Vacuum. Sorry Issue. Issue 21.

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THE SEVERAL THINGS THAT REALLY PISS ME OFF! need to find ways of ensuring some kind of equitable treatment, but that I want to be able to choose it for myself or at least to choose from a list on which each term is of the same kind. Logical incoherence of this kind withers the ability to make clear judgements about oneself or others.

This is not a small matter; it reaches into the heart of civil life because it is a basis on

I put a line through that part of the form.

Just as I do through the clause about ‘perceived religious affiliation’, on the grounds that I am not an object of perception to myself.

I suppose that on the grounds that I am thought to be English, affilation might be taken as meaning ‘to nothing very much’. But most people are ‘nothing very much’. I know two or three devout people in Northern Ireland, and of course many who are knowingly and willingly ‘affiliated’ without it meaning anything very much in religious terms. We all know these terms are about something else.

Meanwhile I demand that under ‘perceived religious affiliation’ we have a box listed ‘imperceptible’.

The gripe I want to raise here, preparatory to other gripes, is not that I don’t want to record my ‘ethnicity’, or any ‘affiliation’, because in a complicated mesh of people we

which others can claim to speak on your behalf. As when city councillors think they are expected to speak on matters of taste and morality, or when they ‘explain’ racial hatred and violence on the grounds of a supposed ‘threat to cultural identity’. And of course the closer we look at ‘cultural identity’ and ‘cultural tradition’ the more they are revealed as spurious or retrospective inventions. The more we look into contemporary reality the weaker the idea of cultural identity becomes, because it gets clearer and clearer that we all of us, continuously, participate in multiple cultural identities, large and small, in an ever shifting matrix of possibilities. This is the

Is it necessary to make the point again? Where some councillors are concerned, YES. This is such a numb-wit mistake that it is beneath comment. Sexuality, ethnicity, and religious belief are not the same kind of thing! Some matters are voluntary and some are not. It is wicked to insult the Chinese community because they are Chinese; but Christians choose to be Christians, so, as ethical agents, they are open targets.

Councillors Rogers, Crozier and McCausland etc. passed beyond parody, beyond satire and beyond a joke; they have become their own parody, their own satire and joke. What a fate!

I APOLOGISE TO THE WORLD AT LARGE FOR THEIR EXISTENCE.

INCLUDE...

THE REQUIREMENT, ON OFFICIAL FORMS, THAT I indicate my ‘ethnic origins’ or sometimes ‘ethnicity’.

The problem is not with the idea of the ‘ethnic’, which is concerned with multidimensional differences and the mesh of their interactions, but with the choices with which we are presented. On a recent form I was asked to tick one box from a list which included ‘Pakistani’, ‘East Asian’, ‘Irish’ and ‘White’. There was no box for ‘British’, though there was one for ‘Other, please specify’. What does this tell us about who wrote this list; that ‘ethnicity’ is for other people?

In each case the basis of differentiation is different, making the list as a whole into a scandal of logical incoherence. It is, consequently, impossible to answer and noone with half a brain should try. Like trying to decide between oranges and sardines on the basis of the train timetables. I found it very hard to imagine how anyone could have constructed such a list and get it into print on official forms – but there it was. Moreover, in so far as I regarded myself as having an ethnicity, as an England-born British citizen living in Northern Ireland I was excluded.

If those choices were presented to the people in the next street busily painting their kerbstones, they would be, quite rightly, outraged and might break windows at the least.

A Member made the point that, whilst ‘The Vacuum’had lampooned people who attended church, it was unlikely to risk lampooning gay or coloured people due to the potential of court proceedings. (Meeting of Art Sub-Committee 4 Aug. 2004)

For my part, and on behalf of a large number of Belfast citizens and rate payers, I demand that they in turn

APOLOGISE FOR BRINGING BELFAST CITY COUNCIL INTO DISREPUTE. defining characteristic of modern life. It is what makes us contemporary.

There is a chain of consequences that links an ‘ethnic’ list that nobody with half a brain functioning should answer, to the notion of ‘cultural tradition’, to that of ‘identity politics’, to racialism. Far from acting as a defence against sectarian hatred, logical incoherence, by creating categorical confusion, sets up differences along the wrong borders. And we know where that leads.

Considered ideologically, identity politics conceal within them a device for making us all seem more different than really we are.

Northern Ireland, as a polity, depended for its very existence on this notion of identity. On the global scale, asserting local difference masks the increasing sameness of late capitalism which everywhere, without exception, demands a commercial globalisation of culture and erases real difference. Northern Ireland, as every visitor notices at once, is a depressingly homogeneous community; ‘diverse’ it is not.

Have you ever lived in a diverse community?

The idea that there are ‘two cultures’ is a rationale for political failure, not the cure.

And this brings me around to a particularly egregious piece of nonsense – in which it is possible for a councillor to equate, as a contribution to serious debate, being ‘coloured’ with being A Christian.

A Member drew the Sub-Committee’s attention to the fact that, due to the large number of organisations which it funded, the Council knew very little about the arts and cultural events and publications which it assisted. (ditto) Surprise?

AND THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU ‘THE CITY OF CULTURE’.

(Just in passing; were I a concerned and thoughtful unionist I would be worried at the way the names on the voting list turned out.)

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s regular readers will be aware, in June we published seperate editions of The Vacuum on the subjects of God and Satan. On the first of July these issues were discussed by Belfast City Council

which had granted funding to Factotum, the publisher, through

their Project Grant Scheme. Some councillors say they find the paper ‘extremely offensive’ and the matter is referred to the Arts sub-committee. Both the Arts and Development committees

recommend that Factotum should receive its

funding, particularly in the light of the advice of the Council’s Principle Solicitor who says that: ‘any decision to withhold the remainder of the allocation could be considered as a contravention of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights’. On the 1st September the full Council

debates the issue. Councillor Eric Smyth says

‘Maybe I’m a dirty old man but that looks like a man’s penis’, Councillor Sammy Wilson says The Vacuum ‘holds up to ridicule... the old, mentally ill and cripples... people who don’t have a great deal going for them in life’. It is obvious that few Councillors have ever seen The Vacuum before. They vote, by 24 to 12,

THAT COUNCIL DECISION IN NUMBERS Council’s estimated expenditure 2003/4 £112,000,000 Culture and Arts grant funding £1,010,000 Grant recommended for Factotum £3,300 No. of committee and Council debates about the Factotum grant 7 No. of official complaints received by the Council about The Vacuum 1

that Factotum will not receive its grant until it: ‘provides an apology for

any offence which may have been caused to Members of the Council and the citizens of the City by previous publications and provides an assurance that future publications will meet such criteria as may be established by the Council.’

These demands are included in a letter sent to Factotum. When asked for clarification of these demands a second letter is sent by Council legal services. This letter contains a partial climbdown: ‘The Council

has since agreed not to

impose any new conditions for future funding, thus an A COUNCILLOR WRITES...

8 September Dear Dr. Murray,

assurance that your publication will comply with any such

2nd August Dear Donovan, I have received your letter regarding The Vacuum magazine, which was rather foolishly grant aided by Belfast City Council. Whilst I believe that the people who published The Vacuum may be entitled to their views however offensive they may be I do not believe they have any right to be funded from the public purse especially since the vast majority of people in Belfast will be deeply appalled by the content of the magazine.I hasten to add that had some of the contents in the magazine been made about minority groups in Northern Ireland,such as Muslims or Roman Catholics that there would probably have been a case taken against the authors by the Equality Commission or some other politically correct group in Northern Ireland.I trust that this clarifies my views on this matter and can assure you that I will doing all I can to ensure that no more public money is wasted on this group, whom I regard as neither brave or creative or exciting.

Yours Sincerely Cllr Sammy Wilson MLA

I have received your letter regarding The Vacuum. I am pleased to inform you that BelfastCity Council, largely as a result of my intervention at the last Council meeting decided not to contribute anything further to this vile magazine.

I must say I can’t understand someone of your position being prepared to defend a magazine that pokes fun at the disabled and disadvantaged simply because of their faith. You may try to dress up your support for this publication by referring to great works of literature such as Shakespeare etc. however I am sure that any objective observer would not be sympathetic to your view that public money should be given to subsidise what is at best, an example of juvenile toilet humour and at worst contains a viscious attack on disabled, disadvantaged people who happen to find solace in church attendance and in their faith.

Standards in London may be such as to regard this as art but the vast majority of decent people in Belfast still regard it as crude, offensive scribblings that deserve no public support.

Yours Sincerely Councillor Sammy Wilson

criteria in the future is unnecessary.’ but there is still an insistance that Factotum apologise or provide an ‘expression of regret’. We believe this demand is unjust and bullying, that the Council’s

decision

making was ill informed and arbitrary and that at root it was the result of a regressive and repressive desire to stifle legitimate cultural debate. We will fight the Council’s decision in any way we can. We will not say Sorry.

I

was buttonholed the other week by a London philosophy student, the light of pure idealism in his eye, and we talked about Irish history. One of his suggestions was that I, as a Protestant from the Republic whose family had once had a bit of land, should make a symbolic apology to a Catholic member of the Irish diaspora for having dispossessed them. I expressed some reluctance about heading off into Kentish Town (where I conduct much of my own dispossessed diasporic existence) and interrupting some truculent fellowcountryman in his drink in order to say sorry.

My student friend found my arguments were pretty pusillanimous (‘It was only eighty acres and they were in Cavan’) but my heart just wasn’t in it. A few days later I found myself telling a left-wing journalist acquaintance that I found the concept of inherited historical guilt problematic. She didn’t – so much so that I nearly felt I should… apologise.

Everyone is at it. Tony Blair apologising for the Famine a few years ago was just the beginning (actually, being a lawyer, he apologised for the British government’s lack of effective action about it, not for the Famine itself, but that was how it came across): so John Mitchel’s version of history finally won out. The Almighty created the potato blight, but the English sent the Famine. A few years later, along came the 1798 celebrations, and once more the idea of inherited responsibility hung heavy in the air, as people argued about massacres; there was even a kind of suppressed feeling that the French should

apologise for turning up late. We haven’t yet had the British army apologising for General Maxwell’s activities post-1916, but that may come. (They may have a few more recent apologies to make in the meantime.)

Historical apology has broken out

Recently four hundred Christian penitents turned up in Jersualem on the nine hundredth anniversary of the city’s sacking at the hands of the first Crusader army, and asked for ‘forgiveness for allowing the name of Christ to be associated with death’. everywhere. Jay Rayner’s satirical novel The Apologist created a character who is appointed chief Apologist by the UN, a concept which looks less and less like parody. Recently four hundred Christian penitents turned up in Jersualem on the nine hundredth anniversary of the city’s sacking at the hands of the first Crusader army, and asked for ‘forgiveness for allowing the name of Christ to be associated with death’. I thought that much of the point of Christ’s name was its association with death, but never mind. What’s more interesting is the idea of shared responsibility descending over nine hundred years – a century longer even than our own hallowed period of steady-state oppression. When Queen Elizabeth apologised to the Maoris for

expropriating them, at least she was referring to events only a hundred and forty years ago; and she does, in a sense, still own their land.

Still, I’m not sure how much value the apology carried, especially delivered while wearing much the same expression as when the monarch praises the achievements of her deceased ex-daughter-in-law. The belated expressions of regret expressed by (one or two) Catholic churchmen about covering up childabuse scandals are a different matter: they could have done something at the time. But here as elsewhere, public relations seem at the nub of the thing rather than an actual act of contrition. Erich Segal, the author of Love Story managed to earn himself a fortune and leave his academic job far behind by coining the phrase that ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’. In fact, as someone sourly remarked, love usually means always having to say you’re sorry, and never meaning it.

Everyone wants to claim responsibility: like the architects of the sorryeverybody.com

Historical apology, merrily skipping back over hundreds of years to find something to expiate, is all part of ‘history as process’ the feelgood factor of identification (and identity politics). website, set up by disappointed supporters of John Kerry to apologise to the world for Bush’s re-election. Why are they apologising?

They didn’t vote for him, and those who did don’t feel like saying sorry: in fact, they have set up a number of rival websites (notsorryeverybody.com, sorryeverybodymyass.com, kissmyamericanass.com, and many more). But it makes more sense than requiring apology for something that happened at a different time, in a different context, perpetrated by different people. These, of course, are the easy apologies: not many expressions of regret were extracted at Nuremberg.

But the language of psychotherapy has invaded that of historical analysis: recovered memory, compensation, alienation, repression, guilt and – bingo! – closure. Historical apology, merrily skipping back over hundreds of years to find something to expiate, is all part of ‘history as process’– the feelgood factor of identification (and identity politics). As we go time-travelling down the heritage trail, in search of therapeutic catharsis, it’s hard to see where it will end. Perhaps Bertie Ahern has the right idea: he never apologises, and when he explains, he appeals to arguments and concepts not easily accessible to the uninitiated. ‘If hindsight were foresight’, as he told the Moriarty Tribunal, ‘there wouldn’t be a problem.’ No, indeed. He has also immortally remarked, ‘The cynics may be able to point to the past, but we live in – the future.’ I suppose it’s better than living in the past, but I’m more comfortable with the present.

WHEN TV CHANNELS APOLOGISE

"""""""""""""" Sir, I must protest in the strongest terms over the portrayal of Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts as ‘tragic and strange-smelling womble-fondlers’ in what Granada were pleased to call their ‘situation comedy’, That’s No Lady, That’s My Common-Law Wife, on ITV4 last night. As an eleventh level wizard of the Fourth Circle in the Seventh Dimension and President of the Amersham & Chorleywood Fantasy Gamers Pantechnicon, I can categorically state that, in all my years as a Dungeonmaster and Gamer, I have never once fondled, or witnessed the fondling of, a strange-smelling womble …

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common enough situation for a regulator of television: someone’s upset about something they’ve seen and is demanding an apology. But what happens when such complaints are upheld and the offending broadcaster handed out a slapping on the backs of the knees?

Under the 1990 Broadcasting Act, the Independent Television Commission was given the power to investigate complaints against commercial television licensees.

Matters of fairness, taste etc. in programme content were generally covered by the ITC’s Programme Code, adherence to which was a condition included in a broadcaster’s licence.

If a licensee was deemed to have caused offence, for example, in terms of contravening the Programme Code, this would be viewed as a breach of licence conditions and the ITC would have the discretion to demand an correction or apology, require that the offending programme is not repeated, impose a fine, shorten a licensee’s franchise period or even to revoke a broadcaster’s licence.

Most people who have watched television for any reasonable length of time will have

seen the sort of thing that happens when complaints are taken up by the regulator. In the majority of cases, the broadcaster concerned is required to broadcast an apology, either before the next episode in a series or at a specific time or times. There can also be conditions imposed about the length and nature of such statements (must be in clear onscreen writing, against a blank background, with a voice-over etc.) In a ‘vibrant’ and ‘fastdeveloping’ television sector such as the UK’s (i.e. one in which broadcasters never tire of trying it on) such apologies are fairly common and indicative of a healthy creative industry (i.e. one in which standards are constantly being eroded). Of course, it isn’t always the broadcaster’s fault that a programme’s content isn’t up to the required standards. For example, during recent coverage on SkySports One of some greyhound racing, the channel’s usual value-added coverage involved a trackside interview with a winning dog and its owner. At some point during the short interview, the owner (no doubt to the dog’s embarrassment) suddenly announced ‘Fuck

suddenly announced ‘Fuck the Pope and the IRA’, no doubt to the confusion and possibly distress of viewers. the Pope and the IRA’, no doubt to the confusion and possibly distress of viewers.

While such comments are clearly unacceptable in broadcasts (the Sky satellite footprint covering considerably more of the UK than just western Lanarkshire) the regulator accepted that such an outburst was nonetheless not what would be expected of a winning greyhound owner under normal circumstances and Sky was let off by offering an apology and promising to look more closely at winning owners’ tattoos before holding a microphone under their noses in future, or indeed to stick to interviewing the dogs themselves.

Another example of how ‘apology regulation’ has worked well in the past is that of the Brass Eye special on paedophilia on Channel 4 in 2001. This was a particularly near-the-knuckle episode of the satirical series, playing mercilessly on the paranoid bloodlust of Daily Mail Britain and producing exactly the sort of incandescent outrage it set about taking the piss out of. While furious missives from the cravat-wearing population rent the air

with deafening howls, and as both the Culture Secretary and Home Secretary added their own simplistic denouncement of the episode in a disgraceful display of opportunistic populism, the ITC maintained the sort of calm that used to make Kipling’s moustache bristle and twitch with pride, finally deciding to give Channel 4 a mild rebuke for not giving enough warning that viewers of a particularly ludicrous disposition might find themselves inexplicably livid and spill their last sherry of the evening all over the axminster. No criticism was made of the programme’s content, Middle England’s priapic indignation was deflated without the satisfaction of a good kill, and interfering ministers were shown what they could do with their cynically pitched opinions.

However, when the ITC and Broadcasting Standards Commission (also previously responsible for taste and decency in broadcasting) joined Ofcom last year, and the legacy regulators’ powers concerning licence enforcement passed to the new body under the Communications Act (2003), a sea change occurred in the regulator’s attitude to public opinion: it started worshipping it. Appearance is all at the new super-regulator and it’s now very difficult to imagine a similarly thoughtful, balanced and unflapped response in the face of a Brass Eye storm, especially if politicians were to get involved. The only thing which might prevent a wholesale pandering to popular belief might be Ofcom’s strong leanings towards withdrawal from regulation where possible. Indeed, areas of content are where the new regulator is pursuing its ‘light-touch’ agenda most assiduously, and it could be the case that a broadcaster as big as Channel 4 would be encouraged to work such problems as may be caused by its more ‘ground-breaking’ programmes out by itself. This could, in principle, be a good thing for broadcasters more concerned with presenting alternatives to the mainstream than aiming ever closer for the middle of the road (although it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think of hapless TV workers barricaded in their office building as a division of retired colonels, WI bluestockings and assorted high-churchers fulminate frothily outside). At the same time, of course, selfregulation is an open invitation to plummeting standards for channels chasing the eyeballs of an increasingly hypocritical, selfish, hysterical and prurient audience.

SORRY FOR EVERYTHING Eamon McCann I’m sorry I haven’t been more clear-minded and consistent in promoting class solidarity against communal solidarity over the last 30 years. I am sorry that the left weren’t able to come up with clearer, more convincing and practical alternatives. I am sorry that a sort of a triumphal pessimism has come to dominate the left in Northern Ireland. There are always people on hand who relish responding to any initiative with sighs of regret, ‘Ah yes, but it will never work.’ I know people in the trade union movement 20 years younger than myself who already affect veteran status and cynicism. I’m sorry they don’t just fuck off.

Being a socialist means always having to say sorry.

I’m sorry that I’m not a better writer, better politician, better family person – in fact I’m sorry for everything. There is practically nobody that I know that I ought not to say sorry to for something, and I do.

I am also sorry that anyone of adult years and good hearing believes that U2's latest album is full of anything more than empty bombast and shallow banalities. I’m sorry that anyone thinks that Edge is a great guitarist. I am sorry that there are folk in the vicinity promoting Ulster Scots as the defining expression of Northern Protestant culture but who have never heard of Henry McCullough.

‘former colonial powers’ (Britain included) couldn’t bring themselves to say sorry because they were worried about any apology resulting in compensation cases. The outcome was that ‘the Conference agreed on a text that acknowledges and profoundly regrets the massive human sufferings and the tragic plight of millions of men, women and children as a result of slavery, the slave trade, apartheid, colonialism and genocide’ (UN Newsletter). The text ‘profoundly regrets’, which is good of it, and handily means that its not really anyone’s responsibility.

Not everyone finds it quite such a convulsive political experience to ‘express regret’. Anticipating our ‘sackcloth and ashes’ times, the Mayor of Brisbane, Jim Soorley, led a National Sorry Day in 1998, formally apologising to Aborigines for the treatment they had received in the city. And in 2002, Belgium admitted that it had participated in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of its former colonial territory in the Congo; and Belgium apologised.

Other effects of imperialism are so widespread that it’s hard to know where to begin. Visiting Peru last year I had that thought which is common enough when visiting post-colonial states. How did such a small European military force take control over such a vast population? Gunpowder, of course, is one answer, at least in Peru. As it turns out, though, the Spanish conquistadors where helpfully preceded by their colonising micro-organisms. Having already arrived in Mexico the Spanish had brought with them to South America smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, and the common cold. The germs moved faster than the Spaniards. The Incas had no immunity to this invisible imperial army. The population of what is now Peru declined by 80% between 1530 and 1570, and presumably the rest weren’t in the kind of health that would allow for a fair fight.

Imperialism leaves all kinds of legacies of

nice straight line along the nearest convenient round-number longitude) to work out how to be a nation-state. This may have made it easier to join the UN (we’ve seen how useful that can be to Africa), and even play to in the World Cup; but nationalism is not much of an answer to ‘what did the British/French/Belgian/ Germans/Italians ever do for us?’.

An offshoot of the imperial firesale of nationalism to the rest of the world has been equally devastating, and even more difficult to shake off. The British ran India (as the Spanish ran Peru), with a tiny number of administrators and soldiers. Once the effects of

Once the effects of the measles had worn off, some other way had to be found to control the population. And so was born the civil service. the measles had worn off, some other way had to be found to control the population. And so was born the civil service. Thousands of administrators, writing everything down, slowly the mechanisms of the country to a pedantic trudge. To try to speed up the wheels of power, local councils were elected on the assumption that devolved power would work more quickly, but, brave attempt as it was, they found themselves mesmerised by the pacelessness of post-imperial life, and the gears shifted down again.

The cultural effects of imperialism ar e definitely the most insidious. They are therefore the most difficult to apologise for, and the easiest to avoid apologising for. Who should take responsibility for Merchant Ivory, for example, and the blacking up of Alec Guinness in A Passage to India? We need someone to lead by example. A suggestion: the City Hall in Durban is a 1910 version of Belfast City Hall. A symbol of what used to be iniquitous majority-rule replicated as a symbol of what used to be iniquitous minority-rule. A

SORRY for the empire Colin Graham ‘N

o sophistry, no jugglery in figures, can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye’. Saying sorry for empire should be painful; and yet it should also be easy, because a wrong has so obviously been done. Empires have much to be sorry for and little to their credit. Now, when most of the European empires are embarrassing shadows of their former selves, it’s time for serious critical self-reflection. Gandhi’s words in response to a charge of sedition in 1922 ask for a plain answer. But empires, try as they might, find it curiously difficult to apologise.

At the beginning of the last century, European empires sometimes displaced their guilt by apologising to each other. After the First World War the British Foreign Secretary apologised to Germany, or more specifically to the ‘honour’ of its army, for war propaganda

which suggested that the Germans had systematically bayoneted Belgian children, and boiled down their own war-dead to make glycerine. Meanwhile most of Africa deserved the real apology.

In our postcolonial times apologies have started to break out. They can be very curmudgeonly though. Before the United Nations conference on racism in Durban in 2001 the African nations drew up a ‘preamble’ which strongly suggested that they would like to see ‘an explicit apology by the former colonial powers or their successors for those human rights violations [that is, slavery], and that this apology should be duly reflected in the final outcome of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance’.

Apologising for slavery should be even easier than apologising for empire. And yet various

devastation, legacies which occasionally revisit us in the Western world from time to time like a bad dream. Nuclear warheads either side of the 1947 partitioning border between India and Pakistan is bad news now. Like every invented border, left after colonial withdrawal, the Pakistani-Indian just creates trouble.

Saying sorry for Partition, anyone? But borders are only the symptom of one of the most miserably impoverished things which imperialism exported – nationalism, a present from the coloniser even more devastating than the common cold. All around the world, European colonialism found peoples who were living out their own conflicts in their own ways. Over the course of imperialism these irrational systems of existence were helpfully reshaped into nations, and then left (some with borders organically drawn in a

neat imperial contradiction, but also a bind which must be broken. We had our City Hall first, so I think we have a responsibility here.

Or rather, our elected representatives do. So Belfast City Council should apologise to the people of Durban for imposing on them a piece of civic architecture with such unfortunate connotations. And there’s no point pretending Belfast didn’t mean it.

SORRY FOR YOUR TROUBLES

How To Be Sorry?

By Bill Drummond

Neal Alexander

‘Sorry’.

‘You don’t mean it’.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you were sorry you would have never done it in the first place.’

‘Well I couldn’t have been sorry before I did the thing that I’m sorry about.’

‘No, the point I’m trying to make is that you are the same person now as you were then.

You would do the same thing today as you did last week. All that’s happened is that you got caught. The only thing that you might be sorry about is me catching you out.’

The above conversation is one that has never happened, I’ve just made it up while I’m sitting in this waiting room with my notebook on my knees. What the conversation is, is a distillation of numerous that my partner and I may have had over the years.

I’m the one saying sorry, she is the one not accepting it. What I am saying sorry about could be chosen from a long list of relationship crimes that I have committed.

I was in court last week. I’m now out on bail. Next week the bench will sentence me.

Right now I’m sitting waiting for my 2.30 appointment with my probation officer and making notes about the meaning of being sorry. I’ve got to go in there and by the time I leave she has to believe I am really sorry for what I have done. Of course I don’t feel sorry, I just think ‘Fuck it, I got caught, it’s not as if I was hurting anybody or stealing anything, I just got caught driving while I was already banned from driving. And it wasn’t like I got banned for drink driving or wreckless driving, just a few too many points on the licence for speeding.’

How sorry I seem to the probation officer will be written up in her report to the bench, who will then hand down the sentence based on that report. I had been warned by my solicitor that it could be a custodial sentence.

He had told me to prepare myself. I went to court last week clutching a Tesco carrier bag containing my pyjamas, toothbrush, spare pair of underpants and a thick book. He had told me it could be as much as six months. My partner thought I should get 28 days, which would mean I would be out just in time for Christmas. She reckoned that it would teach me that I can’t just go through life thinking I can do what the fuck I want.

As it turned out the bench didn’t sentence me there and then, thus me being out on bail.

They wanted to wait until they had a probation officers report, thus me sitting here and waiting.

A door opens, a woman appears. ‘Mr Drummond?’

‘Yes.’ ‘Would you like to come in?’

It is now time for me to be sorry like I have never meant it before.

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e live, according to Roy L. Brooks, a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, in an Age of Apology which has seen the human capacity to say ‘I’m sorry’ become a powerful and seemingly ubiquitous political tool. The recent actions of some prominent world leaders furnish ready examples: Queen Elizabeth II apologised to the Maori people for abuses carried out under the aegis of British colonialism (but not to German civilians bombed into oblivion during the Second World War); Tony Blair has publicly expressed regret for the British government’s indifference during the Irish potato famine; as President, Bill Clinton deplored American involvement in the slave trade during an official visit to Uganda; South Africa’s former President, F.W. de Klerk offered an apology to all the victims of Apartheid; pressure from large sections of the Australian public forced the government to formally acknowledge the suffering inflicted upon Aboriginal families in cases of forced adoption by organising an annual ‘Sorry Day’; and so on.

Such a display of contrition on the part of political leaders and heads of state is surely edifying, is it not, suggesting a generous move towards the acceptance of moral responsibilities? Perhaps, although there is certainly room, and perhaps reason, for remaining cynical in the face of such heart-warming gestures of conciliation. For, when offered at the right time and in the right context, an expression of sincere regret can win the apologist a glut of good-will at a fairly nominal cost to personal pride and position. At other times, however, apologies can be much more demanding, but also more significant and effective in redressing the wrongs to which they refer.

Consequently, in the list compiled above, a general rule seems to be to apologise for some historically distant outrage or atrocity, and to do so in fairly non-committal terms – an expression of regret rather than an explicit assumption of guilt is usually the order of the day. By contrast, those expecting an apology for war crimes committed in Vietnam, Argentina, or Nicaragua in the past few decades will continue to be disappointed for some time to come, and it will be a very icy day in Hell when George Bush junior expresses any remorse over the current orgy of pillage and destruction in Iraq. And yet, as Roy Brooks reminds us, the present vogue for apology cannot responsibly be dismissed as simply so much ‘contrition chic’ or PR flannel, for the very gesture of making an apology incorporates a vital formal element which tends, almost independently of the intentions

of the apologist, to set in motion the interconnected processes of mourning, accusal, and (sometimes) atonement. By saying, ‘I’m sorry’, an individual is not closing a book or drawing a line under a dispute; rather, s/he is inviting an exacting dialogue through which the consequences of her actions might be examined and redressed. It is in this sense that apology may, in Brooks’ words, ‘raise the moral threshold of a society’.

Which brings us to matters closer to home; specifically, to the question of ‘saying sorry for the Troubles’. Few would disagree that the moral threshold of Northern society could do with a bit of raising, although some contention might be expected to arise over the manner in which this should be attempted. Similarly, most of the key players in Northern politics have conflicting views over who should be apologising for what and to whom.

Uncertainties over the definitive conclusion of the Troubles – the war (is/might be/isn’t) over, delete as appropriate – and the especially painful legacy of what remain relatively recent events, make any such apology doubly

It will be a very icy day in Hell when George Bush junior expresses any remorse over the current orgy of pillage and destruction in Iraq difficult. Nonetheless, two noteworthy attempts have been made by the opposing paramilitary groups, both of which deserve scrutiny. The first came in October 1994 when Gusty Spence read a prepared statement on behalf of the Combined Loyalist Military Command, which responded to the PIRA’s earlier ‘complete cessation of military operations’. The crucial passage in the statement read: ‘In all sincerity, we offer to the loved ones of all innocent victims over the past 25 years abject and true remorse. No words of ours will compensate for the intolerable suffering they have undergone during the conflict’. The second came nearly eight years later, in July 2002, just before the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Friday, when twenty one bombs exploded across Belfast in quick succession, killing nine people and injuring more than a hundred others. In its public statement the IRAedged uncomfortably towards an admission of guilt, offering ‘sincere apologies and condolences’ to the families of murdered ‘non-combatants’, and acknowledging ‘the grief and pain’ of the relatives of ‘combatants’. It is difficult to know

how to respond to such statements because they provoke such sharply conflicting responses simultaneously: the desire to accept these two ‘sincere’ apologies at face value and move beyond present deadlocks is immediately countermanded by both an unavoidable suspicion regarding motives and fresh anger over the wrongs that have been done. The IRAstatement continues: ‘While it was not our intention to injure or kill noncombatants, the reality is that on this and on a number of other occasions, that was the consequence of our actions’. This, thundered Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Sunday Independent, was little more than ‘a piece of stinking hypocrisy’; if the IRA really did not intend to kill innocent civilians, why did they continue to plant bombs in busy city centres, issue contradictory telephone warnings, and proceed to extend their list of ‘legitimate targets’ to even the most minor functionaries of the state? More sanguinely, Fergus Finlay, writing in the Irish Examiner, welcomed the IRAapology as a definitive signal that the war was indeed over, regarding the statement itself as ‘nothing less than the beginning of the process of standing down an army’.

That process continues to drag, in spite of a recent flurry of activity in both Stormont and Whitehall. Sincerity remains a stumbling block – just how can we be sure that the remorse expressed is indeed abject and true? As does the insidious distinction between ‘combatants’ and ‘non-combatants’, or ‘legitimate targets’ and ‘innocent victims’. Yet, it is possible to see the formal element of apology mentioned above at work even here. For, whether we like it or not, as a society we are already involved in the processes of mourning, accusal, and atonement which make up the difficult work of reconciliation. In this respect it is worth stressing that reconciliation is itself a process rather than a state; the end of reconciliation is to remove the necessity for its own existence, to erode the enmity without which it has no call. Reconciliation is a difficult, inherently painful encounter in which everyone involved seems to be losing ground, but while forgiveness remains, in the words of Jacques Derrida, ‘a madness of the impossible’, it is the long road we must all make the effort to walk.

22November 2004

helpful. Just simply saying ‘let’s work away here on this whole sorry thing and politically we can get some mileage out of it’ – that’s not helpful at all. There’s no point in saying sorry unless you mean it and a key element of that is a commitment not to do it again.

RG: Are you sorry about anything yourself – are you sorry you became a politician?

WHO’S SORRY NOW? Chris McGimpsey speaks to Ruth Graham CMc: The difficulty with the concept of saying ‘sorry’ is that people have to define what they are sorry about and I think that, on the nationalist side, a creative industry has grown up around trying to make everybody say sorry. There was an element of that in the Bloody Sunday inquiry. For some people it’s all about telling the Prods and the Brits ‘say you’re sorry because you are wrong and we have nothing to be sorry about.’

There has a tendency to politicise the whole concept of ‘sorry’. From time to time, I would make speeches to remind people about the Shankill bomb. I would also go on to talk about the outrageous crimes that we have committed against our neighbours in Ardoyne and the Falls. We have got to face up to that. In this society people are inclined to live in their own hurt. They forget about the hurt they have caused to others. Part of coming to terms with the past is recognising that and obviously if you are recognising it and coming to terms with it, you are expressing contrition.

RG: So if there is a sense of an apology in the air, it’s better to have a mutual apology?

CMc: You never hear that from Republicans.

Take the attempted incendiary attack on the Linen Hall Library about 12 years ago. That was a potentially horrific attack on the arts community in Belfast. If that incendiary had gone off then the Linen Hall Library would have been destroyed. Sinn Fein will talk about the Linen Hall Library and sit on the board but none of them have ever said ‘We’re sorry about that.’

I’m Chairman of Economic Development and there are Sinn Fein members on that committee. They’re very active and perform a positive role within the committee but I’ve never heard one of them say, ‘It’s a terrible shame we blew up all those buildings’ You never hear one of them say ‘That was a mistake. Sorry we ever got into that’.

We certainly never hear the paramilitaries on the Shankill saying, ‘Look, we kneecapped so and so and it was a mistake.’ You don’t hear the North Belfast UDAsaying, ‘Listen, we’re sorry we asked that builder for ten grand and he closed the site so eight local Protestants lost their jobs.’ They don’t think like that. There is something in the mindset of the paramilitaries and their political leadership where they don’t seem to be into ‘sorry’. They are into everyone else saying sorry but they are not so keen on saying it themselves.

RG: Is it helpful to the situation in Northern Ireland to say sorry?

CMc: Sometimes. When you look back at all the things you have done and all the things you’ve missed – politics takes a lot of your time. You’ll see a photograph and ask ‘when was that – why am I not in it?’ ‘You were off at a meeting in Ballygobackwards.’ And you feel a bit sorry then.

Generally I’m glad I’ve been a politician and some of things I have done have been worthwhile, other things I could have done better or should have done and didn’t do. On balance I’m fairly happy with my contribution.

There was a group of us who got together and set up a peace-train organisation. We were from different parties but generally leftwing and decided to confront the provos on blowing up the railway lines. We took them on and won and I consider that to be one of my main achievements.

RG: Do you have any regrets that the leftwing movement hasn’t had more of a unifying influence?

CMc: Some of the quasi-left wing groups have a strong republican agenda and that is unfortunate. In unionist terms the left has always been under represented. The vast majority of people who vote for me would

There was a great Protestant contribution to the trade-union movement and to left-wing causes generally but it seems to have been lost to some extent. probably vote Labour if they lived in England, whereas I can sit at a Unionist meeting next door to a councillor from Holywood whose voters, if they lived in England, would vote Conservative.

The trade-union movement has worked hard in trying to deal with sectarianism and has confronted a lot of the problems. Because there was a history of a Unionist establishment here nationalists seemed to be able to retain their identification with both nationalism and trade-union values without any problem. It seems to be more difficult to bring your unionism into the trade-union movement. Nevertheless, in the part of the city I’m in, there was a time, particularly when the craft unions were bigger, when every man was a member of a) the orange institution and b) his trade union. There was a great Protestant contribution to the tradeunion movement and to left-wing causes generally but it seems to have been lost to some extent.

RG: Are you sorry that the UWC tried to hijack the trade-union movement during the Ulster Workers Strike in the 70s.

CMc: The trade-union movement came out against the Ulster Workers Strike but when Harold Wilson called the Protestants in Northern Ireland ‘spongers’ it got a lot more support.

RG: Did Harold Wilson ever say sorry?

CMc: I think it is helpful if you recognise the hurt that you, or the community you identify with, have caused to someone else. If you feel sorry and actually say you’re sorry – that’s

CMc: No, of course not.

POLITICAL """"""""

APOLOGIES Newton Emerson I

t may surprise you to learn that Northern Ireland’s politicians have very little to apologise for. After 32 years of almost uninterrupted direct rule the people we elect have no real power. Not one single Northern Ireland MP has ever been even a backbench member of a British government. Since the local government re-organisation of 1974, which abolished the sectarian-rotten boroughs along with most of their functions, no councillor here has wielded influence over anything more insidious than bin collection.

Even the MLAs of the Stormont assembly didn’t have to raise the money they spent: the much-vaunted ministerial genius of Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness consisted mainly of dishing out subsidies according to formulae, all pre-ordained by their civil service handlers. In short it is nearly two generations since our political class did anything meaningful – so any act of contrition we might seek from them would be largely meaningless.

This runs counter to how we all feel about our elected representatives. The psychological wellbeing of the man on the street relies on a belief that politicians are to blame for the state of the country. When pulled on the fact that our politicians don’t actually run the country, he will blame them for that also due to their failure to work together. However this argument only holds water for so long and in the case of Northern Ireland it ran dry in 1974 with the collapse of the Sunningdale executive.

The most farcical aspect of the current impasse is that the politicians ‘causing’ it are exactly the same people who caused the last one. Ian Paisley, Gerry Adams and David Trimble were all instrumental in destroying Northern Ireland’s first attempt at accountable power sharing – and yet we keep voting for them.

Hence only SDLP supporters (yes, both of them) can legitimately demand some apology for the resulting cycle of failure. Everyone else

But occasionally an angry angler or keen young BBC Newsline reporter will notice 6,000 dead salmon going over a weir and decide to make a complaint. need point the finger no further away than the nearest mirror.

Yet even in the absence of democratic government Northern Ireland is still governed: surely the public sector, freed from electoral concerns, should be more willing to apologise for its mistakes? Sadly the opposite is the case, as an example will illustrate. Every few months, somewhere in Northern Ireland, the DOE Water Service poisons a river. Usually it gets away with it. But occasionally an angry

angler or keen young BBC Newsline reporter will notice 6,000 dead salmon going over a weir and decide to make a complaint. The body to which this complaint must be made is the DOE Environment and Heritage Service.

Both DOE agencies then engage solicitors and go to court. If the Water Service is found liable the appropriate financial penalty (say, £2.50) is transferred from one part of the DOE’s balance sheet to another, on a strictly ‘no fault’ basis of course. The solicitors then send in a bill for £5 million.

This is what passes for a ‘sorry’ among civil servants. Hardly a week goes by without the Northern Ireland Office fining itself on the basis of an obscenely expensive argument, then presenting this as a triumph of accountability. Clearly it would be preferably if those involved in public sector mistakes simply apologised and invested their legal budget in better services. However this is not how the quango mindset operates. To such people an apology is an admission of responsibility and responsibility is not the preserve of mere administrators. After all, where would such a policy end? Officials at the Planning Service could be held liable for breaches of their own guidelines. Executives at Belfast City Council might be asked to explain why they won’t clear up bonfire rubbish. One can almost see the pursed lips of Sir Humphrey on the face of such an outrage.

‘Power without responsibility,’ as Stanley Baldwin observed, ‘is the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’ – and after ages without responsibility, Northern Ireland’s public sector prostitutes are in no mood to qualify their power with repentance.

But civil servants are not our only unelected politicians. Paramilitaries remain the uncrowned queens of Northern Ireland’s Baldwinian brothel and they alone can be cock-sure enough of their authority to issue apologies. The nature of these confessions has been instructive. Following their 1994 ceasefir e loyalists issued a moving apology to those they had bereaved – then went right on killing people. IRAapologies, in contrast, express regret only in terms of historical excuses that aim to absolve the organisation of all responsibility – yet republicans don’t kill nearly as many people as they used to. It is as if loyalists apologised because they had no sense of how wrong they were, while republicans cannot apologise precisely because they know how wrong they were. Until those with power admit responsibility – be they in bureaucracies, balaclavas or voting booths – sorry just isn’t enough.

STRAIGHT TALKING

T

he first of the Bushmills’ ‘Straight talking, smooth drinking’ billboard ads to catch my attention featured a young, black-haired man – smirking in a way possibly (erroneously) intended to exude crinkly-eyed charm – and the words: ‘She wanted us to move in together. What? After only four years?’ The second in the series, featuring the same twinkling cretin, had some approximation of the (inane) slogan: ‘My sister’s birthday? Easy, I’ll just ask my mum’.

In the third and fourth ads I noticed, the original ebullient youth had been replaced – presumably due to the actor’s lynching and violent demise at the hands of the general public – with a man who looks like the man from Marian and Geoff. These contained the lines: ‘She wanted me to buy her a new

wardrobe. Good thing I did woodwork at school’, and ‘She said she’d never seen me cry.

So I said I’d take her to a match’.

Bushmills should be very, very sorry – Bushmills have damaged my health – for the following reasons. This is not quite the harmless, Loaded posturing of the WKD ads you get in men’s bogs saying ‘She asked for

something we could both use’, and then a picture of a boob job. For one thing, WKD is more or less an alcopop, so theirs are aspirational ads targeted at a demographic who have probably never encountered breasts, let alone breast implants. Nor, though they

Never has an advertisement confused and frustrated me so much with its confused and stupid message and cack-handed fumbling around to push the right buttons for the male consumer money pot rely on the same knackered stereotypes of men and women and relationships, are they merely as annoying as the old ‘he said/ she said’ Lunns ads – which, I can’t remember but which seemed to go along the lines ‘What a beautiful evening, I said. Buy me an enormous expensive diamond, she said’. Here, Lunns have as extenuating circumstances the general naff-ness and conventionality of jewellery – and particularly wedding and engagement rings – as product. But whiskey? Everyone drinks whiskey – and given the sectarian allegiance to rival whiskeys, it’s intriguing to speculate why Bushmills would compound the problem by nixing women as prospective consumers.

Having established their demographic as 25-35 year old men, though, the next dreadful, sorry-making aspect of the ‘straight-taking’ (for which read ‘emotional retardation’) campaign is how very, very wrong they get it.

If WKD succeeds because of the cartoonish over-the-top nature of its lads, this at first would seem to what Bushmills were after with the younger, dark-haired, smackably-faced person. A lovable rogue, he laughs in the face of sexual-equality and the emotional complexities of adult life – laughs and has another drink and presumably makes ever more extravagant claims to freedom from female influence; ‘my girlfriend/mother/ sister asked me what time it was. So I just punched her in the face’. And yet, confusingly, with his woolly black jumper and the warm tones of the picture, it also looks like we’re supposed to take him seriously as a real person. So which is he: a joke about the sex war, or a genuine man’s man, a role model?

This sense of confusion is compounded in the

ads featuring the older, ashen-faced chap – particularly in the hollow sound his blokey comments are now making. ‘She asked me to buy her a new wardrobe…’ Excuse me? How does that work? I may make no claims to representativeness when it comes to relationships, or clothes for that matter, but really, I’m not

sure I find that plausible; ‘Right – so what time will I see you this evening? Oh yes, and can you buy me a new wardrobe? No of clothes, not the piece of furniture. Yes, and something from Lunns please. Bye’. And in fact, with his weird resemblance to the Marion and Geoff bloke and air of disillusionment, it looks like the Bushmills man doesn’t believe it either.

You half expect him to turn to the camera, Marion and Geoff style, and say ‘She didn’t ask me to buy her a new wardrobe. In fact I haven’t even got a girlfriend. And I don’t like whiskey, nasty bitter taste…’

Never has an advertisement confused and frustrated me so much with its confused and stupid message and cack-handed fumbling around to push the right buttons for the male consumer money pot – not counting the current ad for Harp (an Irish beer, am I right?) in which a group of young men wander round an (English?) town and con everyone out of the pub by sticking football colours for a (fictitious?) football team on a bus and then make a crap joke in a completely fake Northern Irish accent (WHAT? Who’s this for?). So I am very angry, and Bushmills should be very sorry, and should send me a written apology for their rubbish time-wasting billboards. And they should be sorry because I will now conscientiously neither purchase Bushmills myself, nor request it as a gift from others, nor bestow it upon family members – male or female – at Christmas time. And to those who have discovered that this is really just a thinly disguised My Beef, I am also sorry, but not so much. Ah yes, catharsis…

PROTESTANT GUILT AND CATHOLIC SHAME. Eamonn Hughes W hat makes us say ‘sorry’?

Presumably it’s because we feel sorrow for some act or omission, but what causes that sorrow: is it guilt or shame?

And what’s the difference between the two? In Christian cultures, we are told that we are born in guilt because of original sin. Before eating the apple Adam and Eve ‘were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed’ (Genesis 2: 25). After eating of the tree of knowledge Adam and Eve know the difference between good and evil, but it is shame, not guilt, that makes them hide from God and drives them to make aprons of fig leaves. (Just think: without shame there’d be no fashion industry, and since ‘God made coats of skin and clothed them’, it’s the one industry that can claim a theological warrant: when people talk of fashion bibles they’re not joking.)

Shame, therefore, appears to be a matter of public appearance, a feeling that is entirely dependent on the social world, a sense that it is how we appear to others that motivates our actions (the perfect basis for the fashion industry therefore). Guilt is something more personal, a condition of our private and internal being rather than of our social and public seeming. Of course, criminals are declared guilty in public at trial, but this is merely a public manifestation of a personal condition, otherwise there could be no such thing as a miscarriage of justice. That concept depends on the fact that no mere public declaration of guilt can alter the private condition of innocence. The Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’ acknowledges the obverse of this: just because a court cannot prove your guilt

repentance, an awareness of one’s guilt. To be sorry because of external factors, such as the fear of punishment or loss of social standing, is to be merely attrite, to put on the appearance of repentance in an attempt to escape the consequences of one’s guilty being.

For Protestants, the blood of the Lord is a spiritual detergent: ‘sinners plunged beneath that flood,/ Lose all their guilty stains’ and any guilt is thereafter dealt with by personal intercourse between the sinner and God. In certain cases, the born-again can be of the elect, chosen by God for salvation, apparently regardless of any question of guilt (which should make the Immaculate Mary a Calvinist figurehead rather than a Catholic one). But such entirely private arrangements give rise to a need for forms of social control, otherwise how do we know that the sinner has said ‘sorry’ to God? This is where shame comes in: you must (in an old phrase that is now

does not alter the fact that you are guilty.

Catholicism and Protestantism deal with these matters in different ways. For Catholics, guilt is a recurrent condition. Baptism of the infant remits original sin but confession is still necessary as the soul is maculated by sin (only the Blessed Virgin escapes from this: she is Mary Immaculate). Guilt is a condition of Catholic being: we are all poor sinners, the banished children of Eve. To be alive is to be guilty, something for which you must always be sorry and that sorrow must be based on contrition, a genuine internalised feeling of

Catholicism then is always having to say you’re sorry, Protestantism is always trying to ensure that you never have to say sorry. probably politically-incorrect) be ‘Protestantlooking’, you must put on a neat, tidy and respectable appearance. Catholicism then is always having to say you’re sorry, Protestantism is always trying to ensure that you never have to say sorry. But, as with so many theological matters, there are some mind-twisting confusions in all of this. To Protestants, confession can look like an all-

encompassing Catholic get-out clause: no matter what you do, you can get the pot scrubbed clean in private. And yet, part of the point of confession is that you show your repentance to be true because, by making it through the priest, there is a public element to it and you are showing proper shame for your guilt. Similarly, to Catholics, the idea that you can escape guilt once and for all by a private contract with God also looks like a get-out clause and shame seems to be more a matter of public attrition rather than private contrition.

So which one is public and which is private?

To add to this confusion one source for both sets of ideas is the story of John the Baptist in which all the people of Jerusalem, Judæa and the region round about Jordan went out to him ‘And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins’ (Matthew 3:6).

While you’re deciding which side of that comma you want to be and whether you want to take the baptismal or the confessional route to dealing with your guilt you should maybe consider one thing. There’s an interesting omission in Genesis – not something you can say lightly about a narrative which encompasses the creation of life, the universe and everything. Of course, it does crack along, getting from the creation of the universe to the expulsion from the Garden of Eden in an economical 2000 words, so there’s only room for the really important things. Maybe that’s why, although Adam and Eve know the difference between good and evil, and although they are both guilty and ashamed as a result, they both make excuses (Eve made me do it, the snake made me do it) but neither of them says sorry.

THE POLITICAL APOLOGY Paul Moore Let me start this sorry little tale with an anecdote. Having been asked to write a spirited resume, and indeed defence, of the way in which Northern Irish politicians can and do apologise to the voting public on a regular basis when things go wrong, I felt it would be useful to seek advice from someone who comes into contact with them on a regular basis. Hence my trip to a national broadcasting company’s newsroom to discuss this issue with a morning news presenter/interculator. Imagine my amazement when, on being told of my quest for knowledge he replied curtly but pointedly, ‘You must be ***king joking!’

On recovery I made my way to a number of other politician watchers and although many did not put the case quite so eloquently as my first interviewee the general thrust of their analysis was invariably the same.

Northern Irish politicians do not say sorry.

One might argue that this is because they are consummate professionals and as such know innately that the first rule of politics is never to apologise. It is not that they do not understand the nature of abjection since many, particularly those elected on a local government basis, know when others need to make retribution for their alleged sins. It is just that they do not feel it is efficacious to do so themselves.

There are of course honourable exceptions, but these have interesting complications, for example when Secretary of State Peter Brooke apologised unreservedly for his rendition of My Darling Clemintine on RTE’s Late Late Show at a time when the country was in shock about one of its most infamous atrocities, the Teebane killings. It might be argued, however,

that he doesn’t count since he was English anyway and historically they take an unhealthy pleasure from wearing the sackcloth and ashes. There are also instances of ‘lesser’ politicians associated with major parties having to show regret for outbursts in relation to social issues. Was it not an SDLPcouncillor who had to apologise for suggesting someone was working ‘like a nigger’ and did not a DUP councillor have to show some kind of remorse (however grudgingly) for homophobic outbursts? Again, however, these may not really count because the climb down was related to social issues and as any selfrespecting politician knows, social issues always come second to the real politics of sectarianism.

But if one must not apologise then one needs a policy for this because there are times when the lie of the political landscape makes it imperative that one shows some semblance of regret. The policy strategy adopted by most of

a word or words must be found to say sorry without uttering the actual word.

This is known in cynical circles as ‘thesaurus’ politics. the parties in Northern Ireland would seem to have a number of elements. Firstly, always speak as a party, never as an individual unless the individual is going to hang the party and then he/she must become persona non grata.

In this situation it is always the ‘party’, ‘we’ or ‘as a group’ that feels strongly enough about the said cock-up to give the party’s position on it. In this case the party’s position is the

‘But what about the Red Berets! What about Ulster Resistance!’ In terms of a sorry sight, well, it certainly was.

RG: But you’re not really sorry about it are you?

SORRY FOR NOTHING Jim McDowell, editor of the Sunday World speaks to Ruth Graham RG: Do you have anything to be sorry about?

JMcD: I’m sorry about all the reporting I did on the City Hall. It was non-stop diggin’ and fighting. The DUP would shout across the chamber that Sinn Fein were the blood brothers of the IRAand they would shout back

JMcD: Oh no – but I think they were. I was thrown out after writing a story about one Lord Mayor who had introduced a golden key system for the toilet. In those days the city council was awash with drink and toilets were in big demand. Somebody had given me the key to this exclusive toilet, which was supposed to be for disabled people. The Lord Mayor caught me coming out and said, ‘What are you doing in there McDowell? That’s a disabled toilet.’ I said, ‘I am disabled through drink and I got it up in your parlour so I’m not sorry.’ After taking him off in all kinds of situations he barred me from his parlour and with the NUJ, if one of us was blacked we were all blacked.

There was always plenty of sex in the City Hall. There was a certain incident where a previous holder of high office was discovered by a security man being shagged on the settee in the High Sheriff’s office but we’ll not go into that. There was also the incident where a councillor campaigned against nude bathing

surrogate for an apology.

Secondly a word or words must be found to say sorry without uttering the actual word.

This is known in cynical circles as ‘thesaurus’ politics. This form of politics (not unique to Northern Ireland I might add) has a lexicon which includes things being regrettable unacceptable, unavoidable and unpalatable.

Issues are to be condemned, put in historical perspective or acknowledged and moved on from. And of course the party is happy to meet with any individual who feels they have been wronged in order to explain the party’s position in person.

Thirdly, when the time comes to use this lexicon in public always ensure that it is the party leader who delivers it with the obligatory sheepish apology-inducing culprit lurking apologetically in the background.

Ironically this actually improves the standing of the party leader since it shows he/she is willing to stand by the troops, allows the boss to show leadership qualities in their mastery of the thesaurus lexicon and leaves the public under no illusion as to who has actually messed up. Needless to say Mr or Mrs Sheepish in the background is never heard of again, living the rest of their political lives in rural town halls, the Northern Irish equivalent of Outer Siberia.

Finally, always take the moral high ground, even if in the wrong. If nothing else this will confuse the general public and allow you to come up with a new addition to the apology strategy and make it look as though you have spent a long time deliberating on this vexatious situation rather than searching for a handy way out of it.

Thankfully, none of this prevarication

applies to journalism in all its celebrated forms. Here is an industry that feels proud to apologise and to repent when shown to be in the wrong. Granted it may take the odd libel case to focus one on the apology in question but if it is good enough for the likes of the Daily Telegraph then it is good enough for any naïve young fledging publication trying to make its way in a vicious and cruel mediascape.

At this moment I myself feel an apology

in Templemore Avenue Baths. We covered him in the paper running nude in the Cotswolds and we’re talking about Sammy Wilson of course. Old Sammy’s alright but he should have caught himself on.

There was one previous Lord Mayor, who dozed off one time and when he woke up they were discussing various brands of paint they might use to paint the chamber. He woke up and said, ‘Before yous go any further, what this chamber needs is a good coat of Durex!’

taking a gang of tourists on a tour of City Hall and he took them into the great banqueting hall and said, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the great banqueting hall and every year the Lord Mayor holds his balls in here and every year the Lord Mayor’s balls just get bigger’ Two American nuns wrote a letter of complaint to the then Lord Mayor. He was busted down the ranks and went from Sergeant of the Mace to a sweeper up in St George’s Market. When he was invited back to reunions at the City Hall, he would end up singing ‘Who’s sorry now....’ [McDowell sings loudly].

The Lord Mayor caught me coming out and said, ‘What are you doing in there McDowell? That’s a disabled toilet.’

Another time they were talking about Belfast City Council getting bad publicity, most of it generated by myself. He woke up from a snooze after too many double whiskies and said, ‘what this council needs to do is to go out and spread its testicles across the land.’

In those days we had real characters. We had Pootsie Millar who always wore a surgical collar after an alleged accident in the shipyard.

I christened him ‘Super Prod’. Then there was a chap who held the office of Sergeant Of The Mace some years back – brilliant guy. He was

At this moment I myself feel an apology coming on. I have been fraudulent and written this article under false pretences. coming on. I have been fraudulent and written this article under false pretences. My brief was to find and analyse sorry Northern Irish politicians. I have not found any. For that I apologise sincerely, abjectly and completely.

But in the meantime may I draw your attention to the fact that at no time was it my intention to cause any offence, my remarks were taken completely out of context, at no time have I ever been racist in my thinking (in fact many of my acquaintances are from far away places), and I have never used my position to advance the career of any individual with whom I have shared an apology. For any other apologies please speak to the editor who is at this very moment composing an appropriate, but undoubtedly dissembling, response.

RG: Have you made any apologies yourself?

JMcD: One thing I should have said sorry for was when I got married, to Lindy, who I love.

It was in the City Hall and the registrar said to me, ‘Do you take this woman to be your wife?’ and I said ‘I do’. The thing that I feel sorry about is that when the registrar said to Lindy, ‘Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?’ I’m sorry that I didn’t turn around and say, ‘Lindy, I’m sorry, but you don’t know what the hell you’re taking on.’

THE APOLOGIST Jay Rayner is the author of The Apologist.

Here he speaks to Richard West, co-editor of The Vacuum.

RW: …there’s something in the air about apologising.

JR: Yeah, it’s one of those, not entirely coincidental things, clearly I thought there was mileage in it when I came up with the idea, but by the time the book came out it almost looked like I’d arranged the Abu Ghraib affair as part of my promotional campaign.

RW: What got you started on it in the first place?

JR: I’m meant, as a writer, to give you a highfaluting response to do with the re-reading of Proust, but the honest answer is that it was while watching an episode of Friends. I cannot tell you how hard I tried not to admit to this at various times till eventually I concluded there was no point not. There’s an episode where Monica sends Chandler off to apologise to an ex-girlfriend that he finished with because she got fat. Obviously she had her own fattist history so she was a bit concerned about this. Anyway he goes off, he says sorry, he comes back and Monica says, ‘I’m really proud of you, you’ve done a really good thing’, and Chandler turns to the camera and says, ‘Gee, if I’d known how good it felt to apologise I’d have started doing it years ago’.

I said to my wife at that moment, there’s a novel in that, the story of a man who decides to apologise for everything he’s done wrong, not because he’s sorry but because he enjoys the feeling; and my wife said, yes dear, as partners of writers probably tend to do when the writer says I’ve got an idea for a novel.

But I needed something a bit bigger and chewier, and at the time the Durban antiracism conference, a UN-sponsored conference on racism, was going on in South Africa. This was the summer of 2001, and eleven nations were haggling over the wording of an apology for slavery. I was delighted by this; the idea of all these diplomatic sherpas sitting around tables trying to work out whether they regretted something, or were sorry, or profoundly sorry, or how sorry they should be, using the language that our mothers taught us to use, in a political sphere.

RW: Did you find out stuff about international law in relation to apologies then?

JR: No, I just made it all up. The joy of writing novels when you’re a journalist is you don’t actually have to go and check anything, as long as it has the ring of truth. I invented a Professor Thomas Schenke, who is an exceptionally dull man, and quite unpleasant, who comes up with the laws of apology as part of his anger management course, under a court order for being horrible to people. He codifies his laws of apology, and it’s partly a response to Fukuyama’s theory of the End of History; what Schenke is saying is that rather than being the End of History, the end of the cold war was going to peel back the wounds of history, and that the conduct of international relations would be stymied by myriad grudges and complaints coming forward from the deepest reaches of history, which needed to be dealt with, and unless

they were dealt with then we wouldn’t be able to move on. And although I made this up, I have to say I think there’s quite a lot of truth in this, if you look that’s exactly what happened in the former Yugoslavia. Say what you like about Communism but it certainly kept a lid on things. The moment it all fell apart, people start shouting about battles in the 16th century. The whole Serbian – Kosovan thing to me is pretty inexplicable, though perhaps for you in Belfast it’s probably less so. So that’s where it came from.

RW: And have you subsequently found that some of these things that you dreamt up in fact have close proximity to things that really do exist?

JR: Yes and no. I did talk to people in the UN and there was an idea going round of an apology box at UN headquarters in New York, one of the British diplomats there said he put this idea but it hadn’t found much of an audience. But what did strike me was that there was developing a formulaic way in which apologies were conducted, and that they were being separated from the idea of any compensation, and that it was about the use of language. My idea was that in the old days, politicians could play the statesman, they could make speeches from the podium and hope that their big rhetorical flourishes would go down well at the back of a hall. In the modern age, from I suppose the 90s onwards, the camera close-up requires the politician to be a human being as well. They have to look authentic. What an apology does is lend emotional authenticity. Blair is brilliant at this, and Clinton was brilliant at it, look back to one of his earliest ones, I think it’s Tuskergee, it’s an apology to a bunch of African-American men who were experimented on by the American government. And then the ’98 apology for the Rwandan genocide, which followed an apology for slavery that had only taken place three days before. People forget this one. And it preceded his apology for Monica Lewinski.

He became very very good at it. As a nice, god-fearing liberal, I went into this thinking, well why shouldn’t the body politic behave in the same way as personal relations behave, why shouldn’t those two things mirror each other? But the further I went into the more I concluded that the apology was actually a route to not dealing with the offense, rather than dealing with it.

Politically it feels relatively recent. I think the first apology in modern times, and it’s one that’s worth paying attention to, is Willy Brandt, in Warsaw in 1970, where he fell to his knees before the memorial to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, and didn’t actually say anything. And what’s interesting about that one is that some opinion polls taken afterwards generally came to the conclusion that the German people felt it was a rather uncalled for act. So he wasn’t following public example, he was leading public opinion, whereas I think it’s the opposite now, where what we have is the offence, and then the desperate cry for an apology, so you’ve got Blunkett running around saying, if I’ve done anything wrong I’ll apologise and repay the price of the ticket, after everybody shouted at him. So that does feel like a modern thing. It feels very banal to reference it back to reality TV and daytime television and talk shows, but I suspect there’s an element there, whereby

the exposing of emotion on TV creates an emotion-hungry culture.

RW: The other thing that I suppose we’ve become conscious of is how telling someone to apologise is way of exercising power over them.

JR: Oh absolutely. I’ve had Australians say to me, so do you think John Howard should apologise to the Aborigines, I don’t know if you remember the Sydney Olympics, with protesters coming in to the opening ceremony wearing suits with the words ‘I’m Sorry’ all over them, things like that. They’ve been trying to get an official apology out of the Australian government for years, and my point is, well even if you did apologise now, would it carry any weight? Would you suddenly believe that he was actually sorry now, when he apparently wasn’t sorry six months ago? It’s the same with getting the Vatican to apologise for looking the other way during the Holocaust. They’ve never done that, though they did apologise for the sacking of Constantinople 800 years ago, quite recently, which is touching isn’t it. Is there a single hope in hell that the Catholic church will ever apologise for putting millions of women into poverty, for the ban on contraception? I doubt it very much. But you can beg for the apology, and if you beg for it for so long, and demand it for so long, and then eventually get it, it seems to me a hollow victory.

For a short while I did a blog of Penitential News, some of which I thought was hysterically funny. I did gather some very interesting stories about different types of apology. The last one I did was July 9th, which was this: Brian McFadden from Westlife, a lap-dancer called Amy Barker had sex with him and then McFadden denied that it had ever happened, so she took him to court to prove she had had sex with him, and he had to apologise, and admit that he had indeed had sex with her. That’s one of my favourite apologies.

RW: Then of course you get the tabloids, as in the case of the Mirror, having to apologise themselves.

think, what else could they do, could the apology get them anywhere. A lot of apologies, I think this goes to your cause most acutely, a lot of apologies are completely useless, I mean obviously if you’ve treated your lover badly, you’ve been a shit to your kids, you’ve been a nightmare to your mates, if you are genuinely going to alter your behaviour and not do it again, then say sorry, but otherwise when it gets to a corporate level, or a governmental level, it starts to look fatuous, and rather bizarre.

RW: Do you think it has to hurt for it to be a proper apology? Like the Willie Brandt example?

JR: I don’t think it actually did hurt Willie Brandt, apart from possibly his knees, that was a more curious one. One of the interesting things about Willie Brandt was that he wasn’t even in Germany during the Second World War, he’d had to run away, being a member of the opposition, to Norway, during the whole of the Second World War, so there was no complicity whatsoever, but nobody else in the German people was prepared to do it and he took it upon himself to do so, although the question was who and what was he doing it to? I think it becomes more complicated the more you look at it, because it wasn’t as if the rest of the Polish people who survived the German invasion were exactly friendly towards Jews either, Poland was notoriously anti-Semitic and there was in fact a pogrom in Poland in 1967, not that there were very many Jews to have a pogrom of.

This wasn’t answering the question; does it have to be painful? The modern apology has to look painful; if it doesn’t seem to hurt, nobody’s very interested, are they? Look at the language that Blair came up with over the Iraq war recently, did you see this? ‘I can apologise for the lapses in intelligence on WMD, but I cannot say sorry for removing Saddam Hussein from power.’ It was a classic barrister’s apology. He didn’t say ‘I am sorry’, he said there are grounds upon which I could.

That’s my reading of ‘I can say sorry’.

RW: Do you have any favourite circumlocu tions for apologising?

JR: Oh of course. Actually I had to make a distinction between the political and the celebrity apology recently. The political apology is made by a politician to make themselves look more human; the celebrity has to apologise for being too human.

When Piers Morgan resigned and the Mirror apologised for those pictures, actually I think that’s a classic example of an apology gone wrong, because I don’t know about you but I essentially reckon the point that those pictures were making was completely correct.

Morgan just unfortunately pursued it in the wrong way. There was no doubt that there was abuse going on by British soldiers on Iraqi prisoners. So there you have a classic example. Or the Sun, apologising yet again for Hillsborough, to the people of Liverpool, which they do like a little spasm once every ten years.

JR: I think ‘I can apologise’, Blair’s one. If I could find the exact text of what the Pope said when he went to the Wailing Wall, that’s quite an interesting one. He went to the Wailing Wall, stuck a note in the Wailing Wall, and it was very very obtuse, about ‘that my people should look the other way when your people were…’; you’d have to seek it out.

RW: So do you think the apology is meaningless?

RW: Please do.

JR: Well it’s not serving them very much.

There are obviously some cases where you

RW: We’ve been asked for an expression of regret.

JR: Are you doing an expression of regret?

RW: No. JR: Good. I’m expecting my phone to ring on ‘Sorry day’, with broadcasters asking me what do I make of it. I wonder if I could sell my book through ‘Sorry day’?

JR: Without apology, shamelessly. I’ll see it merely as a promotional opportunity for my novel. So thank you for that!

OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE Auto-Illustrator 1.2.038 Christopher Murphy I first discovered Adrian Ward’s parody software Auto-Illustrator in 2001 and fell in love with it instantly. As a designer working primarily within the music industry I’d rapidly tired of the numb perfection generated by the mainstream giants’ applications (Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia FreeHand and…

CorelDRAW?) so I turned to Auto-Illustrator in an effort to introduce a degree of measured unpredictability into my work.

I was encouraged by Ward’s summary of the software as WYSINRWYG (What You See Is Not Really What You Get) which ran counter to the ‘industry standard’ at the time.

The fact that the application was bundled with a host of ‘parody plug-ins’ which aided with the rapid generation of artwork ideas was also compelling. Another of Signwave UK’s idiosyncratic products – which also features the familiarly named Autoshop 1.2 – it appeared to be just what I was looking for to force me out of a creative rut.

A quick look at its numerous nested menus revealed a host of possibilities with everything the hungry designer could ask for: ‘Instant Bauhaus Style’ symbols – perfect for that ‘new modernist’ look; an ‘IKEAist’ composition feature – ideal for the creation of Scandinavian slabs of muted pastels at the drop of a hat; and last, but by no means least, the ability to create (and solve) dot-to-dot puzzles from virtually anything you choose to throw at it. What more could you ask for?

Primarily designed for the creation of vector graphics, Auto-Illustrator can be gently nudged into replicating virtually anything that

Illustrator and FreeHand can, but where it comes into its own is its humorous array of parody plug-ins and incongruous set of filters which allow for the instant creation of artwork at the click of a mouse.

For the designer suffering from designer’s block the ability to let the software generate some initial ideas is perfect, allowing you to

export the result in a variety of formats for fine-tuning in the application of your choice.

Whilst its automated results might lack finesse, and often bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of DIY DTP, they’re perfect when used as a means of rapid

prototyping or as a loose digital sketchbook by the experienced designer.

Need a suitably swooshed new logo with just a hint of irony? Why not try the ‘Sportswear Logo’ plug-in as a starting point?

It even takes care of generating a random brand name (which conforms to the latest focus-group-tested, nonsense-name trends and naturally includes a free ™) some recent examples I’ve used include: Nomax™, Airfi™, Adibok™ and, my personal favourite, Notek™. The results naturally feature a strikingly familiar, distorted Nike’esque marque, but then a quick survey of the logo landscape reveals that the swoosh is de rigueur these days.

Need an ad fast that conforms to the look and feel of our increasingly standardised strapline culture? Why not try the ‘Apple Ad.’ plug-in? Again, Auto-Illustrator takes care of everything, generating random product names and the obligatory straplines (‘Feels Powerful!’, ‘Quite Outrageous!’ and ‘Even More Outrageous!’…). All you add is a photograph – fast, efficient and painless.

But beyond its role as a piece of useful software, Auto-Illustrator is unquestionably something more, raising the bar for interactive

artworks significantly. One of a new breed of intelligent screen-based works it suggests a new and refreshing direction for software and screen-based art, one that is challenging and that repays repeated investigation.

Ward states, ‘it raises difficult and important questions by confronting the user with issues that they may not be familiar with… the software is a creative expression of those who authored it. As such AutoIllustrator is an artwork’. It’s hard to argue with this assertion and, to date, AutoIllustrator has won a host of awards since its release, including the 2001 Transmediale Artistic Software Award and an Honorary Mention in the Interactive Art section of the 2001 Prix Ars Electronica. High praise indeed.

In addition Ward has presented it at festivals, lectures, seminars and conferences internationally where it has been met with widespread critical acclaim.

But artistic software and interactive art aside, Auto-Illustrator appeals to me for its ability to force me out of a creative dead end.

Used as a starting point – especially when confronted with a blank digital canvas – it opens up a wealth of creative avenues. More than a means to an end though, it’s a pleasure to use and a welcome deviance from the software norm.

Now at version 1.2.038 Auto-Illustrator supports Mac OS 9/OS X and Windows 98/NT/2000/XPand is free to download as a trial version from the following location: www.auto-illustrator.com

SORRY … I THINK? Danny Morrison In my defence may I quote a Protestant!

Richard Whately, Anglican Archbishop of Dublin (1831), once wrote: ‘It is folly to shiver over last year’s snow’, meaning that to dwell on the past is pointless.

I wasn’t sorry for anything I did at the time – but shivered lots much later. I’ve been stupid, foolish, arrogant, ruthless, cowardly; can’t stand over some decisions and their consequences – and that was before I was even fifteen.

In truth, I am sorry for many hurts and cruelties inflicted on friends and foes, inadvertently or deliberately. You cannot undo past mistakes but can hope not to repeat them.

I have an urgent message for Jeannie Campbell from Andersonstown whom I promised to meet at the Glen Road terminus and take to see Planet of the Apes in April 1968. If you are still there Jeannie, Danny won’t be showing up. He took his mate, Mickey, instead. Sorry.

MUSEUM REPORT Lisburn Borough Council Rubber The Mills bequest Accession number: rublis 816 30mm x 20mm x 5mm coloured rubber composite OBJECT REPORT A ‘slab’ pencil eraser in banded colours from red through to magenta printed with a black design. The emblem, ‘Lisburn Borough Council, I'm a responsible dog owner’ below a depiction of a dog, is slightly obscured; corners worn, though probably not by use.

More of novelty or ‘totem’ object than a practical aid to clean pencil drawing.

CURATOR’S REPORT Lisburn is a small suburb of Belfast situated to the south of the city. Unfortunately its name sounds similar to ‘Lisbon’, a beautiful and ancient city, and the capital of Portugal. Since the advent of mediums of mass communication, such as the wireless and television, the citizens of Lisburn have been lulled by this misapprehension into the belief that their suburb is commonly referred to as of international significance and have begun to refer to themselves as a ‘city’. Happily this delusion has resulted in a number of

MY BEEF Students Daniel Jewesbury Hey student, you are not the victim. It’s difficult telling anyone here in the Wee Statelet that they are not the victim, but this time we can be fairly definitive in our diagnosis. The problem is that it is part of our political culture to claim victimhood, because there is an understanding that by being the most oppressed, one gains the moral high ground, and politics here is about nothing if it is not about proving that you are more hard done by than the other lot. So it should not have been such a surprise when a bunch of drunken teenage layabouts, having gone on the rampage in the streets around their slum dwellings because some of their neighbours had had the temerity to call them drunken teenage layabouts on a BBC TV programme, then tried to claim that they were the ones being unfairly treated. These people are trying to stop us having fun and living a normal student life, they whinge, like the selfobsessed adolescents they are.

Most nights between Monday and Sunday it’s something like a slightly older version of Lord of the Flies in the polystyrene-strewn boulevards of broken glass that are the Holy Lands (can I suggest that we change the name?

Given the recent events around Palestine Street I propose the ‘Occupied Territories’).

Over the last ten or fifteen years, the students have been crammed in, in ever higher

concentrations, to these decrepit, converted Victorian villas and terraces, by rodent-eyed landlords who long ago found that if they can fit another parti-wall into that downstairs bathroom, they can squeeze another hundred and fifty quid out of some wide-eyed culchie’s ma. The families who were once the majority in this formerly respectable residential area feel more and more marooned, as the students (of what, precisely?) indulge in the traditional rural Ulster pursuits of alcoholic nocturnal street hurling (of both types) and random freeassociation primal screaming.

Many people have so far been blamed for this predicament: Queen’s University, for failing to take the problem seriously in the last few years (the University of Ulster seems, for some reason, to be given some special dispensation; personally I have always found that queue of students waiting for the Jordanstown bus from College Green most aesthetically unpleasant); the slum landlords,

Can I suggest that we change the name? Given the recent events around Palestine Street I propose the ‘Occupied Territories’ for exploiting the students and undercutting the better quality accommodation offered by both universities; the planning authorities, for failing to follow the example of other cities, where conversions to multiple occupancy have

idiosyncratic and puzzling cultural artifacts of which this is a particularly fine example.

The first characteristic of the ‘Lisburn style’, as it has become known, is the ambiguious function of these artifacts. This item bears the slogan ‘I’m a responsible dog owner’ but to what purpose? We might imagine a person in possession of the object displaying it to other ‘responsible dog owners’ as some form of greeting. More confusing still are the Gay Pride colours of the rubber overprinted with the bulldog iconography beloved of early 20th century British nationalism. Is this an attempt to bring together traditionally different groups (perhaps important constituencies in Lisburn) through a shared interest in dog ownership?

The final interpretation, and the one I find the most plausible, is that it is the dog who is speaking – for we can see that it is depicted looking at us with its tongue out. ‘I’m a Responsible Dog Owner’ that we had taken to mean owner ‘of’ a dog in fact indicates a dog ‘which owns’ as in ‘I’m a responsible gentleman driver’. But who is this dog that is addressing us? Well it's none other than ‘Lisburn Borough Council’ as is written very clearly beneath him. And what does this dog, Lisburn Borough Council, own? He owns a bone: see he is pointing at it and clutching it in his paw. Lisburn Borough Council is a ‘responsible’ dog because he's got his bone and he's not going to let it go.

to be approved by other residents; the students, for simply being feral, inadequately socialised muckahs with too little to do and too much time to do it in; and, most recently, the residents, for daring to resist the programme of ethnic cleansing being carried out by the stormtroopers of Armagh and Tyrone. We should also include in this list the licensed premises in the area, notably Renshaw’s, Duke’s and the Hatfield, for exploiting the poor dears and forcing them to ingest (post-) industrial quantities of Smirnoff Ice and Bacardi Breezer; and, while we’re at it, what about the NIPS, for apparently doing bugger all about all that persistent Anti-Social Behaviour. What about the government too, for encouraging greater access to universities without considering what amenities need to be provided for a much larger student population? The rest of the UK should take note: here in the Wee Statelet we’ve already achieved the New Labour target of 50% of school leavers attending university, so our experience could be mirrored across England, Scotland and Wales, where the town centres are apparently already convulsed by hordes of binge drinkers.

Personally I blame the older generation. If they kept their young charges on the farm until they were, say, 25, and could get themselves a young girl with a few heifers and bit of land on the high ground, we urbane city types would be spared the results of their premature (one could say experimental) release into society. More seriously, we should blame the political class for allowing a generation to grow up thinking that if they are held to account for their behaviour, the proper response is to victimise the people making the complaint.

The only pro-active approach to the problem has come from Belfast City Council, who have unleashed a plague of specially-bred rats in the area, to try and pick off the unwary and most especially inebriated. I thoroughly approve of this introduction of a biological agent. There are just so many people to blame, and so many helpless victims, that it seems the only way to simplify the situation is to have a few of the protagonists eaten by vermin.

There’s a nice circularity to it, wouldn’t you say?

Published by Factotum Welcome to the doghouse.

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TOUCHED

BY GENIUS Jim Bowen, swimming instructor Jo Baker I grew up in a small village in North Lancashire, so until I left home there weren’t that many opportunities for encounters with genius, greatness or even unmerited celebrity.

I once saw Peter Bowles, who was then at the height of his powers – To The Manor Born was on TV at the time – but that was in Euston Station, and amounted to me pointing and asking in that piercing voice that only precocious little gits can muster, ‘Daddy, do we know that man?’

We were on our way to visit my cousins, who lived in Sutton. It was a place of considerable glamour, Sutton in the early 1980s. My cousins’ next-door neighbour was the drummer from Hot Chocolate; my Uncle, who was a carpet fitter, had done Dennis Waterman’s new carpets, and maintained that Rula Lenska had tried to chat him up while he was knocking down the gripper rod. It gave me considerable status in the playground back home, the fact that my Uncle Ricky had fitted

carpets for Minder and his missus. I probably made rather too much of it, in fact; that and the story about how he’d fitted white shagpile for Freddy Mercury and his wife. And colour me credulous, but it’s only now, writing that last sentence, that I realise Uncle Ricky’s stories of flooring for the rich and famous might have been a little light on fact.

Unfortunately, I can’t really ask him about it: Uncle Ricky ran off with the Gypsies when he was fifty-three, and we’ve hardly heard from him since.

As I said, growing up where I did, there wasn’t much of significance going on. An old manor house in a nearby village was used as the exterior for The Ghosts of Motley Hall (many years later, my husband and I held our wedding celebration there, mainly for that reason) but by the time I knew that, we were well into the Rentaghost era. So between the Peter Bowles moment and the time I met the Dalai Lama (weirdly, the older they get, the more my Dad and the Dalai Lama look alike, to the extent that my eighteen-month old son would point at the cover picture on The Art of Happiness and say ‘granddad.’) my life was a

celebrity-desert. Apart, of course, from Jim Bowen teaching me to swim.

You know how it is with celebrities: they move into rural communities for the simple life, and it becomes anything but simple.

Paparazzi, stalkers, wild parties; the trappings of fame seem to be inescapable. They certainly were for Jim Bowen. No sooner had the family moved into the village than he was rounding up the locals to appear on his forthcoming TV show. He ran a series of quiz-and-darts nights in the local pub, the Bay Horse: the winning teams would go on to star in the first episode of Bullseye. My parents, a golden couple in the local quiz league, were asked to take part. And for a while, they looked all set to be bringing home Bully’s Special Prize (we really could have done with that washing machine, my Mum was stuck with an ancient twin tub for years to come), or at least a glass-tankard-anddarts combo. Unfortunately, the weak link in their team became all too apparent all too soon. They were both ace at general knowledge, but my Mum is shit at darts.

Over the next few years, Jim Bowen’s kids attended our primary and his wife set up a riding school just outside the village. Me and my brother and various friends and even the glamorous London cousins bounced around on the ponies there. I felt that this arrangement held up favourably alongside the Hot Chocolate neighbour, but I was never entirely comfortable, not being by nature the Pony Club type. For one thing, I didn’t have the right gear; I had to wear horrible blue polyester trackie bottoms with sewn-in seams, granny-knitted mittens and a hat borrowed from the school. A high sartorial price to pay for oneupmanship, especially as the cousins had jodhpurs and lovely velvety riding hats of their own.

Like every other parent with kids at the local school, Jim became involved with the PTA, and was soon roped into school

activities. He’d been a teacher before his career in the business we call show took off. I believe he used to teach games, which adds a whole new insult to that ‘those that can’t’ bollocks.

I don’t remember much about the actual lessons, except that he always smelt of cigarettes, and was considered infinitely preferable to Jaws, the pool attendant, who’d taught us up to that point. But I do know that we were going through the Bronze Medallion course at the time, so I can be certain that it was Jim Bowen, of Comedians and Bullseye fame, who showed me how to tie knots in the legs of my peach nylon pyjama-bottoms and

blow them up to make a float, and instructed me in the retrieval of rubber-covered bricks from the bottom of a pool. I’m not saying I couldn’t have learned more from the Dalai Lama, but these are nonetheless important skills. They may yet come in handy.

MY MANY SINS Robbie Meredith

‘D

ear Father, please forgive me.

Forgive me for copying my French homework from Philip in the cloakroom this morning when I told mum that I’d done it last night. Forgive me for lying to her. Forgive me too, Father, for lying when I told Audrey that Stephen had told me that the Girl’s Brigade disco was off just because I didn’t want to go. Please forgive me for hurting Audrey in that way, Father. And forgive me too, Father, for swearing when Liverpool lost the match. Please help me to have more control over my tongue in future.

And Father, please forgive me for listening to Simple Minds today on my stereo. Please help me to listen to music which glorifies only you …’

‘What’s that son?’

‘What?’

‘Who’re you talking to?’

I opened my bedroom door. My dad was standing in the hall. Lately, noticing that I tended to think of other things when praying silently, I had decided to pray aloud to ensure that I fully concentrated on what I was saying.

I had not taken a situation like this into account. I wasn’t sure how much he had heard, but I decided to bluff.

‘Ah…No one. I was just tuning the radio in.

That’s all. Just muttering away to myself.’

Somewhere inside my head a cock crowed three times as my dad shrugged and turned to go down the stairs. Just like the apostle Peter, I

too had denied what I knew to be the truth. I closed the door quietly. Only one thing for it. I made my way to my bed beside the window and fell on to my knees, closing my eyes tightly and clasping my hands. I listened for my dad closing the kitchen door downstairs and began.

‘Father, please give me more strength to testify to your glory. Forgive me for my weakness and denial…’

Being a teenage Christian meant always having to say you were sorry. It wasn’t that I was an especially good or bad teenager. Rather than being angelic or evil I was, like most of us, somewhere in between. My most persistent sin, as I then viewed my shortcomings, was

Being a teenage Christian meant always having to say you were sorry. It wasn’t that I was an especially good or bad teenager. lying to try to fit in with my non-Christian friends at school and the estate where I lived. I wanted to be part of the gang and yet carve out an identity for myself as well – a persona which would not prove too difficult to live up to, yet would ensure my attractiveness as a friend and companion.

Most teenagers, in my unscientific experience, are quite similar in their mixture of

earnestness and bullshit. So I found myself telling my mates that my dad was taking me to see Bruce Springsteen at Slane in 1985, which, believe it or not, was quite a cool thing for a thirteen year old to do in the town where I lived at the time. As a result, I had to spend a warm July Saturday cooped up in my bedroom, hoping that none of my friends would see my dad coming and going as normal. On the Sunday, after church, I showed my face on the streets again.

‘How was the concert?’ I was asked.

‘Aw… just lush. Springsteen was awesome. He did a load of stuff off Born in the USA.’ In fact, I managed to provide a full and comprehensive depiction of what Bruce wore, how the E-Street band sounded, what I had to eat, how gorgeous some of the girls were, and how close I was to the stage (about sixty miles away in reality).

All of my friends did this kind of thing too, of course, but, as far as I could tell, they would merrily spoof away without damaging their conscience. By contrast, as soon it was time for me to go in for my tea, I ran to my bedroom and fell on my knees, eager to assuage my elephantine guilt by seeking forgiveness in prayer.

As time went by, my habit became an addiction. I’m sure that there were times when I lied fantastically just so I could enjoy a particularly intense feeling of guilt, for which the only catharsis was lengthy prayer. My own

particular version of the hairshirt involved waiting until the last moment at night when, warm in bed and on the edge of sleep, I would force myself out from the duvet into the cold room, kneeling in the middle of the floor to confess.

I spent my Sundays (and Monday and Saturday nights) at a Pentecostal house fellowship, one of those ‘hands down for coffee’ places. An intense and zealous teenage disciple, I eventually decided that the only thing worthwhile about me at all was my faith. I could therefore feel comfortably and permanently guilty about every other aspect of my existence. All those normal teenage things – discovering your sexuality, music, a social life, fitting in – became swathed in wondrous patterns of guilt, apology and, I hoped, absolution.

At the time I thought that this was a good thing, as it made me feel unique and special, engaging in dark and light, good and evil, realms beyond the scope of most of my mates.

But it fucks you up in the end. I laugh about it now when I look back, but I want to round off by altering old JJ, in the guise of Leopold Bloom: ‘Offence, Sorry, Guilt, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and retribution. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life – dog logos, funny posters, and Duncan’s rather clever little graphics.’

After that we did a bit of promenading up and down an alleyway, followed by a brisk jaunt. Unfortunately this was followed by a bit of a run, over there and back again. This was problematic because of a drink induced injury and my shoes falling apart. So of we went, with me running like a girl grinding my teeth to the tune of shooting pains. After that we just had to sit in a car and look out the windows. This couldn’t have been easier until we were told to look serious. Straight away, I thought of Kieran McNally telling me about when he borrowed his cousins seventy pound trousers and nearly got hit by a car. The car just about missed him but the trousers must have been too big for him or flared of something ‘cause the wheel caught the bottom of one of the legs and tore it of. When it sunk in, he was in shock at how anybody could pay seventy pounds for a pair of trousers.

All in all we had a good day out. We even got introduced at the props warehouse as ‘the actors’. I feel that this was the turning point of our careers. That’s Actor darling, were the ‘or ’ is pronounced hoar. ‘Mr McSherry we really must celebrate over a bottle of bubbly’ ‘or maybe do lunch’ Have I mentioned my days as a Bollywood dancer, or Mr. McSherry’s staring role as a getaway driver on crime watch.

MC SHERRY AND KEOGH INVESTIGATE BEING THESPIANS November Monday morning Its Lazy rain, today. The sort that makes black dogs sparkle. City Hospital is a temple in the clouds. And everything else is half there, come to that. But I can’t float about in dreams all day. Today needs to be spent in deep concentration preparing for some method acting. After a day of sawing wood.

19:00 Back at the house we realize we don’t really know much about method acting. We do know it’s about getting in the mind of a character. So what would two hoods be doing on a Monday night? I suppose they’d be having a wee drink.

We drink enough to make us swear a lot, then watch The Bill, for research. This makes us swear more. As per usual Mr. Mc Sherry sleeps on the kitchen floor.

Tuesday 09:15 We leave the house cold and lifeless. People cross the road. Even a glimpse into our dead eyes would curdle any mans blood. Because Today Mathew, We are ruthless criminals on a T.V. crime reconstruction. It’s straight to television headquarters for us budding young starlets. After we pick up a fridge from the Ravenhill Road. I’m surprised it fits into the car so easily.

14:00 Sitting in the reception, Mr. Mc Sherry decides

artist’s reconstruction of the suspect that a curry for breakfast is not good preparation for acting. I whole-heartedly disagree and think it adds certain edginess to our characters.

what we’ve been building up to. We ask the director and cameraman, what really drives these men? What makes them tick? What’s the general ambience we’re going for here.

14:30 We are taken to Hollywood and meet the people involved in making the programme.

Most of its already made and they just need a short bit of footage of a tall bloke and a short stocky bloke, in vague glimpses because the actual crime was a good while ago now and there’s no clear eye witness accounts. The programme sets out to help find witnesses to unsolved crimes and not to entertain with violence. This means, we don’t get to act as gangsters in a drive-by. Which is disappointing. But we are far too focused to let disappointment distract us from our roles.

We’re in position and ready to go. This is

‘Lads, stay close together and walk from behind the camera past the chippy, to the Tesco’s trolleys and back again.’

‘Now could you walk over to the lamp-post and back again.’

‘Then I need you both to walk over there and straight back again’ ‘Could you both start now from either side of the camera, walk over there, and then back again’ ‘Then over there and back again’ We started to enjoy this after a while. Up and down Hollywood Boulevard. It was very relaxing.

19:30 Back at the house. The Champagne, Cocaine lifestyle will have to be put on hold for a while. Microwaved spuds and Eastenders will have to do for now. And half a tin of Satzenbrau Pills. After I check there’s no fag butts in it. Maybe being on the T.V. doesn’t necessarily have to change you. A fella ‘Cheeky’ we used to live with has been on crime watch twice, robbing a bookies. And even after all his fame, he’d choose a bottle of Q.C. and a bag of crack, over Bollinger anyday.

Following Thursday We’re on the T.V. tonight and are promised forty seconds of fame at the very least. I miss it ‘cause I’m away but Sean’s taping it. Forty seconds. That’s a good deposit on our fifteen minutes of fame promised by Andy Warhol.

I’m sure we can get the rest on credit. We postpone our VIPpremier until Saturday.

Saturday Premiere night is a good one as premieres go.

Most of it is spent reminiscing in the pub because we can’t find the video leads.

‘Sean, do you still think of the Hollywood days.’

‘Nicky I remember the bright lights of Hollywood, fish, chips and pasties, as if it were last Tuesday’

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CORPORATE APOLOGIES Jason Mills

E

ven in the cut and thrust of the business world, it would seem that saying sorry is the new not saying sorry. Or, to put it in corporate-speak, effective crisis management is the new stonewalling. The single most essential, intangible asset a corporation possesses is its public image, and it will invariably spend vast amounts of time and money preening itself in order to seduce the masses. Therefore, when it is, as occasionally happens, caught with its pants down, ‘Image Restoration’ aimed at ‘Vital Audiences’ (ie. the mainstream media and, subsequently, the general public) is top of the agenda at the inevitable sorry board meetings.

Of course, each response is inextricably bound to the particularities of the case, and therefore different from the next. However, the main goal should such a situation arise is to save face without incurring any legal liabilities in the process. This can be done by a number of methods, such as denial, evading responsibility, reducing the offensiveness of the event, corrective action or apology. The customary response is now usually characterised by strategic remorse rather than defensiveness, an approach which is generally prompted by the desire to spin the event and effectively remarket the brand. The aim of apologising for negligence or misdemeanors is to ease tension and bathe the perpetrator in a humanistic light (‘to err is human’ etc) rather than allow an idea of themselves as faceless, uncaring entities to prevail. In fact, your favourite Benevolent Corporation™ will often go to great lengths to prove to you that it is in fact a caring, sharing community of fairminded individuals with your and society’s best interests at heart.

The recent outbreak of corporate repentance has been traced back to two incidents in the 1980’s, where stark lessons were learnt. The first involved the deaths of seven people in Chicago in 1982 after they had consumed Tylenol capsules (a popular alternative to aspirin) which were laced with cyanide. After initial fears that the tampering could have occurred somewhere on the production line, a swift and thorough investigation determined that the product had actually been removed from shops, poisoned, and then placed back again. The manufacturer, Johnston & Johnston, was widely praised by

the media for its candid and responsible actions. These included immediately informing the public of what the situation was via the media, establishing quickly which batch had been affected, recalling $100 million worth of Tylenol, and working closely with the police and FBI to try and apprehend the killer (who, incidentally, was never caught). In a clever marketing move, the capsules were later reintroduced in new triple-seal ‘tamperresistant’ packaging and, coupled with the company’s initial quick decision-making, this enabled a successful revival of the product.

While there is no doubt that Johnston & Johnston wished to deflect criticism and minimise financial and possible legal consequences, they were seen to act in a way which demonstrated integrity and placed other concerns above and beyond the company itself.

By contrast, the 1989 Exxon oil spill in Alaska is widely regarded as a model of how not to handle a potentially disastrous situation. The company was completely unprepared for a spill and, rather than take responsibility, they attempted to shift the

It was a full six days after the incident before anyone from Exxon commented on it and, as would have been the sensible business manoeuvre, no-one from its upper echelons appeared at the scene to sombrely remove oil from otters with their own toothbrush. blame solely onto the captain of the tanker, who was presumed to be over the alcohol limit (a charge he was later acquitted of). It was a full six days after the incident before anyone from Exxon commented on it and, as would have been the sensible business manoeuvre, no-one from its upper echelons appeared at the scene to sombrely remove oil from otters with their own toothbrush. Although a full page apology was printed in over 100 newspapers, it was largely dismissed as insincere due to widespread dissatisfaction at Exxon’s contribution to clean-up efforts and general defensive conduct. As the apology had

not been backed up by visibly sorry actions, the corporation found itself on the receiving end of a substantial boycott and a number of litigations, at which point it no-doubt became a lot sorrier than it had been initially.

In the present day, apologising has become something of an industry in itself, spearheaded by PR executives and specialist crisis management companies. There is no doubt that they have paid careful attention to the effect that the responses of companies such as Johnston & Johnston and Exxon have had upon their respective fortunes. Formerly, there was a feeling that apologies could be construed as an indication of guilt, and thus provoke lawsuits from affected consumers.

However, PR companies now advise that, when done correctly, apologies can effectively position the company as part of the solution rather than the cause of the problem. The three main points companies are taught to adhere to in damage limitation exercises are: to disclose the facts about the event as quickly as possible; to talk about what they are going to do to bring about a solution; and to make clear what they are going to do to prevent it from happening again. However, there is something in this orchestrated approach which displays a certain arrogance and contempt for the consumer. With media consultants running the show it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a company is genuinely sorry, or whether the façade merely conceals a swaggering attitude of ‘this is how you handle the media and the public in a difficult situation’.

There has certainly been no shortage of recent examples of the ways in which different companies have handled themselves in the face of public scrutiny. In September 2000, United Airlines broadcast an apology following a summer of delayed flights and general disarray, which had led to a 22% drop in share value. In the ad, Jim Goodwin, the company chairman, was filmed at the helm of one of UA’s planes in order to give the impression that he was personally taking control of the situation, and was working on a solution at that very moment. In fact the ad made it look as if he was not expecting a camera crew to turn up at all, and the intrusion resulted in the loss of several minutes of valuable brainstorming time. This charade actually did go some way to repairing

the damage done by UA’s incompetence, with Goodwin promising to reduce the number of flights scheduled, but also led the American public to justifiably question why UAhad scheduled flights in the first place if they could not staff them. Such a glossy penance exercise was presumably designed to demonstrate that Goodwin is a man of action and responsibility, not afraid to slum it amongst his minions on the actual airfield if it means getting things

done. In reality, it is probably one of the only times he had actually set foot on a UAplane, preferring his custom-built private jet to whisk him off to sun-kissed islands where groups of ambitious stewardesses feed him grapes in a hammock and polish his cockpit.

Political correctness is another area ripe with opportunities for the would-be apologist.

In this respect, Hindus appear to be one of the most apologised to religious or ethnic groups in the last few years. The rich iconography of the religion has often proved too tempting for designers to resist, and thus, a number of deities have appeared on everything from sandals to toilet seats, prompting a wave of apologies. Earlier this year Harrods told Hindus it was sorry for a line of bikinis which it was stocking by Italian designer Robert Cavelli. The Hindu Human Rights group helpfully pointed out that the god depicted, Vishnu, was actually the preserver of creation whose powers maintain the cosmic order, and he would certainly not be seen frequenting the breasts and crotches of scantily clad Western women. Aside from being offensive to Hindus,

the swimwear was also utterly hideous and it is probably for the common good that it was subsequently removed from Harrods stock.

Cavelli also issued an apology, claiming that the product was ‘designed to celebrate Hindu culture and not to denigrate it’. Perhaps a similar line of men’s swimming trunks will be unveiled in the future, tastefully emblazoned with the elephant god Ganesh, whose ‘trunk’ could be released through buttons at the front?

The media, the main target of corporations in getting their sorry messages across, is also an industry which finds itself apologizing for mistakes on a fairly consistent basis. The very nature of the industry determines that mistakes are inevitable, and one of the fundamental principles written into the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct is that such errors are acknowledged promptly and with due prominence. The coverage of Iraq threw up two high profile apologies this year at the BBC and the Daily Mirror, both of which were accompanied by the obligatory symbolic resignations. The former, given by acting BBC chairman Lord Ryder, has been lambasted by those within the organization who feel that journalistic principles have been compromised by the ‘unreserved’ abject apology to the government. Tony Blair, for his part, said he was sure that the BBC would ‘continue to probe the government in every proper way’, whilst simultaneously making it abundantly clear that he did not enjoy being probed at all, at least not without first being sufficiently lubricated by Alistair Campbell.

Obviously severely rattled by the sequence of events, the BBC has been in a somewhat more apologetic, self-conscious mode since then. It has apologised to the chief constable investigating the Soham murder case after he

stormed off a Newsnight interview, and it also edited out the parts of Radio 4’s satire Absolute Power which suggested that Tony Blair was a liar. It also apologised after several people complained about the sexual overtones of a dance routine by a boy band called Phixx on Top of the Pops, and, epitomising the ill-feeling in some sectors of the corporation, the host of a Radio 3 poetry programme jokingly offered to resign after receiving complaints that the show did not review enough poetry by women.

The latest BBC apology relates to this month’s (Dec 2004) 20th anniversary of the Bhopal chemical disaster, which left up to 20,000 people dead and 150,000 needing medical treatment for the rest of their lives.

Unbelievably, the incident itself has never drawn an apology from the company responsible, Union Carbide, whose image restoration campaign of dissociation from the event was successful precisely because of the distance between ‘vital audiences’ in the US (who were infinitely more concerned about whether something similar could happen on their own soil) and the site in India. The company has now merged with by Dow Chemicals, who famously manufactured napalm and Agent Orange for the US military during the Vietnam War. In broadcasting an interview with a ‘Dow spokesman’ whose details they had unwittingly obtained from a parody website, the BBC fell for an elaborate hoax. ‘Jude Finesterra’ informed the public live on air that Dow accepted full responsibility for the gas leak, would pay victims $12 billion in compensation and push for the extradition of CEO at the time of the disaster, Warren Anderson. In fact, ‘Finnesterra’ turned out to be a left-wing prankster aiming to highlight Dow’s gross negligence in the matter and the inadequate $470 million settlement which had been reached with the Indian government in 1989.

This sum amounted to a pittance for those affected by the tragedy, although Dow’s PR representative Kathy Hunt disagreed, commenting in 2002 that ‘$500 is plenty good for an Indian’. As Dow quickly moved to distance itself from the hoax report, this also garnered attention from the US media, who (unlike the hapless BBC) had largely ignored the anniversary, the plight of the victims, and the ongoing pollution at the still uncleared site.

Other examples of corporate apologies are too numerous to go into detail on here, but all the big names are there; McDonalds, Intel, Ford, Coca-Cola. No-doubt, roleplays are being acted out up and down the corridors of power even as you read this… ‘Ok, I’m the journalist wanting to know why 53 people have been sucked into their computer monitors by a faulty version of Windows, and you’re Bill Gates’ etc. Crisis management is simply part of business today, complete with its scripted responses and manufactured goodwill. Examples show that the public will forgive an accident if it is effectively portrayed with the correct mix of symbolism and substance, perception and reality. As one crisis management company advertisement puts it, not to have a contingency plan ‘is like playing Russian Roulette with an automatic pistol… you don’t have the luxury of pulling the trigger on an empty chamber’. Strong words indeed. Which gives the impression that the best apologies may be yet to come. The day a crisis management company itself is discovered to have engaged in illegal share trading or other nefarious activity will surely be a full scale, ticker-tape grovel to behold.

Ireland for politicians to say ‘sorry’?

SORRY ABOUT LOTS David Ervine speaks to Ruth Graham RG: Would you like to say sorry about anything?

DE: Lots to be sorry about.

RG: Are you ever sorry you got into politics?

DE: Only as a momentary thought. On any given day you might well be sorry you ever got involved in politics but an hour out of politics and you’d be wondering what else to do with your life.

I’m sorry I’ve lost my anonymity because I used to enjoy being an observer rather than being observed. I remember walking down Castlereagh Street when the traffic was quite heavy one day. There was a bus keeping pace with me as I walked along then I suddenly realised that everybody on the bus was looking at me and it really was strange.

I have another regret in relation to politics: I often wondered if I had made some mistakes when I committed the Progressive Unionist Party, totally, completely and utterly to the

There was a bus keeping pace with me as I walked along then I suddenly realised that everybody on the bus was looking at me and it really was strange.

Good Friday Agreement and the process of change, only to find out that the old George Bernard Shaw commentary was correct: ‘The reasonable man attempts to adapt himself to the world and the unreasonable man attempts to adapt the world for himself, therefore all change is created by the unreasonable man.’

When I watched the belligerence of Sinn Fein and the DUP, I thought, ‘perhaps I shouldn’t have set the Progressive Unionist Party giftwrapped on a shelf.’ The theory of course was that openness and honesty were to be the order of the day and I suppose I was naïve.

In many ways, our analysis was ahead of the game if you see where we are at the moment, where the devils incarnate are about to do a deal. We’ve been sitting waiting on that for a long time whereas we are seen as the Neanderthals, the corner-boys, knuckles trailing the ground.

One thing that anyone in my kind of job tends to regret is that you’re a jack-of-alltrades and a master of none. The piles of defecation that rest on my head at any given moment are huge. You wipe one pile off and it’s immediately replaced by another. You end up having to prioritise and sometimes this means that the little people get pushed to the side because something large and urgent comes in and you have to deal with it. In many cases you regret that you’re not dealing with the ordinary vulnerable person as well as you should.

RG: Do you think it’s helpful in Northern

DE: Sorry is a word. If the receiver of the message perceives it to be genuine then you can imagine that there is some significance in it but if the receiver of the message perceives it to be insincere then you’ve maybe done more damage than you would have if you had remained silent.

I have apologised for mistakes that were made by my party. One was the case where a young Celtic fan was killed in Glasgow and someone had proposed that the lad who committed the act should be moved to a Northern Ireland jail. Our prisoners group supported that and it was not the right decision. I had to apologise for that and it was sincerely meant. We all make mistakes. The question is – how are those apologies received?

Sorry has turned out to be quite an avenue for politicians of late. Bill Clinton made a forté of apologies, Blair has played his process of apology. It’s very disarming to offer apology.

As far as our society learning to face up to itself in terms of truth and reconciliation, I’m not so sure. We’re not experts on worms so be careful about opening cans of them.

RG: Because ‘sorry’ is in my head at the moment I’ve noticed how often I say it.

DE: We say it a lot and how sincere is it?

There’s also the relationship between power and saying sorry. I think that there are those who are inclined to want peace and tranquillity. How many times have you been in an office or home situation where someone is the brooding pensive type and you’re never sure which way they’re going to turn – whether they’re going to be pleasant or nasty.

We’re inclined to defer to those people to keep the peace so that indicates to me that there’s a set of people who would very quickly say sorry and it wouldn’t be because they were really sorry. How much of that is sincere?

How much of that is a power game between people? I think we misuse and abuse language all the time.

RG: I’m not good with conflict and tend to be more humble that I should in certain situations, which annoys me.

DE: Strangely enough – so too will I – to a point. Then I go the exact opposite. I think there is a sort of a zenith that you reach where unreasonable behaviour becomes intolerable and you react. I do lots to keep things on an equilibrium but it’s almost like those Benny Hill movies where you see Benny chasing the girls then suddenly it’s the other way around and they start chasing him. I’ll take so much and then, sorry, I’m not taking any more.

RG: It can be more than looking for an apology. Sometimes it’s about humiliation.

DE: You can see it being played out at the moment between Paisley and Martin Maguinness. Sackcloth and ashes from Paisley and then Martin Maguinness wants to suggest that we should all behave with great humility.

Sorry, but I find it all absolutely fascinating.

CAN A SOCIETY FORGIVE ITSELF? LOUISE MALLINDER

WHY WOULD A SOCIETY WANT FORGIVENESS RATHER THAN PROSECUTION?

I

n every society that has undergone a massive trauma, such as a conflict or a dictatorial regime, involving widespread human rights abuses, the society must decide how to deal with the individuals who were responsible for the atrocities. If individual acts of murder, torture and rape were conducted in a peaceful, law-abiding society, the instinctive reaction would be to put the suspected perpetrators on trial and, if they are found guilty, to punish them. However, this is not always possible in societies that have suffered widespread violence for a number of reasons.

For example, there may have been large numbers of people involved in the violence, as in Rwanda, or the perpetrators could be influential members of the former regime who retain the power to suppress investigations, possibly by threatening to destabilise the country yet again, as in Chile and Argentina.

Similarly, members of rebel forces are often spared prosecution, as they are needed to participate in peace negotiations, as in Uganda. In addition, periods of widespread human rights violations are frequently accompanied by an impoverishment of the state and a collapse of infrastructure, which can make conducting lengthy and complicated prosecutions for the violations, and subsequently imprisoning those individuals who are found guilty, appear an expensive luxury when compared with the need to rebuild and ensure a decent standard of living for the populace. Furthermore, there is a chance that following years of political crisis, it could be difficult to find legal personnel who are independent and unbiased, and to find sufficient evidence and witnesses to enable prosecutions. It is also possible that the victims of the human rights violations, who were tortured themselves or who lost their loved ones, do not place importance on those responsible being sent to prison, rather they wish to draw a line under what has happened and begin to build a better future for themselves and their children. For these individuals their wishes can range from simply wanting the truth to be revealed and for their suffering to be officially acknowledged, to requests for financial assistance for example to compensate for lost income (following injury or the death of an income-provider in the household) or to support their children’s education. If a society chooses not to prosecute perpetrators for human rights violations for the reasons

outlined above, then frequently, the alternative is a programme of group forgiveness, where entire groups of individuals will be ‘forgiven’ for their actions, usually through laws that grant them exemption from punishment.

In addition, to being a response to the potential problems and disadvantages of prosecutions, a policy of group forgiveness can also be attractive in its own right. It can offer a way to rebuild relationships in a shattered society by reducing the tendency to apportion blame and replacing it with efforts to resume normal relationships based on mutual acceptance. In doing this, a policy of forgiveness can help to cool cycles of vengeance or ‘tit-for-tat’ violence. In addition, such a policy can potentially be more sensitive to the needs of the victims than traditional forms of justice. It is also possible that the inclusive nature of a well-designed policy of forgiveness could make people, both victims and perpetrators, feel greater ownership over the proposed solution, thereby giving those individuals who feel that they were previously oppressed, a sense of control and power over their own destiny. This could reduce their need to rely on armed force in order to assert themselves and thereby lessen the level of violence in the society.

WHAT DOES ‘FORGIVENESS’ MEAN? The dictionary definition of ‘forgive’ is 1. To cease to feel angry or resentful towards; pardon (an offender or offence) 2. Remit or let off and consequently, ‘forgiveness’ is ‘the act of forgiving’. This definition implies that the act of forgiveness is only an end to feelings of vengeance and a decision not to punish the perpetrator, it does not require there to be any (re-)establishment of friendly relations following the forgiveness, nor does it expect any repentance on behalf of the perpetrator.

In most philosophical and religious discussions, the concept of forgiveness is usually considered only in relation to disputes between individuals, with all the world’s major religions advocating forgiveness as a virtuous action. For example, in Christianity, Christians are required to remember firstly, that all human beings are fallible and flawed, and therefore in need of forgiveness; secondly, that they are all created in the likeness of God and are thus precious, and thirdly, that it is up to God to punish wrongdoers. Therefore, Christians are encouraged to forgive those who trespass against them, regardless of whether those responsible show any remorse.

In contrast, Christians who commit offences

are expected to repent if they wish to have God’s forgiveness. This is similar to Judaism, although the latter places a greater emphasis on the concept of atonement, which requires the offender to make amends to the victim before s/he can be forgiven. Forgiveness is also regarded as a key part of the requirements for Muslims and Sikhs and it is encouraged for Buddhists and Hindus as a way of achieving Karma. The religious traditions of a society can have a considerable impact on the way it addresses human rights violations, as shown by the selection of Archbishop Tutu as the Chairperson for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the subsequent emphasis placed on religion during the Commission’s hearings. For the victims of violent crimes during warfare or tyranny, the authority to offer or refuse forgiveness is empowering, which is particularly important for those who have had their rights stripped away from them. For many, the forgiveness is an intrinsically personal act, a decision that can only be made by the victim.

In contrast, in severe political crises, many crimes that are perpetrated affect individual victims, but are generally part of a policy that serves or aims to terrorise or brutalise an entire community, and are therefore crimes against society as a whole. Furthermore, in situations like Northern Ireland, ‘many of the injuries are understood as the grief not of individuals but of whole communities’, which has an impact on the political demands of these communities. For this reason, it is necessary for the society to develop some means of fostering reconciliation. This could involve a policy of group forgiveness for some or all of the offenders. Any such policy would be highly political and would require much consideration regarding who is to forgive, and on whose behalf; who is to be forgiven; whether there are any conditions attached to the forgiveness; and whether a grant of forgiveness can be challenged. It is a difficult policy as, if it is introduced with malevolent aims, it could serve simply to try to force the populace to forget what had happened before in order to shield the perpetrators from investigations and prosecutions. It also denies the victims their right to choose whether to forgive their oppressors. Furthermore, it is possible that forgiveness for crimes of sufficient horror may seem out of place, because no accompanying repentance or atonement could begin to compensate the victims proportionately for their suffering.

This argument could also be used, however, to express the futility of courts attempting to award appropriate sentences for crimes such

as genocide or crimes against humanity. The advantages of group forgiveness however would be that it would allow a community to attempt to put the horrors of the past behind them and to work together to rebuild their society. Any policy that attempts to introduce group forgiveness must however conform to certain minimum standards.

WHAT MECHANISMS CAN A SOCIETY USE TO PROMOTE FORGIVENESS?

I

n recent decades, societies recovering from tyranny or conflict have employed various means to promote forgiveness, between different ethnic groups in society, or between citizens and the government. The policies that were used instead of prosecutions for all perpetrators include amnesties, pardons, truth commissions and official apologies. For any of these measures to be successful, they must have a public dimension in order to convey the measure of forgiveness to the population.

These policies must also seek to promote reconciliation through revealing the truth to the whole society; officially acknowledging the errors of the perpetrators; and providing reparations for the victims. In pursuing any policy of forgiveness, it must be recognised however that it has limitations and will never satisfy all segments of the populace, for there will always be groups who seek total justice or total forgetfulness of the past.

The most common form of a forgiveness policy is an amnesty. This policy represents a commitment by the government not to prosecute certain people for crimes they committed and therefore coincides with the second part of the definition above: ‘to remit, let off’. Amnesties are generally introduced for political expediency, and therefore may not represent any genuine change of heart for the government or the perpetrators. In countries such as Argentina and Chile, military regimes introduced amnesties for crimes committed by the armed forces during military rule. These amnesties did not contain any measures to permit the truth to be revealed or to compensate the victims for their suffering (although limited reparation measures were introduced later). Consequently, there has been little forgiveness from victims for the past crimes and legal disputes challenging the amnesty laws are still ongoing. In other states, governments have attempted to tailor their amnesty laws in order to meet the other requirements for reconciliation: truth, acknowledgement of suffering, and reparations. There have also been requirements that in order to obtain amnesty,

George Hallett, Police officer Captian Jeffrey Benzien demonstrtaing ‘The Wet Bag’ torture method, Truth and Reconcilliation Commission hearings, South Africa.

perpetrators show their repentance either by admitting it directly or indirectly, through pledging an oath of allegiance or surrendering information about comrades. This form of forced repentance is however problematic, as frequently it is unlikely to be genuine.

It has been argued that without truth, there can be no forgiveness, as in order to forgive, the victim needs to know who did what, and how and why it was done. The importance of the right to truth was recognised and integrated into the amnesty process in South Africa. Under this process, members of both the former Apartheid regime and the groups who fought against it, were required to confess their crimes before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and their victims. These hearings were broadcast on national television and radio. There was no requirement that the perpetrators show any remorse or repentance for their crimes, simply that they told the whole truth about their actions. The Chair of the TRC, Archbishop Tutu, described the commission as ‘an institutional enabling of forgiveness’, as it did not require victims to forgive those who abused and oppressed them, rather it created the conditions where forgiveness became possible. As a result, there were several instances where forgiveness was both sought and granted during the Commission hearings.

The impact of the TRC on the peace and reconciliation process in South Africa is hard to quantify as it is difficult to measure the emotional impact it had on individuals and it is hard to know how South Africa would have

progressed without it. Furthermore, a truth commission, such as the one in South Africa, can be viewed by different groups as having different goals: for some people, the purpose of a truth commission is to give the victims a forum in which to tell their stories so that their suffering can be officially acknowledged. For other people, a truth commission is a means of establishing a common history based on the truth of events, rather than propaganda or rhetoric, which should enable all groups to acknowledge that they also committed offences, and thereby promoting greater understanding between the warring factions.

Truth commissions have also often been viewed as a compromise between prosecutions and complete impunity, as such they are viewed as the best possible mechanism for making perpetrators confront their actions in situations where prosecutions are impossible due to a lack of evidence or political instability.

Each of these objectives could be applied to the South African TRC and therefore any attempt to fully assess its impact would have to encompass all of them. Overall, however, the majority of commentators view the TRC as having had a positive effect on South African society, and it is for this reason that it has often been touted as a model that could be implemented in Northern Ireland, although with some adjustments to accommodate the uniqueness of the situation here.

CURRENT DEBATES ABOUT TRUTH AND FORGIVENESS IN NORTHERN IRELAND In recent years, there have been many moves towards developing a climate of forgiveness in relation to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

For example, in July 2002, the IRAapologised for over thirty years of violence against civilians. This has been echoed in recent comments by Gerry Adams, expressing regret for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.

Similarly, the British government, in accordance with the Good Friday Agreement, has implemented the Early Release Scheme, which allowed many members of paramilitary organisations to be released from prison provided that their organisation was on ceasefire. The idea of forgiveness has also received support from various church leaders from both communities. These moves, together with other initiatives, have fuelled the debate on the possibility of a truth commission for Northern Ireland. This idea is very contentious, with many people believing that it could be a waste of time and resources as it is unlikely that the truth will ever be fully uncovered or that if the truth is revealed it could re-ignite the violence and undermine the progress towards peace that has been made in recent years. In contrast, there are individuals who believe that ‘without facing our need to forgive and be forgiven, reconciliation remains unattainable’ and without such reconciliation, Northern Ireland is unlikely to ever move beyond an ‘absence of war’. For centuries, the conflict here has been built on memories of

past injustices, with new grievances being added all the time. The emotional relationships surrounding these grievances were not addressed by the Good Friday Agreement and they continue to cause tensions in the society as a whole. It is possible that a carefully planned truth commission could help assuage these grievances and promote understanding on both sides of the community, but in order to do so it would have to obtain broad-based public support.

This support could be gained at various stages, for example, by involving civil society and victims’ groups in the discussions leading to the establishment of the truth commission, in appointing commissioners who are representative of the community, and in using the media to promote public awareness in the activities and findings of the commission. In addition, the powers of the commission, for example, whether it can subpoena witnesses or whether there are penalties for those who fail to reveal the truth about their actions, could have a substantial impact on the perceived efficacy of the truth commission. It is probable that a truth commission in Northern Ireland, if sufficiently well designed, could help society reach a point where the wrongs of the past have been admitted by those responsible, and individuals can begin to unburden themselves of their suffering and move forwards without the resentments that have fuelled the conflict in the past.

never having to say youre sorry ‘L

ove means never having to say you’re sorry’ – that was the soft and sappy tagline from the 1970 tearjerker film Love Story. But you didn’t need me to tell you that, did you? I bet you already knew – even if, like me, you weren’t alive when Ryan O’Neal murmured those honeydripping words. It’s exactly the kind of ridiculously memorable quotation that sticks in your brain, cluttering up valuable space that could be more profitably filled with musings

by Rilke, or a really good recipe for chocolate cake.

Don’t get me wrong. My contempt for these words is not based on a super-snooty, antipopulist intellectual élitism. I don’t hate them

relationship with another human being. In other words, they suck.

‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’ – it sounds like the kind of thing you might have lisped, doe-eyed and earnest, to your first boyfriend in the days when your only idea of ‘love’ was gleaned from reading

cultural consciousness. It shows that many people believe that ‘love’ is essentially romantic passion – epic, soaring, uncontainable and essentially knee-quivering.

(By the way, I’m not talking about erotic passion here, which is a whole different story.)

We’re fed this line from the earliest ages – think of all those fairytales that end ‘and they

vital word in the lover’s lexicon – but they still subscribe to the sentiments behind it. Love is … staring meaningfully in my lover’s starry eyes while a thousand hummingbirds trill ‘our song’. What bollocks. I’d far rather headbang ecstatically with my partner to the Undertones’ Teenage Kicks (and be old enough to cast concerns about dignity to the wind).

illustrations by Colm lived happily ever after’. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a bit of quivering, but what happens during that ‘ever after’? How are we to understand the kind of love that happens in real, enduring relationships once the knee-trembling bit is over? More importantly, how can we value such relationships if they’re constantly forced to measure up to the frenetic, roller-coaster emotions of the early days, as though these were the only markers of ‘true lerve’?

I admit that many people might well disagree with the strict meaning of the sentence – after all, anyone who’s been in a relationship knows all too well that ‘sorry’ is a

because they’re popular. I hate them because they are patently untrue, and – worse – because they shore up the unreflective fetishisation of romantic love that continues to smack its sticky pink kiss all over our understandings of what it means to have a

Anne of Green Gables. That’s forgivable in a 13 year old, but what are we adults doing still buying into this sentimental nonsense?

The fact that we all know the line ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’ means that it has entered our collective

See, I’m not being anti-fun, and I’m certainly not for a moment demanding that everyone in a relationship over one year old don the tweed slippers and settle down to watch endless reruns of Casualty together (though I respect your lifestyle choices if that’s your idea of quality couple-time). I’m just suggesting we should find ways of recognising relationships that are the equivalent of a mature Camembert – no, not all stinky and runny. I’m talking rich, tasty and satisfying.

In the end, it’s all about honouring the small things. Pól Ó Muirí’s poem ‘The Unbidden Cup’, written for his wife, speaks of the ‘minutiae of being together’ that is ‘neither bliss nor drudgery’: of love expressed by ‘an unbidden cup of tea, running a message / To town, visiting a relative, dusting – ’. It’s a quiet celebration, but one with far more depth and meaning than all the verbose spoutings and ringing declarations we’ve been taught to call ‘love’. It’s time to ditch the romantic histrionics and get real. And that’s nothing to be sorry about.

WHO’S SORRY NOW? JEWESBURY DANIEL

G

reat power resides in being able to demand an apology from someone.

Similarly, great power resides in being able to withhold one. Sometimes, the apology is unjustly demanded. Sometimes, the demand is just but, for reason of pride, or shame, the act of apologising is simply too galling. And, in some instances, the apology is merited, and would be forthcoming, were it not that the crowing, self-righteous forgiveness that would be occasioned would test the most ardent powers of forbearance, and would lead to such further outbursts that more apologies would soon become due and the whole bloody business would start all over again. You? Forgive ME? The most unseemly part of any peace process is the race by the protagonists to grab the moral high ground. The attempt to balance, on the one hand, playing to one’s own followers (who like it when you hit the other side hard) and, on the other, playing to the larger, non-partisan crowd (who like it when you demonstrate your statesmanship and political maturity) – what some other cultures call ‘leadership’ – is too much for our own politicians. As a result, when they strive for moral superiority, they trip themselves up and look even more undignified and cackhanded than they did before.

Consequently, it’s not the offer of repentance, or constructive actions, that’s big in the Wee Statelet right now, but the presumed right to demand them off themmuns. And whilst most armed republicans can presumably see the merit in making a gesture of goodwill, or an act of contrition, or whatever, they also see that such a gesture is less painful to make if it is received with the minimum of victorious swanking by the other bunch. Of course it could be that those ‘humiliation’ remarks by the Da, one night in Ballymena, were the product of careful stage management by Wee Ian: maybe there are some in the DUP who don’t want a settlement yet, and realised they had to scupper it somehow. But (and please, no libel actions) we really don’t think Wee Ian is bright enough for that.

Which means that the whole business has been put on hold because the prospective leaders of the WS couldn’t resist the opportunity to swagger and bluster and prance about like children who haven’t learned the virtue of behaving like grown-ups (note the simile: like grown-ups is the closest they’ll ever get). Lest the Provies feel left out (and being from the middle-class, I’m obliged to write one of those ‘a curse on both your

houses, I’m off to Sans Souci’ kind of pieces), we should also note Jeffrey Donaldson’s insistence, repeated to any listening journalist, that no-one but Sinn Féin ever linked the humiliation remarks specifically to guns and photographs. So, according to the DUP, the Shinners are just jumping on a harmless old man’s little joke as a way of scuppering a settlement they didn’t really want (starting to sound familiar?) (The thing is, Gerry and Martin and Mitchel know that it really can be humiliating to get your photos back from the chemist’s and see how much you’ve put on around the paunch and how drunk you were at wee Imelda’s 21st, not to mention how you look when you’re singing ‘The Boys of the Old Brigade’, which you always thought lent you a kind of gravitas, but which apparently transforms you into a fat old leering danger to society.)* But never mind the political parties, isn’t this just evidence of bad conflict resolution management? Whose idea was it to allow the two sides to entrench themselves in their own respective positions without distracting them somehow with bright colours and flashing lights, and maybe some stories about magic animals? Shouldn’t the governments have been running the agenda a little more closely, shifting the discussion when it looked likely that agreement was getting less likely? Wasn’t that the whole point about the capital-A Agreement – making a structure so confusing that everyone thought they’d won?

So who’s sorry? We all are. But who should be apologising, and who should be demanding the apologies? Can it really be the case that members of any political party in the Wee Statelet are demanding apologies from us, their electorate, after the monumentally shabby way in which they’ve conducted themselves recently (and the even shabbier way they carried on less recently; but let’s not talk about the Ulster Resistance Movement now)? How can the esteemed, godly members of Belfast City Council think they have the right to demand apologies when their own childishness and impetuousness – and that of their bearded republican counterparts – is denying us our democratic rights. Perhaps Ian and Gerry should be more worried about this, following their transatlantic phone calls to their pal George; now that he’s up to speed with our democratic deficit it can’t be long before he comes over to ‘help’ us ‘restore’ freedom.

And that’s the real point, of course. The Big Apology was that one that Tony didn’t give about the war. Now, the way that the

British people will judge that apology, or whatever it wasn’t, will be to go and not vote for the Labour party next May. Of course here in the WS we couldn’t vote Labour even if we wanted to; we can barely be trusted to elect a parish council, let alone a national government. Here we are in the only corner of Europe without direct democratic representation at governmental level – and they want us to say sorry?

@

* And another thing, while we’re on the subject of

photography. There’s also the idea (put forward by Baroness Blood) that photos of decommissioning would just be a further perpetuation of that link, in visual representations, between the North and armed violence. The Baroness points out that there are plenty of places across the WS that simply aren’t like that. May I say how true this is, and remind readers that, in fact, a quite remarkable set of such images is on display even now in Belfast Exposed, 23 Donegall Street, Belfast, taken by some pair of interfering outsiders.

SOME PUBLIC APOLOGIES Anne: I am sorry I ever married you.

Ken: So am I. Anne: I said it first.

Ken: But I really meant it.

Ken and Anne would like to apologise for arguing in public.

Titanic, I’m so sorry.

Iceberg.

Sorry for not smiling Pedro Donald Manager, John Hewitt Bar

'Sorry this was late' Glenn Patterson

Flaxart Studios are very sorry.

We are sorry for bringing international artists to Belfast.

We are sorry about our workshop which is full of ungodly woodworking and metalworking equipment.

We are sorry about our brazen audiovisual facilities.

We are sorry there is no spring chicken on the menu as some of Flaxart members are past their sell-by date.

We are sorry that the studios are cold in the winter.

We are sorry about the strong coffee.

We are sorry about marketing strategies and interim reports.

We are sorry for occasional bursts of creativity.

We apologise for any unintentional art.

Queen Street studios would like to apologise their stairs.

My mother bought me a new pair of trainers for school. She told me, reasonably, not to go wreck them instantly. Fair enough I thought. And then promptly went out and ruined them playing football in the mud.

Sorry for that mum. And the ensuing 20 years of emotional torture.

Stuart Watson

‘We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified’.

Aesop, ‘Being sorry is the highest act of selfishness, seeing value only after discarding it.’

Doug Horton, ‘I believe that God felt sorry for

actors so he created Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent.’

Cedric Hardwicke, sentiment Catalyst Arts

feeling a strange empathy with the Scottish copper at one point – followed by a brief period of self-evaluation and finally the maintenance of muttered dissent. All from the leafy confines of my Upper Ormeau dwelling place [cf. South City Beat] via the glory of the idiot’s lantern.

shoveling Pedigree Chum into their cars in the resulting confusion.

SHAFTSBURY DOLE OFFICE A good day or minutes thereof. Press the button for a queue ticket and get called immediately. No time to look for work The lady does so for my benefit and yawns, maybe because I look so tired and it’s contagious.

More likely the job or a late night. Nothing doing. Bad news for new dolers though.,Weekly signing’s back.

G.Orwell

DERRY CITY BEAT Part two of BBC Northern Irelands normalisation campaign for the NIPS dealt with the trafficking of hashish, the burning of Lundy and the smoking of fegs in close proximity to punctured gas canisters. Started

CHURCHILL HOUSE DEMOLITION TEXACO DOGWASH The Texaco garage on the Saintfield Road is now the location of the country’s first dogwash, a phenomenon which as apparently caught on quite rapidly down south. Clean, smiling dogs (one male & one female) are painted onto the aluminium basin structure to lure in potential customers, alongside a helpful set of instructions. However, at £4 for a five minute dog-washing session, it seems a little on the extravagent side. It is also questionable whether or not Northern Ireland is ready for such a bold cultural modification, as people may start filling their dogs with petrol and

RATS As if beleaguered Holylands residents didn’t have enough to content with recently, a series of bland Council posters now inform of a new menace; following a vicious power struggle in the local animal kingdom, rats have now apparently secured control of the area. There is a picture of a rat to aid easy identification and some helpful instructions such as ‘Avoid back lanes and alleyways at night’. How long though until the problem spills out of the alleyways and into the main streets, with gangs of drunken rats rampaging through the area breaking people’s wingmirrors and indulging in late night hurling?

Large crowd of honest family people gather, hungry for destruction, on a damp Sunday morning. Much scrabbling for best vantage point then with bang, tower block thunderously folds in on itself neatly. Children ask if pigeons escaped building and someone offers theory that gunshot heard before explosion was to frighten away roosting birds (very reassuring). Also much learned theorising about quantity of explosives required for this kind of work. General air of satisfaction marred by man who says blowing up perfectly good buildings is stupid and planning process in this city is a travesty but spectacle has whetted our appetites for temple of vapid consumerism soon to be constructed on site and he is not paid much attention.

#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$

SORRY DAY SAYING SORRY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. Apologise

Kiss my furry arse

BELFAST S V CITY COUNCIL “...WORKING TOGETHER FOR A BETTER FUTURE”

THE VACUUM

“AN INSULT TO BOTH CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS IN NORTHERN IRELAND”

! FEATURING " THE SORRY DEBATE

The evening before Sorry Day, 6pm, 14th December, Belfast Exposed, 23 Donegall Street, speakers include Pauline Hadaway, Claire Hackett, Chris Gilligan, Eamonn Hughes chaired by Steven King

A SORRY EXHIBITION

A survey of cultural censorship and outrage in modern Northern Ireland. In the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast Exposed and the Old Museum Arts Centre.

THE BIG SORRY BUS

Driving round the city centre for the day. Join in the Sorry Karaoke, the sorry demos and give out the Sorry Vacuum to people along the route.

CORNMARKET

From 12 to 3pm. Onion chopping and foot washing.

Get ‘sorry’ stamped on your body for the day. Grand finale Miss Whiplash will make all the city councillors sorry.

SORRY SANTA

Visit Sorry Santa in front of Tesco and get your picture taken in his gloomy grotto. But no presents – they’ve all been withheld by Belfast City Council.

SORRY NIGHT

8pm, £5, Special Sorry club night at the Limelight.

Featuring David Holmes, Paul Brown and Stuart Watson and visuals by Seamus Harahan.

# WWW.SORRYDAY.COM

WEDNESDAY 15TH DECEMBER