BBC reporter first journalist to get copy of Belfast Agreement

An obituary in The Irish Times yesterday. It makes for a lovely read. His comment on John Hume is worth noting.

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Stephen Grimason, who has died aged 67 after a long illness, is the journalist who achieved a world scoop in being the first to obtain a copy of the Belfast Agreement. “I have it in my hand,” was how he famously heralded its publication.

Later, as director of communications for the Northern Executive, he had the job of managing the press and public relations of some demanding and at times difficult politicians such as David Trimble, Seamus Mallon, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness.

For several years as political editor of BBC Northern Ireland he reported on unsuccessful attempts to kickstart a viable peace process into gear while his good friend, the author and former BBC security editor, Brian Rowan, covered the equally dismal beat of bombings, shootings and killings.

With sound reason, their reports tended to be pessimistic. In the BBC Belfast newsroom, they were known as “Doom and Gloom”.

But in spring 1998 there were indications that the clouds might lift and Grimason with the rest of the Belfast political press pack was stuck up at Castle Buildings, Stormont, where former US senator George Mitchell was chairing talks aimed at achieving a comprehensive peace and political agreement.

The climax of those negotiations was Holy Week that early April and during those days from the Monday to the Good Friday, when the deal was done, the mood swung between guarded hope and despair.

This time Grimason was optimistic. “There was a lot of pessimism about but by the Monday I thought there would be a deal and that was because John Hume and David Trimble told me so. There was nowhere else to go.”

Around 1.20pm on Good Friday, he was given the agreement in a brown envelope. But a problem arose because the BBC live coverage of the talks presented by Noel Thompson was about to go off air for a period. “I was fearful that if there was a half-hour break that somebody else might get it,” he said.

“So I immediately rang the [BBC] gallery and said, ‘I’ve got the document. Get me on air.’ And then I broke the cardinal rule of television journalism, of running as fast as I could up the stairs and sitting down to realise I hadn’t a breath in my body.”

‘Irascible’

Still, he managed to produce the first public copy of the Belfast Agreement and to declare to Thompson and, in a sense, to the world, that agreement appeared imminent although it was more than three hours later before the deal was concluded. He never disclosed who gave it to him, noting: “A source is not just for Christmas.”

“I believe I was given the document to nudge [the agreement] over the line,” he added.

Three years later, he became director of communications for the Northern Executive, a post he held until 2016. He had great respect for the initial first minister and deputy first minister, Trimble and Mallon, but said both men could be “irascible” at times.

After the DUP and Sinn Féin took over as the main parties from the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP, Grimason observed one of the first signs of how the odd “Chuckle Brothers” pairing of Paisley and McGuinness could have a genuinely cordial relationship.

That was after they wrote to the then Northern secretary, Peter Hain, asking him to vacate Stormont Castle so they could have their first minister and deputy first minister offices there. It resulted in McGuinness saying to Paisley: “You know that your first letter as first minister is a ‘Brits Out’ letter.”

Grimason’s highest admiration was for Hume although he too could have his moments. Grimason said he made no apologies for saying that “John was the greatest Irish man who ever lived, living or dead ... but my God was he was hard work.”

From a Protestant background, Grimason was born in Lurgan, Co Armagh, in 1957. Later, his teachers told him he could have a future in journalism because he was “nosy” and “always causing trouble”. He started his career in 1975, working in the Lurgan Mail before moving to the Ulster Star in Lisburn and then joining the Banbridge Chronicle where aged 27 he became its editor. He joined the BBC in 1987.

He was diagnosed with terminal cancer about three years ago, an illness he bore well, comforting his family with the maxim, “Death smiles at us all, all that we can do is smile back.”

Rapport

He had a great rapport with the medical teams who treated him, and was particularly thankful to the renal unit of Belfast City Hospital.

Earlier this year, he and former UTV political editor Ken Reid were awarded the Queen’s University Belfast chancellor’s medal, both men praised for “a vital public service during the dark days of fear and uncertainty”.

Of his journalistic career, much of which was covering violence or political attempts to end the killing, he said: “We survived the Troubles on the basis not of counselling, which we never had, but on black humour and alcohol.”

A perfect example of that humour was that Grimason and Reid had a £50 bet about which of them would die first – dark but, in its peculiar, twisted journalistic way, life-affirming.

At his funeral two weeks ago, Grimason’s wife Yvonne handed Reid an envelope with the £50, saying: “Ken, Stephen said you must take that.”

Stephen Grimason is survived by his wife Yvonne; and by his first wife Heather, and their four children Jennifer, Chris, Rachel and Jonathan; his mother Jean; sister Cherryl; and seven grandchildren. His younger brother Darryl, also a BBC journalist, died in 2022.

Pentecost and the unveiling of God’s presence

The Thinking Anew column in The Irish Times today. The final two paragraphs do not appear in the printed or digital versions of today’s newspaper.

Michael Commane

Tomorrow is the feast of the Ascension, and the beginning of the last week of the Easter Season. The following Sunday is Pentecost, and so ends the high drama of the celebration of our belief in the crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Pentecost is about the unveiling of the presence of God in the world, the following Sunday is the feast of the Blessed Trinity. They are all fabulous reminders to us of the history of salvation.

But what does all that mean to the majority of ‘ordinary’ people living in Ireland today? To say anything about God and the mystery of God we are deploying difficult language and using words, which mean different things to different listeners. It is too easy to create our own image of God and then feel totally at ease with that creation. But isn’t that what idolatry is?

David Jenkins was the Church of England bishop of Durham between 1984 and 1994 and during those years he got into many controversies about his belief. Video cameras were in their early days, and he was reported to have said that it was unlikely for him to have captured the ascension of Jesus rising above the clouds had he had a video camera at hand. You can imagine the discussion it garnered. “I want to get people talking about religion in the pubs”, he famously said. 

These days I’m reminded of what Bishop David Jenkins said and wrote. So many people alienated from established religions, searching for God in different way. I’m also aware that our profession of faith has become clichéd, and it can be that cliché that many people reject. 

The divisions that are making themselves manifest across the world, including within Ireland, are also openly on view within the churches and within its priestly class. I officiated at a wedding in Donegal last weekend. I know no one should presume anything but I also know that most of the people in that church on the Inishowen Peninsula seldom if ever are inside a church outside the usual big occasions. 

But we had some great discussions after the marriage ceremony. They centred around lines in the readings at the Mass: ‘you are blessed’, ‘delight in the truth’, and ‘That we may be one and the world will realise it’. I got the impression they had never heard those biblical sentences before. Has the Irish Catholic Church lost its way, become deaf and blinded by the trappings of power and control?

This year the Dominican Order, of which I am a member, is celebrating 800 years in Ireland. Instead of talking about all that we did in the past I’d much prefer us to talk about our vision for the future. Interesting how little is being said about the wrong we did. 

I keep getting the impression that the church is trying to prop up old ways and systems. Yes, as priests, we speak to people, we even speak to people who have recently been converted to Christianity and are newly-enthused by all that surrounds a nostalgic church. Nostalgia has its place but not at the expense of present challenges. 

St Dominic founded the Dominicans to speak the words of the Gospel in a way that  made sense to the people of the time. And that’s exactly what we need to do today. Strangely, I felt at that wedding in Donegal I had far more in common with the people who were sitting in the pews than I do with many aspects of the hierarchical church. But of course it is not as simple as that, nothing is. Tomorrow’s feast isn’t either, but it does point us in some wonderful mysterious way to the God of all creation.

I am particularly sad writing these lines as it is my last time on this page. The Irish Times has decided to discontinue the column. Preparing words like these once  a month for publication has brought joy to me. 

Be kind to each other. And thank you to readers and The Irish Times for affording me such a fabulous Saturday morning ‘pulpit’. If someday in the future I should sit down beside you in a pub, you’ll understand that Bishop David Jenkins and St Dominic sent me. 

Oscar Wilde on how men are jokers

"The man who says his wife can't take a joke, forgets that she took him.”

- Oscar `Wilde

UK to expel Russian defence attache as sanctions escalate

This is getting very serious and dangerous. At the same time the far right AfD in Germany is growing in power and status with the passing one every day.

German intelligence claims the AfD has links with Moscow. There have also been physical attacks on politicians in the last few days, including on the finance senator in Berlin.

Today Moscow holds its celebratory parade in memory of the victory of the Great Patriotic War. In World War II the Soviet Union lost approximately 27 million.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/08/uk-to-expel-russian-defence-attache-as-sanctions-escalate?CMP=share_btn_url  

Trying to paint a vision for the future of the Irish Dominicans

The link below is to a talk given by Fr Stephen Cummins in the Dominican Priory church in Galway last week.

It was part of a series of talks in the Dominican church to celebrate 800 years of the Dominicans in Ireland.

The talk is enlightening and well worth a listen.

https://mcn.live/Cameras/Player/239660

Re-turn scheme an earner for enterprising man out of work

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

It’s a long time since I have been in the centre of Dublin at morning rush hour. I was taking a train to Sligo to visit someone in hospital. 

The traffic was extremely light, it meant the bus got into town much quicker than I had expected. With close to an hour to kill I took a stroll up and down O’Connell Street. 

Interesting observing people on their way to work, getting on and off buses, shops opening. The city coming alive. Spotted a number of new all-electric buses, discovering they have no outside mirrors, replaced by monitors in the cab.

Close to the newly restored Clerys Quarter a man was foraging through a litter bin. We got talking. He told me he was searching for bottles and cans that had the Return symbol on them so that he could claim the money due on them. 

My initial reaction was to smile. Because, while I haven’t quite being doing that, I am picking up the odd bottle and can I see on the street. It’s become something of a joke I’m playing with a few friends. Mind you, I am amazed with the number I’m collecting.

Continuing to smile, I got talking to the man at the bin. He told me he is making between €40 and €50 per day on the enterprise. He explained in detail his daily route. I was surprised to hear he was making so much. I told him I too pick up the odd bottle and can. 

Our conversation broadened. He has five children and is living in a hostel. He felt he had no chance of getting permanent employment because of his criminal history. 

He was a tall man, friendly and polite, probably in his early 50s and poorly dressed. 

I was impressed with how careful he was in keeping everything as tidy as possible. He replaced all the rubbish back into the bin when he was finished.

And with every bottle and can he is collecting he is helping make our environment a better place.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ 

The Re-turn scheme began on February 1. In the first 40 days, Re-turn took back almost seven million containers – 3.4 million plastic bottles and 3.6 million cans. That left approximately 193 million containers either awaiting return or already disposed of. It is unfortunate that so many machines are out of order as it is a great scheme.

It means there’s a fortune out there to be made. And I sincerely hope the unemployed man I met on O’Connell Street at eight o’clock on Friday morning might be able to develop his collection system, even turn it into a flourishing business. Who knows? But I do know new doors always open for us and we should never sit back and languish in self sympathy. That’s so easy to do. I know.

It was lunchtime when I arrived in Sligo Hospital to visit my friend. She is unwell but upbeat and not at all interested in talking about herself. She spoke about her wonderful family and how fortunate she is to have such loving children.

It’s good for the soul to meet within 12 hours two people in difficult circumstances making the best of things and with a smile on their faces too.

The adopted genius who invented the iMac

On this day, May 6, 1998 Steve Jobs unveiled the first iMac.

Jobs, who was born in San Francisco in 1955, was adopted shortly after his birth. He was co-founder of Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak.

He pioneered the personal computer revolution in the 1970s and '80s.

He left college in his first year and in 1974 travelled through India and later studied Zen Buddhism.

Steve Jobs died in 2011.

Former US president Bill Clinton knows how to talk

Bill Clinton’s eulogy at the funeral Mass of Martin McGuinness.

Whether or not you like either man’s politics, Bill Clinton’s art of speech giving should be on the curriculum of every person preparing for priesthood.

A class act.

https://youtu.be/WcG6HGoTUic?si=p2-UOdpFMmwzIiiC

When trust dies, anger and cynicism are never far behind

Justine McCarthy in The Irish Times yesterday.

Lionel Shriver writes novels. She called one of them We Need to Talk about Kevin. It was scary. Lots of people bought it. Her new book is called Mania. It is set in the near past. It is about the Mental Parity Movement. Under its rule nobody is allowed to be cleverer than anyone else. The word “stupid” is forbidden. Big words are scorned. No sentence (such as this one minus the parentheses) may have a subclause. The vernacular has lobotomised smartphones. Chess and crosswords are abolished. Qualification points are unnecessary for admission to university. Barack Obama is no longer president. His eloquent oratory proved his electoral undoing. The Three Stooges is banned. Ditto Mr Bean and The Big Bang Theory.

Mania breaks every Mental Parity rule. The novel is intelligent, satirical, literary, dystopian and absurdist. But by no stretch of the imagination is it absurd. It’s chillingly plausible because the anti-intellectualism it depicts is already sprouting in our midst.

Cork city’s main library had to lock its doors to the public last year during protests over books with LGBTQ content and after agitators entered libraries, filmed themselves verbally accosting staff members and put the footage online. In the pre-internet Dark Ages, books were ritually burned. Shriver sets her story in a town called Voltaire, after the oft-exiled French philosopher and civil liberties advocate whose books were publicly cremated in Paris.

In our age of “bigly” Donald Trump, “fake news”, grade inflation, “citizen journalists”, populist politics and keyboard warriors, the lowest common denominator sets the agenda. If you can’t say it in 280 crude characters, it’s not worth saying. Nuance is a no-no. The erosion of respect for expert knowledge – Shriver’s “brain-vain snobs” – is eating away at the foundations of public discourse. Covid-deniers, climate change-deniers, Holocaust-deniers and Elvis-is-dead-deniers demand equal esteem for their opinions as for those of specialist scientists and historians who have spent entire careers studying their niche subjects. In that arena, facts are rendered redundant. Truth perishes. Society slides to hell.

Hatred

This zeitgeist has produced a new catch cry – why on earth is everyone so angry these days? What so enrages people as to make them picket Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman’s home with their masked faces and odious slogans? What fuels the hatred that makes someone phone in a bomb scare concerning Minister for Justice Helen McEntee’s home, necessitating the evacuation of her two infant children? How resentful must the arsonists feel when they set fire to accommodation for asylum seekers? This is not the genial Ireland of the welcomes that many of the protesters claim to love.

Where did it all go horribly wrong? Social media seems the obvious culprit but they are primarily the platforms for ire; not fully the cause. Political correctness gets blamed, along with lefties and too much change too fast. “Progressives” and feminists, transgenderism and NGOs all get a kicking.

But liberalism is not the root of it either. Laxity is. Decades of bungling public administration and institutional mendacity have shattered public trust. One by one, the citadels that once presumed to command the people’s faith have fallen – the Catholic Church aiding and abetting paedophile priests; the government denying the IMF was on the way even while the limos were waiting to greet them at Dublin Airport; Charlie Haughey and his Charvet shirts; the economists assuring us “the fundamentals are sound”; the media whooping up the property boom; the EU threatening we would burn the bondholders at our peril; the health service withholding information from women with cervical cancer; the €2 billion-plus national children’s hospital; the developers and builders flinging up fire-hazardous apartment blocks; the councillors bunged brown envelopes for the planning permission.

When trust dies, anger is its natural successor. Cynicism will not be far behind.

Most people try to live by the rules, but allegiance to the orthodoxy starts to crumble when you cannot get a school place or mental health or scoliosis treatment for your child, or you cannot see the same doctor twice in your out-the-door GP surgery and your frail parent is lying on a trolley with a broken hip in A&E, and you have little hope of acquiring your own home in your fecund prime. These are the realities of life in Ireland little more than a decade after two monumental State reports by the Mahon and Moriarty tribunals were published, chronicling payments to politicians and corruption in the planning system. No politician or businessman – only one PR bagman, Frank Dunlop – has gone to jail on bribe charges as a result of those inquiries. In the same period, the country’s population has exploded, eclipsing five million people for the first time since the Famine, but much of its infrastructure has remained stuck in the 1980s.

Corruption and bad government, excessive taxation and human misery conspired in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Then along came the Dark Ages to take its place. That’s a pattern that is starting to look worryingly familiar. If a country can be traumatised, Ireland is a candidate for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Scant attention

Since the economy crashed in 2008, while the sordid details were flowing from the tribunals and citizens were losing their homes, their livelihoods and their sense of security, scant attention has been paid to its collective psychological impact. Yet the symptoms are visible – anger, fear, destructive behaviour, poor concentration.

When you discover the rules you thought everyone was obeying were being spurned by those at the top, a natural instinct is to reject everything you used to think was true. Thus blind faith is supplanted by cynicism. Trust in those who are supposed to know better turns to knee-jerk derision.

Only by regaining the people’s trust can Ireland recover. That will require every institution to be fastidiously fair and candid with those they serve. It means no political playing to the gallery, no empty election promises, no pretence about quick-fix solutions, no refusing to answer questions, no more hubris. Once trust is broken it is doubly hard to regain it.

For all our sakes, we should remember the Carl Jung quote that Shriver chose for Mania’s preface: “It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is mankind’s greatest danger, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”

Dangerous and selfish driving on Bank Holiday roads

We are now into the May Bank Holiday weekend. There has been much publicity on the media asking people to be more careful on our roads.

Is it working? The traffic on Dublin City roads yesterday was heavy, far too many drivers behaving in a reckless manner and on a selection of roads not a sign to be seen of the Garda Traffic Unit.

The amount of tailgating, drivers on phones and people driving over the speed limit was plainly visible yesterday to anyone who has eyes to see.

And we the driving public are the people to blame.

'Parents must be consulted about sex education in schools'

 Michael McDowell in The Irish Times yesterday.

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There has been some degree of public controversy in recent times concerning the role of schools in educating children about sexuality, gender identity, and the treatment of dysphoria and self-identification by children and adolescents.

The whole question of gender identity among children and adolescents has become a much greater issue in the last decade than it appeared to be before then. Whether this has to do with access to online information concerning gender and identity or whether such issues always bubbled beneath the surface but rarely found expression in former times is hard to determine. It is probably a case of both to some extent.

Certainly in my school days, issues of dysphoria, gender identity and gender fluidity simply never arose in an educational context. Which is not to say that such issues simply did not then exist.

On the other hand, it seems to me that there is an abundance of evidence internationally that children these days are exposed to doubts, discourse and online material in connection with these issues to an extent never known before. Surveys suggest that children are now much more aware of issues concerning gender identity and are devoting more thought to these issues than previously.

Far healthier

In addition, sexual orientation is now much more commonly discussed and considered by children and adolescents than it was a generation ago. Certainly it is far healthier that children and adolescents can address questions of their sexual orientation in a far more open way than was permitted in previous generations. I am aware of one school where a teacher sought to convince a class that homosexuality was wrong “morally, mentally and medically”. His pupils, conscious that a number of the class were gay, simply informed the teacher that they did not want to hear him any further on this matter. And that ended his teaching on the matter.

That contrasts with my years of secondary education where to my certain knowledge none of our religious or lay teachers ever once mentioned homosexuality at all. One might have thought that in the course of a traditional Roman Catholic education the matter might have arisen if only for condemnation. But it didn’t. Was it “taboo”? Or did teachers simply consider that its discussion was more likely to do more harm than good? It is hard at this remove to be certain as to whether avoidance of “scandal” motivated our educationalists to ignore rather than confront that issue.

But nowadays, the experience of children and prevailing attitudes among adults in relation to sexuality are radically different. The internet effectively means that nearly any child or adolescent can explore issues relating to sexuality outside of educational and parental supervision.

Where does that leave modern parents? Insofar as they attempt to control their children’s consumption of online material, they fight an uphill battle. It is not simply a matter of controlling access to pornography. Children and adolescents cannot be corralled into a state of blissful ignorance, as was practice in the past.

Article 42 of the Constitution states that “the primary and natural educator of the child is the Family”. The State, by that article, guarantees “to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children”.

The European Convention on Human Rights in article 2 of the first protocol provides: “In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical teachings”.

As Conor O’Mahony pointed out in his published work, Educational Rights in Irish Law, the ECHR guarantee extends not merely to respecting religious and philosophical beliefs of parents in private or religious schools but extends to State-run or State-funded schools.

While what used to be termed “sex education” is undoubtedly a proper part of every child’s school curriculum, there remain significant questions. These include whether and to what extent the State should attempt, through State-funded primary and secondary education, to deal with enormously complex and contested areas of gender identity, gender fluidity and associated issues – especially during children’s formative preadolescent and adolescent years. Both our Constitution and the ECHR require that parents must be given a very considerable input into what is – and what is not – taught on these subjects to their children.

The matter is not simply one for educationalists – whether teachers or policymakers. It is not an area where one social or ideological viewpoint becomes imposed educational orthodoxy to the exclusion of parental beliefs or values. Nor is it enough to accord opt-outs to individual parents. Do the collective wishes of parents not need to be discerned as the guiding value in each school’s policy on such matters?

Dictatorships never happen in a vacuum

On May 1, 1945 a soldier of Red Army raised the Soviet flag atop the Reichstag in Berlin.

Seventy nine years ago.

Did the Western World appreciate the role the Soviet people played in  ridding the world of the Hitler regime?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union where was the West to help Russia?

Dictatorships never happen in a vacuum.

‘Holy' and ‘Sacred' can easily be misused word

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

Paddy Cullen, no, not the former Dublin goalkeeper but a retired chemistry lecturer in Dublin’s Bolton Street, now part of TU Dublin, died last week. He was born in Screen in Wexford in 1939, the year World War II began.

I first briefly met him in the late 1960s in Tallaght. He was heading off on his Honda 50 to Dunsink Observatory, where he was studying astronomy. Even in that extremely cursory exchange of words I was greatly impressed with him. There was something gracious about him. He made me feel at ease.

At the time Paddy was a newly ordained Dominican priest.

It was 50 years before we met again. This time under different circumstances. Soon after our first encounter Paddy left the Dominicans, retiring from priestly ministry and began his career in chemistry.

 

This time around we got to know aspects of each other and again I was greatly impressed with the man. I felt I was in the presence of a wonderful human being, a gracious and wise person. He had time to listen to me. I always got the impression there was no game playing, no spoof, no trotting out any sort of party line about anything. And he also had a lovely smile.

I’m nervous about using the word ‘holy’ because I think it is a most misused word. In some ways the same applies to the use of ‘sacred’. 

Far too often they come across as fake. But the moment one meets genuine holiness they know immediately they have encountered something real, something holy and indeed, sacred.

I saw a sign in a church telling people to be quiet because they were in God’s house. Some days later I saw another sign on a sacristy door informing people entry was only for priests and staff. Both those signs came across to me as profoundly unholy, un-sacred too. I consider those who put those signs in place are establishment apparatchiks, doused in clericalism.

I can’t help but think there are forms of religion that simply alienate people. The sacred and the holy are not the exclusive possession of any group or any specific place. We can encounter the holy and the sacred stopping and talking to the person on the street, whether they be the powerful or the powerless. 

Breaking down all the suspicious and dark ideas we might have about others, realising that they too suffer fear and dread, helps us communicate with the other. Surely then we are close to the holy and sacred.

Jesus spent his time engaging with people. The breaking of bread was a powerful sign of the union between people and between Jesus and people. It was so deep a sign that it had a whole new reality to it. 

The breaking of bread or the Eucharist goes hand-in-hand with our deep love and respect for each other. Christians believe the Eucharist is at the pinnacle of friendship and respect. There can never be anything anonymous about the Mass.

Holiness and sacredness are sublime words. They cut through so much nonsense. Isn’t it ironic they can be used in such fake and insincere ways.