30 years ago today – the debut of Under Clery’s Clock September 23, 2017
Posted by Tomboktu in Commemoration, LGBT, Music.7 comments
30 years ago today, on 23 September 1987 (it was a Wednesday), the Radiators played Under Clery’s Clock for the first time in public. The band had reunited for a one-off gig in the Hawkins nightclub in Dublin to raise funds for AIDS.
Under Clery’s Clock was both of its time and way ahead of it. Written by Phil Chevron (who died on 8 October 2013), it condensed into just 117 words both his isolation growing up gay in Dublin in the 1960s and 1970s and — unlike many other gay songs of the time that set ambitions of coming out or escaping queer-bashing — envisioned a time of true equality: “All I want is to embrace / By the streetlight / Just like other lovers do”.
And it was comfortably Irish — Dublin, even: not only Clery’s (gone) and its famous clock (still there) or the last bus to An Lár (remember them before the electronic signs?), but also Burgh Quay (and the now gone public toilets which had been a cruising spot for gay men).
(PS: A recording was made of the 1987 gig, to help raise additional funds. I’ve not been able to find a copy. It anybody knows where I can borrow one, do pop me an email: cedarlounge.tomboktu@gmail.com)
Mother Jones Festival, Cork, 31st July – 2nd August July 16, 2012
Posted by Garibaldy in Commemoration, History, Trade Unions, United States.1 comment so far
The 175th anniversary of the birth of the legendary trade union activist and “Miner’s Angel”, Mary Harris Jones is being celebrated in Cork by the Mother Jones Festival, following a motion from Ted Tynan (WP) for a memorial to her to be erected being passed by the City Council. The website of the broad-based committee responsible for putting together the Festival is here. The Festival has a wide range of sponsors, including the City Council, SIPTU and UNITE.
Highlights from the very impressive programme include
31st July with Irish premier of film “Mother Jones, America’s Most Dangerous Woman” with talk by film producer and writer Rosemary Feurer (USA).
1st August Opening of the Mother Jones Exhibition on 1st August at 12.15pm at the Firkin Crane Centre
1st August, the Inaugural mother Jones lectures and discussion with Prof. Elliott J. Gorn (Brown University), whose books include Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America and Marat Moore, herself a former coal miner, union activist and writer. She was a founder of the Daughters of Mother Jones who played a big role in the Pittston Mine Strike in 1989, and is the author of Women in the Mines.
1st August Official Unveiling of the Mother Jones plaque at John Redmond Street
1st August “Freedom Bells” concert with Andy Irvine
Full details of the various events and venues can be found in the programme.
The Wood for the Trees. Another Massive Leap for Progress. Or, More Ignoring of Imperialism. January 5, 2012
Posted by Garibaldy in Commemoration, Republicanism.14 comments
The recent trend for commemorating WWI as a good thing because Catholics and Protestants/Unionists and Nationalists both fought in it is something that drives me absolutely nuts (previous rants include this against Myers, this in praise of Nadine Coyle, and this. Usually we are spared this rubbish apart from the run-up to November 11th, but Belfast City Council’s decision to invite an Irish minister to its Somme commemoration has brought it back into the spotlight.
The motion, from former Lord Mayor Pat McCarthy of the SDLP (and former member of the Republican Clubs to save anyone else the trouble of pointing that out), was unopposed, with PSF abstaining on the grounds that this should have been dealt with by a sub-committee that exists to deal with the forthcoming centenaries (kicking off this year with the Ulster Covenant). There’s a thread about this on Sluggerotoole that makes for depressing reading. Amidst all the sound and fury, no reflection on what the war actually meant, nor what it was about. One of the greatest disasters in human history, the very epitome of all that is wrong with imperialism, reduced to a petty squabble about here.
This is the reality of politics in Northern Ireland still. Empty gestures that are in and of themselves are often either meaningless or – as in this case – utterly reactionary, and serve only to reveal how either variety of nationalism (British or Irish) on offer in the north is inherently limited in its potential to be progressive. So wrapped up are they in their combat with one another, any place for consistently progressive politics, for secularism, for class politics, gets squeezed out almost entirely by all-too-often sectarian forms of populism. See the 11 Plus debacle for a fine example. Unfortunately, this is what the people want, and this is especially what the middle and lower middle classes represented best by the DUP and PSF especially like. In my opinion, anyone who considers themselves a principled progressive who can look at these maps and think about the commemoration of WWI in positive terms because of nationalism and unionism in Ireland is kidding themselves. I’ve mentioned this before, but in 2003, The WP in Waterford opposed the erection of a statue to a VC winner by proposing a memorial to all the victims of imperialism. No doubt in my mind which is the progressive option, and which is the message most fit to build class unity across the island.
Guess Who’s Back… September 5, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Commemoration, Communism.3 comments
Back Again (This is an Eminem reference, punk and indie-obsessed readers).
Workers Unite! Belfast Workers Parade at Home and in Havana May 1, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Commemoration, Trade Unions, Uncategorized, Workers' Party.11 comments
Details of the ICTU Belfast May Day parade and associated events are available here. The parade will be held on Saturday May 2nd, leaving its traditional departure point at the UU Art College in York Street at 12pm. Marchers are asked to assemble at 11.30. After the parade there will be a family diversity festival in St George’s Market. There will also be on May 1st and 2nd a Migrant Workers’ Festival, and an event organised by the Shared History Interpretive Project (S.H.I.P.).
The main speaker will be SIPTU President Jack O’Connor, and the march will be led by SIPTU and by workers involved in occupying the Visteon plant in west Belfast. This occupation is for better severance conditions from the company, which supplied Ford.
May Day in the north has been an important event for decades, as a visible representation of progressive social and political thinking that draws in people from across the community and rejects sectarianism and the damage it does to the lives of ordinary workers. Now that we have a power-sharing government, the trade union movement has a vital role to play in keeping pressure on the politicians to deliver, and to promote progressive ideas. A big May Day turnout is especially needed at this time of cuts and job losses, both as an expression of resistance to the bailout of ruthless speculators, and to raise awareness among ordinary people that alternatives economic strategies that stress job preservation and creation are possible.
On a related note, there will be quite a few familiar faces missing from this year’s Belfast May Day parade. Instead, they will be attending May Day in Cuba. Around 80 members and supporters of The Workers’ Party are in Cuba for the May Day celebrations in this, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution as an expression of solidarity and support with the Cuban people in their struggle against imperialist oppression. This is the essence of what May Day is about. Solidarity among workers of all countries against the common enemy – the exploitation of one human being by another.
Hasta la Victoria Siempre! As the lucky so and sos in Cuba would say.
Neither Truth nor Reconciliation January 29, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Commemoration, Northern Ireland.17 comments
Remarkable scenes at yesterday’s launch of the Eames-Bradley Consultative Group on the Past report. And, it must be said, depressing ones. (The above link to the BBC has lots of relevant material, including interviews with some families of victims, and see Nuzhound for January 29th for lots more, including editorials from several British and Irish dailies. Also this report from The Times for a video of an angry confrontation between unionist and nationalist relatives, and there was also jostling between Gerry Adams’ security team and the protestors targetting him.) The issue of victims, and dealing with the past, was never going to be anything but highly sensitive and controversial, especially given that the victims were ignored nearly altogether in the process that led to the Good Friday Agreement and the establishment of devolution.
This relates to the issue of what has come to be termed a hierarchy of victims. Naturally enough, the families of dead paramilitaries have been adamant that the sense of loss felt by them be recognised as no different from that of anyone else. Allied to this has been the determination of certain political groupings, the most influential of which is by far PSF, that dead paramilitaries be treated as the equal of dead soldiers and policemen. This difficult issue has been complicated by a great deal of hypocrisy and inconsistency on all sides. Wille Fraser, of FAIR, was prominent among the protestors yesterday. Yet he is on record as saying that loyalist paramilitaries should not have been in gaol. Similarly, while members of nationalist paramilitary groups portray their dead as fallen soldiers, they dismiss loyalist paramilitaries as members of death squads (part of a wider failing to understand that unionists have agency, but that’s another story for another time). The fact that all sides can point to the others and accuse them of hypocrisy helps sustain the bitterness and anger that was displayed yesterday.
Brian Feeney, in his Irish News column yesterday, spoke of the need to “flatten” this hierachy which he claimed had been developing over the last 15 years or so. I confess that I cannot understand this chronology – from day one, all sides have not regarded all victims as equal. There are many who would agree with Feeney, and with the argument that the suffering occasioned by the loss of a loved one violently taken before their time is the same for all. I would certainly agree that there is no hierarchy of suffering among the families of the dead. Whether, however, that is the same thing as no hierarchy of victims is a different matter. Patrick McKenna, an ordinary Catholic man murdered standing outside some shops by the UVF is not a victim of the same type as his murderer, killed by an undercover British army unit moments afterwards. In that context, one was guilty and one was innocent. This is the feeling that motivated Michelle Williamson, who lost her parents in the Shankill bombing that also killed their murderer, to protest yesterday. And yet the gunman and bomber can be portrayed as a victim also, a victim of a set of abnormal and violent political circumstances into which he was born, and which caused him to join a paramilitary group. My own feeling is that we have free will, we bear responsibility for our choices, and their consequences, and that in any story of the Troubles and commemoration of the victims we must take account of that simple fact.
The example of South Africa has loomed large in all the discussions of the need to find a way of coming to terms with our past. Certainly, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission there proved a tremendously positive experience, healing many wounds, and bringing a sense of closure to the society. Yet that was possible only because the era of Apartheid had come to a definitive end. There was a clear winner and a clear loser in that struggle, and a basic acceptance even among those responsible that Apartheid and the brutality that supported it had been unjust. Clearly, that is not the situation in Northern Ireland. No side will admit that its basic position was the wrong, and no group involved in violence has declared its campaign illegitimate. Nor will any do so, whatever about individual “mistakes”. As we saw yesterday, such a process would only tear the old wounds open, and raise a great deal of animosity. Given the public denials of many players from all sides of things they are responsible for, nor would the same type of honesty be possible without risking wrecking the entire political settlement.
In the context of our deeply-divided and bigotted society, where political divisions continue to run deep, the Eames-Bradley group was never going to be able to produce a report that would come even remotely close to pleasing everybody. I do feel though that the proposal to offer a payment to the relatives of all those killed in the Troubles was destined to unleash fury, and we would have been better off had it not been made. In the way it was leaked to prepare opinion in advance, it all too easily came across as an equivalence of victimhood, and not of family grief, alienating many people – and not just unionists, though maninly them – from the entire report. The whole thing was very ham-fisted.
What then was the alternative? The report was designed to deal not only with victims’ suffering, but also commemoration. Commemoration is both a private and a public act. Look around Northern Ireland, and we can see public acts of commemoration everywhere. Murals and commemorative gardens erected by the paramilitaries on both sides, the plaques and windows dedicated to the RUC and military personnel, and the mounuments to innocent civilians, commemorating events like Kingsmill and McGurk’s Bar. My own sense is that instead of the payment to the families of those who died during the Troubles, the report would have been better off recommending extensive funding of victims’ groups or committees at a local level, which then would have the funds to organise the whatever forms of support mechanisms and commemorations they considered best. This would have been I feel more responsive to the needs of the families, and less controversial, being less suggestive of an equivalence of responsibility as opposed to suffering. I speak though from the privileged position of never having lost a family member due to the Troubles.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 