Vacuum.

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

g{x `ÉÇxç

!

N

orthern Ireland is a numismatic’s dreamland. While the Euro is a currency which begrudgingly gives way to national difference, and then only on the reverse of its coins, Northern Ireland’s paper money exists in the leftovers of an early capitalist free-for-all. Our plethora of notes was for a long time a sign of the strangeness of the North in the UK, just as Scots could for years remind themselves of the Devolution yet-to-come when they forked out in Clydesdale Bank £50s.

Money has always been political – not just in the matter of who controls the macroeconomic system, but in the altogether less elevated question of who prints it or coins it, and what it looks like. Back in 1722 Ireland was in turmoil over Wood’s Halfpence. Mr Wood of Wolverhampton had been given royal approval to make coins for Irish use. This was not popular, mainly because the coins themselves were of inferior metal, and these were days when there was a suspicion about the ‘promise to pay the bearer on demand’ fallacy which is still on Bank of England notes.

Back then, coins almost represented actual wealth – you’d want to be able to melt them down and sell the metal for something like the face value of the coins themselves. Wood was pulling a fast one (having bribed his way to the contract), and those Irish people wealthy enough to have a halfpence or more in their pockets took it as a slight on their patriotism

Wood was pulling a fast one (having bribed his way to the contract), and those Irish people wealthy enough to have a halfpence or more in their pockets took it as a slight on their patriotism that inferior coins were being shipped from England. that inferior coins were being shipped from England. Wood, perhaps anticipating trouble, put a charmingly bad depiction of Hibernia with her harp on one side of the coin, in a preemptive attempt to calm the national waters.

Unfortunately his pride got the better of him, and he had ‘Wood’ inscribed on every coin, reminding everyone who used them of their provenance.

Today in Northern Ireland Hibernia is just one image in the cacophony of mixed metaphors, over-subtle images and kakhanded designs on Northern Irish notes. This visual strangeness makes Northern notes eminently collectable (there was apparently a big run on Northern Bank notes recently).

More interestingly it provides an insight into the sometimes surreal workings of the provincial capitalist mentality in Northern Ireland. Poor Hibernia, for example, has been the most restless of icons since Mr Wood stamped her akimbo on his coins. Over the years, Hibernia has been seated and has been standing. She has had her harp, and then had

it taken away. Sometimes she can see her harp but would have trouble reaching it. It all became too much for her in the 1970s when the Bank of Ireland had her standing tall and proud, facing directly out of her note, and leaning on her harp in a vaguely suggestive, femme fatale way. She might as well have been at the bar in a London night club, trying to persuade the temporary owner of the fiver she was on to buy her a drink. After this incarnation she seems to have been left exhausted, because the Bank of Ireland allowed her to sit down (albeit in a negligee) on its next issue of notes.

Hibernia is an image which is a blast from our collective past – she only makes sense as a heritage handed down from the days of Mr Wood. First Trust’s current notes make even less sense. For years now (previously as Provincial Bank of Ireland, and then AIB, and then the enigmatic First Trust) they’ve had faces, young and old, always slightly badly drawn, on the front of their notes – faces which occasionally call for a double-take, since they adopt the portrait pose of the Queen, or Charles Darwin, on a Bank of England note.

But they don’t seem to be anyone in particular.

This is uncannily brilliant as an ironic critique of the design of bank notes in the province – though irony may not be what the bank is striving for. The faces are nothing, though, compared to the reverse, where First Trust perseveres with an inherited design obsession with the Spanish Armada. The reverse of the £10 note has the Girona in full flight. Even more terrifyingly the £100 note shows the entire Armada, ships stretching off into the distance, reminding us of how different history could have been. Up until relatively recently there was a First Trust note which

pictured the Girona being unceremoniously smashed onto Ulster’s protective rocks. There is, presumably, no particular or arcane message here about the relationship between the Britishness of sterling as a currency, and the sponsors of the Armada. What’s more likely is that the whole joyful mess springs from the embedded memory of some oddball banknote designer who only just recalled seeing coins from the Girona’s hold at an impressionable age.

In comparison to First Trust, other banks in the North are blandly unadventurous. They even copy each other (though thankfully no bank other than Bank of Ireland has sucked up to Queen’s by putting the university building [minus its hideous library] on a fiver). In our

everyday transactions we circulate designs for banknotes which, in some form or other, have been knocking around since the beginning of this century. In 1918, for example, the Northern Bank had, as the centrepiece of its notes, a strained artistic vision, in which a handloom sat on a seashore. Behind it, and alarmingly close, was a vast sailing ship, which looked to be in some danger of coming ashore to crush the merry weaver. To the left was a plough (wisely abandoned by its owner). Shipbuilding; weaving; farming.

Simple enough to become a standard triptych representation of the Ulster economy. By 1930 the Ulster Bank had an only slightly different version of the same – except that the weaver had been joined on the shoreline by some kind of machine and two men working at it. The ship had edged closer to shore (paying no

She might as well have been at the bar in London night club, trying to persuade the temporary owner of the fiver she was on to buy her a drink attention to the example of the Girona). Then in the 1970s (of all decades) a sudden flourish of radicalism sweeps across these landscapes.

The content is exactly the same. But now capitalism is beginning to eat itself and the note-design leaves behind an early nineteenthcentury world of industrial idyll to join the cut and thrust of contemporary managerialsm. So the Northern Bank goes for a bold, strong font, the like of which had never been seen before.

Less adventurously the hand loom is mechanised (this is 1970), the ship is in the shipyard being built, and the embarrassingly outmoded plough can’t be seen for happily chewing cows.

In the same decade we reached the height of banknote design in the North. A montage of modernity, on the backside of the sexy Hibernia of the Bank of Ireland. A Shorts Brothers plane, a sleek passenger ship, flax on spindles. And all done with just a touch of American brashness. From this zenith it’s only a short step into the wonders (soon to be destroyed) of the Northern Bank’s celebration of the dull but worthy successes of Northern entrepreneurialism – Dunlop and Ferguson.

These eminences are but a preparation though, for the Northern Bank’s real stroke of capitalist hubris, when they replaced the Short Brothers plane with something altogether more ambitious; the Space Shuttle, on a sliver of plastic. I’m as much annoyed by Ulster provincialism as the next person, but space travel seems to me an excessive reaction – and they might remember what happened to the Girona. If Marx was right, and capitalism does carry within itself the seeds of its own demise, then let’s say thanks to the banks of Northern Ireland for showing us a glimpse of the incoherence which might one day make these pieces of paper, pieces of paper.

present themselves in the form of a café or other typical ‘friendly place’ so as to convince us that they are honest and ‘clean’ in their thinking. In psychoanalysis money is a trade payment for problem-solving, a reciprocity though it is still subject to the charlatans of every industry, willing to exploit the implicit rules of that particular economy. Yet beyond that aspect, psychoanalysis shows that money is symbolic and that how we pay our debts is just as important as what they are for. Karl Marx also showed us that money, as a thing is meaningless unless it is exchanged. Maybe this is also why the banks and building societies have dropped their avaricious image. The image of a bank as like a café or like a friend on the end of a telephone line eases us into the usage of money. ‘Money’ lives and works when it is exchanged, yet this always comes with these symbolic aspects as an unavoidable relation of the transaction.

In myths and fairytales, money often figures in relation to dirt. Money is ‘dirty’.

Like sex, money can be used in strange ways, although for Freud it is most often drawn into connection with shit as the infant’s first ‘gift’.

He connects the attitudes of individuals towards the economy of the potty and toilet to that of money. The economy of the infant, shit, can be taken up as the economy of money for the adult. Some are frugal and like to keep it with(in) them, others (less common) are generous and happy to let it go, while others want to control when it goes. But also, perhaps just as interesting here is that many of the case histories in Freud usually involve a symbolic ‘debt’. The ‘rat man’ case, for example, (in

Money Mania ‘M

oney talks’ it is often said. This is probably nowhere more true than in psychoanalysis. In classic Freudian therapy it is a tradition to pay the analyst in person before the analytic session.

The patient ‘pays’ in advance of speaking to the analyst about the things that trouble them.

Money enables the patient to talk ‘freely’, or this, at least, is the ideal principle for the relationship between patient and analyst. In contrast, free treatment tended to increase the resistance of the neurotic patient to his or her own illness.

There are many stories about money in psychoanalytic literature. Sander Ferenczi, a friend of Sigmund Freud, tells the story of a patient who came to him desperate for help saying, ‘Doctor, if you help me, I’ll give you every penny I possess’. The sober response Ferenczi gave, ‘I shall be satisfied with thirty Kronen an hour’ was met with a surprising response: ‘But isn’t that rather excessive?’ The apparent contradiction in the expression of the would be patient may sound to us like a joke, but that is because jokes universally draw out such contradictory behaviour and make their manifest content visible to all. Like jokes, our attitude towards money often reveals our attitude towards other things, as in the seemingly mean patient above.

Money, Freud argued a hundred years ago, is treated by ‘civilized peoples’ with an equal hypocrisy, prudery and contradictory manner as they do sexual matters. Although some of our manners towards sex have changed, no doubt many psychological characteristics revealed through money have not. The complexity of the symbolic exchange relation that can exist in any money transaction is made explicit through the case of one of patient of Freud’s, a government official. The patient in question always paid Freud in notes that were ‘clean and smooth’. One day Freud remarked to him that one could always tell a government official by the brand new notes

(with which they were paid) drawn from the State Treasury. To Freud’s astonishment, the patient replied that the notes were far from new and their clean and flat appearance was entirely due to the fact that he always ironed them out at home before using them. He went on to explain, with an air of pride, that this was a matter of conscience for him to do this.

The reason that he ironed them was because he did not wish to hand out any ‘dirty’ paper money, since he believed the notes ‘harboured all sorts of dangerous bacteria and might do some harm to the recipient’. The neurotic origin of this fastidious obsession appeared in a later session when Freud asked the patient about his sexual life. With an equal pride to his ironing, the patient told Freud how he used his social position to invite young women for a day’s excursion to the country. He would then arrange for them to miss the last train back and thus be obliged to stay the night in a

Now the banks have modernised their parsimonious image to compete with the building societies. They all increasingly present themselves in the form of a café or other typical ‘friendly place’ so as to convince us that they are honest and ‘clean’ in their thinking. country hotel where he would enter the room of the woman and masturbate her with his hand whilst she was vaguely asleep. When Freud challenged him on this behaviour, his ‘fiddling’ about with their genitals with his dirty hand, the man flew into a rage, claiming it had done them no harm. The man never came back for treatment again. For Freud, the obsessional activity of cleaning money was a displaced affect of the form of sexual gratification: the ‘dirtying’ of his hands with

by David Bate this illicit sexual act was symbolically ‘cleansed’ with the ironing of the money. The philanthropic motive of cleaning the money (prevention of others being contaminated by bacteria) served to cover over the guilt derived from the sexual motive.

Of course the man’s lack of knowledge of his own neurosis was governed by a kind of defence, which prevented the two things, cleaning of money and ‘dirty’ sex, being linked consciously. We can see here how the economy of money and how we use it can serve as an analogy for other economies. This is indeed anyway the function of money: to stand in as a substitute for another item. Money can mean more than just ‘money’. This is why money matters in psychoanalysis and is why paying the analyst is so important in psychoanalytic treatment. The payment stands for the commitment and it has to be made ‘now’. The value of money here is not only about money, but also about ‘money’ as a sign of exchange.

Historians of money argue that a trade economy is not the same as a market economy.

A trade economy presupposes reciprocity, a pig for a cow or five geese, or whatever, in which at the end there is no surplus left over. In a market – money based – economy such as ours, it is the exploitation of reciprocity that is the almost normal condition. It was precisely in order to distance themselves from such ideas that banks employed the architectural rhetoric of the mausoleum to demonstrate their disinvestment and disinterest in exploitation (the dead have no investments).

Now the banks have modernised their parsimonious image to compete with the building societies. They all increasingly

which a man was cured of his fear of rats burrowing into his anus) revolved around the man’s actual monetary debt to someone for his glasses, which was in turn unconsiously related to a debt his father had owed.

And the way we use money might tell us about someone’s general psychological charac teristics, for example whether we pay bills promptly or prefer to delay them. For Freud, a delay in paying can be explained in psychological terms as a kind of ‘habitual constipation’. Not only a monetary relationship, debt is also a psychological one too. Being in debt might be thought of as selfish, as wanting something for nothing, a gift with no reciprocity. This is why the money advertising industry has become so sinister, pretending something is given for nothing.

Advertising for money, loans, etc tend to use and project a clean image, with a crisp white background or bright lighting. If cleanliness is next to Godliness, the Devil is close to dirt and the ‘Devil’s Gold’ is indeed money as shit.

Some people get rid of it as soon as they have it; others hoard it, or give it to those they love.

(For the baby, shit is a ‘gift’ that can be given to others.)

When it comes to buying someone dinner, the gift is often taken to mean, as Marcel Mauss the anthropologist and author of the famous book The Gift (1925) once argued, the sign of a contract. It is not be surprising that money appears so fairly frequently in psychoanalysis because of the trouble it causes in personal and social contracts. After all, money talks, but in another sense than the usual one this is taken to mean.

usury

IWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWY

ÉÜ how banks used to be evil but aren’t any more

T

he taking of interest in either goods or money is found from the beginning of recorded history. The Code of Hammurabi (c1700BC) has many provisions relating to interest aiming at preventing unfair enforcement. In the Old Testament the taking of interest between fellow Israelites is prohibited, but is allowed with non Jews (Ex22.25, Dt 23.19/20, Lev 25.36/7, Ez 18.8, Ps.15.5). The Deuteronomists wanted full remission of debts every seven years (Dt 15), and the authors of Leviticus every fifty (Lev 25), in order to prevent debt slavery, a common feature of ancient Near Eastern civilizations.

Usury is not condemned as such in the New Testament, but Jesus put remission of debt at the heart of the prayer he taught his disciples, and condemned ruthless creditors (Mt 18). There are the severest warnings against riches (Mk10.25, Lk 6.24, 18.23, James 5), and money is called ‘the root of all evil’ (1 Tim 6.10). This helps to explain why many of the Church Fathers condemn usury outright on the ground that it contravenes Scripture and breaks all the laws of charity (Tertullian C.Marc 4.17; Cyprian Strom 2.18; Chrysostom Hom 57 on Matt; Nyssa Oratorio c Usuarios).

Augustine regards it as a crime (Augustine, On Ps 128). The Council of Nicea (325) ordered usurious clergy to be deposed, and the Council of Carthage (345) condemned its practice by laity. Later Councils reiterated this, the third Lateran Council (1179) denying usurers the sacrament or Christian burial, and the second Council of Lyons (1274) forbidding the letting of property to foreign usurers.

The economy of Europe began to grow in the eleventh century with greater political stability. As states became centralised, so rulers, and even popes, found the need to borrow money. Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, set the tone for much later teaching in repeating Aristotle’s condemnation of usury as unnatural. Money is made for exchange, and to lend it on interest is to sell what does not exist. This leads to inequality and is contrary to justice (S.Th 2.2 Qu 78, Art 1; Aristotle,

Though usury is sinful, however, it is not sinful to take a loan so long as this is done for a good cause. This prevarication enabled Jewish moneylenders to be simultaneously employed and vilified.

Politics 1.3,1.10) Though usury is sinful, however, it is not sinful to take a loan so long as this is done for a good cause (78 art 4). This prevarication enabled Jewish moneylenders to be simultaneously employed and vilified.

Developing economies soon made it difficult to exist without taking interest. In the fifteenth century Franciscan schemes to help the poor found it necessary to charge a small amount of interest to cover expenses. Despite this the

medieval canonists all condemn usury and place it alongside adultery, theft and murder. It was allowed only to cover actual losses, or the profit forgone by making the loan.

In 1524 Luther’s great tract On Trade and Usury appeals to the medieval tradition. Usury is ‘grossly contrary to God’s word, contrary to reason and every sense of justice, and springs from sheer wantonness and greed’. Twenty years later, however, and writing from the merchant city of Geneva, Calvin argued that the biblical texts relating to usury have to be understood in their context, that conditions have changed, and that restrictions on usury were too severe. Both Protestants and Catholics now distinguished between loans for

forces people into criminal practices, and the usury laws expose a useful class of people to unnecessary suffering and disgrace.

The principal justification of usury is pragmatic. Appeals are made to the tremendous advances achieved by capitalism.

These could not have happened, it is argued, without interest, which is necessary to attract investors to make their capital available.

Interest can be regarded as a charge on services, or a kind of danger money for putting capital at risk. Moral objections, however, remain cogent. According to the labour theory of value it is labour which creates value. Under the system of interest however, money accrues to the rich where no

From this standpoint we can see that the biblical opposition to interest was not some obscure shibboleth but represented the perception that usury kills – it chokes the life out of both individuals and communities and creates huge social divisions. Today even ‘bible based’ Christians simply do not see that there is anything wrong with interest. They noisily condemn homosexuality on the basis of a few texts of dubious interpretation but completely ignore the absolutely clear prohibition of interest. At the root of this blindness is the assumption that ‘modern life’ would be impossible without interest. Is this the case?

Interest free economies have been envisaged for many years. Proudhon (1809-65) wished to replace interest by worker cooperatives with their own banks. Micro credit banks like the Grameen bank manage to operate without the usurious rates of most the high street banks.

The truth is that interest is a tax in the interests of the rich. What is needed is some other form of the social regulation of money so that research and development needs are met and losses through inflation are addressed. A

Today even ‘bible based’ Christians simply do not see that there is anything wrong with interest. They noisily condemn homosexuality on the basis of a few texts of dubious interpretation but completely ignore the absolutely clear prohibition of interest. democratic society organised in this way is perfectly imaginable. What is in the way is money and power, crying ‘moral hazard’ when debt remission is demanded – a savage irony.

The reorganisation of economic life in this way is perhaps the most urgent task we have in the reimagining of democracy without which we all perish.

production and consumption, and argued that in the former case capital was productive.

Usury was neither contrary to Scripture nor to natural law, but must be used only under the strictest conditions so that the poor are not oppressed. Benedict XIV re-iterated scholastic warnings against usury in 1745, and usury laws remained on the statute books throughout Europe for another two centuries (in England until 1854), but fell everywhere into desuetude. Within Protestantism attacks on usury ceased and the market place came to be seen as a moral battlefield where the righteous could prove their mettle. When Bentham wrote his Defence of Usury in 1787 he felt no need to offer a moral defence of it.

Money he regarded as on a par with any other form of goods. When usury is not legalised it

labour is involved. Such earnings are therefore parasitic. More importantly, Aquinas’ contention that usury leads to the growth of inequality has been confirmed by careful contemporary studies. The present operations of interest lead to a systematic transfer of wealth from those who have less to those who have more. This occurs within Northern Hemisphere economies, but has reached catastrophic proportions in the relation between Southern Hemisphere economies and the IMF and the World Bank. Countries such as Brazil pay more on interest per annum than their entire Gross National Product. The present indebtedness of Third World countries is a major threat to world ecology, as the attempt to meet interest payments leads to the reckless consumption of natural resources.

Bibliography: T.F.Divine, Interest:an historical and analytical study Marquette Univ Press, Milwaukee 1959; N.L.Jones, God and the Moneylenders:Usury and the law in early modern England. Blackwells Oxford 1989; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae vol 38, ‘Injustice’, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London 1967; J.T.Noonan,The Scholastic Analysis of Usury Cambridge Mass, Harvard University Press; 1957; M.Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , London Allen & Unwin 1976; R.H.Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Penguin Harmondsworth 1964; Luther, On Trade and Usury Luther’s Works, Muhlenberg Press Philadelphia 1962 vol 45;B.N.Nelson,The Idea of Usury:From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood Princeton 1949; F.Green and B Sutcliffe, The Profit System, Penguin Harmondsworth 1987; S George,The Debt Boomerang Pluto, London 1992; J.Robertson Future Wealth Cassell London 1990.

BANKS 1 - GOD 0 Money proverbs A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it.

Money is round and rolls away.

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

A moneyless man goes fast through the market.

Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honour, make him pay cash.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

One law for the rich and another for the poor.

Penny wise and pound foolish.

The best things in life are free.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

A penny saved is a penny earned.

As the person who has health is young, so the person who owes nothing is rich.

Bad money drives out good.

Forgetting a debt does not pay it.

If you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves.

It is better to be born lucky than rich.

Lend your money and lose your friend.

Money doesn’t grow on trees.

Money is power.

Money is the root of all evil.

Money makes dogs dance.

Money isn't everything.

Money makes money.

Money talks.

Money often costs too much.

Time is money.

Money is money’s brother.

Money is the sinew of war.

Money makes the world go round.

T

he Qur’an is the holy text of Muslims, which they believe contains the word of God as revealed to the prophet Muhammed. Muslims must live according to the will of God, and so must follow the teachings contained in the Qur’an. The rules of Islamic law, known as Shari’ah in Arabic, are contained within the Qur’an, and are interpreted by Islamic scholars.

Usury, or the charging of interest in return for lending money, is forbidden in the Qur’an.

The result is that many Muslims feel unable to use conventional mortgage finance in order to buy a home, as of course conventional mortgage lenders make a profit through charging interest on loans made.

Trade and profit are not forbidden under Islam, so two methods of lending for the purpose of buying a home which allow the lender to make a profit have been developed and approved by Islamic scholars. A Murabaha mortgage is essentially a deferred payment sale. The lender buys the property from the seller, and then immediately sells it on at a mark up to the buyer. The difference between the price that the lender paid for the property, and the price that the buyer has agreed to pay for it, represents the profit element, and is spread over the course of several years. It equates in conventional finance terms to a long term fixed loan, as the full amount that the lender will recover is set at the outset.

Under an Ijarah mortgage, the lender buys a property at the request of the buyer. The buyer enters into a contract with the lender promising to buy the property at the end of the mortgage period, and the lender grants a tenancy to the buyer for the period of the mortgage. The buyer makes monthly payments to the lender, some of which represents repayment of capital, and the remainder of which is rental payment for the use of the property while it is owned by the lender. It is the rental payments which make up the profit element. The lender can increase the rent over time in line with inflation, for example, which better protects the lender’s investment. Once the buyer has paid off all of the capital borrowed, ownership of the property is then passed to the buyer and the payment of rent ceases.

These arrangements allow lenders to make a profit from lending. The Murabaha is the least popular type of loan with lenders, because the amount that is repaid is fixed, although the loan may be spread over many years. Conventional lenders dislike long term fixed rate loans for similar reasons – they do not provide enough flexibility to deal with changing circumstances over the course of a mortgage. The Ijara is the most commonly used model, as it allows lenders to increase the rental payments, and so increase the profit element during the course of the loan.

Using Islamic compliant finance to purchase a property means that three parties are involved in the transaction: the sale is from the seller to the lender and then on to the buyer (either immediately for a Murabaha arrangement, or possibly many years later

under Ijara). Conventional finance only involves two parties: the sale is directly from the seller to the buyer, although the lender provides the finance for the purchase to the buyer.

There are over 2 million Muslims in the UK, and it is thought that many would prefer to use Islamic compliant mortgages. In the past, those who were devout were either unable to buy properties unless family money could be provided, or they had to pay considerably more to use Islamic finance than a conventional mortgage. Stamp duty used to be required for every purchase, so a Muslim would have to pay stamp duty twice because two sales were involved in using an Islamic compliant mortgage. The stamp duty rules have now been changed, and so using an Islamic compliant mortgage is finally

The charging of interest is forbidden because it is unfair to the poor, leads to exploitation, and provides an unfair gain to lenders. However it seems that lenders have found a way to make sure that they are able to profit in just the same way as if conventional finance was used. becoming affordable for many more Muslims.

Many Muslims have of course bought properties using conventional finance, but they commonly feel that they have been forced to compromise their faith in order to buy a home.

The numbers of Muslims in this country now means that there is a sizeable market of potential borrowers that institutions willing to offer Islamic mortgages can tap into. When the cost of using an Islamic mortgage is compared to the cost of a conventional mortgage, it is generally true that the Islamic product is more expensive. There are extra costs involved in Islamic finance, as two sales means two sets of conveyancing documents, and also Islamic scholars have to be paid each year to check that the product and the institution are in accordance with Shari’ah law. But ‘rental’ payments, strangely enough, are generally equivalent to the payments a borrower would make to cover interest payments under a conventional mortgage, and can be increased in a way so as to mimic variable interest rates.

The charging of interest is forbidden because it is unfair to the poor, leads to exploitation, and provides an unfair gain to lenders. However it seems that lenders have found a way to make sure that they are able to profit in just the same way as if conventional finance was used.

The legal structure of the Ijara mortgage also means that the lender is in fact the owner of the property throughout the life of the mortgage, rather than the borrower. Islamic mortgages are yet to be tested in the courts in this country, and one of the main issues is what will happen if a borrower falls into

arrears and the lender seeks to repossess. The Ijara structure is likely to be treated simply as a tenancy. The basis on which tenancies can be ended is specified by law, but of course the law was not designed with a mortgage lender/homeowner type relationship in mind, rather it was a landlord/tenant relationship. If Ijara mortgage payments are simply treated as rent, then if the tenant falls into arrears, the landlord can bring possession proceedings on the basis of those arrears. If the rent arrears reach the specified level, then the landlord is entitled to possession and a court has very little discretion. This is in contrast to the situation for a borrower under a conventional mortgage, where a court can be asked to spread arrears over the remainder of the mortgage term, which has given many a borrower the chance to pay off arrears and remain in their home. So lenders offering an Ijara mortgage may well be in a much stronger legal position in relation to those defaulting on their mortgage, as the lender is already the owner of the property, and will be able to evict defaulters much more easily than if conventional finance were used.

It would be sadly ironic if a religious edict designed to protect the poor and vulnerable against abuse had the opposite result, and placed Muslim homeowners in a more vulnerable position than those borrowing conventionally. Can financial institutions, whose aim is to make a profit whether they be Islamic or not, be trusted with acting in the best interests of consumers? It is only too easy to imagine the marketing potential of being able to promote a product on the basis of its spiritual benefits, rather than having to rely merely upon its economic competitiveness, and yet the product seems to amount to an imitation of the effect of conventional finance.

It seems that the burden of ensuring fairness may have to fall on the shoulders of the Islamic scholars instead, but the question is whether knowledge of Shari’ah law will be enough to deal with the financial and legal complexities involved. Muslims may be denying themselves the benefit of consumer protection legislation by following their faith.

Is that really God’s will?

THE SUPER

RICH H

ow do you get rich? Obviously if I have to ask a question like that, I’ve clearly no big ideas myself. No garage crammed with half-built prototype successors of the Sinclair C5 and the like abuts my house.

No grand business plans for bottling the river down at Macnamee’s farm and selling it as Soldier’s Tears Spring Water lie weighted down by calculators and spectacles on the green leather of my bureau desktop. However, the most cursory check of any pub would confirm my suspicion that I’m not alone in this predicament. The truly rich are truly a breed apart. But how did they do it?

A look at a list of Northern Ireland’s richest citizens can tell us a thing or two about raking in the happy cabbage. Take, for example, Dr Allen McClay, third-wealthiest man in the land according to the Sunday Times Rich List’s most recent edition. Dr McClay apparently set himself on the road to super-richness when he ‘carved out a niche [unfortunate phrasing, I feel] in female medicines and aids’. I think that means he cleaned up (I’m at it myself now) in thrush cures and lube. Anyway, the first lesson is clear: find something people need. Don’t sell petrol-driven teapots when there are thousands of women clearing out the natural yoghurt section of the local Spar.

Dr McClay is also a good example of what seems to be a second lesson on becoming rich: keep a hold on your money. He is apparently ‘dismissive of wealth’ and lives in a bungalow.

Notwithstanding the high prevalence of this type of dwelling in Northern Ireland, this does seem slightly on the frugal side. Of course, it could be a bungalow covering the area of several car-parks, with more wings than Paul McCartney’s biggest fan, but it’s hard to believe that such a lack of a first floor is for any other reason than to save on stair carpet.

This idea has been confirmed by Dr McClay himself, who is quoted as saying, ‘The Lord gives nuts to those who have no teeth’. Of course, this may be something of a confused reference to the source of his wealth (although I don’t think toothpaste is in his portfolio of patent medicines), but it seems more likely to be some sort of commentary on his own less materialistic nature. Thus it would appear that the second rule of being rich, after getting rich, is staying rich.

As well as not spending any money on such fripperies as banisters, another way of staying rich is by minimising the amount you pay in tax. While various methods exist of

doing this, such as burying shoeboxes full of £50 notes in the woods around your bungalow, or paying vastly over the odds for a consignment of natural yoghurt, writing the amount off as a cost in the production of your anti-fungal dental preparation and getting half the money back as a kickback from the yoghurt manufacturer in cash (which you then bury in the woods around your bungalow), one way less likely to land you in trouble with the authorities (not to mention the local badger-baiting club) is to up sticks and move to a place where they pay less tax. You know the sort of place – usually some ghastly rock in the sea somewhere, packed with gnarled walnut-stained Yorkshiremen with Panama hats and orange wives hanging about golf clubs upping their claims of spending on any worthless, glittering tat, as long as it’s not tax.

The problem with moving somewhere like

some ghastly rock in the sea somewhere, packed with gnarled walnut-stained Yorkshiremen with Panama hats and orange wives hanging about golf clubs upping their claims of spending on any worthless, glittering tat, as long as it’s not tax. that, apart from the occupants, is that you always miss home. But once you’ve renounced the taxation regime of the UK for the appalling waste of hard-earned brass on politicians, skivers and ludicrously subsidised asylum-

sneaking lesbian scroungers, you might find it a bit difficult to pop back over there for anything more than the very occasional plastic surgery consultation without landing yourself with an Inland Revenue bill to sink the largest motor-yacht like a mile-across meteor.

With having to hand over half your wife’s weight in jewellery a strong possibility should the craving for your favourite childhood fish and chips render you momentarily reckless of the consequences, you may need a stronger strategic commitment to overcome the timeinconsistency of the tax exile decision. Number four on the NI rich list, Eddie Irvine, clearly found staying out of the country voluntarily too much of a problem for his willpower and decided to impose on himself a heavier punishment for coming home unnecessarily: at least, I can think of no other rational explanation for his being a fugitive from justice since last December, following his failure to appear before Bow Street magistrates after being caught speeding on a scooter in Hyde Park. It does seem an excessive way of ensuring one’s tax status, but apparently a warrant has been issued for Eddie’s arrest should he show up in the UK again – certainly a greater incentive to stay away than the possibility of an Inland Revenue clerk spotting him pictured in the ‘Party People’ pages of Hello! attending a charity polo match when he should have been drinking Bollinger out of a starlet’s bumcrack in a Cannes nightclub. So: move away but make sure you stay away.

Finally, of course, there’s always the hard way of getting rich. Work. Indeed, the richest man in Northern Ireland appears to have reached that position through what can only

be described as graft. Sean Quinn (estimated wealth £771 million) apparently started his business career by selling gravel from his family’s small farm. However, it’s pretty clear that this didn’t grow into Ireland’s secondlargest cement-manufacturing concern through letting the gravel sell itself. Whereas most farmers might have been content to let a sign saying ‘Gravel: Quarry your own’ do the work, Mr Quinn must have travelled the length and breadth of county Fermanagh convincing people of the need for coarse grit in their lives until the family farm stood at the bottom of a big hole in the ground. And I’ll bet Mrs Quinn was still complaining about the pitiful state of their own potholed and weedchoked road long after all the neighbours had smart gravel sweeps leading up to their homesteads.

So there we are – how to get onto the Sunday Times Northern Ireland Rich List: find something people want, work hard at selling it and don’t let anyone else get their hands on the proceeds. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to work on the promotional literature for my new anti-gravel-rash cream. I’m thinking of a mailshot on Guernsey – just think of all those manicured driveways.

MONEY

TROUBLES

M

oney is part of our everyday life, in our hands, pockets, wallets and bags, and down the back of our sofas. Its value is tied to the fortunes of the country: when the US army is having a good day in Iraq, the dollar surges, but when they’r e having a bad day, it drops in value. Its design is linked to the identity of a country and its view of the past and future. You can read a country’s history in its money.

WARS AND REVOLUTIONS War and money have been linked for thousands of years. One of the earliest motivations for minting coinage was to pay armies. In antiquity there was no concept of controlling the money supply, so a town or state would mint coins when there was a need to make payments. Some Roman armies minted coins as they moved around, and the armies they encountered in turn minted their own coins to pay the soldiers for their effort in resisting the expanding Roman Empire.

For the losing side in a war, things were serious, and saved-up coins and precious metals had to be protected from looting. One safe place to hide your cash was in the ground: the Roman equivalent of stuffing banknotes into your mattress. Some hoards were never retrieved by their owners, and are found by archaeologists and metal detectors.

The hoarding instinct hasn’t left us – new research by the Post Office revealed that 11 million Britons keep money hidden in their homes. A quarter of them keep the cash in their sock drawer, coffee jar, or under the mattress, and the total amount stashed away for a rainy day might be as much as £800 million.

War also brings shortages: of food, of course, but also of the metals normally used to make coins. To keep the money system going during wartime many different materials have been used instead, including porcelain, aluminium, plastic, cardboard, leather, and postage stamps. Armies and prisoner of war camps issue token and voucher currencies so that a money economy can operate even in these restricted circumstances.

After a war is over, a country’s economy might have to be rebuilt almost from scratch – starting with a new currency. In 2003 Iraq’s banknotes were redesigned, replacing portraits of Saddam Hussain with famous Iraqi people and monuments. Removing his face from the money is seen as an important way of removing Iraq from Saddam’s influence, but the new notes are also harder to counterfeit, giving a more secure basis to the restructuring of Iraq’s economy.

FAKES, FORGERIES AND IMITATIONS Only in a cashless society could there be no forgery, and even then there would probably be fraud and scams to create money unofficially. In World War II, the Nazis

planned Operation Bernhard, which was to counterfeit almost perfect pound notes. The idea was to destabilise the British economy, which would undermine the government and the war effort. But the counterfeiting of currencies as a war tactic wasn’t anything new: more than 500 years earlier Duke Galeazzo Sforza of Milan made fake Venetian coins to undermine the economy of the rival city-state.

Going further back, it seems as though as long as there have been coins, there have been fakes, forgeries and imitations. An ancient Greek coin might look like silver, but might in reality be a base-metal core with a thin layer of precious metal on the outside (if you don’t want to cut ancient coins in half to check their authenticity, you can tell whether they’re genuine by weighing them). Throughout history counterfeiting has been taken very

In World War II, the Nazis planned Operation Bernhard, which was to counterfeit almost perfect pound notes. The idea was to destabilise the British economy, which would undermine the government and the war effort. seriously, and often punished by death – by decapitation in Ming Dynasty China, or hanging in seventeenth-century England.

Problems for the world’s banking authorities increased as colour copiers became better and cheaper in the 1990s, so new techniques were needed to protect the value of paper banknotes and stop the counterfeiters.

The answer, it seems, might be to abandon paper money altogether. In 1988 The Reserve Bank of Australia introduced the world’s first plastic banknotes. Not only can they survive being accidentally put through the washing machine in your trouser pocket, they also have a clear window which makes them extremely difficult to fake. Impressed by the reduction in counterfeiting reported in Australia, more and more countries are looking at introducing the new banknotes.

Belfast banknote, issued following the partition of Ireland in 1921

POW voucher from UK

overprinted Brazilian revalued note

MAKING YOUR VOICE HEARD In August 2003 inflation in Zimbabwe was 426% – a rate that caused serious problems for the country’s money supply. The largest banknote is $1000, which can’t even buy a loaf of bread. To try and cope, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe issued large denomination bearer cheques which circulate alongside the banknotes. Earlier this year, the Reserve Bank announced that they are working towards replacing the bearer cheques and old banknotes next year. In the meantime, however, the bearer cheques have become a vehicle for protest, and opposition slogans have been appearing stamped onto them.

Some quote Bob Marley, who performed at

In the meantime, however, the bearer cheques have become a vehicle for protest, and opposition slogans have been appearing stamped onto them.

Belfast token

SMALL CHANGE AND HYPERINFLATION Assuming for a moment that all the money in circulation is genuine, and that there ar e supplies of whatever materials a country wants to make coins from, there can still be problems with the supply of coins and banknotes. At times when there is a shortage of coin, tokens were often issued, and these could be restricted to a particular town, or a particular business. In medieval Europe, and particularly in the eighteenth century when there was a shortage of small-denomination copper coins in Britain, there were tokens for use in the pub, at the workhouse, or for

buying groceries.

If there was not enough small change in eighteenth-century Britain, there was far too much of it in 1920s Germany. Hyperinflation meant that the value of the Mark spiralled downwards, and banknotes in larger and larger denominations were printed. Similar problems have faced other countries fighting hyperinflation: in Belarus in 1998 the largest denomination note was 500,000 Roubles, but by the end of 1999 a 5,000,000 Rouble note had been issued. Perhaps the largest denomination banknote ever issued was the 1946 Hungarian banknote worth 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 Pengo. Often, when inflation gets out of control, a currency is devalued to make things more manageable.

The old banknotes and coins might be replaced with new ones, but as a temporary measure they can be marked with their new values.

suffragette “Votes for Women” coin

Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations in 1980, and read ‘get up, stand up’. Others simply read ‘enough’, which the Zimbabwean government says links them to an underground group called ‘Enough is Enough’ which put similar messages on packets of condoms in 2004. Whoever was responsible, they hit upon a brilliant way of getting a message out to people in a dangerous country. Money is made to circulate, and messages stamped on it are seen by lots of people. And, unlike posters which can be taken down, or speakers who can be silenced, how could a country with billions of dollars in circulation withdraw them all in order to silence this protest?

A FOOL AND HIS MONEY ARE SOON PARTED

Uâç aÉã j{|Äx fàÉv~á _táàA

N

o matter how much or how little money you happen to have, there will always be a heaving, disorderly queue of people eager to prise it from your grasp by whatever means possible. Recent rapid advances in communications technology have ensured that even traditionally backward, insular places (such as Azerbaijan and Lisburn) are no longer immune from changing global structures. All you need is access to an internet café and you can instantly become a scammer or scam victim. Scammers know that once you dangle the carrot of wealth in front of many people, their powers of rationale become impaired by greed, with the result that desires become reality, wishes become facts, and the cautious become idiots.

The oldest and most enduring method of parting a fool from their money is the pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes have been around for at least a century in various forms, the earliest of which involved a chain letter distributed with a list of names on it. The recipient was told to send a specified amount of money to the person or people at the top of the list then move all the others up one place.

They would then be told to add their own name to the bottom of the list and forward it on to as many potential recruits as possible in the hope of eventually receiving money from a large number of other participants. The success of such ventures lies in the exponential growth of new members to layer the pyramid.

In theory, each recruit’s name will eventually be at the top of millions of lists whereby they will receive millions of pounds, but unfortunately the earth’s population is exceeded within a relatively small number of iterations, rendering the chances of success virtually impossible. This means that the people who started the scheme and those who got in very early will walk away with a lot of money once they scheme collapses (which it inevitably will once the base is no longer strong enough to support the upper structure), while everyone else loses their investment.

It is the nature of the deception involved in the promise of something which is mathematically impossible that means pyramid schemes are illegal in most countries, although they still operate in various guises.

Some of the most notorious pyramid schemes occurred during the 1990’s after the fall of the Eastern bloc, snaring populations in countries where free market financial experience was lacking. In Russia the MMM ‘investment fund’ tricked people into investing their life savings by promising them huge returns, but the whole scheme was being funded only by new investors and eventually the pyramid collapsed. A similar story occurred in Romania with the Caritas scheme, which several million people bought into, and in Albania in 1997, where investors poured an estimated $1 billion (43% of the country’s GDP) into various pyramid schemes. Currently, the internet facilitates a massive number of pyramid

schemes, one of which the UK Government recently issued a warning over. Companies such as Gratis Internet are using a series of websites to promote ‘free’ offers for products such as iPods and flat-screen TV’s, although after paying £30 to join a list (surely this contradicts the definition of ‘free’ to begin with?) you must wait to move to the top, which could take a considerable amount of time.

The most widespread scam currently in circulation is known as the Nigerian 419 email scam, named after the section of Nigeria’s legal code which prohibits fraud. There ar e many elaborate variations on these hoaxes but the basic ingredients are always the same; an email purporting to be from an official representing an African government, bank or monarchy requests assistance from you in urgently siphoning millions of pounds out of the country (eg. ‘I am Madu Sese Seko the son of the former president of Zaire ... the family has empowered me to seek for any honest and God fearing individual who will assist in transferring the huge amount of US$45 million to a less tax account overseas. ...’), for which you will be handsomely rewarded. For those who reply, here begins a barrage of pressing and persuasive correspondence requesting bank details, contact numbers and passport photocopies to ‘speed up the transaction’. The victim is then asked to send money for processing fees (usually several thousand pounds) and if they do so all kinds of complications arise which require the sending

It is astonishing how many people actually fall for this rather ham-fisted trick, with police estimating that it cons UK citizens out of £150m a year of more money to rectify. All of this is underpinned by the promise that millions of pounds are just around the corner, whereas in reality of course there is no such money. It is astonishing how many people actually fall for this rather ham-fisted trick, with police estimating that it cons UK citizens out of £150m a year. Sometimes individuals lose tens of thousands of pounds in savings, sometimes they are kidnapped and held for ransom after travelling to meet their ‘partner’ in the transaction (Amsterdam is a popular location used by the scammers for this end), and several murders have also been linked to the fraud.

An interesting subculture which has grown up around the 419 phenomenon is that of ‘scambaiting’. There are several websites (such as 419eater.com) dedicated to not only disrupting the criminals’ plans and wasting their time, but making them look as stupid as possible in the process. In a typical scenario the scambaiter will reply to the 419 email expressing an interest in the offer and exuding

gullibility. It is actually something of an inversion of the way in which the scam itself operates on victims; by exploiting their greed.

Once the scammer senses that money is imminent their judgement becomes clouded and they are suddenly willing to enter into the most bizarre agreements in order to get it, often with entertaining results. Upon receiving an urgent request from ‘Prince Joe Eboh’, one scambaiter claimed that he could only do business with people of his own denomination, The Holy Order of The Red Painted Breast, and sent a digitally altered holiday photograph as guidance for the ‘initiation ceremony’. Sure enough, the ‘Prince’ replied declaring himself a member of the

In a bizarre twist, police have claimed that the latest 419 letter doing the rounds could actually be a real request for assistance in criminal activity and have urged people not to respond, even in baiting the perpetrators.

Below is a transcript of the letter:

Order with an attached photograph of himself in his newly sanctified state, and requesting £18,000 in processing fees. A variation on this for a different scammer was The Church of Fish, Bread and Wine in which new followers had to provide a photograph of themselves with a loaf of bread on their head and holding a large fish in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. Occasionally, fake meetings are set up whereby the eager scammer is duped into turning up several times to airports and hotels (probably with the intention of kidnapping his victim) only to find that there is no-one there.

One scambaiter caught his would-be business partners on a webcam in downtown Amsterdam after posing through emails as a gullible old lady with a small, ugly dog. When the scammer finally twigs as to what is happening a tirade of abuse in broken English usually follows (‘You are nothing but poor american that feeds only on burger, a cheap harlot that will die of heart attack eating burger. We are repariting [sic] our moneys you stole from our forefathers you took on slave.

We are very much angry with you foolish white pigs’).

he and his party colleagues are being persecuted by the occupiers of our country for their political and religious beliefs.

My husband and his party colleagues have accumulated party funds in the region of £26 million Stg which they wish to relocate outside of the country URGENTLY. Please provide to me your personal banking details, account nos, sort codes etc and I will arrange for the money to be placed in your account.

In return for this service we will give to you 20% of the overall funds. Should you wish to discuss this proposal further I can be contacted C/o Frankie Ramseys, William Street, Derry - (I’m the one that pours the tae and butters the bread) Love Bernie XXX’

‘Hello, my name is Bernie McGuinness, your name has been given to me by a reliable mutual acquaintance who has advised me that you may be able to be of assistance to me in a matter of business.

Our county has been occupied by a foreign power.

My husband Martin is a former education minister in the government of our country,

A leading intelligence figure stated ‘The matter is under investigation, but usually with this sort of thing, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. You don’t get something for nothing in this life, apart from The Vacuum’.

ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS

A

s the great ship of the Good Friday Agreement ploughs rather gracefully into the harbour wall, we can begin to cast about for a symbol of the last fifteen years.

For me it is not Hume, Trimble and Bono impersonating Jamaicans in the Waterfront Hall, not sharp suited PSNI lads and lasses being hectored by Barbre De Bruin, or indeed Tony Blair getting felt up by history. No, when the story gets told the leading symbol will be the auditor’s report, buried deep within your local library. As the good people of Iraq will testify, democracy ain’t cheap.

This however is not a mock disgusted tirade about the IRAnicking white goods from Makro. Rather this is an account of the massive amount of clams, bones or what have you, expended in the pursuit of what appears to be a busted flush.

The elected politicians of the Northern Ireland Assembly have cost a lot money. Each MLAstarted out at £29,000 salary which was later raised to £41,000. Added to this is an allowance of £12,000 for each constituency office. Also factored in should be travel expenses, bringing us to a grand, if rough, total of £6 million per year for merely the pay and expenses of the MLA’s. That amounts to around £40million to feed and clothe our politicians for five years.

This is just the start of the spending.

Staffing the executive, the eleven ministerial departments and their staff, the six

implementation bodies for North-South partnerships and the short-lived Civic Forum.

Add to that, tables, maintenance, landscaping, paper, computers, chad counters, it all takes money.

That’s the basics of democracy, what about the dressing? The interior of the Stormont debating chamber which has been so underused in recent years was for example, dressed in Damask linen from Sweden. A nice

local democracy has always cost a fortune in this country, since its inception in the early 1920s. A parliament building was created as an obvious symbol of the viability of Northern Ireland as a political entity, with the original plans for the building imagining a massive dome atop the Palladian building that we know today touch, but undoubtedly an expensive one. A television studio was built in the basement of Stormont. Armies of cleaners, unparalleled security for a small assembly, car pools, subsidised catering (may I recommend the steak, when dining at our parliament?) It is

estimated (because no-one can agree on a final figure) that the running cost of the Northern Ireland Assembly is somewhere around the £50million mark, per year.

However, local democracy has always cost a fortune in this country, since its inception in the early 1920s. A parliament building was created as an obvious symbol of the viability of Northern Ireland as a political entity, with the original plans for the building imagining a massive dome atop the Palladian building that we know today. This was only jettisoned after protracted negotiations with the British government who objected to the astronomical cost of £3 million which the treasury was to pay for entirely. To take a gauge of how much this was in 1925, the renovations of Stormont that took place in 1994 was £2.5m, after 70 years of inflation.

In the end the British haggled Lord Craigavon’s government down to Stormont costing an immodest £2m, and our parliament was opened in 1932 by a famously grumpy Prince of Wales. The building has therefore been functioning for 73 years. In that time it has had a number of different democratic guises. The first was the government of Northern Ireland, from 1921 – 72. Then the Sunningdale Parliament, falling in 1974. The Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention existed from 1975 to 1976 and the Northern Ireland Assembly (Mark 1) sat intermittently from 1982 to 1986. Twelve years later, after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, we have the Northern Ireland Assembly (Mark 2).

We have therefore had five attempts at representative democracy in Northern Ireland, each one of which has failed, each one ensuring a decent wage for Ian Paisley but delivering very little else.

After this litany of expensive failures, perhaps it is time to take stock of the psychological damage that this constant circus of representative politics as we have enjoyed it, is doing to us. If you speak to people who have worked in Stormont they talk of the early energy and excitement that was engendered by seeing local issues being represented in an assembly with power to effect change society.

Their experience however has changed from a hopeful one to one of energy being wasted as they have been shuffled about by the civil service and been instructed to ‘skill up’ by their superiors to prepare for the job market. They now make cynical jokes about what a lovely clubhouse Stormont would make, if it took its place amongst the great golf-courses of the world.

The sadness of seeing such potential being pissed away mirrors the wasted monetary investment that has been pumped into assemblies, parliaments and conventions here simply to be jacked in. Staff from within the Assembly have told me that workers there ‘invested their desire for change in the job’, and the same could be said of Northern Irish society itself.

Like Karen Carpenter, perhaps we’ll say ‘goodbye to love’ the next time it comes acalling. Because if another experiment hits the rocks, could we ever expect representative democracy to flourish here? And if we did try again, who’s going to put their hand in their pocket to cover the tab?

The point is that local democracy is a worth-while project, but until we reject the trappings of grandeur, and remember that at its heart democracy is not fancy wallpaper, nor high wages, but the ability to negotiate for the betterment of society. Perhaps if it is attempted, it will be a grass roots movement that eschews lavish palaces in favour of draughty village halls, with the first item on the agenda not whether to have the foie gras or the steak, but ‘kettles on, who brought biscuits?’

rewards The highway robber Dick Turpin started with a reward of £50 in 1735 which rose to £200 by the time he had become a double murderer.

One of his victims was trying to claim the reward at the time. Ned Kelly’s gang attracted a reward of $8,000. This was enough to tempt one of their early associates to turn informer.

The gang promptly executed him.

After fifteen years of robbery and murder Jesse James attracted a $10,000 reward in 1881, James’s fellow robbers Robert and Charlie Ford brought James to their home and shot him in the back of his head. Billy the Kid met a similar fate at the hands of Sheriff Pat Garrett soon after a ‘Wanted’ poster announced $500 for his head.

Companies, newspapers and individuals offer rewards in response to high profile crimes. £150,000 was offered for information leading to the arrest of the killer of Sarah Payne. The Daily Mail offered £10,000 for information about those responsible for brutal attacks on horses and Microsoft offered $250,000 for information about the author of the computer virus MyDoom.

The really big rewards however are offered for people of political consequence. $100,000 was offered for the killer of President Lincoln in 1865. Today a number of politicians and terrorists attract the biggest offers of money.

These have included $5 million for former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and other senior officials indicted for war crimes; $2 million in the Oklahoma City bombing, $1 million still available for Eric Rudolph, wanted for the 1996 Olympics bombing and other crimes; $1 million for Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and $1 million for Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega.

The ‘war on terror’ and its associated war in Iraq has generated the biggest rewards of all, including a $30 million reward – $15 million each, for Uday and Qusay Hussein and a $25 million bounty on their father Saddam; $25 million for Abu Musab alZarqawi, the accused terrorist mastermind in Iraq and $25 million for Osama bin Laden which The State Department is currently considering doubling to $50 million, making him the most wanted man ever.

THE RAID You’ve been reading a lot of stuff lately about ‘Crime don’t pay.’ Don’t be a sucker. That’s for yaps and small-timers on shoestrings. Not for people like us. This is the story of the twenty-six million Northern Bank owl swoop – the inside job, the weak sister: the pushover – and how it enriched us all.

THE HEIST At dark o’clock on Sunday, December 19th 2004, a ten-guy gang, armed to their smokestained ivories with Kalashnikovs and parceltape bracelets, went to Poleglass and Loughinisland and in turn interned the families of two Northern Bank officials. The bankers were ordered to go to work the following day to ply as usual their usurious trade in the concrete bowels of their potbellied piggy bank business, and pretend all the while that nothing unusual was going on, or else their families would end up residing in a place considered by some to be even worse than Poleglass: a cemetery. After the bank’s winding-up time, while their colleagues wound down at home, the two familyransomed officials wound up working late.

Their job was to enter the Northern’s vault and fill plastic bindles with lovely bank spinach. They then took this money, disguised cunningly as rubbish, out past the bank’s security guards. An insider denied that the security guards were in fact blind, deaf-mute Siamese twins sporting lobotomy scars, asleep on the job in a square-tired play-dough wheelchair, who couldn’t guard a condom at a Star Trek convention.

Outside the bank, the robbers, masquerading inconspicuously as twilight binmen in wigs and baseball caps, loaded the haul onto their getaway gravytrain, but they soon realised that they didn’t have adequate transport to shift all the spoils: they had room only for a meagre £26 million. They tried to take the rest of the stash (alleged to include the philosopher’s stone, the arc of the covenant, the salmon of knowledge and two cartons of unicorn milk) on a citybus, but the bus driver, adhering strictly to his professional code of conduct, told them to ‘get the fuck off my bus’ because he didn’t have change of a twenty, or a pound, and he wasn’t paid to offer a reliable and reasonable service to customers who pay twice through the nose in taxes (left nostril) and fares (right nostril). The robbers also considered a black taxi, but the minimum fare is £30 million, and they’d have to share the cab with seventeen other people, variously drunk, incontinent and copulating, and travel for six long days and nights via the far ends of Hyperbole Avenue and Exaggeration Parade.

THE FALLOUT At first, everyone laughed with Lady Justice at the financial loss suffered by an international conglomerate of stupid bankers. But a concerned politician, reformed bedwetter Darwin Pinkpanther MLA(whose golf handicap is five and improving daily), realised that there might be political capital to be

earned. He contacted Chief Constable Hugh Orde, who had ‘just put some chicken Kiev in the oven’ when he heard the news after an arduous day’s work at his office in Ian Paisley’s pocket, to ask if the heist could be pinned on Sinn Fein/IRA. The Chief Constable duly complied, but republicans have been busy denying responsibility ever since and have challenged anyone to come up with evidence linking them to the larceny. The IMC – the Independent Monitoring Commission, a commission which monitors independently the activities of paramilitaries – also blamed Sinn Fein/IRAin its investigation of the robbery, but it too refused to publish its evidence. However, one member of the IMC, Cllr Curlywurly Rubiks Pube, has – after being bribed by The Vacuum with a £50 note purchased in South Armagh for ten euro – ratted like a stool pigeon which sings like a canary squealing like a pig letting a whistleblowing cat out of a bag. Here, exclusively, is the IMC’s dossier of evidence:

g

g

g

The robbers were organised, efficient, sophisticated and intelligent: loyalist involvement is thus ruled out.

If, as was the case with the training of Marxist guerrillas in Columbia and gunrunning in Florida, the IRAdeny something, then the denial is definitely false. When the IRAwas asked if it ever issues false denials, a spokesman said ‘no’, to which the IMC replied ‘exactly.’

g

The robbers were known to be wearing wigs, and republicans are notoriously bald: Joe Cahill; Caoimhghin O Caolain; Alex Maskey; Danny Morrison; Martin Meehan; and P. O’Neill, who won’t even show his baldy head for shame. Gerry Adams is also believed

by British intelligence to hide his baldness, and his face, with a wig and false beard fashioned from the fruit of a flower, a flower which grows from the bodily hair of a republican martyr dipped in rooting powder and implanted in blood-soaked soil: the Padraig Pearse Pube Plant, which flourishes in County Westmeath, according to MI6 surveillance.

One of the wig-wearing Fenians was spotted by a traffic warden just before the getaway. After collaborating with the police, he arrived at the following description:

THE SUSPECTS Eyes: Green, far part Skin: White, Eucharist-pale where untattooed Hair: Gold, where grown Team: Celtic Eyebrows: One, continuous Age: Post-juvie Height: Of impudence Weight: Not pulled Shoulder: Not to the wheel Lip: Service paid to DLA Instep: With the IRA Arms: Undecommissioned Features: Heavily, at Army Council meetings Heart: Land, Republican, South Armagh Leg: None to stand on Hand: Kept close to chest Chest: Obscured by hand Waist: Deep, in shit Cheek: Plenty given Tongue: In cheek Toes: Stepped on Chin: Up Back: Also up Wrists: Slapped Thigh: Also slapped

Money Words

Neck: Head: Brow: Knuckles: Ears: Knee: Nose: Feet: Hip: Stomach: Gait: Calves: Bum: Heel: Fingers: Cock:

Brass Strong Beaten Wrapped Bashed Jerked Cocked Dragged Flask Pumped Crasher Rustled Rap Down at In pies Sure

This evidence was deemed of such ironclad importance that, along with evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, it was stored in a safe, the contents of which were considered to be at risk in the contemporary bean-spilling environment; thus, they were transported back in time by the British government – who have always been good at manipulating history for their own ends – and stored in a top-secret, high-security spatio-temporal location: the Northern Bank’s vault just prior to the robbery. The fact that Sinn Fein/IRAcomplain that evidence against them is now missing only serves to condemn them further: there is no evidence at present because they stole the evidence, and they would look less guilty if they pretended not to know that no-one has any evidence against them. But since they know there is no evidence, they must have stolen it themselves: QED they are guilty.

THE RESOLUTION Everything is always someone else’s fault, as psychotherapists from Freud to Trisha have been or are aware. In Northern Ireland, when anything goes wrong, each side of our irredeemably and eternally divided community immediately blames the other side. Thus, in the case of the robbery, each side blames the other: the Brito-unionists blame Sinn Fein; Sinn Fein blames a Brito-unionist conspiracy. Chief Constable Hugh Orde – who, being English, doesn’t usually care much about Northern Ireland – recently had a meeting with local psychologists in order to get to grips with this quintessentially local phenomenon of ‘whataboutery.’

Professor Mervin Complex, of Queen’s University, explained to the Chief Constable that: –– ‘every time a republican is challenged by a unionist on some point or other, he tries to

shift the blame by saying “but what about…”, and then proceeds to shift attention and blame by describing some wrongdoing committed by unionists.’

–– ‘Ah, but every time a unionist is challenged by a republican on some point or other, he tries to shift the blame by saying “but what about…”, and then proceeds to shift attention and blame by describing some wrongdoing committed by republicans’ explained Professor Fintan Syndrome of The Gaeltacht Institute for Farther and Higher Indoctrination.

–– ‘I call it Fintan Syndrome’ said Mervin Complex.

–– ‘I call it Mervin Complex’ said Fintan Syndrome.

So nothing is ever anyone’s fault: each side is innocent because some prior event is responsible. The burden of blame is thus shifted conveniently backwards through history (the robbery, the Troubles, seditionists backed by the Irish government, the civil rights movement, the famine, the plantation of Ulster, Henry II) so that eventually one starts blaming Vikings, Picts, Romans, adventurous hominids, mastodons, dinosaurs, primordial soup and, eventually, infinitely dense matter at the dawn of time (the skulls of local politicians are only almost infinitely dense).

The Chief Constable realised immediately that the person behind it all – the person ultimately responsible for the robbery, the Troubles, the interminable Irish problem – must be He who telephoned the coded warning to a celestial newsroom (at Pie in the Sky News) prior to the big bang, 15 minutes before the beginning of time: Hugh Orde thus fingered and arrested God. The Almighty was placed in custody and incarcerated in Johnny

Adair’s former prison cell, which was comfy and spacious enough even for an omnipresent being, although God did have a little trouble moving Adair’s dumbbells 100 yards from beside the jacuzzi over to the gym beside the omniplex. The omniscient alliance of Bob ‘I’m a barrister, you know’ McCartney, MLA, and Robert ‘Ho Chi’ Kilroy-Silk, MEP, twat, ran the universe while God was in custody.

But with God in prison, it seemed all hope was lost. Satan was raising an army of conscienceless, willing fools to invade Iran and North Korea, and, locally, the odds on a lasting peace agreement still seemed infinitely long.

Then Sinn Fein’s Mahatma Gaddafi and Cinderella Minority underwent a joint lightbulb epiphany: if the odds on an agreement are one in infinity, then placing the stolen £26 million – or, indeed, any amount of money – on the outcome of a peace deal would pay off an infinite amount of money, should the bet come off.

Since their vengeful God was safely behind bars, local evangelical Protestants no longer had a problem with gambling, and – after the stolen money turned up in a massive sock in Daphne Trimble’s marsupial pouch – they even agreed to place the bet themselves, and on a Sunday, too. With money, the root of all evil, at stake, everyone agreed eagerly to a permanent peace pact, and an infinite amount of money was won, which was enough to bail out God until He was found entirely innocent in an enquiry led by Lords Widgery and Hutton. There was also enough money left to buy an infinite argosy of Argos jewellery to pay off, weigh down, and distract with magpies, any remaining dissident groups.

Malfeasance pays.

a bob (shilling) a tanner (sixpence) a quid (£1) a squid (£1) nicker (£1) carpet (£3) fiver (£5) tenner (£10) score (£20) pony (£25), macaroni (£25) (rhyming slang for pony) ton (£100) monkey (£500) grand (£1,000) a K (£1,000) archer (£2,000) from the Jeffrey Archer court case in which he was alleged to have bribed call-girl Monica Coughlan with this amount. marigold (£1,000,000) moolah filty lucre rhino spondulicks lolly brass dosh doubloons mazuma oscar pap plaster rivets scratch spondulicks beer tokens bacon (as in bring home), bread (rhyming slang, bread and honey) dough poppy (rhyming slang, poppy red = bread) green (rhyming slang greengages = wages) wad wedge cash bling loot shrapnel readies wonga

MY BEEF Arts Extra Martin Mooney Arts Extra? Don’t get me started. I’ve vented so much of it on that show, it’s a wonder I’ve any spleen left. Once it was Thought for the Day’s Christianity for Dummies that got me spitting, out from the duvet faster than you can say ‘integrated education’. But Arts Extra?

BBC NI doesn’t do arts coverage. But if they did it’d probably be the worst arts coverage in the world. Arts Extra is actually a nightlife listings magazine without the restaurant reviews (though I can just imagine an Arts Extra restaurant review: ‘Ian, what did you think of the fish?’ ‘Well, it was fish-tasting, and the oblongs of deep-fried potato were a lively accompaniment.’) Arts Extra (notice that it’s almost an anagram of ‘Trex-arsed’) is an entertainments guide for people who’ve noticed that there’s fuck-all on the radio.

The wee girl who saw Hermione Gingold asked, ‘Mummy, what is that lady for?’ Well, what is Arts Extra for? It keeps Ian Hill and the Merediths in Creme Eggs, and I’d rather they trousered the cash than Hugo Duncan.

But is it for heartfelt and well-thought-out responses to new books or plays or movies? Is it bollocks. Arts Extra exists so that arts

the arts, because that’d be elitist. The researchers at Arts Extra (waiting to be headhunted by David Dunseith) grasp at these straws, as do ACNI bean-counters desperate for any quantifiable evidence that anybody actually gives a toss. Everybody ticks their

Arts marketers, or smarketers, fire press releases so dumbed-down and upbeat they make Thought for the Day sound like Heidegger. Of course they can’t aim this drivel at anyone who’s actually interested in any of the arts, because that’d be elitist. boxes, and the licence fee payer has his pockets picked.

Whatever the smarketers may think, it’s never put a single bum on a theatre seat, or sent a birthday book token into Waterstones.

Picture the scene: generic arts fan gets home from her work and puts the tea on. Suddenly, it’s half six, and there’s a show at OMAC in thirty minutes. ‘Drop everything! Ex-Tarts says some bloke called Brecht combines ideas and

of On Eagle’s Wing, and On Eagle’s Wing is greeted with fanfares bloody Sophocles wouldn’t get if he came back from the dead with a new play called The History of the Troubles According to Medea. The smarketers, desperate for the merest sniff of mass audience arse, programme what Arts Extra or its shallow gene pool of guest critics praise.

And if it treats the performing arts badly, cover your ears if you like books. It makes Richard and Judy sound like Jean-Paul and Simone. It patronises its listeners (those of us who aren’t smarketers), embarrasses its guests, and pretty much ignores or pimps the writers it deigns to acknowledge. If they really think we’re as illiterate a bunch of numpties as they seem to, why do they go on air at all?

Look, there’s really no personal animus here. Arts Extra’s been kind enough in the past to mention things I’ve had a hand in, and not trivialised them any more than the work of the next humiliated soul with a book or gig or festival to plug. I’ve no axe to grind against BBC NI, who produce the best current affairs broadcasting this side of C4 News in its miners’ strike heyday. But Rat Eaters (ooh, almost!) really is an ineffable piece of shite, broadcast five nights a week when I’m trying to eat my dinner.

Guys, get it into your heads, you and the smarketers. There’s no such thing as The Arts.

No-one is interested in all of the disparate forms you lazily lump together. I mean, dance, for Christ’s sake! On the radio! There isn’t a big homogenous ‘arts sector’ (a hateful phrase borrowed from the police, I think), no audience for everything, however catholic our tastes (the City Councillor at the back can sit down, it’s a lower case c).

We’re just not as cultured as you want us to be, or as you think you are yourself. And it’s not elitist to say so. It’s elitist to pump out any old guff because you know we’ve nowhere else to turn. It’s an abuse of the electromagnetic spectrum (or, if you’re listening on the internet, you’re a bigger masochist than I am).

It’s noise pollution. White noise pollution.

Take it off the air. Replace it with radio ventriloquism or an extended Thought for the Day. In Ulster Scots.

Or just silence.

[Under-reviewed poet and occasional theatre writer Martin Mooney lives in secure accommodation in Co Antrim, and has strictly limited access to the media.)

marketing officers (and why is everybody an officer these days? Are we at war?) can justify their grants with a toothless soundbite on Arts Extra (a hairs-breadth off ‘sex trader’) and call it audience development. Does the phrase ‘circle jerk’ mean anything to anyone?

Arts marketers, or smarketers, fire press releases so dumbed-down and upbeat they make Thought for the Day sound like Heidegger. Of course they can’t aim this drivel at anyone who’s actually interested in any of

imagination!’

Let’s face it, Arts Extra (Tex Sartre?) isn’t just a waste of money, it’s theft. At least Dick Turpin wore a flipping mask.

Oh look, who cares? (Apart from you, clearly—Ed.) Well, the farrago of relentless puffery, the bonfire of the banalities that is Arts Extra (‘X-rate star’ to you and me) trivialises and demeans what it pretends to support. A play by Brecht gets treated with no more seriousness than an am-dram production

assassinations Prices for contract killings are not openly quoted and assassins cannot publicly advertise their services. An American High school student offered $20 on his website for someone to kill a teacher. No one took him up on his unrealistic offer and the student was expelled.

The going rate for a killing seems to be between £10,000 and £25,000. The property tycoon Nicholas van Hoogstraten, in his recent trial at the Old Bailey ridiculed allegations he organised the contract killing of a business rival for £7,000 as ‘laughable’. The multi-millionaire told the court that contract killers in Belmarsh prison said the asking price was between £20,000 and £25,000.

The killers in Belmarsh would appear to be asking over the odds judging by other cases.

Kalvinder Dosanjh, 51, tried to hire an assassin because he believed his daughter, Sanjit, 24, had brought disgrace on his family by running away with Temple Jazac. He planned to have Malcolm Calver, whom he wrongly believed to be Mr Jazac's father, shot dead, in the hope that the couple would come out of hiding attend his funeral, where they could be targeted. It was revealed in court that he promised to pay £10,000 for each killing.

Meanwhile in America Amr Mohsen, a former Chief Executive, was charged with trying to recruit an assassin to murder U.S. District Judge William Alsup. The authorities allege he began an effort to hire an assassin to arrange a ‘funeral’ for Alsup. When told it might cost $25,000 to kill a federal judge, Mohsen tried to lower the price to $10,000, according to a federal indictment.

Trying to drive a hard bargain with your hitman can backfire as in the case of a Russian woman who offered a taxi driver $15,000 to kill her boyfriend. When she was handing over the advance payment and the victim's photograph the man taped her voice and then took the evidence to the proposed victim in search of a better paypacket.

MUSEUM REPORT DIVERSITYPOSTER AND PROFILE CARDS The Mills Bequest Accession number: comfluff 187 A1 poster and 21 cards colour litho printing OBJECT REPORT Described in the promotional literature as a ‘poster consisting of cartoon characters illustrating the theme of diversity... accompanied by 21 profile cards on each of the illustrated characters’. The characters are presented as part of a band called ‘Diversity’ with the slogan ‘now playing: any place, any time’. Additionally the ‘profile cards’ itemise their ‘age, influences, favourite instrument, favourite band, favourite song, favourite movie, hobbies and musical career’. It is aimed at ‘young people (aged 7-13)’ or more likely their schools and is produced by the Community Relations Council, a charity set up to ‘promote better community relations between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland’.

CURATOR’S REPORT Northern Ireland has been for some time a hotbed of sectarian hatred and violence and therefore a profound embarrassment to the various governments that have ruled it indirectly from Westminster since 1972. One governmental strategy, particulary persued in recent years, has been the establishment or funding of non-governmental organisations with the aim of stopping people hating one another on sectarian lines. These bodies occasionally produce artifacts such as this poster intended to promote the idea that tolerance is a more admirable form of behaviour.

Despite the fact the poster and cards are aimed at children, a basic grounding in sectarian principles is assumed for the user to even understand the ‘Diversity’ idea. A sectarian identity can be worked out with reference to a name or certain cultural references, such as a preference for particular types of archaic musical instrument. Thus ‘Ciaran Numb’ and ‘Billy Warp’ we can take to be, respectively, Catholic and Protestant from their names. The cards work, however, by establishing and then confusing this identification, giving the characters the ‘wrong’ type of musical instrument. So young Numb plays a ‘(Lambeg) Drum’ and Billy Warp is ‘on the Harp’; instruments with Protestant and Catholic associations. Having

Published by Factotum How much is that doggy in the window?

112-114 Donegall Street Belfast BT1 2GX 028 90330893 [e] info@factotum.org.uk www.factotum.org.uk www.thevacuum.org.uk

confused their everyday sectarian presumptions the message is then reinforced with a few other sectarian references – Ciaran Numb’s greatest ‘influence’ is ‘the 12th of July’ – and a catalog of ordinary interests that one might expect from any 10 year old: he likes the film Spiderman. Notably there is very little interest expressed in local cultural production.

The young user thereby comes to understand that Protestants or Catholics need not play only specified musical instruments and that, as they had always secretly suspected, they like the same inane Hollywood films.

So far so good. But is all quite as it appears? For a start, there are some peculiar references in the children’s profiles. Sonia-Rose ‘on the bongos’, at twelve years old, says her favourite films are a 1939 John Ford war epic Drums Along the Mohawk and the 1979 version of Gunter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum (which is rated a 15 so she shouldn’t even have been allowed to see it). These titles appear to have been discretely slipped into the profiles under the pretext that they are about ‘drumming’, but this is obviously a smoke-screen.

Then we notice that the characters’ names seem to ryhme with the instruments they play, ‘Seamus Hoot on the Flute’, with a frequency that just does not occur in nature – in fact they all do. Stranger still, for a ‘diversity’ poster with 21 characters, it is noticable that not one of them is black. There is a ‘Suki Tan on the Bodhran’, representing the Chinese community, but given the recent rise in racism we might have thought it would be better if the band wasn’t quite so white?

Finally, on studying the annoying cereal

box style illustrations it becomes apparent that many of the characters, in particular the female ones, have very similar features despite the fact that they are apparently unrelated.

There may be a number of perfectly ordinary reasons for this, such as, that the illustrator can only draw one type of girl, with that gaunt high-cheekboned appearance? Along with the other anomolies however, it does suggest something else is at work, some discrete subtext. But what could explain this strange lack of diversity, in a ‘Diversity’ poster?

Is the message that we are sectarian not because we dislike one another’s differences but because there aren’t any differences? Or should the physical resemblance of the characters be taken as evidence that Northern Ireland has a higher than average rate of inbreeding? And would that count as good or bad community relations?

Leaving these propositions aside for a moment I think we must look for a more radical answer to this conundrum; after all poor community relations is an old and well examined problem. I believe the reason that the characters all look alike can be explained more easily if we see the ‘Diversity’ concept as a parable about cloning. Since we have had made so little progress in overcoming our tribal antagonisms the Community Relations Council is suggesting that in future we should be generated asexually like spider plants. It seems an outlandish idea and yet it has to be conceeded that the asexual species are notably less aggressive and competative than those that practice conventional sexual reproduction.

They might just be on to something.

EDITORS & DESIGN Stephen Hackett Richard West REVIEWS EDITOR Eugene Macnamee ILLUSTRATIONS Duncan Ross, Colm Clarke, Marcus Patton, Oliver Jeffers COVER PICTURE Duncan Ross WEB EDITOR Stephen Hull DISTRIBUTION Jason Mills ADVERTISING To advertise in the Vacuum or receive information about our advertising rates call 028 90330893 or email info@factotum.org.uk print run: 15,000 distribution: Northern Ireland

The Vacuum welcomes and encourages correspondence. Email letters@factotum.org.uk All copyright remains with the authors.

Printer: Bangor Spectator This project is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

inch promo tracks, distributed exclusively amongst DJs for testing out on club-going audiences, tsk. He added that these tracks would sometimes – though not always – end up on Chemical Brothers albums albeit at a later date and under a different name, tsk again.

Of course all of this only served to increase my desire to own this exotic piece of electronica. On one occasion I even dreamt

OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE Auto-Illustrator 1.2.038

Back in the Summer of 2002 I had occasion to attend the ‘Creamfields Ireland’ festival of dance music. For the uninitiated, such festivals commonly comprise half a dozen or so huge arenas – in this case spread out over the grounds of the Punchestown racecourse – each playing host to a seamless succession of DJs providing a non-stop marathon of beat-mixed

playing host to its own ‘Planet Love’ (a ludicrous name, for sure) dance festival, once again yours truly was in attendance. Amongst the many DJs pedalling their wares was the considerably revered dance duo Agnelli and Nelson. Being that Mr Nelson is an Ulsterman I went along to show my appreciation and lo and behold they were playing the very same track I had heard at Creamfields.

This timely reminder was enough to leave the memory of the track firmly wedged at the fore front of my consciousness. I was humming it to myself for days afterward, driving my girlfriend to distraction with bad acapella renditions – she of course had no

dance tunes. It was in the ‘Bugged Out’ arena at said festival – enjoying a set by Jon Carter – that I had my first encounter with a rather extraordinary piece of dance music.

Dance festivals don’t commonly provide much in the way of a connoisseur experience The sheer volume of tracks heard in the course of a festival combined with the fairly brutal acoustic volume at which they are played can leave one’s ears a little numb, to say the least.

For a track to stand out at a dance festival it really has to be something a bit special. This track was astonishing Hammering big-beat simultaneously cycling upwards and downwards, swooshing acid noises, sustained synth organ noises – like someone jamming the keys down, barking noises, ringing bells and whistling, shrieking fireworks. The sense of something spiralling terrifically out of control – with a life all of its own.

A few months later County Antrim was

recollection of it. Clearly I must find a copy of the track from somewhere, but how? I had no idea what it was called nor who it was by.

Around this time Channel 4 were running a series called ‘Ibiza TV’. A snippet of each episode would showcase a DJ playing in an Ibiza venue. This week’s snippet featured Sasha playing at ‘Space’. Instantly I recognised the uncanny echoing signature of my mystery tune. The caption at the bottom of the screen informed me that the track in question was in fact entitled ‘Electronic Battle Weapon 6’ by the Chemical Brothers. All the more surprising, as I was pretty familiar with the artists in question and would never have guessed this was one of theirs.

It ought to have been straightforward from here on in, but no. After some confusion, a knowledgeable sales assistant in HMV informed me that the ‘Electronic Battle Weapon’ series were in fact a limited run of 12

Christopher Murphy Obscure Object of Desire: Electronic Battle Weapon 6

Instantly I recognised the uncanny echoing signature of my mystery tune.

The caption at the bottom of the screen informed me that the track in question was in fact entitled ‘Electronic Battle Weapon 6’ by the Chemical Brothers. that I found a copy of the track in a second hand record shop but, distressingly, the dream ended before I could get home and listen to the blessed thing. In an act of desperation I even emailed a request to Annie Nightingale’s Radio One show to play the track on air.

Mercifully, she obliged, but the signal reception was far from perfect and the track was marred somewhat by the Miss Nightingale’s incessant babbling while it was playing. Still, I don’t really hold this against her and a tune half heard is better than no tune at all.

In the days to come I would spend quite a bit of time scouring the internet for

information about this elusive tune. Suddenly news came that it was in fact due to be released on a forthcoming seven track enhanced CD. Infuriatingly though, the CD in question – tellingly entitled ‘AmericanEP’ – was only to be released for the American market! Graciously, the American branch of Amazon let me pre-order a copy. Finally the day came and the package arrived though not before a few restless nights had elapsed – such a large ocean for such a small package to cross.

Despite the fact that I’ve listened to this track probably hundreds of times since, there’s still nothing else that sounds quite like it.

they get it made they’re spellbound by its efficiency.’

The important thing about model work is that it must show every single component in order to act as an effective medium. Stephen works off site drawings and contour drawings cut from the architectural file and uses an expensive looking CNC milling machine to cut every last detail accurately, such as bricks and window frames. ‘They give me the drawing and I cut it up so there is absolutely no fault; everything is done exactly to how the architects draw it’. It certainly appears to be a very intricate process, with everything down to fibre optic lights needing to be put carefully in place. The models then need to be painted (for which there is an adjoining room to the

WHAT’S HE BUILDING IN THERE? Models One Jason Mills Despite having the ring of an establishment proffering escort services, Models One on Clifton Street is in fact the only specialist architectural model makers in Northern Ireland (although if you wanted your Escort serviced while you were there then Clifton Autos is just around the corner). It's proprietor Stephen McIlroy opened the shop three years ago after having been in the model-making business for eight years previous to that with Southern company Modelwork. Modelmaking is a relatively new thing here, although it is becoming an increasingly popular way of presenting a social landscape for PR purposes.

‘Basically, how things work is that if there’s a New Build scheme which the client wants to

promote, they will approach the architect who would then approach me. Models can be a very useful tool for demonstrating the impact a building will have on the surrounding area, like how roadways will work. It’s definitely good for people to be able to see the projects in 3D form so they can walk around it and examine it, whether it’s the public or an architect using the model for faultfinding.’

Unfortunately, Stephen doesn’t have any models in his workshop but he flicks through an album containing photographs of some of his recent work including Eircom Park (a proposed Irish national stadium), various London streetscapes and the Odyssey. ‘It just depends where the architect’s work is’ he tells me, ‘I’ve made models for places ranging from America to Hong Kong. The last local job I did was for the lights at the Custom House.

Sometimes clients can be sceptical beforehand as to what the model can do for them but once

main workshop), and Stephen tells me that it is common for architects to drop in bricks and other pieces of material as guidelines. The main materials he uses himself are plastics and

If a site is up for grabs and there are three or four plans getting models made here I sometimes have to hide the rival models away. plexiglass for sharpness and so that the paint gives the best texture and tone.

Despite all this work, Stephen only has one other assistant. ‘There’s no-one else really here to employ. It takes years to learn how to make models properly and there’s no time for me to start teaching someone.’ As I’m leaving Stephen asks me to refrain from mentioning the current job he is working on and sites privacy issues as an important aspect of the trade. ‘If a site is up for grabs and there are three or four plans getting models made here I sometimes have to hide the rival models away.

That way a client can’t just come in and say “Who’s doing this or that?”’.

On my way home I can’t help but envisage the representatives of the big development players dropping round in the dead of night to stomp all over their rivals’ models like great Godzillas towering above the city.

Wealth of Africa: 4,000 years of money and trade

A

frica has a long and rich history, spanning ancient kingdoms, colonisation and independence. The story begins in Ancient Egypt, where pieces of weighed metal were used to make payments and value goods. Egypt was rich: King Amenhotep (c. 1390-1352 BC) went as far as to say that in Egypt gold was more common than dust. Around this time, in c. 1352 – 1336 BC, a hoard of gold and silver rings, ingots and pieces was buried in a pot in el-Amarna, providing us with rare archaeological evidence of the Egyptian monetary system.

The first coins in Africa were used in Greek, Persian and Roman colonies in North Africa. Cyrenaica (in modern-day Libya) issued coins from the sixth century BC, and on these coins was a plant called silphium.

According to the Roman writer Pliny this medicinal herb was used to treat leprosy, hair loss and as an antidote for poisons, and it was also thought to be useful for birth-control.

Because of its many uses, and the fact that it grew only in a small area around Cyrenaica, it was ‘worth its weight in denarii.’

Some of these ancient African coins travelled long distances: coins of Massinissa (202 to 148 BC), king of Numidia (an area roughly corresponding to modern Algeria), have been found in Cornwall. Three hundred years later, after the expansion of the Roman Empire into North Africa and Britain, there are records of African soldiers serving in Britain with the legions. As the Romans gained control of North Africa, local rulers started to copy their coins. Juba I (c. 60 to 46 BC), King of Numidia, minted large numbers of silver denarii to finance his support for Pompey against Julius Caesar in the civil wars. On these coins, Juba is shown with a long beard and an elaborate hairstyle, which agrees with Cicero’s description of him as adolescens bene capillatus (a young man with very long hair).

Unfortunately for Juba, he backed the wrong side, and was defeated by Caesar in 46BC. Roman coins were also used along the East coast of Africa – a source written in the first century AD reports trading with denarii along the Red Sea coast. Soon after this, in the second century AD, the kingdom of Axum (in modern Ethiopia) begain minting its own coins. The Axumite coins followed Greek designs, but quickly developed a style of their own. When king Ezana converted to Christianity in the fourth century, this change was reflected in the coinage, which started to show crosses as a symbol of the change in religious identity of the kingdom.

Another religion that was to have enormous influence in Africa was Islam. In 622AD the prophet and religious reformer Mohammed left Mecca and moved to Medina, and within 10 years of this much of the Arabian peninsula acknowledged his leadership. By 642AD Arab/Islamic armies had conquered Egypt, and only a few years later Cyrenaica and Tripolitana on the North African coast were under their control. In the

following 100 years Islamic influence continued to spread throughout North and East Africa, and the new religious unity opened up long-distance trade routes as well as spreading the Arabic written and spoken language. From the early eight century coins of the Umayyad Calpihs were being made in Africa, probably Qairawan in modern Tunisia, marked ‘minted in ifriqiya’.

Alongside these incoming influences, Africa was home to several powerful kingdoms whose wealth and power were legendary. In the west, Mali was one of the centres of the gold trade, and became fabulously rich. It is said that when king Mansu Musa of Mali went on a pilgrimage to

Q

W

Mecca in the fourteenth century he spent and gave away so much gold in Cairo that the Egyptian economy was depressed for years.

On the east coast, a group of cities on the Swahili Coast traded across Africa and the Indian Ocean. These city-states were cosmopolitan places, with Arab and Chinese merchants dealing with African traders, and the archaeological evidence from these sites points to goods from across Asia being imported into Africa. The coins minted in these areas reflect their Islamic culture, and are based on Arabian coin designs, but in keeping with the international links of the cities Chinese cash coins also circulated.

However, from the fifteenth century the ancient trade routes were disrupted by the arrival of European colonisers and traders who wanted to control the lucrative west- and east-coast trade routes. From the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries British, French, German, Belgian, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese colonizers fought for control of Africa and its resources. Colonial Africa exported many goods including ivory, pepper, cotton and salt, but 90% of the exports were gold and slaves. Slave traders took millions of Africans to the Americas, bringing cloth, guns and metal in return. The relationship between traditional African currencies (including cowrie shells, copper manila bracelets and ingots, and raffia cloth) and the new colonial coins and banknotes was not always troublefree: the authorities sometimes tried to control the local currencies, but did not always manage it.

In the second half of the twentieth century came another huge change for Africa: independence from colonial rule. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s new nations and governments came into being, and because their borders were based on the old colonial

The Amarna hoard

boundaries these new countries had to work to build their national identity. One of the ways they did this was by redesigning the money.

Some kept the old colonial currencies, many did not, and most changed the old designs for new ones which proudly feature Africa’s history and future. Coming up to the present day we can look at the redesigning of the South African currency after the end of Apartheid. The new banknotes feature the stunning wildlife of the region – a national symbol everyone can agree on.

S African banknote War, poverty and corruption: these are the images of modern Africa that we most often see in the news. According to the United Nations, sub-Saharan Africa is the only continent where poverty has increased in the last 20 years. But these negative images are not the only ones of this vast continent: a recent survey by the BBC showed that many Africans are very positive about their future, and say that their family will be better off next year than this. African countries and their people are ambitious, looking to the future. With the right investment of time, effort and money, Africa could once again be one of the major trading forces in the world. But the problems are big, and the solutions will have to be radical.

E

R 1. Silphium coin 2. Juba I denarius 3. Axum coin with cross 4. Umayyad coin with ifriqiya on it

traditional currencies

WHAT’S A MAN WORTH?

T

he word ‘bourgeois’ denotes both an aspirational consumerism and a desire for respectability; the two can’t really be considered as separate, since the very thing which confers ‘respectability’ is consumption (not wealth in itself, but the display and demonstration of one’s wealth in a ‘tasteful’ way – the mysterious transmogrification of wealth into taste). Whilst craving respectability for themselves, the bourgeoisie also use it as a way of defining those people who are not respectable. One’s ‘worth’, then, is measured by something extrinsic, made to appear

These are the ‘nouveau riche’, who are sneered at for thinking that wealth transforms unproblematically into ‘class’, but who, because they do not have ‘taste’, can never be real bourgeoises. intrinsic (through the transcendent categories of ‘taste’ and ‘respectability’).

There are those who aspire to respectability and are denied it, thanks to their insufficient initiation into the arcana of class and taste.

These are the ‘nouveau riche’, who are sneered at for thinking that wealth transforms unprob lematically into ‘class’, but who, because they do not have ‘taste’, can never be real bourgeoises. Interestingly, those members of the working class who achieve ‘social mobility’ through increased wealth often complain that the bourgeoisie’s ‘taste’ is in fact utterly rubbish – characterised by shabby dress sense, knackered family heirlooms and so on. This is the paradox: if you try too hard, if you display your wealth too gaudily, you’ve missed the point. Taste is something that cannot be acquired, in the way that money can be acquired. Thus the bourgeoisie still control the gate: Thatcher may have increased social mobility (emphasising individualism and effectively destroying any idea of collective, inclusive belonging to ‘society’), but social mobility is useless if you’re still, in the words of John Lennon, fucking peasants at the end of it all.

Then there are those who can see the game for what it is and say ‘up yours’ to the whole business of bourgeois respectability and gentility. These people are not simply to be sneered at – they are the enemy, unrepentant proles and proud of it, and the might of the

state must be turned against them, through ‘anti-social behaviour’ and curfew orders, to defend the bourgeoisie from the ideological threat that they pose. Beneath even them are a group of people who exist entirely on the fringes of society, quite literally: moving around from one patch of wasteland to another, refusing to doff their hats to civility, or to compromise their way of life. I’m thinking of the Travellers, who’ve recently emerged again into the consciousness of bourgeois Northern Ireland because of a series of recent illegal settlements and subsequent evictions.

It’s surely worth reiterating at this point that the more money one has, the more one’s supposed ‘worth’ seems less to be an intrinsic thing – measured in terms of one’s actual character – but is connected with one’s possessions. Those who have traditionally had less (materially speaking), and who have been accustomed to their peers having roughly the same as them, have been more inclined to adhere to group and individual ‘codes of honour’, by which one’s ‘worth’ was measured. These ‘codes’ are typically described as incomprehensible, or even derided as tragically self-limiting by bourgeois observers, encompassing as they do notions of ‘pride’ and self-respect of which the bourgeoisie have no need and for which they have no use. The working class and

underclasses can thus be characterised as the architects of their own exclusion from respectable, mainstream bourgeois society (it sees itself as the mainstream because it controls the means of production, even though the actual producers – and nowadays the

consumers – of that society vastly outnumber them; another bourgeois paradox). It never seems to be worthy of mention that many of ‘them’ do not seem that keen to ‘belong’, in the exclusive, bourgeois sense, that they actually have some pride in their own culture (debased and trashy as it must inevitably appear to the bourgeoisie).

I am a member of the middle class (into which I was born, without any particular special pleading on my part). This is not the same as being a member of the bourgeoisie, although membership of one is usually a precondition for membership of the other. I can’t do anything about being middle-class (despite my best efforts to divest myself of my wealth), and make no apologies for it. As long as I have any control over my mental faculties, I will resist the acquisitive, pusillanimous attitudes of the bourgeoisie. I was confirmed in this attitude very recently whilst out worshipping at my local church (First Church of J. Sainsbury (Subscribing), Parish of Sprucefield). I’d already been made suspicious by the presence of large numbers of police and hi-vis security guards in the car-park; it was

And here it occurred to me that, simply by their presence, by their mere existence, the Travellers had plunged the normally confident, urbane people of Lisburn and Hillsborough into selfdoubting paranoia. only when I was cut up by a Hiace towing a large caravan that I realised that this guard of honour had turned out because a group of Travellers were being turfed out from the B&Q car park, currently not in use because the store was badly fire-damaged before Christmas.

Such was the threat that Radio Ulster were carrying updates of the situation in their evening news bulletins: the hue and cry had been raised across Northern Ireland.

I wouldn’t have thought much more about this had it not been for what followed. As I walked into the nave of the übermarket, I noticed more security types planted at the entrance. I quickly realised that my usual middle-class invisibility was not working: my rather splendid newish brown fedora, which usually marks me out as a man of style, distinction and discrimination was, in this new situation, counting quite dramatically against

me – the anxious eyes of the guards told me that they thought that, with this freakish getup, I was Blackie Connors out of Glenroe, and that at any moment I would ask if their drive needed done. For a moment I was indignant about this, but I realised that looked at from the embattled mind of the bourgeoisie, my artless combination of sartorial and scruffy could only indicate a present danger. I tried to re-establish my respectable credentials by identifying myself as a parent, and thus responsible, but in this too I was thwarted – a laughing, no-more-than-usually-untidy child, skipping and dancing around the store, was transformed in their eyes into that most feared creature, the wee tinker, an urchin who symbolises single-handedly the persistence of the threat into future generations. I was amazed to find that these nervous stares continued as we walked around the store, except that this time they came from fellow shoppers. And here it occurred to me that, simply by their presence, by their mere existence, the Travellers had plunged the normally confident, urbane people of Lisburn and Hillsborough into self-doubting paranoia.

They were ready to scrutinise one another for signs of deviance, and, if necessary, to raise the alarm. I’m sure that the fact I was scanning my own purchases as I walked round the stor e added to their unease – surely my bags must be bulging with unscanned, and thus nearly stolen, goods? The final indignity came when I arrived at the checkout and my credit card was declined. As the whole store breathed a sigh of relief, gloating at my failure to destroy their civilisation, I fully identified with the role into which I had been cast. The bourgeoisie can take their squalid complacency, their casual ease, their affected nonchalance, their transcendence of grubby politics, and stick it up their arseholes, I thought. We’re worth more than this.

HOME BANKER?

T

he Northern Bank robbery, which took place in Belfast just before Christmas, appears to have caused irretrievable damage to our ailing ‘peace process.’ Yet events in Donegall Square have also created a couple of other effects.

One of these has been a surfeit of bad jokes, from the circulation of fake Northern Bank notes with Gerry Adams’ face on them to ‘rumours’ that Donegal Celtic or Cliftonville, football clubs situated in predominantly Nationalist areas of Belfast, are about to buy David Beckham. Ho…Ho…Ho. More entertaining have been the suggestions put forward by conspiracy theorists about the real reason for the robbery.

An acquaintance, who isn’t a Republican and has no party political motive for her version of events, believes, in all seriousness and despite all evidence to the contrary, that forces within the bank itself conspired to engineer the theft as a way of taking attention away from some of their, allegedly, shady practices in the personal account market.

Of course I’m providing a synopsis of her complex reasoning, omitting the arcane logic, arched eyebrow and cigarette smoke in a darkened back room. While it’s pretty unlikely that the Northern Bank Military Industrial Complex – cleverly masquerading as Yvonne and Chris in Cashier Booths 4 and 6 – are at the centre of the PSNI and Garda investigations, her sincere conviction that the

Bank itself has more to reveal about the crime is only an extreme manifestation of a more general distrust in our local banking provision.

Surely it hasn’t always been this way.

Looking back to my own childhood, I can remember that one of the defining moments of my elevation into puberty was my first bank book. This says more about my uptight and thrifty Protestant soul than I really want to go into, but I can still remember the shiny green book, only about the size of a passport, embossed with three interlocking gold circles containing the letters ‘TSB.’ The Trustee Savings Bank had been collecting and looking after the working population’s small savings for about 200 years, being formed ‘for the safe custody, and increase of small earnings belonging to the labouring and industrious classes.’

Well, I was labouring through my P6 year in Primary School and was, according to my school report, fairly industrious, so I was an ideal customer. My earnings were also small. I opened my account in school. An enthusiastic teacher, hoping to teach us fiscal responsibility, organised the system. Once a week, on a Thursday lunchtime, the bank would open, and I would deposit 50 pence, given to me by my parents, into my account. Our teacher collected the money and wrote the new sum total of my savings in my little green book. By the end of P6 I had twelve whole pounds. I couldn’t wait to begin again in P7.

My benign respect for our local financial institutions survived the privatisation of the TSB in 1985 at the hands of the Tories, who signed over control of the bank from its depositors to new shareholders. I had spent my savings on games for my ZX Spectrum

do not compensate with higher interest for savers, offering paltry interest instead – hence my 35p. My friend’s conspiracy theory, meanwhile, stemmed from the charge that the banks’ prices are not cost derived. Local banks, it is alleged, charge their customers, in some

anyway, and knew little of the ideological circumstances behind the disappearance of the TSB from our local high street. As a teenager, I opened up a current account with another

cases, 21 times more for the same services than customers face in the rest of the UK, and yet the banks’ costs are not substantially greater in order to justify inflated prices. Therefore, in the case of the Northern Bank, my DIY spy alleged that the robbery was an attempt by the bank to force an increase in its costs and therefore justify maintenance of high charges.

The loss of £26 million, she argued, is more than offset by the profit they make from inflated fees.

Hmmm. What can’t be denied, however, is that our big four banks are coining it. They hold 77% of our £1.9 billion personal banking market, and the Northern itself, along with the smaller National Irish Bank, has just been bought by Danske Bank Group of Denmark, from the National Australia Bank (which took the loss from the heist) for £967 million.

In fact, only the Bank of Ireland, with headquarters in Dublin since 1783, is Irish owned. First Trust and the Ulster Bank are part of the Royal Bank of Scotland group.

Therefore, it seems obvious, even to a financial illiterate like me, that those banks aren’t going to compete against each other to win customers, but, according the OFT, the other two banks are also more than keen to cosy up together. Their strategy certainly seems to work for them. The Bank of Ireland Group, for example, made a pre-tax profit of Euro 1.267 billion last year, and has swallowed up building societies and financial companies in Britain and the US. I’ll have to stop now – my head hurts with all this economy. The banks know that most of us react this way when faced with financial matters beyond the immediate, which is why they have seemingly got away with picking our pocket for so long. It might be time to try to pay attention to the small print.

Local banks, it is alleged, charge their customers, in some cases, 21 times more for the same services than customers face in the rest of the UK, and yet the banks’ costs are not substantially greater in order to justify inflated prices. bank, and I regarded my ATM card as proof that I was becoming a man.

The first jolt in my relationship with my bank came when I was a student. I had worked like a navvy during a year out and in a summer job to get some money to enable me to get through my first year at university, in the days after grants but before fees. I had saved about £2,500 and looked forward to my next bank statement to see how much interest I had earned. Having saved diligently, and played about with attractive sounding APR figures, I was expecting more than the measly 35p in interest which my bank saw fit to give me. People, something in me died that day.

I was reminded of this when listening to our conspiracy theorist. The Office of Fair Trading are currently considering whether to initiate a Competition Commission investigation into accusations made by consumer organisations Which? and the General Consumer Council for Northern Ireland that our ‘big four’ banks here – the Northern Bank, Ulster Bank, First Trust and Bank of Ireland – are conspiring to rip off customers.

Among the allegations which may prompt the investigation are that the local banks impose a number of credit charges to customers not found elsewhere in the UK, and

T

he Asia Times of August 1st 2003 carried a story about the fact that the USAwas attempting to persuade countries in the area to become involved in the Iraq War by offering ‘carrots’ in the form of goods, trade contracts and even weapons. The article was headlined ‘US Bartering Arms for Soldiers in Iraq’.

Leaving aside the bizarre calculation involved in all of this (for example how many infantry men are equivalent to a smart bomb?) it was a reminder that bartering is not the sole preserve of pre-capitalist societies with little or no currency but goods that have value through their capacity for exchange. The usefulness of bartering to capitalism is emphasised further is one looks at internet business sites from the USAwhere it is estimated that approximately 8 billion pounds a year of trade goes on through exchange of goods between small businesses. The cynical would say this is to avoid taxes and create demand for static goods but it might also simply be good practice in over-saturated economies where one person’s passé object is the nearest town’s next big thing. More worryingly fundamentalist militia groups in the USAalso offer advice on what not to barter in the event of an Armageddon-like crisis and highlight which goods are likely to be most in demand in order that you can hoard resources in your bunker in the firm knowledge that you will then become the Survivors Bank of Middle America.

In many ways this knowledge disappoints because I want to believe that bartering is a form of business that is somehow more wholesome than capitalism and exists in societies which have refused to buy in completely to the worst excesses of 21st century life. This is, of course, romantic twaddle.

It is based on a city view of rural life but like all twaddle it has a germ of truth. When I first came to live in what most refer to as ‘the sticks’ I was accompanied by a local to buy a pair of shoes. I selected an appropriate pair, paid for them and left the shop content only to

be lectured by my companion on the fact that I had not tried to ‘barter’ for a few pounds off.

It was not my welfare he was interested in, however, more the fact that if people like me became the norm then the rest of the town had no chance of getting a few pounds off. While not strictly within the dictionary definition of bartering it was a good example of the way in which tradition has transformed itself to be more useful in a modern context.

Romantic or not it is also still the case that bartering is an important mechanism in small rural areas. This can be gleaned from the language. During particularly busy agricultural seasons the farming community is often said to be ‘working through one another’. In essence this means that men and machinery go to the person whose need is greatest on any given day in the firm knowledge that their day will come and they will receive the same attention and care for their produce. In many areas the advent of the contract machine farmer has put paid to this but in subsistence farms it still pertains.

If an individual has an emergency and others offer help either in terms of labour or

Those who fail to ever keep their side of a barter are easily identified by their capacity to ask ‘Do I owe you anything?’ after a service has been given and these individuals will never hear that it is ‘Alright, I’ll get you again’. goods their input is recognised by them being offered thanks ‘until you are better paid’.

While not on paper this is a verbal contract indicating that the work will be repaid in some form in the future when the emergency changes venue. And if there would appear to be a situation which was unlikely to be repeated or where there was a question mark over any form of repayment barter or otherwise, this is justified with the remark that

it is ‘never lost what a friend gets’.

Not that there is complete naivety when it comes to bartering. Those who fail to ever keep their side of a barter are easily identified by their capacity to ask ‘Do I owe you anything?’ after a service has been given and these individuals will never hear that it is ‘Alright, I’ll get you again’. They will be expected to pay with cash since they have opted to ignore the rules of the barter society and will inevitably end up with a label which characterises their meanness of spirit. The finest of these I have heard is a man whom, I was warned, would ‘wrestle a goat for a ha’penny’.

That all of this is not total nonsense is proven somewhat by the fact that in urban areas there have recently been attempts to

Context Gallery

Gallery one Dougal McKenzie New Paintings Culloden (Scenes I-VI) Gallery two Stephen Gunning Re-lapse Exhibitions preview Saturday 12 March 2005 8pm runs until 2 April

Context Gallery, The Playhouse, 5-7 Artillery St, Derry BT48 6RG t. +44 28 71 37 35 38 f. +44 71 26 18 84

mirror this ‘working through’ by establishing communities where hours of plumbing for example can be exchanged for the same number of hours of gardening. And is it too fanciful to suggest that pawn shops have some connection to the barter economy?

And even though many see it as a means of raising easy cash from easily duped suckers who are prepared to pay big money for a sock that was allegedly left by Prince Harry in a hotel in Mayfair, it might just be that e-Bay is virtually the only way to drive a good barter these days.

TOUCHED

BY GENIUS Luvvies Ian Shuttleworth I’ve been a theatre reviewer in London for fifteen years now, and that side of me has got used to big names and famous faces, both on stage and in the audience. But another part of me will always be rubber-necking, always the same Belfast schoolboy in awe of his P6 teacher who used to read out the sports results on TV (hello, John Bennett).

And I’ve found that my own case is even more dire than that. I even get awestruck by the children of the famous. Strange, I never turned a hair at school about rubbing shoulders with one of Gloria Hunniford’s Keating brood, possibly because he was a wee... anyway. But when I started pratting about on stage as a student, I had my head turned with the number of celeb offspring who were doing likewise. Not even celeb: sometimes character actors whose names only

I would have heard of. Nick Waring’s mother may have been the late, great Dorothy Tutin, but like him, I was secretly more impressed by the fact that his dad had played Inspector Goss in Z Cars. Andrew Baker’s father Richard got goggled at in the street in America, obviously not for being a BBC newsreader, but for being ‘the man who said “lemon curry” on Monty Pyth-ahn!’

The single greatest contact I’ve had for children of the famous has been Ken Campbell. You’d know him if you saw him: Alf Garnett’s neighbour in In Sickness And In Health, the man in those dreadful Citroën commercials a few years ago (‘...and needs somewhere to put the giraffes’), but still best remembered for being in that episode of Fawlty Towers where he gets the ghastly line, ‘Oh, Syb ill, Baz well!’. That fella. As it happens, he is also the greatest theatrical fruitcake in these islands, and a few years ago he revived a production he’d first done in 1979-80, of The Warp, which used to be in the

Guinness Book of Records as the longest play in the world. It can clock in at between 22 and 29 hours, depending on pace and the stamina of the leading actor.

Anyway, whether through accident or design, Ken had been around so long and worked with so many people that the various casts of The Warp over the next few years included a whole host of second-generation acting names. He started with Benedick Bates, son of Sir Alan Bates, and Alan Cox, son of original Hannibal Lecktor [sic] Brian Cox (Samuel West, son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales, could unfortunately only make it into the audience; he professed himself very disappointed).

Subsequent casts included Nina Conti, daughter of Tom Conti. Nina later got fed up with acting and became a ventriloquist, and at all her early shows that I saw, proud father

The Warp also boasted John Alderton and Pauline Collins’ daughter Kate Alderton, who is the most beautiful person I shall ever meet and mad as cheese into the bargain. Oh, and at one point Ken Campbell’s own daughter.

Hell, at one point his six-month-old granddaughter.

Tom would either be in the audience or actually working the sound and lighting board. I so wanted to get to meet him, so that he could ask me what I thought and I could say – untruthfully, because Nina’s very good indeed, but just for the sake of the atrocious

pun – ‘Meretricious, Mr Lawrence.’ The Warp also boasted John Alderton and Pauline Collins’ daughter Kate Alderton, who is the most beautiful person I shall ever meet and mad as cheese into the bargain. Oh, and at one point Ken Campbell’s own daughter. Hell, at one point his six-month-old granddaughter.

I did get a bit carried away in my fervour about The Warp, it must be said. I reviewed it twice, acted in it three or four times, and went to... I can’t remember... something like 15 or 18 performances of this marathon. You get a bit fried by the experience. And so, when Ken introduced me to Warren Mitchell at one performance, the dialogue wasn’t your usual luvvie exchange. In fact, the exact words were, ‘Christ, you’re a bloody legend!’ Which I think was very nice of Mr Mitchell to say to me.

A WEE BLACK BOOK OF BELFAST ANARCHISM (1867 - 1973) Máirtín Ó Catháin Published by Organise! availalbe from Just Books, P.O. Box 505, Belfast, BT12 6BQ or by emailing: JustBooks@safemail.com Price: £2.50 + 10% postage.

DAILY IRELAND JOANNA MACGREGOR Piano Recital Elmwood Hall Belfast 30 January 2005

S

THE WEE BLACK BOOK OF BELFAST ANARCHY

ometimes it’s hard to be an anarchist. The public imagination recoils in horror from anarchism’s stereotypically aggressive image, perhaps most fully espoused in the lyrics of the Sex Pistols’ shouty, mouthy 1976 ‘Anarchy in the UK’: ‘Get pissed. Destroy!’.

And it’s this crude reductionism that The Wee Black Book of Belfast Anarchism sets out to challenge, aiming to provide the reader with a truer insight into the characters and ideologies that defined the anarchist agenda in the city, in the years between 1867 and 1973. As author Máirtín Ó Catháin wearily admits, ‘the equation of anarchy with violence is nothing new and the word continues to be misapplied in almost every context from the chimpanzee house at Belfast Zoo to the streets of Iraq’. Ó Catháin humbly acknowledges the ‘marginal status’ and ‘relative unpopularity’ of the movement: ‘this short introduction does not claim a popular but suppressed mass appeal nor even a historical continuum for anarchism’.

The Wee Black Book of Belfast Anarchism is a short, serious publication, strangely weighty for its size, but anyone hoping to reach a clearer understanding about anarchist ideologies may well finish it more confused than when they started it. Ó Catháin pins his classical colours to the mast with his opening citation of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous assertion: ‘Property is theft’. But the subsequent ceaseless references to ‘anarchosyndicalism’, ‘anarchism-communism’, ‘Christian anarchism’ and even ‘anarchistrepublican-Guevarism’ (!!) sent me scurrying for my dictionary of political terms (the latter was strangely absent from its pages.) This bewildering array of obscure anarchist flavours inevitably leaves the movement open to mockery, as in the case of ‘lifestyle anarchosentimentalism’, which sounds like an antistatist version of the Irish News women’s pages.

The internal squabbling of the anarchist movement is legion. Apart from the central belief that political authority in all its forms – and especially in the form of the state – is both evil and unnecessary, anarchists have traditionally disagreed profoundly about the true nature of an anarchic society. These are the moments when the history of Belfast anarchism approaches absurdity. Ó Catháin’s account of an April 1969 march from Belfast to Dublin organised by the militant anarchist group People’s Democracy (PD) and the Belfast Anarchist Group (BAG) is representative of this tendency. The plan was to disrupt the Irish state commemoration of Easter 1916, using the opportunity to attack both the British and the Irish states, but the whole thing fizzled out in fractious squabbling, due, according to the author, to ‘the tiredness of the marchers and internal dissensions’. It’s moments like these that irresistibly recall the divisive bickering between the People’s Front of Judaea and The Judeaen People’s Front in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

The most bizarre incident recounted in The

Wee Black Book is a description of a plot to bomb Queen’s University in the early 1970s, hatched by a German anarchist, a New York photographer, a Belfast journalist and an unemployed salesman in the bar of the Wellington Park Hotel. A Molotov cocktail was chucked at Queen’s Common Room, followed by a chase and an armed stand-off. In a burst of colourful imagery, Ó Catháin notes that the incident ‘proved a salacious one for a continually salivating media hungry for a glimpse of the mad anarchist bomber bogeymen as a new alternative to the grinding predictability of nationalist and sectarian violence’.

But it’s this comment which gives a clue to the real value of the political ideology that informs The Wee Black Book. In 1973, following the allegation by British police that local anarchists were aiding the IRA, the Belfast Anarchist group released a statement arguing that genuine anarchists refuse to support ‘any group that hasn’t the interests of the ordinary people at heart, but instead keeps itself in existence through authoritarian means and nationalist ideology’. The BAG rejected both ‘the Irish nationalism of the IRA’ and ‘the Ulster nationalism of the UDA’, arguing that these groups ‘can’t be considered to be fighting for the people, since the conditions which divide the working class are perpetuated by these groups through their inability or refusal to escape the trap of nationalism and sectarianism.’

It seems that anarchism, like many other alternative political ideologies, had the breath

all but squeezed out of it by the twin monoliths of republicanism and loyalism.

Despite the wilful obscurity of their political groupings, with their inexplicable internal squabbles, the rejection of the sectarian agenda

by Belfast anarchists was a moment of forgotten heroism. It’s in the challenging of these and other orthodoxies that The Wee Black Book really hits the spot.

Fionola Meredith

DAILY IRELAND

I

n this age of mass media communications, where the remnants of various newspapers, join with Subway sandwich wrappers and Centra Carrier bags to majestically float like tumbleweed down Belfast streets on the quiet mornings after the nights before, where even the most humble of students have access to several 24 hours news channels on their chipped NTLbox, and the most inane pieces of trivia and tabloid tat are only a double mouse click away, one could be forgiven for asking if Northern Ireland really needs another daily newspaper?

Well the good people at Andersonstown News certainly think so, having recently launched Daily Ireland. Like its sister paper, Daily Ireland makes no attempt to dilute or neutralise it’s politics in order to make itself

In fact quite the reverse, it promotes itself rather like a dazzling tri-coloured bacon calling out to weary nationalists on a stormy night. more accessible to a wider audience. In fact quite the reverse, it promotes itself rather like a dazzling tri coloured bacon calling out to weary nationalists on a stormy night. Its attitude being that of love us or loath us, and it is fair to say that most people with opt for one of the above depending on where their

allegiances lie. It’s not so much preaching to the converted, as it is providing them with a Hymn books.

However while politics does constitute as a huge part of the paper’s reason d’etre there is a lot that this fledgling publication has going for it that will be of interest to those who don’t really see themselves as political animals.

Firstly it is printed in tabloid form, though there isn’t a pert nipple or drunken soap star in sight. That means the kitchen table gymnastics involved in battling the average broadsheet can be avoided each morning, and it is ideal for commuters. The Thursday Arts and Entertainment section is a great read,

INSIDE STORIES: Memories from the Maze and Long Kesh Prison Catalyst Arts 8 April - 7 May BILLY HUTCHINSON I spent a good part ofmy life in here... I didn’t waste my time. I ran 18 miles a day. I took a degree in social science and a diploma in town planning.I learnt how to negotiate. I don’t regret my experience here.

DES WATERWORTH You knew who you were working with.That person was watching your back and you were watching theirs. IfI seen a member of staff being attacked by six prisoners, I’d be in... you looked after each other.

GERRY KELLY The difference between this and an ordinar y jail, you discussed everything here. From politics to everyday life. there was solidarity in the conclusion and republicans moved on it.The British system could not break this down.

The Long Kesh and Maze prison acted as touchstone and tinderbox of the Troubles in the North of Ireland. Between 1972 and 2000 up to 10,000 prisoners passed through their gates. Three previous occupants, a loyalist ex-prisoner, a prison officer and a republican ex-prisoner tell us stories from this site of contested memories.

Billy Hutchinson recounts his 15 years inside the compounds ofLong Kesh Prison.

Des Waterworth tells the prison officer’s story ofthe no-wash and hunger strikes.

Gerry Kelly remembers the importance ofeducation inside the H-Blocks.

3 screen installation - 30 minutes each Catalyst Arts Gallery 2nd Floor, 5 College Court Belfast,BT1 6BS T: 028 90 31 33 03 E: info@catalystarts.org

or Cahal Mclaughlin 01784 443734 c.mclaughlin@rhul.ac.uk

covering current gigs and trends, while touching on poetry, literature and historical figures. And of course the sports section is also hardy, especially for GAA, although not exclusively so. For those gossip mongers out there though you will be disappointed, in one edition I spotted only one celebrity picture. It was of Brian McFadden and in the Gaelic language section. Although I can’t read Gaelic, I’m sure I made out the term ‘Ireland’s shame’, but perhaps that was just wishful thinking.

Daily Ireland certainly has aspirations as a major daily player and it certainly has the potential to do so. But while it avoids the king of ‘cat stuck up a tree’ fillers that litter your average advertiser, one cannot escape the feeling that this is still very much a local paper for local people. The writing is sometimes unreliable, and there have been the occasional editorial and picture errors.

Yet while it is far from perfect it is fair to say that it is still finding its feet; unfortunately given the already crowded market it is battling into, it is unclear whether it will last long enough to do so.

Rebecca Shiel

JOANNA MACGREGOR PIANO RECITAL

J

oanna MacGregor’s programming has an audacity which few pianists dare attempt.

Nor for her the safety of a chronological progression from Bach and Scarlatti past Haydn and Mozart and on to Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms before dipping her toe into the stormy waters of the twentieth century. No, she began her Sunday evening recital at a near-full Elmwood Hall with Beethoven at his most improvisatory (the 32 variations in C minor), before jumping forward two hundred years for two contemporary works by the jazz pianist Django Bates, ‘Is there anybody up there?’ and ‘Hollyhocks’. The Beethoven fairly fizzed along while the Bates showed that she is equally at home in the classical and jazz repertoires.

Next came six tangos by the Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla which MacGregor herself has arranged for piano. In his own time Piazzolla faced much opposition from his contemporaries for his jazz-influenced

in Macgregor’s hands these were a revelation; at times wistful and heartachingly tender, and in a flash passionate and ecstatic, they were a perfect vehicle for her awesome technique. recasting of the tango form but in Macgregor’s hands these were a revelation; at times wistful and heart-achingly tender, and in a flash passionate and ecstatic, they were a perfect vehicle for her awesome technique. They also served to demonstrate the range of colour of which the modern concert grand piano is capable. In the hands of a master the piano is

an instrument of truly infinite variety, capable of displaying the most lyrical pianissimo or rattling the windows when its full power is unleashed.

The second half of her concert contained only one work and in order of composition it was by far the earliest in the programme. We were taken on an assault of the Everest of the early keyboard repertoire, Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ of 1741, a work of knucklebreaking complexity. If your image of Bach is that of the unsmiling Lutheran church organist of endless fugues, chorals and cantatas this performance would have shattered that perception for good. This is Bach at his most inventive, 30 variations of seemingly limitless variety and played here with a dramatic intensity which held her audience‘s rapt attention throughout fully fifty uninterrupted minutes. This is as far removed from the ‘sewing machine’ approach to the playing of Bach as it is possible to get. Joanna MacGregor showed that there’s no need to up-tempo Bach to make him acceptable to modern ears. All the excitement and drive are there within the music, it takes only a pianist like her to reveal it. That’s why there was nothing incongruous in setting Bach alongside Bates and Piazzola.

What united them was their integrity as works of arts and the conviction of MacGregor’s playing.

Her gig in Belfast was the last of five given on successive evenings in Derry, Bangor, Armagh and Portstewart, and we would have forgiven her for being a little weary. But there was no sign of this in her playing. She displayed a freshness and passion which completely captivated her audience. I’ve seldom known an audience listen with greater stillness and intensity.

Joanna MacGregor is a passionate advocate for her instrument and especially keen to encourage children to play the piano. The publishers Faber have recently issued a series of books and CDs she has devised for children showing that learning the piano isn’t all about five finger exercises and scales and can be enormous fun.

Her concert tour was organised by Moving on Music and they are to be congratulated on promoting an artist of her stature and having the courage to back a programme of such originality. I met two discerning friends who had been to the recital in Bangor and enjoyed so much that they happily bought tickets for the repeat performance in Belfast. Lucky them!

What better comment could there be on appeal and power of MacGregor’s playing?

Wesley McCann

WWW.LOMOISLAND.COM

UNDERPASS ART

MONSTER POSTER CAMPAIGN A new marketing ploy designed to invoke the conscience of students is launched in South Belfast. Amongst other features 15,000 leaflets are distributed to student ghettos to be used as roach material, and new poster panels are put up in bus shelters to be kicked in after closing time. Indeed, the most obvious answer to the central question posed by the campaign is ‘Yeah I do, wanna make something of it?’

A good tip for motorists in Belfast is to keep your eyes closed as you pass under the M3 flyover at Corporation Street. Here, Belfast's latest public art project has materialied, a series of billboards shaped like car wing mirrors, with scenes of the historic Sailortown district contained therein. The effect is entirely like being caught in a kaleidoscopic timetravelling machine, and I found myself driving round in circles for hours mesmerised by these hoardings. I consequently caught rickets and found myself working in a shipyard, and was only catapulted back into reality when a distinguised local artist appeared on the radio babbling about icebergs.

ART AND ANTIQUES FAIR, KINGS HALL Very expensive to go in therefore disappointing to discover that the selection of old things was so boring, mainly chairs, jewellery and art deco nick-nacks. Likewise the ‘contemporary art’ which wasn’t even bad.

Is a Northern Irish website looking for depiction’s of ‘any island through the medium of lo-fidelity photography’.The Lomo camera was originally designed by a top-secret military optics factory in the Soviet Union. It’s easy to use, takes 35mm film and the photos have an unusual quality. Some interesting pictures of Musgrave police station slowly enveloped in smoke under the caption ‘blow up’, a series of photos from the seventies perhaps? – the causal attitudes of the people in the photos suggest not – I suspect it’s the aftermath of the demolition of the Churchill tower.

PORK SCRATCHINGS A new bar snack is making it self apparent in NI bars. KP Pork Scratching’s. Although common enough in pubs on the mainland it seems that our diet in bars stretches no further than nuts and crisps. And it’s not surprising given the fact that these scratching’s taste like boiled and battered bacon rind- which in fact they are. I don’t mind the crunchy bit but sometimes you bite into one and it’s got some sort of soft goo at the centre. Truly disgusting.

RUGBY WINDOW DISPLAYS Rugby fever sweeps across the land in the form of the Six Nations, and the Guinness team are out whipping pub-goers into a nationalist fervour with their paintbrushes.

One can only imagine that in Italy and France similar images of rugby players ploughing through giant bowls of spaghetti and fields of garlic adorn the nations' windows.