The Trouble with Malachi

Gerry Adams walks into a room and mentions that it's a bit stuffy. Hardly remarkable. But if you're Malachi O Doherty, the event becomes a Joycean epiphany. In the twinkling of a jaundiced, supercilious eye, Gerry has exposed himself as a closet Christian Brother. Oh my God, the man wants a window opened. He must have been educated by the Brothers. Who else would exhibit such arrogance? I bet he possesses all the usual vices associated with the Order. The Brothers used to teach their pupils rebel songs. So they're to blame for the IRA. Oh, the shame of it, the shock of it. I'd better share this vital insight.

And so it begins. Illusions shatter, doubts finger your throat, and a small voice orders you to join the Alliance Party. There's no war in the north of Ireland. The IRA is not a guerrilla army. It is not the voice of a community. It does not seek to defend Catholics. Loyalist violence is reactive. The Brits aren't the worst in the world. John Hume's a dupe. Malachi O Doherty is the smartest man in the whole wide world.

Poor Malachi, He really hates republicans. They are anachronistic, myth-taken, under-educated, amoral, vain, deceitful, and worst of all unpleasant to high-minded journalists like himself.

Furthermore, as expert conspirators, they are to blame for everything that has happened in the Six Counties since partition.

Here is the gospel according to St Malachi. The 1916 Rebellion was motivated by status envy, Northern Ireland was not a violent place before 1969. The RUC's behaviour at Garvaghy Road was `heavy handed' but necessary, loyalist murder gangs like the Shankill Butchers were guilty of `untidy indulgence of sectarian anger', Bloody Sunday was caused by troops disobeying their superior officers.

I genuinely wanted to take this book seriously, because republicans do need to consider opposing perspectives, but Malachi O Doherty's pathological hatred of republicans and his ill-concealed, rather ugly, snobbery made that impossible. And sadly, it's all gone straight to his head. He argues, with no sense of embarrassment, that a `decent' school education makes one an SDLP voter.

He also believes that `it makes sense, if only in terms of heredity, that the son of an IRA man will be as wild and dangerous as his father'. Presumably, if we retain Malachi's logic, it can be argued that in terms of heredity, the sons of lazy hacks will be as slovenly and hypocritical in their thinking as their fathers. Such sweeping generalisations. Such tabloid crap.

The Trouble with Guns is a short essay puffed and padded up on journalist steroids; it is an exhaustingly repetitive, over-heated rant. One thing about Malachi that I do admire is his modesty and consistency - he's morally better than Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, he's cleverer than Conor Cruise O Brien, Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick, and he's less inclined to delusion than John Hume. A renaissance man, our Malachi, well versed in the arts of war, politics, culture, and self-aggrandisement. There's no doubt about it, when Malachi sits down on a Friday night, he's the most contented wee egoist in Ireland, and the smuggest.

By Seamas Keenan





It was a good year for Africa's people, a bad year for the white supremacists in Pretoria. A bad year also for apartheid's many, many friends in the West. In November 1975, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) raised the flag of liberation over Luanda.

For ten years the tenacious MPLA had fought the colonial Portuguese, the Zairan army of US puppet Mobutu, the Boer army of South Africa, and two rival Angolan forces which were backed by the US. They defeated all of them.

Like their precursors in newly-liberated Vietnam, the victory of the MPLA represented a remarkable triumph of Third over First World, of colonial subject over colonial power. Equally, the victory of the MPLA had a particular resonance in Africa: the end of Ian Smith's white power regime in Rhodesia and that of the detested apartheid regime in South Africa were now within the grasp.

A liberated Angola necessarily carried within it the seed of apartheid's destruction.

The South Africans, in particular, quickly grasped the significance of the MPLA's victory. And by way of response they set about the slow, painful and brutal destruction of a nation, a revolution and the dreams of a people.

Victoria Brittain's slim, 100-page book is a compelling, passionate and deeply angry work. It burns with her outrage at the destruction of what, in 1975, was no less than Africa's brightest hope.

South Africa's chosen agent of destruction was UNITA, a less than popular army which had opposed the MPLA in the war of liberation. It was headed by Jonas Savimbi, a depraved demagogue who, as Brittain reveals, executed several members of his own leadership, so fearful was he of potential rivals.

Over the course of the next 20 years Savimbi's terrorist gangs systematically destroyed the social, economic and, inevitably, the political fabric of the nation. They were aided in this by repeated South African invasions of Angola proper - the international community ignored the aggression - and campaigns of economic sabotage run from Pretoria. More than two million Angolans lost their lives and the country, potentially the wealthiest in Africa, is now among the poorest, most deprived nations on earth.

Honourable mention in this sad tale goes to Cuba. A supporter of the MPLA, Cuba quickly dispatched aid, materiel and troops after the MPLA's 1975 victory. Their presence, Brittain points out, helped ensure the survival of newly liberated Angola.

More importantly, it was the Cuban army which repeatedly prevented the South African army from overrunning the country.

In 1987, a joint Cuban-Angolan force comprehensively defeated the white supremacist army at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale.

In a major set-piece battle, the much vaunted Boer army were forced into headlong, ignominious retreat. The apartheid regime never recovered from that enormous psychological blow. Within South Africa, contacts were established with the ANC as key establishment figures realised the writing was on the wall.

It was Cuba's finest hour, their intervention paving the way for the liberation of Namibia and the end of apartheid.

When South Africa crumbled, the US government took over direct control of UNITA, using Mobutu's Zaire to the north to re-supply the terror army. With US backing, UNITA was able to lose a 1992 UN-sponsored election and then, ignore the result and go back to war. Even attacking UN aircraft carried no sanction for Savimbi.

Throughout this entire, sordid period the US withheld recognition from the legitimate government in Angola and conferred it on UNITA.

Indeed, the depth of US affection for Jonas Savimbi was revealed when Reagan's ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, lauded him as ``one of the few authentic heroes of our time.'' This of a man given to shooting down civilian airliners. No wonder Noam Chomsky labelled Kirkpatrick ``chief-sadist-in-residence of the Reagan administration.''

The only positive note was the toppling, in 1997, of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. That removed Savimbi's last major ally in the region and his source of US supplies.

Angola today, as Brittain shows, is but a devastated shadow of its bright, hopeful 1975 self. The country's health and education systems for example, simply do not exist.

Brittain's book is a vital and necessary work, a retelling in many ways of a story with which we have become too familiar: of how the self-styled forces of democracy undermine and destroy freedom and progress.

By Dara Mac Neil





On the inside cover of this booklet is Pearse's poem The Mother. The last line reads, ``my sons were faithful and they fought''.

It is appropriate at this crucial stage in the struggle that we remember that were it not for those republicans who, down through the years, remained committed to their ideals and fought against British rule in Ireland we in the Six Counties would still be in the nightmare of partition with little hope of equality or justice.

It is, therefore, proper that those who fought and died during that period from partition to the present be given their rightful place in our memories and our esteem. That is why booklets of this nature are important. This booklet has the added use in that sales of it will go towards funding a memorial to the three Volunteers commemorated in its pages.

Commandant John James Kelly, Commandant Charles McCafferty and Staff Captain James Joseph Reynolds died when a bomb exploded prematurely in a cottage at Castlefin on the Donegal/Tyrone border in November 1938. It is thought that the trio died when adjusting the timer of a bomb they were to use on an attack at a border customs post.

The booklet carries a copy of a letter from Independent Newspapers Ltd from the year after the explosions saying the paper couldn't carry a memorial notice to the three Volunteers because of censorship - typical of the Free Staters' attitude to republicans.

•Anyone wishing to get a copy of the booklet should contact John Kelly, Strabane Graves Association at 8 Landsdowne Park, Strabane. Tel 01504 882836.

By Peadar Whelan