Ulster August 69 - The Other Side of Summer

Well I travel at the speed of a reborn man...

Last month I finally managed to track down a replacement for a long-lost late Seventies copy of The Rolling Stone Record Guide. There were several editions published of this extraordinarily comprehensive and well-written overview which never pulled its punches by way of qualitative shortfalls it perceived in major musical careers - up to and including John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Other famous performers - anchored in both the commercial and the underground markets alike - could be savagely dismissed from Billy Joel to the Grateful Dead. Conversely no artist was held in higher regard within this definitive reference source as Van Morrison.

Some posts ago I mentioned Morrison's Seventies back catalogue which followed upon 1969's Astral Weeks. Any random investigation  of the nine albums from Moondance through to  Into the Music will reveal such an extraordinary sweep of lesser-known tracks of outstanding and timeless quality - Redwood Tree from Saint Dominic's Preview, Linden Arden Stole the Highlights off Veedon Fleece and  the Hard Nose the Highway opener Snow in San Anselmo are just three.

Another wonderful track in this remit is Old Old Woodstock from Tupelo Honey which one must assume is a rumination on the utter bliss of  married life in upstate New York as opposed to recollections of one of East Belfast's major arterial routes close to Morrison's own childhood home off the Beersbridge Road.

Over the course of this summer there has been a large raft of retrospective media analyses of both the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival and that of the outbreak of major civil disorder in Derry and Belfast in 1969 which constitute for many historical observers the de facto commencement of the Ulster Troubles. This beyond the three loyalist paramilitary murders of 1966 and the heavy October 1968 Royal Ulster Constabulary response to a civil rights march in Derry.

Although the presence of Grease Band guitarist Henry McCullough from Portstewart at Woodstock has been flagged up several times as the sole Irish connection with the most famous rock festival in history - and an interesting Belfast Telegraph article recalled Marmalade at Pop for Peace at Minnowburn Beeches in South Belfast on August 2nd - the exact linear overlap of these events on both sides of the Atlantic that summer are worth further consideration.

The violent mayhem in Belfast which left seven dead played out over four days and nights - Wednesday 13th, Thursday 14th, Friday 15th and Saturday 16th August. The long weekend of the Woodstock Festival took place through Friday 15th, Saturday 16th, Sunday 17th and Monday 18th.

The civil disorder in Belfast in August 1969 was triggered by the aftermath of  the Apprentice Boys' march on Derry's city walls on Tuesday 12th which resulted in rioting in the Bogside between nationalist youths and the RUC. The geographical transference of trouble to Northern Ireland's capital however would see bloody conflict erupt directly between the two religious communities across three urban interfaces in working class Belfast - Clonard, Ardoyne and Divis Street.

On Wednesday 13th August Belfast republicans organised demonstrations in the west of the city to draw police attention from Derry - over 500 attending a rally at Springfield Road RUC station. The police station at Hastings Street was later attacked by a crowd and serious trouble ensued in the Falls district with stones and petrol bombs being directed at RUC vehicles. Barricades were thrown up at residential interfaces and many civilians living in these areas fled their homes - the IRA were involved in the disturbances of the evening but no direct fighting took place between republicans and loyalists.

The course of Thursday and Friday morning however would see circumstances spiral out of all public control and civil restraint. In this period Hastings Street police station was attacked again and groups of loyalists faced off against nationalist crowds at Dover Street and Percy Street before burning Catholic properties there, in Divis Street in the Lower Falls and at Conway Street near Clonard Monastery. Meanwhile petrol bombs rained down on police from the Divis Flats complex.

An IRA unit at Divis Street shot dead a Protestant civilian while  rounds from RUC Shorland armoured  cars killed a nine-year-old Catholic youth and a British soldier home on leave in Divis Flats. With rioting between loyalists and republicans spreading to the Crumlin Road/Ardoyne in North Belfast over the course of the evening, the IRA and the RUC exchanged fire - two Catholic civilians were shot dead by police. On this day too a Catholic civilian was killed in Armagh by auxilary policemen and units of the British Army deployed in Derry.

Thus Friday 15th August - the opening day of the Woodstock Festival one million miles away in Ulster County, New York state - dawned in Belfast. For older residents of the city -  who could recall the troubled times of the Twenties during the Irish Revolution or indeed  the savage riots of 1935 as times of  unprecedented and surely unrepeatable terror - mortifying waves of violence would return to shadow all the rest of their days. Similarly the lives of all adults and children in Northern Ireland would thereafter be fogged by anger, suspicion and the lottery of three decades of murder.

On yet another extraordinary day in Belfast's history, families in interface areas continued to flee to safer locales while British troops arrived at the Falls/Shankill shatterzones that evening at 2135 following a 0430 request  from the police commissioner for military aid and a Northern  Ireland cabinet appeal to the London Home Office at 1225. Prior to the military intervention violence had continued in West Belfast with loyalist incursions down Cupar Street leading to the burning of Catholic properties here and in Kashmir Road and Bombay Street. A loyalist sniper shot dead a volunteer from the IRA youth wing at the latter flashpoint. The British soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Wales had initially arrived in the Falls area at 1830.  Violence also raged at Ardoyne over the course of Friday with another Protestant civilian fatality caused by IRA gunfire.

Day one of the Woodstock "Aquarian Exposition" meanwhile commenced at 1707 with Ritchie Havens and then other folk performers taking the stage including Ravi Shankar, Tim Hardin, Melanie and Arlo Guthrie. It ended at 0200 Saturday morning with Joan Baez singing We Shall Overcome - a song heard  frequently at Northern Ireland civil rights demonstrations and marches.

Assuming a standard five hour time difference between the east coast of America and the old soil of Ireland as then directly applying, the opening sets at Woodstock would have overlapped with the real Ulster passion play in terms of a 2200 to 0700 framework on the British Isles - hence the Army  "peacekeeping force" set foot on Belfast's mean streets around 30 minutes before  Ritchie Havens' From the Prison acoustic opener.

Over Saturday 16th August unrest died down across Belfast city with British Army coverage extending onto the troubled Crumlin Road in turn. At 1820 that night and as a devastated Belfast came to terms with the eruption of sectarian hatreds long considered as organically diffused into history, the second day of the Woodstock Festival commenced with Quill, Country Joe McDonald and Santana.

Performances would continue on through until 1110 on Monday 18th August - including Creedance Clearwater Revival, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, The Who and Jefferson Airplane. It finished with a two-hour Jimi Hendrix set which began with his mesmeric and driving Message to Love.

The August violence in Ulster beyond Belfast and Derry incorporated disturbances in Dungannon, Dungiven, Coalisland, Strabane and Newry. Aside from the eight fatalities outlined above, there were 750 injuries , over 150 Catholic domestic residences and 275 businesses destroyed while 1800 civilians fled their homes. The political, constitutional and security repercussions would be immense and the ramifications for civil society in Ulster would be devastating.

Fifty years on from Ulster's alternative Endless Summer and the millenium peace appears to be radically deconstructing as catalysed by both the political stasis at Stormont and Westminster's Brexit implosion. The latter's extraordinary complexity now fuelled by a parliamentary prorogation atop the explosive trigger of a democratic mandate - this being not dissimilar to the March 1972 and February 1974 milestones in Northern Ireland's earlier descent from blanket chaos to complete anarchy to eventually the very living room lights going off.

Strangers To Our Strange Land: The Vietnamese Boat People in Ulster

Some posts ago I considered the lifepaths of two professional West German businessmen - Thomas Niedermeyer and Werner Heubeck - whose careers brought them to the North East corner of  Ireland in the Seventies during years of unrelenting violence and unrestrained madness. The fate of the former - along with his wife and children - casting a pall of dark shame over the entire island to this day.

Another small group of people who shared Ulster's soil in the depths of our very very troubled times were the Vietnamese boat people refugees. Between 1979 and 1981 approximately 60 families were resettled in Northern Ireland - many of whom came to Craigavon in Country Armagh.

Recently I have finished reading Max Hastings' lengthy 2018 history of the Vietnam War and also watched the acclaimed Ken Burns PBS documentary series on the conflict that was produced the previous year. A decade ago I visited that country myself and saw many of the associated historical sites not only in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi but also at Hue, My Lai and in the former Demilitarised Zone. Approximately 800,000 fled Vietnam by sea  in the two decades following the 1975 fall of Saigon - over 11,000 would come to Britain from Hong Kong camps.

In hindsight the destination of Craigavon for some of the boat people appears extraordinarily strange with regard to the acute town planning and infrastructural difficulties affecting all British New Towns in the period let alone the sole Ulster model. This was analysed in depth in Newton Emerson's superb 2012 BBC documentary Lost City of Craigavon. Even the choice of name for the new modernist conurbation between Portadown and Lurgan - that of Northern Ireland's first Prime Minister and the earlier organisational genius behind the original Ulster Volunteer Force of 1912  - had  garnered as much sectarian controversy in the late Sixties as Stormont's decision to site a new university at Coleraine instead of Derry City.

The story of the boat people in Northern Ireland was recalled in a BBC news feature in 2014 on the 35th anniversary of their arrival.  It references the culture shock awaiting all by way of the local carb-heavy folk cuisine, inclement weather patterns and heavy British military footfall. Language barriers and the regional unemployment problem were major drawbacks to ease of settlement.

There was also the juxtaposition of a warm civic and community welcome in Craigavon with their being made targets of lowlife hood activity. In fact an article on the AgendaNI website notes original government plans to place the refugees in a part of North Belfast where the author himself grew up. I can readily confirm that it was then an exceptionally volatile district by way of paramilitarism and interface tension. Many of the families placed in Northern Ireland would leave within the next two decades - the extremely talented Dungannon photographer Victor Sloan capturing some wonderful images of the Vietnamese community in Craigavon at the time.

Over the past few months in Ulster the deaths of two leading Republican paramilitary commanders from the Seventies, a veteran Sixties civil rights leader and a victims campaigner has underscored - by way of the digital trail of public commentaries - just how deep the psychological transition in the North is now running on historical legacy issues despite the stagnant political culture. Thus in similarly reinvigorated regard, the arrival of those Vietnamese families in Ulster may be recalled in disparate respects within the complex social history of Northern Ireland and as set against that three-decade battle for contested and shared space.

Firstly the Vietnamese arrival marked a very rare demographic influx within what was still in the Seventies and Eighties an overwhelmingly monocultural society bar the Chinese community in Greater Belfast, a dwindling Jewish population and small numbers of South Asians.

In turn, for all the horrendous murder and carnage that was wrought on the civilian population of Ulster for thirty years  - let alone across the county of Armagh - the Vietnamese who came to Ireland's shores were escaping unimaginable levels of sustained industrial horror and were victims of a political betrayal that dwarfed anything the Protestants and Catholics perceived to have been inflicted upon them by the policy dictates of Stormont, Westminster or Dublin. Hence even in the context of Ulster, their suffering was sobering and unfathomable.

Lastly, the refugees experienced both sides of the archetypal Northern Irish life experience in terms of a genuinely friendly and empathetic welcome and alas an unfortunate interface with the anti-social goon behaviour that the country excelled at for so long as European market leaders.

Vanguard politician Bill Craig once reflected in 1975 that fundamentally the conflict was due to an accident of history beyond the complex catalysts and solutions rendered. The same base essential relates to the position of the South Vietnamese within Indochinese geopolitics in the third quarter of the 20th Century.

Just a few hundred of them were to make their way from their beautiful yet troubled country in the tropics to an Atlantic island where bloody historical payback played out across a landscape of extraordinary physical grace. Whether they stayed or passed through Northern Ireland I hope life has been very kind to all of them.

The Liberation of Europe: Ulstermen on the Rhine and the Weser

During the latter part of 2018 I spent an extended period of time back in County Down in Northern Ireland. Just before Christmas I visited Movilla Abbey in Newtownards to see the grave of the Special Air Services legend Colonel Robert Blair Mayne. He had died in a drink-driving car accident in his hometown on 14th December 1955 at the age of only 40 after military service in both the North African Desert War and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Western Europe.

Little remains of the famous abbey itself which was founded by St Finnian in 540 upon a site of pagan worship and was one of Ireland's most famous monasteries along with that located five miles away on the coast at Bangor. St Columba studied at this Movilla centre of learning and craftsmanship which was sacked by Danish Vikings in 823 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1542.

While there I noticed a small mossy memorial on the ground in front of Mayne's gravestone underscoring that In heaven is rest and endless peace. Such a blessed landscape of celestial calm of course tends to sit in somewhat stark juxtaposition to the wild life of high adventure the great Irish warrior lived professionally and personally over his four explosive decades on earth. Yet the seven redemptive words remain thought-provoking, poetic and elegiac in their own beautifully understated spiritual right.

The 1987 Rogue Warrior of the SAS biography of Blair Mayne by Martin Dillon and the former Unionist Party politician Roy Bradford includes details of his presence at Lower Saxony's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 when British and Canadian forces arrived. The Seventies and Eighties Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux from Crumlin in County Antrim was also in attendance as a Royal Air Force officer and returned to the site in later years for a BBC feature - he remembered a priest conducting a Catholic mass in the corner of the camp with a fellow clergyman dead at his feet. In turn an old North Belfast schoolfriend who lives in Australia told me how his father was also involved in the early days of the KZ liberation because of his knowledge of German and was so deeply traumatised upon what he witnessed that he cried for several days.

The three infantry regiments of Ulster in the British Army (the Royal Irish Fusiliers, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and Royal Ulster Rifles) were engaged in the conflict between 1939-45 along with the Irish Guards. The six great regiments of Southern Ireland had been dissolved upon the partition of the island in 1921 and the constitution of the Irish Free State the following year - the Royal Irish Regiment, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Leinster Regiment, Connaught Rangers, Royal Munster Fusiliers and the South Irish Horse. However a great many Irishmen from Eire served in the war against the Axis powers - over 70,000 across several estimates. In turn approximately 52,000 servicemen originated from Northern Ireland and the total Irish dead in the conflict may have reached over 9,000.

The Royal Irish Fusiliers historically had recruited across Counties Armagh, Cavan and Monaghan; the Royal Inniskillings in Fermanagh, Tyrone and Donegal and the Royal Irish Rifles throughout Antrim, Down and Louth - thus including four counties that would fall within the Southern jurisdiction after the island's divison. As noted in an earlier post, two of the most globally famous photographs from the Great War are of 36th Ulster Division soldiers - some men from the Royal Irish Rifles tensely reposed together within their trench confines and then a literally electrifying image of a grouping of Royal Irish Fusiliers going over the top on a raid. The RIR were renamed as the Royal Ulster Rifles on 1st January 1921.

During the Second World War itself, the First Battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Second Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were part of the initial British Expeditionary Force of 1940 and evacuated from Dunkirk. Both battalions - along with the Sixth Inniskillings and the Second Battalion London Irish Rifles - were to fight as part of the 38th (Irish) Brigade of the Sixth Armoured Division and later 78th Battleaxe Division. Battle was engaged by these divisions in Tunisia, Sicily and then on the Italian mainland including at Monte Cassino. The Second Battalion of the Fusiliers served on Malta between 1940 and 1943 while the First Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers fought in Burma throughout World War Two.

75 years ago today the Royal Ulster Rifles were the only British Army regiment on D-Day 6th June 1944 to have forces in the airspace over Normandy - First Battalion glider infantry units within the 6th Airborne Division - and on the landing beaches too during Overlord. The Second Battalion had been evacuated from Dunkirk four years previously and both the First and the Second fought through the Battle of Normandy - the latter amongst the first Allied troops to enter Caen. The First Battalion were later to play a small role in combating the Winter 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes before final airborne missions crossing the Rhine in March 1945. Second Battalion fought during Operation Bremen which opened on April 13th and was accomplished with the fall of that great Hanseatic city on the 27th April. An Eighth Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles would also see action in North Africa and Italy.

The Irish Guards meanwhile fought in the Norway campaign and through the fall of France in 1940, the end of the Desert War in Tunisia and then in Italy including the Anzio landings. Following D-Day the Second and Third Battalions were engaged as part of the Guards Armoured Division in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany - thus incorporating Operations Goodwood and Market Garden at Arnhem. The division liberated Brussels on 4th September 1944 alongside Free Belgian forces. The Siegfried Line was breached in early 1945 and the division then pushed on to Bremen on the River Weser too. During the Second World War the fourth Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg, writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor and early James Bond film director Terence Young served in Ireland's Foot Guards regiment.

The outstanding and comprehensive Wartime NI website recently located the three Northern Ireland infantry regiments across both theatres of war on VE Day 1945. The First Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were at Dehra Dun in India. The Second Battalion was at Udine in Italy while the First Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers were also in that country at Cividale. Within Germany, the First Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles were positioned at Niendorf near Hamburg and the Second at Bremen and Delmenshorst in Lower Saxony.

As for the fighting men of Ulster - Protestant and Catholic alike - who helped liberate the future capital of the European Union and one of the two Nazi "Capitals of German Shipping", there would be no rest and endless peace in the long run. As unkind, unsympathetic and unfair a future lay ahead as had done so for all the Irish soldiers of the Great War who returned beforehand.

The blood-soaked quarter-century provincewide conflict which erupted in the summer of 1969 in Northern Ireland would not just bring down the Stormont polity - and indeed terminate the gathering dilution of religious animosities in a riptide of desperate historical payback - but also sow toxic seeds into the very bedrock of Irish society through the outplay of that terror war into self-perpetuating legacy conflicts.

Today of course the Protestant Unionists are regularly vilified and ridiculed across swathes of modern cosmopolitan British and Irish society for the electoral underpinnings one particular Northern Ireland party provided for the sustenance of Conservative rule in the United Kingdom as the European project radically deconstructed in 2016. Conversely there is little public discourse on the raging bull elephant of historical revisionism which dynamised that same Ulster party's electoral reach in the first place. Indeed subtle complexities of Irish history are rarely diffused with accuracy through modern multimedia platforms gauged to momentary 21st Century hand-held attention spans. Starting with the galling comparison between the Fifties and Sixties NILP vote (garnered in the main from the Protestant worker) with the criminal failure of British Labour to organise in Ulster, they all spin dizzily into time and space as day follows idiot day.

As the United Kingdom's natural party of government now faces up to a similar electoral collapse as affected Northern Ireland's default party of government during its fifty year existence as a separate state, let us hope that the local and European election results of May 2019 will cast new morning light over Ulster's landscape of beauty and soulfulness, ghosts and curses. Anything now to move on from the soul-destroying political morass and economic stagnation engendered by the shotgun marriage of two fundamentally myopic, painfully parochial and clearly played-out sectarian agendas.

The three Ulster regiments who served in the Second World War amalgamated as the Royal Irish Rangers in 1968. Twenty four years later a new Royal Ulster Regiment was formed from the Rangers and the home Ulster Defence Regiment which was on continuous active service for 22 years during the Northern Ireland Troubles.

Regimental museums for the Royal Ulster Rifles, Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers can be visited in central Belfast, The Mall in Armagh and Enniskillen Castle respectively. In London there is a Guards museum in Wellington Barracks near St James Park and one commemorating the London Irish Rifles at Connaught House in Camberwell south of the Thames. Located geographically between the two in Victoria Street there is also a chapel in the Catholic Westminster Cathedral dedicated to the regimental soldiers of Leinster, Connaught and Munster.

Fields of Fire - Two Wednesday Nights Up The Lisburn Road

Some days will stay a thousand years.

Some pass like the flash of a spark.

Who knows where all our days go?

It is generally accepted by the people of Ireland of all cultural backgrounds (and indeed the broader international diaspora across Europe, North America and Australasia) that our island home is a uniquely blessed land of deep soulfulness, rich character and staggering physical beauty - albeit just a wee bit mad in all sorts of happily benign and violently malign respects.

This was encapsulated for me around five years ago when I was living in North London. One night on the way home from another miserable day of work - dealing yet again with overinflated egos and general drudgery for a relative pittance - I left the Overground train for the local bus service. As I sat there during the painfully slow journey up a steep winding hill of Ponzi-driven multi-million pound properties towards residual domestic sanity- and with my eyes glazed over with physical tiredness and world weariness - I noticed some graffiti written on the plastic backing of the seat in front of  me. It boldly proclaimed Jimmy From Belfast.

Having recently endured a fruitless six month search for employment upon the deeply stagnant economic landscape of Northern Ireland - and thus being exiled for the second time around from the Emerald Isle in pure post-modern fashion -  I would probably hesitate from embracing the sentiments expressed in that song by Derry's Phil Coulter Thank God That This Was My Life. In fact whereas in more cynical days I would consider the lyrics of Planxty's Irish folk classic Emigrant's Farewell to Ireland to be a wee bit hackneyed to the point of snigger-inducing parody, the fact remains that the diabolical collapse of social mobility and financial security today across the British Isles makes it sound like nothing more than highly incisive journalistic reportage.

At the same time however I can definitely relate to some of the moving commentaries towards the end of the political crime writer Martin Dillon's 2017 autobiography Crossing The Line regarding the strange hold that Ireland has on the memories of those long departed from its soil. These being very deeply fused together on an emotional plane, complicated in their makeup because of the national political conflict and associated with a myriad of historical touch points relating to family and community life.

Following on from my last post on The Starjets and their classic Power Pop single Shiraleo, I have been giving some thought lately to some of the most memorable times  that particularly stand out from my youth in Ulster. Two events sprung to mind immediately - strangely enough both from Wednesday nights in winter during the Eighties and both emplaced along the Lisburn Road in South Belfast. 

This roughly two mile long thoroughfare stretches from the fervently Unionist Sandy Row district - as namechecked in Van Morrison's 1968 Madame George - and up to the now-closed King's Hall in Balmoral where many famous artists performed at the acoustically-challenged venue including Mario Lanza, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Nirvana. On the way the road passes Windsor Park international football stadium where George Best played eighteen times for  his country. The Lisburn Road was the actual route that King William III took through Belfast in 1690 following his landing on the Carrickfergus shore and on towards battle at the River Boyne in Meath.

On Wednesday 17th November in 1982 I attended Windsor with a handful of mates - and of course 25,000 others - to watch Northern Ireland surely be thrashed by holders West Germany in the European Championship qualifiers. With regard to Billy Bingham's glorious period in charge of the overperforming Eighties international squad this set of fixtures sits between the 1982 and 1986 World Cup Final appearances in Spain and Mexico. The seven year light flight of football glory had commenced with the the 1979-80 British Home International victory and would incorporate winning the final tournament for the same trophy in 1983-84.

Throughout the bitterness and violence of the Troubles years the international team were mixed in religious persuasion though the crowd back in the Eighties was fiercely partisan in a very militant and vocal Loyalist respect. Whatever ethical jarring this dichotomy clearly represents in hindsight within Irish sporting history, the atmosphere at Windsor back in those days as a rule was highly animated and engaged to say the least. When Billy Bingham later recalled the events of that cold winter night he noted how the German stars on their preliminary pitch inspection - players of the sophisticated gilt-edged ilk of Rummenigge, Littbarski and Matthaeus - were immediately disconcerted by the downpour over bitter oul Belfast and the then-dilapidated condition of the stadium.

As to what I can remember of that night ...well I definitely recall the miserable marrow-chilling rainfall on the Spion Kop as a given, some deeply nasty scatological chants from the crowd directed towards the Bundesrepublik Deutschland goalkeeper Harold Schumacher and of course the earthquake roar upon Ian Stewart's 18th minute goal which won the match. Even though blurry footage of the game is available online I still think back to a sound file of the goal on an old unsophisticated Northern Ireland football website which captured the supporters' reaction to crystal clear perfection against Jackie Fullerton's BBC commentary. I used to share it with workmates in London just for the Wall of Sound audio sensation alone and to let them know I was actually there. Although little of the football action on the night itself remains in my memory I can never forget the crowd response of demented release and utter disbelief as the moon pinballed back and forth overhead, black crows fell dead from the Belfast sky and logic and perception shifted tectonically across time and space.

Northern Ireland alas did not reach the 1984 finals of the European Championships despite winning in turn against West Germany the following November - one of the most extraordinary achievements in modern British international football history. They ended Group 6 runners-up on goal difference with an earlier scoreless draw against mighty Albania in Tirana providing their statistical downfall. The  players capped in the two German ties included goalkeeping legend Pat Jennings, 1982 World Cup heroes Gerry Armstrong and Billy Hamilton, future Republic of Ireland manager Martin O'Neill, Sammy McIlroy the last Busby Babe,  Manchester United icon Norman Whiteside who scored in Hamburg and the late Noel Brotherston of Spurs and Blackburn Rovers, The latter is still remembered with much affection today by the fanbase for both his moments of sizzling Brazilian craftsmanship on the wing, scoring the winning goal against Wales to take the British Championship trophy back to Ireland for the first time since 1914 and for that legendary Ulster receding ginger hairline.

Two years after watching what still remains Northern Ireland's greatest home victory I attended an incredible performance by Big Country at the King's Hall on Wednesday 19th December 1984.
The Celtic rock group were formed by Scottish guitarist Stuart Adamson following his departure from The Skids whose own incredible creative output from 1978 to 1981 is still held in awe today - from Open Sound through to Fields, across four albums and with three singles reaching the UK Top Twenty. Big Country would in turn release eight albums between 1983 and 1999 not including the Restless Natives soundtrack - they never featured any Skids material in their concert sets.

The existent appeal towards the music produced by Big Country is qualified to an extent by the questionable fashion styling and fundamentally naff marketing of the Eighties and some terrible misproduction affecting their mid-period releases. Yet in the earlier stages of their career with The Crossing and Steeltown albums they received similar critical appreciation as that devolving to Simple Minds, U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen. These two albums reached number 3 and number 1 on the album charts in Britain. Their 1993 The Buffalo Skinners is also a fantastic collection of engaging guitar rock and certainly their third great album.

Big Country's music at its best touched upon genuinely universal themes of maintaining self-respect and hope in the middle of struggle and deflation. Likewise Adamson's lyrics stand as a vital contemporary commentary on the violent and brutal death of industrial Britain - surely the single most important historical factor underpinning the self-perpetuating social meltdown of today and the staggering disconnectivity with the recent past we can now sense constantly.

The December 1984 concert in Belfast was the first time I had seen the group - I subsequently saw them again at Belfast's Avoniel leisure centre on The Seer tour (they played the previous night at the Templemore sports complex in Derry), supporting David Bowie at Slane in the Irish Republic (some miles directly west of the Boyne battle site) and then at London's Hammersmith Odeon and Town and Country Club.

From what I can gather online the group had played at Queens University Belfast in July 1983 and then a further nine times in Northern Ireland in their original lineup after the two concerts I attended - Derry and Belfast in January 1989, Cookstown and the Belfast Mandela Hall in November 1991, Belfast again in April 1993, Belfast Limelight in May 1994, the Ulster Hall in Belfast in September 1995, the Limelight again in August 1996 and lastly the Belfast Waterfront in May 2000 during the Final Fling tour. The group's wonderful off-the-cuff electric rendition of the Scottish folk song KIlliekrankie was recorded during a soundcheck by Ulster Television prior to that 1991 Mandela Hall gig. They also played many concerts in the Irish Republic during this period in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Dundalk, Tralee, Waterford, Limerick and the Thurles Festival in Tipperary.

The King's Hall concert during their Steeltown tour was an extraordinary night of pure passion, soul and exhilaration that was further dynamised by the absolutely wild reaction they received from the crowd. I have read online comments in the past from their former manager that staff at the venue claimed the crowd noise that night surpassed even the regular world boxing championship bouts that were held there. The Big Country set included their raft of four consecutive hit singles in Fields of Fire (with throws within their extended live working to The Jam's Boy About Town, Aerosmith's Walk This Way and The Clash's Should I Stay Or Should I Go?), In A Big Country, Chance and Wonderland. It also included the extraordinary Just A Shadow - a song which in its content prefigured the horrendous epidemic of male mental illness which would affect so many in the fractured and misfiring century ahead.

I always remember one point during the concert when the hall lights came up during the instrumental military-style guitar-and-drum passage in the middle of Where The Rose Is Sown. Even at this career point where the group were leading commercial players in British rock, I still recall the look on Adamson's face as he gazed out at a literal sea of unrestrained human joy with what seemed like total amazement. Over the years I got to see some wonderful concert performances including Prince, Tom Petty, The Clash, Rush and The Rolling Stones but I will never but ever forget that night in Belfast. It remains for me the greatest concert I ever saw - let alone the most ecstatic crowd reaction - though the memory is always tinged with sadness as to the outplay of Adamson's life. This also casts a terrible gloss of melancholy over some of his later songs such as You Dreamer, Alone, Dive Into Me and particularly My Only Crime.

Stuart Adamson - who was born to Scottish parents in Manchester and grew up in the Kingdom of Fife - certainly had huge pride in his own roots within both the Celtic littoral of the United Kingdom and industrial Britain alike. Hence when The Skids were asked by a record company at one point for the title for a forthcoming compilation he replied “There's no argument over what it's called. It'll be called Dunfermline - or it won't be released “. Such words of faith, passion and a true belonging have all but disappeared now from our British and Irish folk memory.

Now one of the most complex bearings embedded within the mature spiritual condition is the acceptance that every minute of every hour a person of profound intelligence, wit, warmth, talent, fun and compassion passes from this earth. The life and soul of our human footprint is in a perpetual cycle of loss and (now extraordinary strained and malfunctioning) regeneration. The same without doubt applies to all sentient creatures - a piece of bloody roadkill that makes one instantly shudder may well once have been a vehicle for some extraordinary physical strength, functional ability or unique character. This sobering awareness of life as it is actually lived underscores how many unforgettable moments are often so fleeting in time and a combination of very unique circumstances and settings.They also most certainly lie outside the remit of extravagant financial engagement.

All three factors certainly constitute the background to those memories I have from what is now three and a half decades ago. Of both the night Northern Ireland equalled Linfield's 1970 trumping of Manchester City at Windsor to become the greatest football team on earth and when a few hundred very lucky souls got to see one of the greatest live rock acts in history literally blow the roof off the Forbidden Planet of Eighties Ulster.

Belfast may not have the architectural glory, temperate climate or effortless panache of other American or European capitals - and I personally have huge bloody reservations on the 21st Century rebranding of the city and the Ulster Troubles alike. Yet I remain cognisant that I was blessed to see and experience those moments of magic on the Lisburn Road. Many people have not been that lucky as to how the timeframes of their life coalesced while in turn others were cut short on the opportunity - as was the case for thirty wasted years in Northern Ireland because of direct human agency. One particular Stuart Adamson lyric that was often quoted after his December 2001 suicide in Hawaii reflecting: 

There are only seconds of your life 

that really count for anything. 

All the rest is killing time.

Waiting for a train.

Shiraleo - Belfast City's Power Pop Classic

My enthusiasm for association football and popular music alike did not long survive the fading out of the 20th Century. It terminated essentially with Matthew Le Tissier of Southampton FC, Blackwood's Manic Street Preachers and Therapy? from Larne in Northern Ireland (or Ulfreksfjordr in its appropriately dark and menacing Old Norse).

Some posts ago I referenced Mark J Prendergast's Irish Rock: Roots, Personalities, Directions
from The O'Brien Press which remains for me the definitive overview of Ireland's rock music history. There are excellent narratives here on the careers of Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, Horslips, Van Morrison and U2 though with no further editions following upon from its 1987 publication the coverage missed out on globally successful Nineties artists such as The Cranberries, Ash and The Divine Comedy.

The book was released at a point where the careers of Ireland's main punk and New Wave acts had drawn to apparent closure. Northern Ireland's Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones fell apart in 1982 and 1983 respectively after the release of their fourth albums Now Then and The Sin of Pride respectively. In the Irish Republic The Radiators From Space disbanded in 1981 having produced two albums in the late Seventies while fellow Dublin act The Blades broke up in 1986 after The Last Man in Europe and Raytown Revisited releases of the previous year.

However I can clearly recall some other Northern acts from the time who put out material that has dated fundamentally well in the main.  In particular there was The Moondogs of Derry who had a great run of single releases from She's 19/Ya Don't Do Ya on the Good Vibrations label onwards and who eventually were gifted their own 1981 seven-part music show on Granada TV - this without even releasing an album or having well-connected parents in showbusiness for that matter. Guest artists included The Boomtown Rats, David Bowie and The Police.

There was also Bankrobbers who were the support act I saw on the SLF Now Then gig in Belfast. They opened for The Kinks at one point in their career and their incredibly catchy Jenny single in 1983 was performed on a special Belfast edition of Tyne Tees' The Tube on Channel 4. That Petrol Emotion in turn had an impressive creative run through from their debut Manic Pop Thrill album in 1986 right up to the fantastic Hey Venus single at the start of the next decade which I remember hearing on crackling early hours London wavelengths as Radio Luxembourg's Power Play of the week. Then there was the equally wonderfully named Ghost Of An American Airman whose debut I Hear Voices single in 1987 remains a smart and melodic pop record alas buried in some questionable production values of the period.

Every edition of Moondogs Matinee commenced with a rendition of the artist's Power Pop. The other Northern Irish band long associated with this particular rock genre - of the stylistic ilk of Badfinger, The Raspberries, Flamin' Groovies, Big Star or The Knack  - was The Starjets from West Belfast's Falls district who were formed in the Summer of 76.

Unlike other gritty and aggressive punk sounds produced on the city's very mean streets, earlier concert material performed by The Starjets included The Archies' Sugar Sugar and The Beatles' Please Please Me. Their harmonious sound and clean-cut look had them labelled as The Bay City Rollers of Punk in some clearly spiteful quarters as their career started to roll. Having moved to London and signed to Epic Records they released several singles and one long player God Bless The Starjets in 1979 - the only commercial success coming from the War Stories 7" which reached Number 51 in the UK charts and rewarded them with a performance on the BBC Top of the Pops.

War Stories namechecks several Sixties and Seventies British comic book legends from back in the day when the only safe space a teenage boy needed was throwing himself headlong into a World War Two dream landscape after his own da had finished reading the travails of Captain Hurricane, Johnny Red and Sgt Fury himself in Victor, Battle, Valiant and the wee ubiquitous Commando magazines. All good healthy preparation for the Sven Hassel and Leo Kessler Wehrmacht pulp to come of course. The Johnny Red story title I now realise was wordplay based on the Johnny Reb nickname bestowed by Yankee soldiers on the Confederacy rank and file in the American Civil War - a large section of which were of Scots-Irish descent as indeed was Ulysses S Grant whose family hailed from the beautiful county of Tyrone.

The Starjets released a final single Shiraleo in March 1980, changed their name to Tango Brigade for a final release called Donegal and split up. Singer Terry Sharpe then cultivatied more public appreciation with The Adventures - this including a Top 20 single Broken Land and Top 30 album The Sea of Love.

And thus the Belfast post-punk group's story would reside in the dusty and scratched vinyl annals of British and Irish chart rock history were it not for the fact that Shiraleo happens to sound today as effective, sunny and engaged a piece of Power Pop as anything released by the international artists named above - up there with No Matter What, Tonight, Shake Some Action, Back of My Car and Good Girls Don't.

Several public comments on Youtube seem to clearly concur with that appreciation alongside disbelief as to how The Starjets final single commercially flatlined on the musical radar screen:

It must be heartbreaking to write a killer song such as this only to see it fail...

If I had written this, and released it, and it hadn't made the charts, I would have gone mad with frustration. I don't know how The Starjets stood it....

I was baffled at the time, thought it had all the right ingredients to be a big hit - shame.

Powerpop Punktastik...why wasn't this anything like a hit?

Now having listened to the song a lot over the past few weeks - and even with the twin qualifications on board that I cannot fathom the meaning of the lyrics and that the group did not play that often in Belfast during their very fleeting brush with chart fame - it has nonetheless brought back a raft of memories of teenage years in Northern Ireland in the Eighties.

Granted these stand a long metaphorical distance away from how John Luke's previously discussed portraits of Ulster life can instill measured melancholic reflection upon vanished urban landscapes and rural idylls from the Fifties. Nonetheless the music does concentrate the mind on a strangely disjointed and still little analysed decade that played out under considerable strain and darkness in a troubled Ulster.

The levels of political discord and violence in the North were underpinned by the ramifications of the 1980-81 Maze Prison hunger strikes upon Sinn Fein electoral support and how the imposition of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the middle of the decade lead to loyalist paramilitary revival. Yet I remember other sustained features of life from the time that were to undergo staggering transformations ahead.

These include the absence of alienating (and now literally transhuman) behavior patterns gauged to the digital revolution, a world of employment and recruitment yet to be totally wankered into total checkmated oblivion, an existent connectivity with the afterglow of the Seventies Golden Age of cinematic and televisual excellence,  the sustenance of genuine creative spaces as directly linked to potential financial remuneration, heavily animated downtown landscapes full of financially sustainable commercial footprints, a generation gap still grounded on some residual deferential respect and a time when the past still felt close in comparison to this century's engineered drift and lack of focus.

So whereas on a personal level Shiraleo tends to engender somewhat bittersweet recall by way of the Ulster people and the places who have passed on from those days it is still  tied fast to memories which are fundamentally positive of a time when the nightmarish socio-economic and political shifts around us today were still to globally engage and seal fast.

An intelligent and empowering piece of Irish popular music in itself but also one that has yet excavated some long buried thoughts and feelings about the certainly unique, frequently edgy, often crazy and yet still wonderful place we either call or once called home.

Ulster Zen - The Deep Past Within The Fractured Present

Without doubt one of the most beloved artifacts residing within the Irish heritage sector today is the mummified remains of Takbuti at the Ulster Museum on Belfast's Stranmillis Road.

Like many thousands of children who grew up amid the violent social transformations affecting the city in the Seventies, a trip to see the genuinely unsettling black-skulled mummy - alongside visits to the Palm House, Tropical Ravine and indeed the Ulster 71 exhibition in the adjoining Botanic Gardens -  is lodged with deep affection in the memory of our communally shared lost youth.

Takabuti was brought from Egypt to Ireland in 1834 by Thomas Greg of Holywood in County Down. She has thus been resident in East Ulster through famine and economic depression,  industrialisation surges and deindustrialisation waves and two bloody civil wars involving various triangulations of bad guys and good guys. Also Northern Ireland's national engagement in a global military conflict which incorporated significant aerial bombardment of central and suburban Belfast by the German Luftwaffe that left over 900 Protestant and Catholic civilians murdered.

Last week I visited the museum again with my Scandinavian partner to have a look at their display on the historic Viking footprint in Ireland following upon the initial attack against Rathlin Island monastery in the Straits of Moyle in 795. Perhaps because of the regional strength of the Irish kings this was much less engaged by way of physical settlement in the North of Ireland in comparison to other quarters of the country where the Vikings from Denmark and Norway founded major coastal towns and cities such as Wexford, Limerick and Dublin.

Within Ulster itself Viking encampments were situated at Strangford and Carlingford on the beautiful County Down coastline as well as on Lough Neagh near the site of Shane's Castle and up upon  the western shore of Lough Foyle. The great abbeys at Movilla and Bangor were destroyed in Viking raids and violent assaults were also set fast against churches on Fermanagh's Lough Erne and the ecclesiastical capital of Armagh.

I found it especially interesting to discover how the original name for Country Antrim's Larne Lough was Ulfreksfjordr since I had reread only last month in Jonathan Bardon's wonderful 1992 Ulster history how the name of the province itself came from the Norse Uladztir which in turn was based on the Irish words Ulaidh and Tir.

Just beside the small display of Viking ephemera at the museum is a section on the Irish Bronze Age and a wonderful installation piece where one can look through a square hole in the white wall and see delightfully crafted models of human figures across the ages and as positioned around the same sobering burial pit.

At first we see a family from our ancient kindred gathered mournfully around the graveside at sunset and with the grandfather's corpse placed in a foetal position for his journey into Celtic or Pictish eternity. Suddenly the lights extinguish across the landscape and having travelled through a mysterious otherworldly prism of time and space we are now watching a modern archaeological dig on a sunny day. Two late 20th Century alpha male researchers living the career dream are looking down into the Ulster soil at the skeletal remains of the long-interred farmer or craftsman.

When I was at university in the late Eighties I used to spend a lot of time in the museum but cannot actually recall seeing this particular display or furthermore if it would have been there even during my childhood visits in the previous decade.  It is a wonderful encapsulation of not only  the fleetingness of human existence and family life but also the sheer density of Irish folk culture as transfused every day from this island's complex, ethnically heterogeneous and fraught past into the equally volatile present.

Over the past few months I have visited some extraordinary passage grave, standing stone and holy well sites across counties Down, Tyrone and Fermanagh. The emotional connectivity with our shared folk past that one can experience at these coastal, forest or moorland locations has never felt stronger in many ways - so untrammeled and unsullied in this world of avarice, lack of direction and blanket idiocy.

Thomas Sheridan’s intriguing fourth book The Druid Code is an extraordinary deconstruction of ancient British and Irish history as relating to the complexity of such megalithic remains across the British Archipelago, Northern Europe and the Mediterranean.  It also traces the passage of druidic ritual into witchcraft and specifically Irish freemasonry - it is hugely recommended. Most interestingly, and prefiguring the selection of Northern Ireland for the location shooting of Game of Thrones, there was in fact an outdoor heritage park based on early Ulster history located near Omagh during the Nineties. Resembling a physical manifestation of a Horslips Celtic Rock concept album it is long defunct.

The sense of continuity and timelessness in Ulster life that the museum tableau represents was discussed here in an earlier blogpost on the Belfast artist John Luke. Whether the degrading excesses of selective historical amnesia in Ireland is broadly cancelled out by the continual warmth and welcome of the native people and the staggering beauty of the landscape of course remains impossible to conclusively configure.

Alas in contemporary Northern Ireland the fudging of Troubles legacy issues has fundamentally overwritten the consociational higher mathematics of the 1998 settlement which provided the solitary political fix available this lifetime around for the province following the trumping of Bill Craig's voluntary coalition proposal at the 1975 Constitutional Convention in Belfast.

In turn the deeply strange economic makeup of the Northern state with its grotesque private and public sector imbalance atop desperately low salaries throws up deeper questions about the long-term logic of Irish partition in a financially globalised world and  the very competence of Westminster central government in managing post-industrial UK regional economies.

In any case, and as society forges towards a point where the only employment left very soon will be programming or polishing robots, I genuinely hope that when the Irish museum sector clears out its content on some futuristic commercial purchasing platform that I can perhaps pick up the Ulster Museum's From Past To Present masterpiece for my own personal Irish archive and watch it again and again and again to the end of my mortal days.

A cold eye on life and death and no finer concentration of earth magick to be seen since Catweazle walked the soil of Albion across the ITV/UTV network in the first two years of the Nineteen Seventies. The six wee figures underscoring the core human conundrum of getting up in the morning and either living your life fully as a unique transitory soul or just surviving the end of everything good like all the rest.

The Waxie's Dargle of Irishtown

In the middle of last month I caught up with an old schoolfriend in Belfast. We got talking about what was the first concert we would have both seen together back in the day. We settled on a gig The Clash performed at the Ulster Hall in February 1984. This was towards the end of their career when guitarist Mick Jones had left the group.

I can't remember much about the evening to be honest apart from the video backdrop they used that night for the Police On My Back cover and the fact that singer Joe Strummer played most of the set with a towel held at arms-length from his face as a barrier against the rich volume of spit and phlegm directed towards him from the fans at the front. I read years ago that at one point Strummer had contracted heptatitis from one particularly potent discharge of vintage sputum which made the perfect rock n roll trajectory all the way down his throat during a punk gig.

Some months after this Clash concert another friend told me about a Belfast gig he attended at the same venue where the artistes performed with a similarly strange onstage accoutrement - this being a tin beer tray which one member of the support act smashed against his head in time to the music. This of course was Spider Stacey the tin whistle player of The Pogues who were opening for Elvis Costello and the Attractions.

The first of The Pogues' seven albums was Red Roses For Me and was released in October of 1984 on the Stiff label. It contains some great breezy instrumentals in The Battle of Brisbane and Dingle Regatta as well as the first of the group's paeans to the now long lost soul of the British capital in Transmetropolitan and Dark Streets of London - that city of dreams, struggle, nightmares and epiphany. 

The album title is taken from a 1943 Sean O'Casey play and the thirteen tracks include their impressive reading of Brendan Behan's The Auld Triangle. The best song of the album in my opinion - Sea Shanty - also lifts a vintage line from Behan's Borstal Boy in "Compliments pass when the quality meet". This being a wonderful aside from one personage to another when having overheard examples of verbal vulgarity in public that have surpassed all boundaries of social acceptability and redemption.

Track four is the extraordinarily ribald roar of Waxie's Dargle which I suspect was the main song in their early repertoire to incorporate the beer tray headbanging thing. Covered by several artists over the years including Sweeney's Men, the first time I ever heard the song was in a long-forgotten
13-part Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series Cities which transmitted a few times on the ITV network in the early Eighties. The Dublin documentary in the series was presented by director John Huston and Waxie's Dargle was duly performed by a talented and hirsute duo called The Jacobites.

The title is such a strange combination of  disparate wordage - especially as placed alongside the namechecking of working class Dublin quarters as Monto and Capel Street  - that in essence it could almost be the recollection of a regularly underperforming racehorse at Leopardstown in the Fifties or a physically vanished pub in The Liberties. The actual historical background needless to say - Ireland being Ireland -  is both genuinely fascinating and just a wee bit bloody glorious.

Hence the legendary Waxie's Dargle - as mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses - was a jolly excursion for the cobblers of Dublin in plebeian imitation of the gentry's own annual society picnic jaunt to the banks of the River Dargle near Bray and Enniskerry which lies south of the Irish capital. The cobblers were known as "Waxies" because of their use of candlewax  to preserve the thread which stitched the shoes and "going to the Dargle" had long become a part of Dublin vocabulary for an annual day out.

The cobblers trip on loaded-up flat dray carts or jaunting cars was at Easter and with the original Waxies Dargle having been part of Donnybrook Fair until it closed in the mid-1850s due to riotous behaviour. Subsequently the annual procession - which extended by default to workers from all sectoral backgrounds - went nowhere near as far as Bray but only to a grass-covered triangle of land at  Irishtown between coastal Ringsend and Sandymount in the south of the city. Irishtown had been the location of the main Gaelic settlements outside Dublin following upon the native population expulsions of 1454 from the city by the English authorities.

Therefore this classic and indeed globally renowned folk song is essentially a discursive consideration between two male friends in a pub on how their wives aim to fund familial attendance for this day of merriment, drinking and music- Monto was Dublin's large red light district while many pawnbrokers' shops were located in the old Jewish quarter of Capel Street.

A similar Easter-time public excursion within Ulster social history is captured in Glenn Patterson's 2012 novel The Mill For Grinding Old People Young. The narrative of the story follows the course of the 19th Century in Belfast from the aftermath of the United Irishmen rising through to the societal surges of the industrial revolution - the narrator Gilbert Rice at one stage walking with hundreds of other young people up to the environs of the Cave Hill in the north of the city.

Indeed many of the older generation in Northern Ireland to this day will recall Sunday afternoon and evening walks to the Belfast hills - up from Woodvale Park on the Shankill Road to the Horseshoe Bend at Ligoniel in my own parents' case - when the roads were crowded with people taking the weekend air. And of course in the north of Ireland too there was a rich vernacular associated with trades, professions and labour. The most famous by far relates to the "millies" or mill girls of the many linen factories in North and West Belfast.

Returning to Irishtown and according to some online resources an engraved stone near a pub in the area commemorates the actual location of the Waxie's Dargle. I haven't been able to find any confirmation of whether it still stands there but, should it do so, it represents a wonderfully understated memorial to the toils and trials and concomitant warmth and community of the Dublin working people.

In turn, back in 2010, a magnificent city council-funded statue to the mill girls was erected at the corner of the Crumlin Road and Cambrai Street in West Belfast. This was in close proximity to the former Ewart's, Brookfield, Flax Street and Edenderry linen mills that provided such a dynamic for the city's initial wealth and industrial expansion. The tens of thousands of millies - both Catholic and Protestant - would work long hours for minimal pay (or "buttons" in Belfast slang) while under threat of horrendous industrial injury and a raft of appalling lung and chest conditions.

When I saw the statue some years back around teatime, the surrounding streets - which would have once been black with hundreds upon hundreds of workers leaving the factories at that time of day in the earlier half of the last century - were completely and utterly deserted. And there the wee Belfast millie stands all alone by herself this very night - waiting for her mates who are now in the main all long departed this earthly life and its associated joys and pains.

The inextinguishable respect the Irish still have for their forebears and the hard lives they lead so clearly unites people on both sides of the border and - along with a love for the staggering physical beauty of the island - remains one of the most important underpinnings of the deep living soul of Ireland.

The Last Walk of the Sixties High King - Belfast 1970

Some months back on a social media page about George Best's career in Britain and the USA a public commentator drew attention to a particularly quirky aspect of a contemporary Seventies press photograph. The picture is of Best walking past the wire mesh frontage of a stand packed with supporters at a football ground clearly somewhere in the British Isles by all downbeat and gritty aesthetic appearance.

It is hard to clarify whether the match is still in play or if it was a domestic or international tie. Either way the footballer as ever carries off his rugged bearing with effortless charismatic ease - he appears lost in thought about the game with his hand covering his mouth and a white jersey draped over his bare shoulders as he passes the ranks of male attendees on the terraces.

Many of these appear to be still watching other activity on the football field though some follow the path of his exit. None however can match the attention of two teenage girls at the extreme bottom right hand corner of the photograph whose utterly besotted love for the Northern Irish star is clearly observable to an almost hypnotic degree - their smitten eyes and rapt smiles are affectionately focused on him and him alone across the universe and in utter dazed adoration. It is a wonderful hidden pictorial detail.

Another classic Best image worth retrospective consideration is from the 18th April 1970 British Home International Championship match in Belfast against Scotland - a game long recalled for his sending off by the referee after he threw mud in the direction of the official following a contretemps. The black and white picture captures his return up the players' entrance at the corner of the ground following the dismissal. Another oft-published photograph from the same match -  used generically on many occasions  to symbolise his stormy lifepath as a celtic hellraiser - is of an angry Best being restrained previously on the pitch by Wolverhampton Wanderers' Derek Dougan.

This was the 23-year-old George Best's twentieth international appearance for Northern Ireland and his thirteenth at Windsor Park in the south of the city. Northern Ireland lost all three ties in this 1969-70 Championship. His footballing career at Manchester United by this stage of proceedings - alike his equally high profile and media-engaged personal life - was already highly problematic, becoming more volatile by the day and clearly spiralling out of control.

In terms of the three groupings of human actors composing the photograph - and as arraigned around the seething departing sportsman - we see several policemen whose facial expressions range across a wide spectrum of sternness and with one in particular bordering on rank supercilious contempt. Interestingly, an equally well known picture of Best taking a corner kick at Swansea's Vetch Field on the British mainland seven days later also sees him surrounded by officers of much more benign hue in Wales than here at home at Windsor off the Lisburn Road. There are also two middle-aged or elderly members of the groundstaff clad in the ubiquitous flat cap of Belfast sartorial vintage - the gentleman on the right physically emanating the generational bewilderment that would track Best's entire career path as a metaphorical headshaking shadow.  Finally we have teenage boys draped over the barriers who are either dead excited at the turn of events or just struck dumb by proximity to such heightened, grown up and anarchic bad boy behaviour.

It is such a strange and brooding image in so many respects - let alone the fact that the player appears to be physically floating his way up the concrete incline - and with the even more melancholy backdrop that Best would only play in the international stadium five times again for Northern Ireland between then and 1977. In turn 1970 represented a complex political interregnum for the country itself as heightened civil disorder gradually gave way to the arrival of concrete terrorist onslaughts and concomitant mass murder. The violence in Ulster would continue on for another 28 years. Best would only outlive the qualified political consolidation in 1998 by a further seven.

Forging deeper into the dynamics behind this famous sports photograph again and there is clearly a sad forlorn atmosphere pervading it without question. Desperate times ahead for all parties concerned as the mood of the late Sixties quickly dissipated and much more complicated and fractious times arrived on Ireland's northern shores - for Best, the working classes, the cops and the kids. Everything was about to go very very wrong and just perhaps something reflective of this discordant fall  is captured in the photo's composition and tone.

Indeed this international fixture which saw Best sent off in April 1970 took place just three months after the Irish Republican Army split into Official and Provisional paramilitary wings and only weeks after massive civil disturbances erupted between the British Army and Republicans in the Springfield Road area of West Belfast following an Orange Order parade. At the end of June major disorder erupted again across the capital between the IRA and Loyalists with six fatalities on the Crumlin Road in the north of the city and in Best's native East Belfast.

So George Best took his long deflated walk back up the player's entrance in just the first third of the first year of the decade. By the time he walked down again for the four springtime Home International and World Cup qualifying fixtures in 1971 Ulster would be on the brink of utter disaster and catastrophe. The escalation of violence after the introduction of internment without trial in August that year would burn all remaining intercommunal bridges and herald barely contained civil war against a gargantuan military infusion. Hence the great port city of Belfast around and about the thousands of fans packed together on that sunny Saturday 15th May afternoon to watch Bestie outmanoeuvre the great goalkeeper Gordon Banks and tease the English defenders to take the ball from him would in many fundamental respects soon be gone forever in substantial form and spirit.

Needless to say the British Home International Championships are long defunct and unlikely to reappear in the game's currently demented commercial constitution. In the 1976-77 season Northern Ireland would compete under that specific national title as opposed to  "Ireland" for the first time, in 1980-81 the entire competition was cancelled off the back of unrest in Ulster associated with the IRA hunger strikes at The Maze prison and the last ever tournament in 1983-84 was won by Billy Bingham's legendary squad. Northern Ireland thus remain the reigning British champions alongside being victors in 1979-80 and joint-winners with England in 1957-58 and 1958-59. (Prior to the national partition Ireland won in 1913-14 and jointly with England and Scotland in 1902-03).

Ironically the picture under discussion also perfectly compliments the artistic representation of a literally crucified Georgie Best Superstar which graced the cover of his friend Derek Dougan's own study of the changing face of the game from 1981 - How Not To Run Football. Whether or not that professional martyrdom was essentially self-inflicted in the main or not, the photograph from Windsor Park that day is a truly fascinating encapsulation of the rise and fall of one of Ireland's greatest sons. 

Heart Of The City - Bombs, Bullets And Bunion

The dark nature of the Troubles in Ulster would be of such mortifying scope as to quite effortlessly infuse itself into the already grim black humour that characterises hard industrial working class life by default. Little would be ethically off-limits in this regard such as the naming of loyalist interrogation locales after a globally-franchised children's television programme Romper Room for example. The author once appeared on Ulster Television's own presentation of this broadcast brand around 1970.

While the aforesaid generic wordplay was clearly constructed with considerable native wit and ribald urban savvy the dynamics of the usage itself remains yet so puerile and crass in historical context and consideration- let alone shockingly malign and utterly bloody depressing.

Another strange interplay of humour with the unrelenting political conflict in Ireland would be the presence in the second half of Belfast Telegraph editions during the worst years of the Troubles of  a particular cartoon strip that also appeared contemporaneously across the world  in different press outlets.

Whereas Rowel Friers' renowned cartoon commentaries on sectarian violence and constitutional collapse in the same journal were so unique and insightful as to warrant compilation at the time into no less than four volumes of Blackstaff Press publications between 1971 and 1974  - Pig in the Parlour, Riotous Living, The Book of Friers or The Book of Yells and The Revolting Irish - by comparison Fun with Bunion seems to have been lost to time and space. This despite I assume having been seen by the vast majority of the Northern Ireland population at some point due to the newspaper's national reach across the River Bann.

There is little information about the cartoon character online but the artist who drew the two-to-four panel Bunion strip in the Sixties and Seventies was George Martin and it was also a regular feature of other newspapers in Britain, Northern Europe and North America - such as apparently the Bath Evening Chronicle, Birmingham Daily Mail and Stockholm's Aftonbladet. Martin produced other children's strips for the classic DC Thomson British comics The Dandy, The Topper and The Beezer from the Fifties through to the Eighties. I gather from some public commentary on websites that Martin is now deceased.

Bunion was a small rotund middle-aged man and the strip basically recounts events in his married life at home, in various work scenarios and at play on the ubiquitous golf course for example. The wife is a typical angry harridan figure of vintage comedy presentation, his extraordinarily impressive CV ranged from vicar to trawlerman to astronomer to liontamer and  there are also some fantasy scenarios where the character is shipwrecked on an island, engaged  in nefarious criminal endeavour, riding an Indian elephant or getting lost in the desert.

On a Flickr compilation of strips I found there seems to be no suggestion that Bunion was ever physically resident in Belfast when I saw his japes and pranks in my youth there - this bar launching a ship, employment as a prison officer, fixing a broken window, tossing a coin in despair in a voting booth and briefly watching a UFO land and leave as soon as possible.

There appears to be nothing sidesplittingly funny about Bunion and in hindsight it is not even touched by any particular wry charm or unique spin beyond perhaps the fact it is dialogue-free in modernist style and of course there is some residual analogy to the BBC childrens' TV classic Mr Benn. Yet like the Ulster Television transmission start-up music discussed in an earlier post, Fun With Bunion definitely triggers deep memories of both happy and tragic times alike - let alone some of the strangest days ever yet lived by any group of people anywhere in post-war Europe.

Tragedy In East Ulster January 1953 - The Sinking Of The MV Princess Victoria And The Lord St Vincent Plane Crash

In the fifty-one year history of the Northern Ireland state between 1921 and 1972 - and as standing outside civilian and security force fatalities caused by engagement in global conflict, domestic civil disorder and terrorism - the biggest death toll resulting from an accident was the sinking of the MV Princess Victoria in the Irish Sea on 31st January 1953.

Off the back of some research recently I was surprised to note how another major incident in Northern Ireland involving air traffic was so confluent in time to that major maritime disaster and indeed of a significant tragedy at a major sporting occasion back in the Thirties. These two events - in Country Antrim and County Down respectively  - are very rarely referenced within Irish social history compared to the MV Princess Victoria's fatal last voyage from Stranraer to Larne.

To provide some historical background to the period of the early Fifties, the post-war decade running up to the commencement of the IRA Border Campaign on 12th December 1956 saw Northern Ireland's constitutional position within the United Kingdom in a state of considerable security and anchorage. This following the state's belligerent status during the six year global conflict against the Axis powers and then the passing of the Ireland Act at Westminster in 1949 upon the declaration of a Republic by Eire the previous year.

The Stormont elections of 19th February 1949 had thus taken place in a tense atmosphere against the backdrop of southern political and public support for the Nationalist Party in the North. It is also remembered in the main for the fundamental undermining of the Labour vote in Ulster for the next nine years - as discussed in an earlier post on the NILP.

The Unionist Party won 37 seats in the election to the Nationalists nine - there were also two Independent Unionists,  two Independents, one Independent Labour and a Socialist Republican elected. Compared to the 1945 election therefore one Nationalist seat had been lost along with two Labour and one Independent Labour. The October 1953 election - this the year of the MV Princess Victoria and Nutts Corner disasters - saw another substantial victory for the Unionist Party. The party took 38 seats to the Nationalists seven while the other representatives elected would be two anti-partition candidates, one Independent Unionist, one Independent and three others from an extraordinary multiplicity of Labour political brands standing for office.

Some of the more well recalled Members of Parliament  sitting at Stormont from the 1949 election as 1953 dawned included Prime Minister Basil Brooke, the Belfast Socialist Republican Harry Diamond, South Fermanagh's Cahir Healey, the Shankill Independent Unionist Tommy Henderson, William McCoy of East Tyrone who had pushed for Dominion Status for Northern Ireland as the prime guarantee against future Westminster ambivalence toward the Union, the former Commonwealth Labour figure Harry Midgeley, Dehra Parker the first female MP in Northern Ireland, Eddie McAteer of Derry and two future Prime Ministers in Terence O'Neill and Brian Faulkner. The Member of Parliament for Cromac Ward in Belfast in this parliament was Major Maynard Sinclair who had been Stormont Minister of Finance for a decade, was serving as Deputy Prime Minister in January 1953 and seen as a potential successor to Brooke.

The horrendous loss of the roll-on/roll-off MV Princess Victoria ferry has been analysed in considerable depth over the years. On the last day of the month - a Saturday - it set sail from Scotland in the morning as an extraordinarily severe storm gathered pace across Northern Europe. Spray broke over the stern doors and an emergency guillotine door was not lowered. On leaving Loch Ryan conditions worsened and waves further damaged the rear doors allowing water to flood on board the car deck. Unable to return to Scotland the captain attempted to reach Northern Ireland by a course that would minimise more damage to the stern. At 0906 the ship messaged Portpatrick Radio Station for urgent assistance from tugs - a SOS transmission followed at 1032. The final morse message at 1358 from five miles east of the Copeland Islands near Donaghadee in County Down reported that engines had stopped.

Multiple rescue attempts were made - neither HMS Launceston Castle nor HMS Contest could initially locate the ship. Portpatrick Lifeboat Jeannie Spears was also dispatched in the search. An RAF Hastings aircraft did not reach the scene of the disaster in time due to other rescue work in Scotland. As the location of the ship clarified in Northern Ireland itself the emergency services put to sea in appalling conditions - four merchant vessels also attempted to save lives. Finally the Donaghadee lifeboat the Sir Samuel Kelly arrived to bring survivors on board - Jeannie Spears and HMS Contest were also there in support.

The ship sunk in the North Channel with the loss of 133 lives including all women and children on board - their lifeboat having been dashed against the hull. 100 bodies were recovered and 44 people survived. Fatalities included Northern Ireland Deputy Prime Minister Sinclair - who assisted many women and children during the incident - and also the North Down MP Sir Walter Smiles whose home was at Orlock so close to the sinking site. Both men had military records from the Great War. Lists of those onboard show that the crew incorporated residents of Northern Ireland and Scotland while the passengers came from both countries, England, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. A maternal relative of my own from Carrickfergus in County Antrim was also numbered among the dead. He was returning to Ulster from training in Scotland for a new job.

An interesting article by History Hub Ulster traces the historical footprint of the disaster with all survivors having today now passed on - the graves of the crew and the passengers visited by the author of the piece includes Sinclair's at Drumbeg Parish Church near Lisburn and Smiles at Belfast City Cemetery on the Falls Road. Two senior officers of HMS Contest were awarded the George Medal for diving into the seas during the rescue, MV Princess Victoria Radio Officer David Broadfoot was posthumously given the George Cross for remaining at his post to allow passengers and fellow crew to escape and the captains of the merchant ships were made OBEs. Captain Ferguson was witnessed at the moment of sinking on the bridgehead giving instructions and saluting. From what I can gather online Sinclair's mother-in-law died of a heart attack on receiving news of the tragedy while one of the merchant captains also died prematurely in light of the stress of involvement in the incident.

Memorials to the disaster were erected in Larne (which lost 27 town residents in the sinking), Stranraer, Portpatrick and Donaghadee where a civic campaign to preserve the Sir Samuel Kelly is ongoing. An annual memorial service is held to the present day to commemorate the victims and rescuers. A sports pavilion on the Stormont estate and a children's ward at the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald were named in memory of Maynard Sinclair.

The sinking of the MV Princess Victoria remains the worst United Kingdom maritime disaster in peacetime. On 10th October 1918 a German U-Boat had sunk the RMS Leinster from the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company outside Dublin Bay leading to 501 deaths - the greatest single loss of life in the Irish Sea. The biggest disaster in Ulster resulting from an accident prior to 1953 was the eighty killed and 260 injured in a June 1889 rail accident between Armagh and Hamiltons Bawn stations - to this day it remains the worst rail accident in Irish history and the fourth worst in the United Kingdom.

Of the two other tragic events mentioned earlier the aircrash occurred only twenty five days before the MV Princess Victoria sinking - on Monday 5th January 1953. A British European Airways Vickers Viking plane Lord St Vincent flying from Northholt airport in London to Belfast's Nutts Corner crashed on approach. On board were 31 passengers and four crew - 24 passengers were included in the list of 27 fatalities including four medical students from Queens University and an eighteen-month old boy who was killed with his mother. Another fatality was Captain Thomas Haughton who was married to Lady Moyola -  the future wife of the fifth and penultimate Northern Ireland Prime Minister James Chichester-Clark. She herself survived the crash though was seriously injured.

The board of inquiry concluded that the cause of the crash was pilot error - the aircraft had lost height too suddenly on approach to the runway and hit a pole which supported an approach light near the aerodrome. Further collisions followed with more poles and a van before it finally impacted against an equipment store.

The automobile accident in 1936 which involved the general public happened during the running of the International Tourist Trophy for motorcar road racing which was then a massively popular event in Northern Ireland due to the legal slack pertaining in the province to closing off roads. In 1928 a triangular course was constructed  between Dundonald, Newtownards, and Comber under the sponsorship of Harry Ferguson and Wallace McLeod. By the mid-thirties cars had become faster and faster on the circuit and it was during the 1936 event that a Riley car lost control on Church Street in Newtownards and crashed into the crowd on the pavement after hitting a lampost. Eight spectators were killed including two fifteen-year-old boys, 40 were injured and a decision was made to end racing on the course. Several of the victims are buried in Moville Cemetery in the town while two of the dead came from Worcester and Hull in England.

TT motor racing on public roads famously returned to Ulster at Dundrod County Antrim in 1950 - the track was half the size of its predecessor though the event still attracted such famous racing names as Juan Manuel Fangio and equally huge crowds. The September 1955 event in rainy conditions lead to the deaths of three drivers - Jim Mayers, William Smith and Richard Mainwaring. The race was won by Stirling Moss but it was then decided that the Northern Irish roads were too dangerous for the sport.

No memorial exists to the Nutts Corner disaster and a very sad BBC article on the incident notes that even the specific site of the crash would appear unknown today to the general public - the airport closed a decade after the deaths there and with the field being used in the main for car boot sales thereafter. A piece of propeller from the plane is kept in the Ulster Aviation Society Museum at Langford Lodge near Lough Neagh- the organisation campaigns for a permanent memorial and held a sixtieth anniversary service in 2013.

In turn a memorial on Conway Square in Newtownards honours the original racing circuit in County Down - both the winners and those who lost their lives in general at the event. There is furthermore a plaque in Comber at the famous Butchers Shop corner on Castle Street and another marking the start of the race beside the Quarry Inn pub near the Ulster Hospital. An online forum discussion from 2003 notes how chipped masonry from the event could still be seen at that time on the approach to Conway Square close to the accident site.

The disasters outlined above cast such deeply sobering reflections on how random factors of time and place can have such fateful consequences for the human condition. This is not dissimilar to the Isle of Man's 1974 Summerland disaster which affected so many holidaymakers from Ireland - a  good friend from secondary school was inside the building when the fire broke out while I can myself recall to this day several trips to the complex in the summers beforehand.

Historical focus of course dissipates through time in truly uncategorisable fashion - one tragedy is overwritten by another in the public consciousness and therefore even something as unprecedented as the 1953 Great Storm's repercussions in the North Channel, Eastern England and Holland would appear to be relatively unknown to so many people today in Britain and Ireland. In the case of the MV Princess Victoria - and also the air disaster which preceded it -the waves of madness and division which hit Ulster's shores sixteen and half years after that day of abject horror in the Irish Sea certainly compounded this instance of strange historical distancing even further.