shedding colours the rainbow fades and ceases to be.

That was then, this is now.

That was now.

What is to be becomes is.

When does now become was?

The editor of the Cork Literary Review at the time was Sheila O’Hagan, who was a prominent presence on the Dublin writing scene during the 1990s and afterwards. I recall seeing another letter from her which I cannot find now. In it , she said she wanted to publish more of my poems and compared me (particularly in the light of my poem called ‘Work in Progress’) to Denis O’Driscoll (whom I had not read at that time. I have since read and enjoyed O’Driscoll’s poems and his collaboration with Séamus Heaney, Stepping Stones).

Unfortunately, Sheila O’Hagan handed the editorship to Fred Johnston, who did not like my efforts. Fred saw something in me and later sent me a friend request on Facebook which I accepted and I had warm and friendly conversations with him without mentioning his rejection of me. Fred left us in September 2024.

I no longer do Facebook but had cordial relations with many distinguished poets, particularly George Szirtes and Christopher Reid .

In Ireland, we lived within walking distance of the village of Lisgoold which was the birthplace of poet Maurice Riordan, who has had several collections published by Faber and Faber. From 2013-2017, Riordan served as Editor of The Poetry Review. I sent him a few poems mentioning our geographical connection but it was no go.

Here is one inspired by an unpleasant real-life incidence of racism in the Ould Thatch pub in Lisgoold village. I never went that pub again again.

Céad Míle Fáilte

Sauntering in to The Old Thatch,

My brown-faced friend is full

Of the Bailey’s Cream of human kindness.

Back in his savage homeland,

Kindly Irish priests brought culture

To his benighted youth without

Pedagogical pederasty,

The usual bonus

Of beatings and buggerings.

On this account,

He thinks well of Ireland.

Back home, in darky land,

Vishnu and Kali and Ganesh

Quailed at the onslaught of Foster and Allen

And Daniel O’Donnell from my friend’s battered Dansette.

His love of such high Gaelic culture

Is so strong his brown-faced

Chums call him ‘Paddy’

And his garden, the paddy field.

He has been to Ireland before-

Land of saints and scholars

And Bridie Gallagher.

Hibernia, winterland of warm hearts and hearths-

Within a controlled tourist cordon sanitaire,

Protected by the full force-field of céad míle fáilte.

As we stroll to the bar, the Bord

Na Mona fire in the grate sputters and dies.

A susurration, like a fart at a funeral.

The air is sucked from the room,

The craic is drowned in the vacuum.

All eyes turn to us.

A Citizen, leaning on a pint of stout.

Big, hairy ginger tweed jacket;

Brown corduroy trousers;

Highly buffed brown brogues;

Checked waistcoat stretched across

Belly full of crubeens and cabbage.

Atop the ensemble, a red face,

Various bellicose veins

Pop on his forehead;

Foxy bristles, complementing the tweed jacket,

Sprout alarmingly from his ears.

The Citizen’s voice booms

Into the vacuum. ‘Jasus Maloney!

Are they letting the little fuckers in here now?!

Will we live to see this land of Cuchulain

And Padraic Pearse swamped

With picaninnies and cannibals?’

Our neighbour, Peter,

Takes a great interest

In the patterns on the curtains.

A cock crows.

I guided my brown friend out of the door.

Failte to the real Ireland my brown friend,

The Ireland of Jackie Healy-Rae.

If you’re Irish, come into the parlour.

There’s a welcome there for you.

If your name is Timothy or Pat,

As long as you’re not

A nigger, wog, spick, tinker, yid, dago, chinky, gook

There’s a welcome on the mat.

Ah, the toxicity of taxonomy.

When Paul Muldoon became poetry editor of the New Yorker I thought nothing would be lost by submitting a few poems. I doubt if Muldoon ever saw them but they were rejected, possibly by an underling.