It Occurs to Me: Storm Boelo and Jim McGuinness

I was in Jim McGuinness’s hometown of Glenties last weekend for the inaugural Patrick MacGill Festival.

Well done to Billy McInnes and committee for organising a festival concentrating only on MacGill’s work (as distinct from the MacGill Summer School). I was delighted to see the local involvement and thought of the late Stephen McCahill who organised upwards of a dozen festivals annually in Ardara, and each and every one of them had a distinctive ‘local’ flavour.

As poet Patrick Kavanagh put it: “To be parochial a man needs the right kind of sensitive courage and the right kind of sensitive humility. Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals.”

Hopefully, the MacGill (literary) Festival will go from strength to strength. All it got this year was a paltry €500 from Failte Ireland , so it was a delightful miracle to see what it achieved.

I was staying in Ardara, but when the lights went out and the windows shook, I departed for calmer climes early the following morning. I grabbed a few newspapers on my way and was shocked not to see headlines like “Jim McGuinness causes Storm Boelo!” and “Jimmy Mc the reason for power cuts!”

I jest of course, but my God, there are a few pundits out there who are so obsessed with Jim that they used Finbarr Roarty’s exit to Australia to give him yet another slap or two. Former Monaghan player Dick Clerkin has long had a bee (wasp?) in his bonnet about the Glenties man. Two years ago, he said we were “effectively a Division 2 team on an upward trajectory.” and recently, Last week, in the Indo, he wrote: “Jimmy McGuinness will be absolutely seething” (on Finnbarr Roarty’s departure to AFL side Collingwood) “Former Monaghan midfielder believes something must be amiss in the Tír Chonaill set-up.”

Well, I’m sure Jim is none too happy about losing Finbarr but did Clerkin ring him and ask:

“Are you seething, Jimmy?” and as for something “amiss” in the camp, this again is pure speculation. Jimmy Mc is living rent free in Dick’s head and as for Pat Spillane, the Kerry man is not only paying feck all rent as well, but I’m sure he has found a sponsor to make sure his favourite tenant stays. Pat ranted about “Donegal’s Omerta” and said: "Donegal is the GAA equivalent of an enclosed order of nuns".

I have one bit of advice for Mother Superior Spillane; “Kick the habit, Sister!”

HIRING FAIRS? WHITE SLAVERY

In the course of my talk on MacGill, I dealt with his hiring fair experience and also mentioned “Rotha Mor an tSaoil - The Hard Road to Klondike” by Micí Mac Gabhann from Cloughaneely Micí was only 8 years old when he walked through the night with his mother Bridget to his first hiring fair in Letterkenny on 12 May 1874. After bargaining through an interpreter, young Mici was purchased by a landowner from Glenveagh until the following November in return for the sum of £1 paid to his mother.

As he bade a brief and painful farewell to her, he noticed she was "tightening up her face as though a dagger was going through her heart." In November 1874, he completed his indenture and returned home. But the following May Mici and his mother returned once more to the Letterkenny Hiring Fair where Mici was once again hired out, this time to an Ulster Scots farmer from Drumoghill, where he lived until November.

An anonymous person wrote to the Donegal News in 1903 complaining about the ‘white slave market’ and the ‘phraseology’ applied to ‘fine Irish boys and pure Irish girls as would be applied to beasts’ or to ‘ordinary articles of produce or merchandise, and yet there is not one to raise a word of protest, not one to even see anything wrong in it’. The anonymous complainant also outlined the way in which the potential hirers ‘gather round the lads and lasses who are in for hire and jibe, and mock, and jeer at them, and say all sorts of ‘funny things’ at their expense’.The treatment of young girls is also cited in the article.

NO SURRENDER AND NO VISION!

Last weekend, the Orange Order marched through Portadown, in what was more than a nod to their innate triumphalism. Portadown Orange Order District Master Nigel Dawson, who’s been huffing since Drumcree, said “Our country cannot be ruled by the mob and the lawbreakers and the threat of violence. After 28 years, we have won the right to return home via our traditional route, and Portadown District intends to exercise that right on a date and time of our choosing.”

Not even a token acknowledgement of the ‘rights’ of nationalists!

When Phil Moffatt, the Imperial Grand Master of the Independent Orange Order, said: “They speak of an all-embracing new island,” the crowd in unison responded: “Never!”. The only other organisation that comes to mind that has an Imperial Grand Master is the Ku Klux Klan.

Glasgow Orange Order Grand Master Mark Kirkland added: “Tonight I have seen Ulster united. This province has to be united to defeat Sinn Féin and the IRA.” He concluded his speech with: “No surrender.” How pathetic! Absolutely nothing to offer by way of reconciliation. Same old mantra from an organisation who only knows what they’re not, not who they are. “We’re not that other crowd…and we’re going to make sure that the other crowd knows that!”

As for Carla Lockhart, whose constant huffing has caused a rift with the DUP, she puffed: “Walk tall, walk proud, keep the faith, and keep fighting for this wee province…It’s great to see people getting the beat of the drum back in their hearts,”

I’ll say one last thing, and I said I wouldn’t enter into politics, but profound consequences must mean profound consequences. Michelle O’Neill must go. That’s where I stand, and this lady is not for turning.”

Two things: The ‘wee’ province is wee because of small minds, and as for “this lady is not for turning”, those words were originally Maggie Thatcher’s at the Tory Party conference in October 1980. That attitude eventually destroyed the UK economy, and had she been around in 1998, there would have been no Good Friday Agreement. The reason my sons have witnessed relative peace over the past thirty years is because of that agreement and my hope for my grandchildren is that their futures are not mapped out because - in the minds of some - they only qualify as second class citizens. Last year, Sammy Wilson backed Nigel Farage's suggestion that Reform UK would look to renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement as part of its plan to stop small boat crossings to England. God between us and ‘wee’ minds! (Glad to see DUP refusing to collapse Stormont despite Lockhart’s call during Portadown rally).

THEATRE OF DREAMS?

Former Sky Sports presenter Jim White, currently with Talksport, had a fascinating piece in the Telegraph after the Man United collapse to Bournemouth. Michael Carrick is still manager but that may change pretty soon, after another defeat on Saturday, this time at Chelsea. The supporters have made their feelings clear about who they think is to blame, and the collective boos for the players post-match said it all. Mind you, after the hammering by Como, Carrick did himself no favours when he mused: "I definitely trust them, yeah, 100% I trust them. It wasn’t a very good night at all for so many reasons. We all know that. I think that’s pretty obvious.

I definitely trust them, yeah. I trust them. We’ll be a different team on Sunday. We have to be a different team on Sunday." They were! They were worse!

Jim White wrote: “This was as abject a performance from a team in red as anyone can have witnessed in a generation. Carrick, a man who, like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer before him, appears still enchanted by the magical past of a club floundering in the miserable present, had told his players they needed to step up. He talked ahead of kick-off of humility and hard work. And his players subsequently delivered neither. A team bereft of confidence, lacking coherence and togetherness they may be. But, as Sunday’s hopeless effort demonstrated, there is something more about them: they have come to redefine the term second rate. It was, as we will no doubt discover in the next 24 hours, the kind of performance that chucks a manager under the bus.”