There are no direct flights in winter so my route to Canada takes me via London. I’d guess I have taken this flight, the 50 minutes from Dublin to London, 30 times in the last 20 years. Probably half of that time for political events of one sort or another. (a recovered post from March 2007, see end)
There are no direct flights in winter so my route to Canada takes me via London. I’d guess I have taken this flight, the 50 minutes from Dublin to London, 30 times in the last 20 years. Probably half of that time for political events of one sort or another. (a recovered post from March 2007, see end)
It has changed. Flights from Ireland land in a special section of Heathrow, isolated both from domestic flights and other international ones. For the first ten of those twenty years those exiting this section involved passing ranks of CCTV cameras and checkpoints manned by plainclothes cops. I think I remember a section where you walked along beside a mirrored wall, presumably with more cops on the other side of that mirror.
Inevitably while doing this i would catch myself humming some republican tune, most often the humorously crass ‘My Little Armalite‘ . Everyone travelling to London in those days was magically transformed into an Irish nationalist on touch down right down to trying to recall a cupla focal.
Of course this appears to be how the cops viewed it as well, which added a touch of excitement if your luggage consisted almost entirely of Anarchist publications including the charming ‘Ireland and British Imperialism’ with its green cover of a cartoon Britain attaching shackles around the island of Ireland. The cops of course were not looking for anarchists but you did wonder if they would be interested, never mind understand such fine distinctions on forcing you to unload your luggage on the waiting tables.
Fortuantely I never had to discover this, I was never stopped while travelling to political events. I was pulled over a couple of times to be questioned, once when travelling over for summer work my friends and I had decided to try to be stopped and had stuffed our pockets with various weird objects in preparation for it. Sure enough we were. An uncle who was an Arsenal fan was stopped every time he left left on the return trib to Dublin after a big match. In frustration he finally asked one secret police man why he was being singled out. The cop said nothing but simply tapped the Anti-Apartheid badge my uncle had fixed to his jackets years before and simply forgotten about. Sure enough from then on he remembered to remove it just before passing through the checkpoints and he was never stopped again.
This was the period in which the IRA were repeatedly bombing London. The secret police seemed unable to intercept the bombers on the way over except where they had managed to recruit informers. I guess the story of my uncle reveals why, the bombers were presumable smart enough to leave their political badges at home.
I’m writing this entry in Heathrow, all the security mentioned above is gone. There were no secret police at the check point, just a rather bored looking airline workers staring at the surface of the desk in front of her. Time has moved on.
Airline flights tend to make me very introspective, the fact I was listening to Johnny Cash on the iPod as we crossed the Irish sea probably didn’t help any. Anyway for old times sake i thought it would be amusing to switch the ipod over to my ‘rebel songs’ playlist as we approached Heathrow.
I’ve always been fond of the recording of political events and ideas in song and Ireland has this in spades. A huge percentage of such songs are badly performed ballads and anthems, popularly referred to as chucky songs, a reference to the pronunciation of the first word of the republican slogan ‘Tiocfiadh ar la‘
Mostly I have the quality stuff, Christy Moore, Nick Kelly and Frank Hart’s wonderful CD of 1798 songs. But also for, ahem, research purposes I’ve picked up a few chucky CD’s in the last few years, I’ve deleted the songs I hate from these but that still leaves a good few whose poor quality of performance is brought out by the three artists above. Finally thrown into the mix is that CD of English folk ballads produced by Chumbawumba which actually compares quite favourably with the good Irish material.
When you select the list the ipod seems to generate a new random playing order each time. This often is pretty interesting, a musical version of the ‘celestial librarian’ my fellow worker in Ireland claims selects his reading for him.
It was a clear sunny day with just a scattering of white clouds and the flight path went straight over central London, just a little to the right of Westminister and Buckingham palace. I think this is the only time I’ve had such a route on a clear day.
The first song on my playlist is one that I have only recently become familar with. Back a couple of years Aileen and Dermot got the Christy Moore box set for me for Christmas. I listened to it once through but at the time I was out of the habit of listening to music and so it was really only when i got the ipod that I’ve started to become familar with the tracks.
Its a set of six discs with previously unpublished recordings made throughout Christys career. So its got a lot of the republican stuff he no longer performs, as he sings in another song on that set ‘And some of those old songs are not worth singing’. Many of the recordinsg are not selected for the quality of the recording or the uniqueness of the song but for the atmosphere that goes with them. There is a muffled recording of him in Glasgow singing Viva la Quinta Brigada which commemorates the Irish killed fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The recording is muffled and sounds like it was made on a tape deck at the back of the hall. From time to time you can hear people chatting to each other. But the reason it was presumably selected is the extrodinary reaction to the song itself from the audience. Christy is not very far into it before all you can really here is the audience bellowing out the lyrics.
Most of his political songs are not however anthems but rather ballads and some of these also carry a strong atmosphere where you can feel the emotion in the audience. It was one of these that started as was first to play as London came into sight below. The title of this piece is from the first line of the song, or the spoken introduction to it ‘Every time I come to London’ Christy starts to a low cheer from the crowd, I guess its a gig in London, ‘I think of Guiseppe Conlon’ he continues and a huge roar claps wells up and fades. The song is "They Fouled the Ball Daddy"
This is the celestial music librarian on overtime. When I first started going to London there were a large number of Irish people in jail wrongly accused of carrying out various IRA bombings in Britain. The PTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) meant that the secret police pulled aside thousands of Irish people year after year on that journey to or from London and at the back of your mind as you lugged that litreature around was that if you were lucky and were stopped you might only be held long enough to miss the flight. Or perhaps overnight. But if you were unlucky and something had happened the stupidity of police methods meant you might fit their frame which would be all together more unpleasant.
In the 1970s’ an IRA unit carried our a number of horrific pub bombings in Britain. Most of their targets were pubs where British soldiers were known to drink so soldiers were among the casualties. But so were a growing number of civilians for whom the pub selected was simply the local boozer where they liked to drink. As well as being killed such bombs tore arms and legs off people and blinded others.
The Guildford four as they came to be known were three young Irish men and an English women working, squatting and partying in London at this time. They visited one of their aunts who lived in Britian as well, Annie Maquire. So when they Guildford four were put into the frame the Aunt and her famiily, the Maquire seven, soon followed. The only real evidence against them was the confessions that had been beaten out of them by a police force under massive political pressure to get results.
Guissipe Conlon was the father of one of the Guildford four. When he heard of his sons arrest he did the obvious thing, he left his home in Belfast to cross the water to support him. This brought him into the frame, he was arrested and spent long years in prison where he died, still trying to prove his innocence. The story is perhaps better know than most, it was turned into a big budget film as ‘In the name of the father’.
It had never really crossed my mind on my earlier trips that a bit of stupid policing and bad luck for me could have repercussions for those outside of my political circle, including my family, back home. It’s a sobering thought.
This was written Friday, March 09, 2007 but was locked away in a myspace account I’d forgotten the password for linked to an email account I’d also forgotten the password for. Had the bright idea of accessing them through a friends account.