CONTENTS

August 1984

Early Days In The Cosgrave Coalition

An excerpt from Chapter 5 of "Round Up The Usual Suspects: The Cosgrave Coalition and Nicky Kelly" which outlines the political background to the arrest of Nicky Kelly.

Citizen Ken
by Olivia 0 'Leary

13

Ken Livingstone is a man with a mission: to save the GLC and spread egg all over the face of Margaret Thatcher.
T

e Big Irish Ball

lark Brennock and photographer ith the Irish troops.

16
Patrick Redmond spent two weeks in the

Framing Of Marie McCarthy

:._-Calm Toibin

24

How 'Today Tonight', Gordon Thomas and the Sunday Press used the Pope and an innocent woman to sell a story which was completely untrue.

Olympics 84
A complete guide to all the field and track events by Hugh Quigley.

39

A Fool For Ireland A Profile of Donall 0 Morain

by Tom O'Dea

51

Twice Chairman of the RTE Authority, Chief Executive of Gael-Linn, Donall 0 Morain, is now about to publish a Sunday newspaper in Irish.

Million Dollar Bash

56

Declan Kiberd casts a cold eye over the fun and frolics of the middle classes at the Dylan concert at Slane.

DEPARTMENTS
Diary Motoring. Art . 4 35 48 As Time Goes By Business Forum . . . . . . . . Wigmore 50 60 61

Editor Reporter Political Correspondent

Man4ging Director Printed by Distribution

Colm Toibin Anne Connolly Gene Kerrigan Lithogrlphic Univer.1 Ltd. Olivia O'Leary N_spreld
Advertising

Ltd.

Manager Colour Separations Editorial and Business Address

Patricia Burrell Litho Studios Limited.

Promotions

Patricil Burrell 14 Merrion Row, Dublin 2. Telephone: 606055

Magill is published by

Megill PubliCltions Ltd.

~ABC ~The average net paid salesas certified

I
January-June

by the AUDIT BUREAU OF CIRCULATIONS

for the period

1983 was 30. 596 copies per month.

MAGILL AUGUST 1984 3

IN JANUARY THIS YEAR a meeting was held between the senior garda officers involved in the Nicky Kelly case and the Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP wanted to know why John Fitzpatrick had not been arrested and charged with the Sallins train robbery which had taken place eight years earlier. The meeting discussed whether it was now possible to charge Fitzpatrick with the robbery. This information has been revealed in "Round Up The Usual Suspects", by Derek Dunne and Gene Kerrigan, which is published today. Fitzpatrick was first arrested under Section 30 on April 5 1976 and held for 48 hours. His first statement was an account of going to Limerick with Micnael Barrett on the day of the Sallins robbery. His second statement made at 8.15 in the morning of April 7 admitted to the robbery but did not name anyone else. He was also alleged to have made verbal statements naming all the other IRSP members supposedly on the robbery. Fitzpatrick got bail along with the others accused of the robbery and spent eight months waiting for the case to come to trial. Then Justice o hUadhaigh dismissed the case. In December 1976 word came from the DPP's office: arrest and charge Nicky Kelly, Brian McNally, Osgur Breatnach, Mick Plunkett and John Fitzpatrick. The day the others were arrested the gardai raided Fitzpatrick's parents' home but Fitzpatrick wasn't there. That was the end of his involvement in the case. Seven years passed. In October 1983 procee"mgs began for taking Nicky

Kelly's case to the European Court. Also, John Fitzpatrick gave a press conference in Dublin. He told the press that he had an alibi for the night of the robbery when he had stayed with various members of the Hayes family in Limerick. If he was brought to court and his alibi stood up there would be a problem. Not alone had he confessed to the robbery but he was named in Nicky Kelly's confession. If he was elsewhere that night, why did he confess and why was he named in Nicky Kelly's confession? Either the press conference or the European hearing alerted the DPP's office to the existence of Fitzpatrick. Senior gardai were summoned to a meeting. When asked why they hadn't arrested Fitzpatrick as they were ordered to do, they said that they couldn't find him, that he had fled the country. According to "Round Up The Usual Suspects", Fitzpatrick says he never left the country during this seven year period except to go on . holidays. He says that during this time he lived in constant fear of being arrested again and charged. He claims that h,e was seen by the Special Branch just three months after the others had been recharged. So the senior gardai sat in the DPP's office in January of this year and they discussed whether they should re-arrest Fitzpatrick and if not why not. It was concluded that the grounds of appeal which had been successful in Osgur Breatnach's case would also be likely to be successful if Fitzpatrick be tried and convicted on the basis of the statement which he made. So the outcome of the discussion between the gardai and the DPP was that Fitzpatrick would not be prosecuted. So, John Fitzpatrick, against whom there was precisely the same evidence as Nicky Kelly was not prose-

cuted. For seven years, while facilities would be provided Kelly was being tried, abscon- [ at a planned new health ding, on the run in Dublin centre in Loughlinstown. and America, and in prison In considering Mr Desin Portlaoise, John Fitzpatrick mond's proposals Dun walked free. Laoghaire citizens should have a good look at the experience of the people of St Teresa's Gardens. Agitation about heroin in St Teresa's Gardens did not come out of nowhere suddenly last summer. It began in May 1981 when the then Health Minister, Michael "THE DIFFERENCE BE- Woods, was presented with a tween their approach and petition asking him to take mine," said Barry Desmond action about the "heroin about Sinn Fein, "is that I epidemic" in the area. This am prepared to combat the followed a speech by the evils of drug abuse in a demo- Minister in Maynooth College cratic manner." Speaking at in which he had claimed that St Colrncille's Hospital in his there was no serious drug problem in the Republic. Dun Laoghaire constituency The Minister attended a last month Desmond had meeting in Teresa's Gardens in the first week of June 1981 when he was told by local parents and community workers that children as young as twelve were affected by heroin in Teresa's Gardens. The delegation gave the Minister a list of demands, the first of which was for a local drugs treatment centre. For eleven months nothing happened, apart from endless lobbying from local people of TDs, the Eastern Health Board, the Department of Health and the Garda Drugs Squad. In April 1982 at the launching of the community magazine "Gardens" a senior Eastern Health Board official announced that a "rehabilitation centre ... the first of its kind in the country" would be set up in the locality. The official, Ms Aine Flanagan, nothing good to say about gave a detailed account of the local Provos and their in- how the centre would be run. volvement in the anti-drugs It was to be managed by a campaign. He promised that committee chaired by an Eas"financial resources" would tern Health Board social worbe made available to approved ker and including representavoluntary groups, that a new tives of the local development extension to the hospital committee, the clergy, a docwould be equipped to handle tor and a health nurse. It would provide a day-time drug cases and that further

Drugs

drop-in centre, therapy for drug abusers and education on drug abuse aimed particularly at young people. There would be three fulltime posts. One had already been advertised. All that was needed were premises. For more than a year nothing happened apart from the taxi traffic jams at the entrance to the Gardens as addicts poured in to do business with the local pushers and the lobbying of every official who could be found to do something about the problem. Then Fergus O'Brien spoke on "Today Tonight" about the government Task Force report on drug abuse. He announced that premises had been found - a four classroom school building owned by the Sisters of Mercy In reasonably nearby Weaver Square. The premises existed and they still do. They are empty and they are falling asunder. On April 9 this year Barry Desmond attended an open

day at a community club in the Gardens and was pleased to announce that the Weaver Square premises had now been purchased. He wasn't as specific as Aine Flanagan had been two years earlier about the running of the centre, although he did promise that local people would have a "major say". Possibly encouraged by the Minister's speech, Aine Flanagan spoke at a seminar in Trinity College on May 31 in terms which left some of her listeners with the impression that it was already in operation. In fact it would take up to 12 months to do the place up and there is no sign of the three full-time workers, not even the one whose post was advertised in April 1982. The earliest the centre will open - if it ever does open will be the summer of next year. This saga provided a full explanation for the emergence of the Concerned Parents movement in St Teresa's Gardens in June last year. Two years had passed since it had been made known to the Department of Health that heroin abuse was epidemic in the area. During this period all the democratic methods urged by Desmond on the people of Dun Laoghaire had been tried. They achieved nothing.

Mountjoy
AT LUNCHTUME LAST Friday eighty prisoners sat on the ground in the exercise yard of A-Wing. Later thirteen prisoners climbed on the roof of A-wing. Eleven stayed there for 28 hours without food or water. On Sunday morning at Mass a student priest received minor injuries to his neck when he was attacked by a prisoner. Another prisoner took the microphone and shouted "Let's get the screws." Other prisoners stood on their seats and began shouting and chanting. The Department of Justice informed the public that there was "no reason" given for the protests. The General Secretary of the Prison Officers Association said that the problem was lack of discipline. There were, however, reasons for the protests. The first was the events of Thursday, the day before the protest, when an assault case against two prison officers, arising out of the riots in the prison last November was dismissed on a technicality. The prison officers in court were jubilant in court and those prisoners who had been brought. to court as witnesses went back to Mountjoy and

relayed the news. Last month we revealed that 400 letters were found' in Mountjoy which had not been delivered to prisoners. The Department said it was enquiring into it; nothing has happened about it. . Mountjoy prison is still overcrowded; many of the prisoners have a heroin problem. There is no treatment for drug addiction. The prisoners still wash in cold water. They get only one shower and change of clothes a week. There is still no work for the prisoners in .A wing because the workshops were destroyed in last year's riots. Prisoners still spend over fifteen hours a day locked in their cells.

IN THE LAST ISSUE IN AN analysis of the Euro-election results we said that the Labour vote in Dublin South East had been seven per cent, which if transferred to a general election would mean that Ruairi Quinn would lose his seat. In fact the figure was eleven per cent which will still leave Quinn in trouble but with some chance of regaining his seat. And now for some more good news. The circulation of Magill has gone up from 30,500 in the last six months of 1983 to 33,045 in the first six months of 1984.

Three chapters of ROUND .up THE USUAL SUSPECTS by Derek Dunne and Gene Kerrigan, published today by MAGILL, outline the political background to the Nicky Kelly case. The section printed below is taken from the second of these: 'A State Of Siege',
he National Coalition was on top of security from the start. Liam Cosgrave's Fine Gael would never be soft on wrongdoers. Labour would provide the balance needed to preserve civil liberties. The government of all the talents, they were called. . What about the repressive legislation that Paddy Cooney had called "repugnant to the basic principles of justice and liberty", just four months earlier? Now, as the new Minister for Justice, Cooney said that "as long as democracy was threatened in any way it had to have the means to protect itself, even if the laws necessary were repugnant." The Cabinet posts were divided ten-five between Fine Gael and labour. It was to be an odd Cabinet, the lines of division based more on personality conflicts than on party or ideology. There were no serious clashes, everyone got on with running their Departments and there was no political disagreement. There was likewise no political agreement. The ministers worked more as administrative heads of their Departments rather than as politicians collectively making policy. Paradoxically, Cabinet meetings were often and lengthy. Cosgrave believed in talking things out, letting all have their say, putting off taking a vote. Some ministers found the process so frustrating that they sometimes conducted Departmental business in siderooms during Cabinet meetings. At the time, Frank Hall's satirical TV show portrayed Cosgrave as a Hitler figure, barking out orders. At the end of one long gabby Cabinet meeting one minister turned to another and asked wouldn't it be grand if they had that fella from Hall's show as Taoiseach, at least they'd get a decision. The Cabinet was entirely divorced from decision-making on security. They didn't decide policy, monitor events or make decisions on practical matters. They got reports, but there was little detail and less interest. Such reports were almost always concerned with the party political embarrassments resulting from successful subversive action. Within the Cabinet there was a sub-committee on secu-

rity. The three Fine Gael places on it were filled automatically. Cosgrave, as Taoiseach got one, Paddy Donegan was appointed Minister for Defence and took to it like a kid who has been given a very large box of toy soldiers. He automatically got the second place on the sub-committee. The third place went to the Minister for Justice, Paddy Cooney. Labour had two places on the sub-committee. One went automatically to Brendan Corish, as Tanaiste. Corish, however, wasn't too interested. He spent a lot of time in his constituency and delegated his position on the sub-committee to Jimmy Tully, Minister for Local Government. There was one Labour place left. They had to fill it because this was a coalition, and because, went the theory, Fine Gael shouldn't have too tight a hold on security matters. Neither Michael O'Leary nor Justin Keating expressed any interest. Conor Cruise O'Brien, still interested primarily in the Northern conflict, took the fifth place on the subcommittee. In the event, the sub-committee didn't have to press its views on the Cabinet. During the entire four years of the Coalition's reign the Cabinet would vote just twice on security matters of any moment. In effect, whether through inexperience or lack of interest, the Cabinet abdicated its responsibilities on security (and civil rights) in favour of the sub-committee. Some Cabinet members didn't know or weren't too sure who was actually on the sub-committee, where it met, how often it met or just what it did.

n the beginning it didn't matter. There was great crack on the security front. Paddy Donegan had been Minister for Defence for a fortnight when the Provos tried to bring in a consignment of guns on a ship called the Claudia, The gardai were tipped off and Donegan rushed to the scene, stayed up all night and "personally directed" the swoop on the ship. There were several arrests and the guns were confiscated and the Claudia was allowed go free. Journalists reached for the dictionaries to find out what a transom was when Donegan announced that he had delivered "a kick up the transom". In May Liam Cosgrave told a triumphant Fine Gael Ard Fheis that his priorities were law and order, an incomes

policy and a housing programme. He got the usual standing ovation. The security successes went on. Five Provos, including Joe Cahill, went to jail for their part in the Claudia affair. Paddy Donegan announced the formation of two new battalions of the army for border duty. Thirty Provos were arrested when disturbances followed the annual Bodenstown commemoration. A raid on a ship in Dublin port netted 17 rifles and 29,000 rounds of ammunition bound for the Provos. In July gardai foiled an attempted escape

from Mountjoy. things were still unsettled, but the Coalition was getting on top of the security problems. There was a bonus in that Fianna Fail were finding it hard to settle in to opposition after 16 years in power. Deputy Liam Ahern told the Dail that what was needed was "more guns, bags of guns", to Jack Lynch's embarrassment. That embarrassment deepened when it was revealed that .as Taoiseach Lynch had been told - but had forgotten - about the activities of Kenneth and Keith Littlejohn, two thieves recruited as British agents and sent

Portlaoise Prison
over to infiltrate the IRA .. The Lirtlejohns Iaimed to have robbed banks and set off explosions in the South in order to push the government towards more repressive measures against republicans. And there was real hope that there could be a solution to the [orthern conflict. In October 1972 the British government had issued a Green Paper outlining proposals for new political structures in the North. Three weeks after the coalition won the election a British White Paper had been issued developing the ideas. The coalition had made a successful start and was feeling pleased with itself. On October 8 there was another small victory when Provo leader Seamus Twomey was sent to Mountjoy to start a three year sentence. Just over three weeks later that little victory would lash back into the government's face. when the helicopter landed in the exercise yard of D Wing in Mountjoy. Some of the warders thought it was the new Minister for Justice, Paddy Cooney, come to pay a surprise visit. At 3.41pm the helicopter took off again. It had three Provo leaders, Seamus Twomey, Kevin Mallon and J.B. O'Hagan, aboard. When the prison warders realised what was happening they tried to stop the escape but other prisoners in the yard prevented them. There were six uniformed gardai in the prison and one plainclothes garda with a gun. That garda was near the front gate. The gates were open as a truck was about to enter the prison. The prison alarm bells went off. A warder yelled for someone to close the gates. The helicopter, overloaded, made it up and over the walls of the prison with just twenty feet to spare. Three Provo leaders, the pilot and Leonard with the American accent. The helicopter escape gave the Provos a needed boost to their morale. It severely embarrassed the Coalition. Paddy Cooney had been away in Turkey, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Turkish state. Des O'Malley called for his resignation. Cooney shrugged off criticism. He couldn't forsee everything. But the escape shook the government. Cosgrave announced that there would be a judicial inquiry. The idea was forming that the state should forsee everything. On June 3 Michael Gaughan, a republican who had been on hunger strike since March 31, died. At Gaughan's funeral service in Kilburn Rev Michael Connolly described him as a great man. The priest was suspended from his parish duties. There was a military-style parade down the Kilburn High Road. As Gaughan's body was taken from Dublin to Ballina thousands of people lined the roadsides in tribute. The Cosgrave government was angered at the open display of support for the Provisionals. They determined that it would MAGILL AUGUST 1984 11

eonard had an American accent. He wanted to take some aerial photographs of ancient monuments around Stradbally, County Laois. He went along to the Westpoint hanger at Dublin Airport, following a phone call, to have a look at the kind of aircraft he could hire from Irish Helicopters. He thought the Alouette helicopter should do fine for his purposes and 80 an hour sounded about right. He booked the helicopter for Wednesday week. On Wednesday October 31 1973 the National Coalition had been in government for eight months. Leonard arrived at Dublin airport at noon and set off on his flight, with Irish Helicopters pilot Thompson Boyes at the controls. They flew down to Laois and at about 2.30pm Leonard said he'd like to land in that field over there. They landed. Two armed men came out of the trees. An hour later Thompson Boyes was flying at gunpoint, approaching Mountjoy prison. He used the Royal Canal and the nearby railway line as landmarks. It was 3.39pm .

-:s

:e '" 'lowed

happen again.

- the end of that month the authorities found an 80oot tunnel in Portlaoise prison. The number ofgardai :::. die prison was increased and army foot patrols were set ~ outside the walls. Wire contraptions were erected to zasure that no helicopters could suddenly drop in. On August 18, shortly after noon, nineteen Provos in Cell Block E overpowered warders and got out onto a roof. Tiley had gelignite and used it blow their way through two gates. All nineteen escaped. The image of confidence cracked. The embarrassment of me helicopter escape was compounded. Paddy Cooney announced a judicial inquiry headed by Justice Finlay. In fact, this inquiry had been under way since the helicopter escape the previous October. Although the impression was given that the Finlay inquiry was a routine affair in which the security failures which allowed the escapes would be identified and rectified the inquiry went very far beyond that. The Finlay report was never published, but it radically restructured the whole security network - gardai, army, intelligence, prevention, detection. The Finlay Report, delivered to the Taoiseach in 1974, carne in several sections. It examined and made recommendations on prisons, RTE, ESB, the airports, the courts, water and gas installations, railways, embassies and diplomats, communications, and just about every institution or service which might be under threat from subversives. It was divided into sections and each section was given only to those affected by its recommendations ~ for instance, the section covering the ESB was seen only by those involved in ESB security, and that was the only section of the report they saw. The most important innovation was the setting up of the National Security Group. This was a body chaired by the secretary to the Taoiseach. It had representatives from the Departments of Justice and Defence, the Garda Commissioner, the army Chief of Staff, and a senior garda officer with direct responsibility for state security. Representatives from any government Department could be called to attend meetings of the group when their area was being discussed. The group met at least once a month in Room 6B of government buildings and constantly assessed security developments and made recommendations. It reported, through the Taoiseach's secretary, directly to Liam Cosgrave. Cosgrave therefore, by late 1974, had direct lines of communication to all aspects of state security. He also had the Cabinet sub-committee on security, which was so homogenous in its views that its only function was to endorse the measures which Cosgrave - separately from the sub-committee - decided in conjunction with Paddy Cooney and Paddy Donegan. The direction and control of the forces of state security had been gathered in very few hands and those hands belonged to people of like views. The Cabinet, which in theory had responsibility for security and to which the various instruments of security were

. in theory accountable, was otherwise engaged. Its members were content to let Cosgrave and his circle get on with it. There would later arise a myth that the National Coalition launched a concerted attack on civil liberties. It wasn't true. So far from the minds of Cabinet ministers were civil liberties that it never occurred to them to attack them. Much less defend them.

n between the helicopter escape and the Portlaoise breakout Coalition hopes for progress to stability in the North were dashed. The British discussion documents had led to a four-day conference at Sunningdale in December 1973. The idea was for Protestants and Catholics to share power in an Executive and that there would be an "Irish dimension", a Council of Ireland. No one was sure what this last was. It was sold to nationalists as a first step to a united Ireland and to unionists as a structure which would stymie moves to a united Ireland. Cosgrave did his best. Even before he formed his Cabinet, in March 1973, he flew to London with Brendan Corish to discuss the situation with Edward Heath. Garret FitzGerald met William Whitelaw for talks in London in June. Cosgrave again went to London to see Heath in July. On September 17 there was a massive military exercise which sealed off Baldonnel airfield while Cosgrave and Heath engaged in nine hours of talks. Then there were the four days of Sunningdale in December, to which Cosgrave committed the best part of his Cabinet. Cosgrave consulted by phone with Brian Faulkner, the Northern premier, on the Council of Ireland proposal and then met Faulkner for five hours at Baldonnel on January 16. After the British general election in February Garret FitzGerald went to London for talks with the new Northern secretary, Merlyn Rees, Senior Garda and RUC officers met to discuss security arrangements. It was all go, and all for nothing. The general election results in February 1974 showed which way the wind was blowing in the North. Eleven of the twelve Northern seats at Westminster were won by antipower sharing unionists. The unionists didn't want power sharing, they wanted their state back. They launched a general strike, closed the power stations, patrolled the streets carrying cudgels, and bombed Dublin and Monaghan, killing 31 people. The power sharing Executive collapsed in May, after a tentative start. It was the first genuine attempt to square the circle in the North, and it would be the last for a decade. From that point on the Cosgrave Coalition had no Northern policy. Only O'Brien had a policy based on an ideological positon. For Cosgrave and his circle the job was now merely one of tightening security. There was no underlying political strategy, as there had been with Sunningdale, just a decision to stamp out the IRA in the South and push the problem back across the border. For Liam Cosgrave, enough was enough. When the Executive collapsed he turned to Conor Cruise O'Brien and said, "The Protestants have won - isn't that it?" That was it.

HANKS" SAID THE WOMAN HANDING KEN Livingstone a copy of his new biography to sign. "Thanks for everything you're doing for us." She was neat, spinsterish, and timid. Livingstone handed her the signed book. "I hope we can keep on doing it," he said gently. They queued up in W.H. Smith's in Streathem to buy "Citizen Ken" by John Carvel of the Guardian, and 'to have a word with Livingstone. He's London's folk hero, came second only to Pope John Paul II in the BBC's Man of the Year Poll, and he's easy to talk to. There are no sharp edges to Livingstone, no defensiveness, no quick glances at his watch to remind one he is a busy man. "N'yeah sure" he said in his nasal South London drawl when pounced on for a Magill interview that his press office said was totally out of the question. "Sure, why not?" Insults and compliments he meets with the same selfdeprecatory good humour. Ken doesn't believe in hassle. Socialist well-being does not allow for stress. The British gutter press have called him Red Ken, Loony Ken, This Damn Fool - even the liberal Guardian have suggested he should stick to raising his beloved salamanders and leave the government of London to others. But Livingstone, the man who said all people are bi-sexual, who supported the H Blocks hunger strikers and invited Gerry Adams to London, who believes diet is a political statement, has become a working-class hero - and not just to the working class. As left wing Labour leader of the GLC, he cut fares on London Transport and proposed extra rates on business people and property owners to cover the subsidy. He queried the GLC support for elitist pursuits like opera, and gave grants to community-based arts groups, creches, ethnic, homosexual and women's groups. He opened the GLC's halls and facilities to striking workers and when the government tried to abolish him and his council, he took them on by appealing directly to Londoners. That morning he'd announced that he was resigning his GLC seat, along with a handful of other Labour councillors, to force a series of by-elections in which Londoners could show their support for his campaign to maintain the GLC. The queue in W H. Smiths were right behind him. Two beautifully dressed blue-rinsed ladies told him they were on his side because Mrs Thatcher was using the law to conduct a personal witch-hunt. "It's outrageous what's she's doing," they said quivering with indignation "and it's all to get at you - just to get at you!" An adoring girl with a pony tail said she was really delighted to meet him. "Go on, you're not really," drawled Ken with a grin. "Yes she is," said her black friend. "Gawd, she's been talking

T [!J

about it for weeks, and what's more she had to drag me along." "Do Tories support you, too?" asked a man who had driven his teenage daughter up from Kent that day to meet Livingstone. "Yes, some of 'em do," mused Ken. He's had letters from Tory voters, from retired colonels in the shires backing him to the hilt in his bid to save the GLC. They'd seen him on BBC television's Question Time, he said, and realised he wasn't an ogre. . The response to Ken's campaign has startled not only Mrs Thatcher, but more significantly, his own Labour colleagues in Parliament who have too easily dismissed Ken as a Looney London Leftie. From the terrace of the House of Commons, MPs can look diagonally across the river to the elegant curve of G LC Headquarters at City Hall. There, in giant letters along the parapet is the week's message from Citizen Ken. This week, it's a thank you to the Lords for throwing out the bill to abolish the GLC: "Peers, thank you for saving London's democracy." Other weeks, it will be another battle-cry in the fight against abolition: "Vote us in to vote us out"; or it will revert to the regular tally of the total unemployed under Mrs Thatcher's administration. Ken was never a man to waste prime adyertising space. MPs watch the massive message board with varying degrees of fascination, fury and pure envy. To the Tories, it's impudence beyond all bearing. To the Labour Opposition, it is a brazen and stylish assault on government which makes their own performance, hampered by the traditions and etiquette of parliament, look tame and stuffy. Ken, to the London man in the street, is fast looking like the real leader of the opposition. Livingstone knows his London, and he knows his Eng. land. A winsome eccentric of which a modern P.G. Wodehouse would have been proud, he has milked the English sense of fairness and the popular hostility to Whitehall civil servants. Pointing out that the refusal to hold next year's local elections is a reduction of London democracy, that the abolition of the GLC leaves London effectively in the centralised hands of Whitehall, he has dotted the city with mad posters: "This" declares one large hoarding bound in masses of fluttering red tape, "is how London will look run by Whitehall"; ''This'' announces another above a giant crawling snail "is how London will feel run by Whitehall". The Thatcher government, taunted at every London crossroads by an inspired poster campaign which is costing 3 million of London taxpayers money, has turned every legislative gun in the armoury on Mr Livingstone's council, and ended up with a House of Lords mutiny allover its face. The noble Lords, whom egalitarian Ken has been eager to abolish, accepted reluctantly that Livingstone was right. The democratic way to get rid of Ken was to fight him fairly in a local election - not to abolish his council. The battle has turned into a Tom and Jerry cartoon, with Mrs Thatcher as the snarling thwarted cat, and Livingstone as the cheeky mouse. The nation is enjoying it hugely.

IVINGSTONE' A 38 YEAR OLD SOUTH Londoner and former teacher, reluctantly accepts the Trotskyist label, at least he would prefer it to being called a Social Democrat or ~ indeed a Stalinist. What he's never been vague about is his commitment to the left and his determination that the

Labour Party whatever its leader, shall be the voice of the left. "Hugh Gaitskell" he explained to a young CND activist who complained that the Labour party had failed the left "was about as far part from me as is possible in politics but still people did better under him than under any Tory government." She must join the Labour Party, he insisted over twenty persuasive minutes. If everybody who felt like her joined the party, they could change the party, the country overnight. She was hooked. Livingstone believes in evangelisation, imaginative persuasion. That's what's gone wrong, he complains, with the main bulk of the party establishment. Everything he's done could have been done by the MPs who look so enviously across at Ken's campaign from their Commons terrace on the river. "The Labour Party when in government could have done something, but they never had the imagination ... the Fare's Fair policy, the development of the National Health Service. From the 1950s up to now, the Labour Party has lost sight of the fact that people are not naturally socialist - they've got to be persuaded. There's a grey bureaucracy, and Neil Kinnock has caught the public eye simply because he hasn't been absorbed by that awful bureaucracy of Westminster." For a leftwinger Livingstone places a startling belief in the power of personality. Denis Healy, from whom he is worlds apart politically, would still have been his choice for leader over leftwinger Michael Foot. "Healy's a larger than life figure - one warms to him. Had he been less arrogant as Chancellor he might have been leader of the party. When Jim Callaghan resigned, I made it clear that I thought Healy should have been made leader. Healy's a bully, and at the time you needed a bully. The left always get on with Healy in opposition. It's when he's in power we have trouble with him." Livingstone who grew up in Streathem looked around the bookshop and then he confided pleasantly to a respectful manager: "You know, I stole a book here when I was ten. It was a German phrase-book. I stole it, at least I think I did." The manager laughed as though shoplifting was his favourite past-time, too. "C'mon Ken" said his girl-friend Kate. "Stop wallowing in guilt and sign some more books." He'd changed his mind about W.H. Smith, confided Ken, signing away. Years ago, he demonstrated against them when they refused to stock "Private Eye". "Now I don't care who does or doesn't stock "Private Eye", they write such nasty things about me." Over the last year, Livingstone has taken on and routed those who write such nasty things about him. Sought after by television because of his very notoriety, Livingstone performed superbly, shattering the bogeyman image of souless, implacable Red Ken. "At first, people depicted me as a puritan, who hated food or nice clothes or any sort of joy - a sort of automaton who went to meetings. Then when they saw you on TV, they realised that you were like them and the image didn't stick. Papers, after all, have a declining readership as sources of news or comment. Television is taking up more and more of that audience. You can reach over the heads of the press." Mind you, nasty as the British gutter press was, they were reacting to some of Livingstone's own beliefs, not all of which would meet with widespread acceptance. Before we get to his views on the Northern Ireland question, which even his own press handlers realise could damage his hardwon popularity, there is Ken's belief in vegetarianism for a better, fairer world. The replacement of red meat with

_~ 1lAGILL AUGUST 1984

.~~2b:e protein, he says, would lead to a fairer distribu::~ of the world's resources. "People are sold red meat and .-=~- products because the farming industry benefits from ~. r; we eat these things rather than consume vegetable :~C':ein> we condemn the Third World to live at subsistence
'1~'T ,&" .J. .

"I'd do it in ten days," says Ken evenly. And would he, one ventured, like to be living as a besieged Catholic in West Belfast during and after those ten days? "Yes, I would," says Ken. "I walked around Andersonstown with Gerry 'Adams and I felt perfectly safe. "The Protestant terrorists wouldn't get involved in a civil war," he claims, "they would know that international forces would stop them. The very balance of terror between the two sides would stop such a war, and the Irish could all get down to working out a constitution, a new deal which Protestants would be quick to have a major say in." He sounded reasonable and persuasive about it all, as kind and concerned as he was about bus passes for old people, and proper housing and giving the GLC's unused building ground over to caravan-dwellers to live on. But he sensed he hadn't quite persuaded the questioner and Livingstone always likes to persuade the questioner. "])0 I gather from your attitude that you wouldn't like to be in Andersonstown during that ten days?" Not on your life, I told him - not even for a free vegetarian dinner. I'd rather be in London, on a subsidised bus, where comment is free and diet is a political statement, and peace is not maintained by a balance of terror, and where Mr Livingstone, I presume, will be as persuasive and as popular as ever.

Ken took the questions on Northern Ireland though his _ ress office were keen they be avoided - Ireland, just now, shouldn't distract from the fight to save London's democracy, Even as we moved 'out of the shop to talk further, two bystanders were calling "Bloody Irish, get 'em all out of here, we say." It may have been a bad joke but one didn't wait to find out. The British army, says Livingstone, were accepted in ~orthern Ireland until 1972 and Operation Motorman. Interrunent proved them to be on the side of the Unionist regime and therefore unacceptable to Catholics as an independent force. So now they should get out, he says. It's a new held by most British people, he claims, if not by their politicians. London Radio's most recent poll showed over eighty per cent of people in favour of withdrawal. The commitment to union was fast becoming an empty shell maintained by politicians, he said. But wouldn't withdrawal have to be a gradual process, even if one agreed it was desirable? Something which happened over ten or fifteen years?

IGHT AM IN TIBNIN AND THE SOUND OF THE PIPE BAND playing "Twenty Men from Dublin Town'. echoed through the prefabricated billets of Camp Shamrock, making sleep impossible for those who had not yet emerged from under the mosquito nets.

There had been drinking the night before. The canteen opens for an hour and a half every night between eight and nine-thirty. About thirty people were in the canteen, sitting around tables and drinking the standard beer, Alrnaza, out of cans. Michael Jackson played from the tape recorder in the corner, bought from one of the many local traders. Because the bar is only open for an hour and a half, some soldiers have developed the tendency to drink their cans at an alarming rate. At ten o'clock an officer came in to clear everyone out. Some of the lads muttered things under their breath but they all obeyed orders. Back in the billets the Privates and NCOs were sitting around a table when someone from another billet came in

looking very angry. Somebody had stolen his thirteen cans of beer, and he was accusing one of the lads of stealing them. They began to shout at each other. The soldier who lost his beer went away again, and someone said "we only got twelve" The troops agreed that they should give him the money for his cans, and someone was nominated to do this the next day. "The worst thing about drinking out here," said one man, "is getting up in the morning. The heat would kill .ou," ;'\0...- IT W~ morning. people were moving about the :RS gertiag hor. A~ tae front gate the fOUI

lined up inside the gate, waiting to transport to the morning briefing at HQ.

the officers

using South Lebanon from which to attack Israel. The UNIFIL role was to keep peace in the area. They cannot, however, enforce peace, and can only fire weapons in selfdefence. Since then, Irish troops have been fired upon by all sides in the area, including the Israeli army. Eighteen Irish troops have been killed, some in action and others in accidents. The balance of power in the area has been constantly changing in the last six years. The PLO are gone, but the Israelis are back. The Christian militia is now' being trained by the Israeli Army and styling itself as the "South Lebanese Army". This "Army" is not recognised by the Lebanese

government and, therefore, not by UNIFIL. It gets much of its funding by a system of local "taxation" which amounts to a crude form of extortion. Ten different nations are participating in UNIFIL. There are 736 Irish troops there, who spend six months in the 88 square kilometres of the Irish Area of Operations before going home, to be replaced by a new battalion. The Irish Army is well used to UN peacekeeping work, having served in the Congo for four years and in Cyprus for ten.

day sits behind a desk at the top of the room with a large map of the Irish Area of Operations (AO) behind him, with different coloured markers on it. The officers sit down again as the duty officer begins his account of the events in the Irish AO for the previous 24 hours. One. The Israelis fired two rounds from their position at IDF house down into the valley below - probably just clearing their weapons - and there were two overflights by Israeli planes. Two. Lauis (locals, armed and uniformed by the Israelis) fired two shots in the air and twelve on the ground from one of their two positions, and one into the valley below from their other position, all for no apparent reason. Three. One Irishbatt truck was stopped for some time at a DFF (De Facto Forces - Christian Militia) checkpoint, before being allowed through. Four. The Laui position at Brashit was attacked during the night, with 60 rounds fired at it, and a hundred fired back. "It all seemed to end at 6.l0am when the Lauis went off for a cup of tea."

HE OFFI CERS LEAP OUT OF THEIR SEATS TO ATTENTION as the commanding officer of the 55th Irish Battalion walks into the room. The duty officer, for the previous

-:::-he olue cravatted officers listen attentively as the ~:ernus day's shooting incidents are read out. There is zothing unusual. The last item raises self-satisfied grins the price of petrol had gone up in Dublin. White UN jeeps bump along potholed roads and greenclad soldiers stop and search cars as the daily routine of Irishbatt begins. Most mornings some part of the landline communications system has to be repaired. The cables laid along the side of the road are regularly cut by locals, who use them to pirate electricity into their homes or to make reins for their donkeys. Soldiers sit with binoculars on rooftops of houses at isolated vantage points in the Irish AD and report on anything unusual. Their reports are usually of overflights of Israeli planes, or the sound of gunfire. At the checkpoints. cars are stopped one at a time, while ill cards are checked and boots opened. Most of the Irish know how to ask the routine set of questions in Arabic. They seem to understand the answers. The local children wave and shout "hello" as the Irish vehicles pass along the dusty roads through the villages. The Irish have a self imposed speed limit of 25mph. The thus far harmonious relations with the locals could be severely shaken by just one incident involving a fast moving Irish jeep and a local child. Much of the manpower is spent on the maintenance of the Irish operation. Mechanics work in an area known as "The Pits" maintaining and repairing the UN vehicles, which get a rough battering on the appalling roads. For more serious vehicular casualties there is a Norwegian maintenance company beside Camp Shamrock. The provision of food and water is also a' major operation. Several times a day, the water truck must travel 25 kilometres to get water to service the main camp and the smaller outposts. Cooks work a full day providing food for the officers and men. In A company at Haddatah, the officers sometimes participate by barbecuing their own food on the balcony.

tion) is required. People leave it late before coming to the doctor too. Sometimes they have applied toothpaste to burns and ground coffee to wounds before they come for medical attention. Many villagers who come to see the doctor go next door to see the dentist before they leave, in order to get value from their visit to Camp Shamrock. The locals seem to prefer the Irish medical treatment to the local treatment at Tibnin hospital. It may be that they prefer the Irish medics, it may be because it's free at Camp Shamrock. A few of the villagers specialise in acting as go betweens between the locals and the Irish medics. They regularly arrive up with one or more people in tow, dramatically explain the plight of their clients, and escort them back home again when they are finished. These intermediaries may be merely doing a good turn for their friends - gratis - but one is known as the ten percent man. "On the ball Irish!" The soldier at the Fijian checkpoint jerks himself to attention, smacks his rifle in salute and flashes his white teeth before shouting his greeting as the Irish jeep goes by. Another black face appears at the win dow of the checkpoint and roars: "On the big Irish ball!" Driving from the Israeli border to Tibnin involves passing through the Fiji controlled UN area. The Fijians have picked up the Irish habit of saying "on the ball" and invariably shout some variation of it as the Irish go by. They don't know what it means but they still say it in thick Fijian accents. Some of them think it has something to do with football and they draw imaginary footballs in the air as the Irish pass. The Irish try to confuse them by drawing hexagonal shapes in the air. But if you drive from the Israeli border to Tibnin, the Fijians are the least of the problems. One must also pass through an area known as the enclave, a narrow strip of land between the Israeli border and the UN area. Here the natives have taken to firing .at Israeli patrols and detonating roadside bombs beside Israeli vehicles. On the road Lebanese vehicles stay 100 yards behind Israeli jeeps, and UN vehicles only travel in pairs. Some Irish UN drivers tell of Israeli vehicles trying to manoeuvre themselves into the middle of UN convoys for safety. The UN drivers don't like that sort of thing. The Irish are playing a local soccer team - Haris - in a friendly match. The pitch is set deep in a valley with high banks of rock on each side. The sun is getting low in the sky, which casts a shadow over the pitch making it more comfortable for the players to run around. Up in the rocks and around the pitch sit around 50 locals. The referee is a local as well. An Irish player shouts handball and the referee wants to send him off. It was handball - the ball had clearly been handled by one of the local players - but the local referee wants to send off the Irish player. The referee finally changes his mind and the Irish player stays on. "Fair play to you ref", the Irishman says, not without a trace of irony. The locals take their soccer very seriously. They have matching blue shirts with "Haris" emblazoned across them. The local referee bows to the will of the spectators, who have been known to throw stones at particularly good Irish players. In the previous game the Irish had been winning in the end but the referee extended the game for fifteen minutes until the local team scored. The referee slept easily in his bed that night. "I hear him, he say fucking ref, he go off." The friendly match is getting less friendly and an Irish player is being MAGIUJAUGUST 1984 19

HE OLD WOMAN WITH THE KIDNEY INFECTION IN THE WAITing room is calling for Allah. Three members of her family gather around, torn between comforting her and liaising with the Irish medical orderly. The jamjars in the office contain assorted snakes and tarantulas, so that anyone coming in with a bite can identify the assailant. The cast from MASH smiles down from a poster on the wall as well they might. The regimental aid post is the busiest part of Camp Shamrock. At 7.30 in the morning locals start to queue outside the gate and are given numbers to wait in the queue. Some patients arrive with a large entourage offamily SId friends, who keen and wail while the sick person is aeing seen to. On a bad morning the waiting room is filled ~h howling people. The dentist, Mary Keating needs only two words of _ ..... rabic, which sound like Rasras and Ecla. Most of the !.:r::2ls corning in want a rasras (filling) but they usually ~~ taeir visit to the dentist so late that an ecla (extrac-

off. The Irishman doesn't think he has done anything wrong and he doesn't want to go off. The Irish are winning, :De crowd is getting frustrated and the referee is getting worried. An officer indicates that the player should go off and the martyr for community relations goes to the side5ne. "Sure we have to let them win. It's their pitch and their Dill. " There's no disco in Dibil. Soldiers on their first trip to South Lebanon are told that there is, that the tiny village of Dibil is the place to be. But it's not. Dibil is in the Christian controlled enclave, and a UN soldier there would be as popular as a black at a disco in Cape Town.
SU:

OMMANDANT PIERCE McCORLY IS FRANTICALLY CRAWLING across the floor of the canteen in Reece company headquarters at Al Yatun. The room is smoky and crowded and the tables are covered with beer cans. Everyone thinks it's very funny. Tonight there is an inter company quiz between Reece company and C company and it's the charades round. Soldiers who had been concentrating more on the 50 cent cans of Almaza start to pay attention to the quiz. People nudge each other and point out the senior officer on the hard dusty floor. The laughter gets louder. The two teams sit in front of the cartoon covered walls at the top of the room facing down towards the people at the bar. Pierce McCorly is trying to mime the two worded name of a book. He has done very well so far. The first word is animal and the second rhymes with arm. Pierce McCorly is trying to mime the second word. He raises his legs in the air, he walks up and down the room with an imaginary plough and puts his fingers to his head and wiggles them, but nobody thought that he looked like a farm and C Company won. Finding amusement for the 648 Irish troops in a barren and desolate place such as South Lebanon is difficult. Many soccer, table tennis, volleyball and quiz competitions are organised to keep the men occupied, but for those who are thinking of home, the competitions are a poor substitute. Shaper and Joe and some of the lads are lying out in the sun on top of a bunker - an activity known as swarming. It's two in the afternoon, the hottest time of the day, but on top of the bunker the breeze makes the heat bearable. Down on the balcony of the officers mess the officers are swarming as well. There is an unofficial siesta between 12 noon and 3 in the afternoon, during which most of the troops plaster themselves with suntan oil and top up their suntans. There were a lot of sore people in the first two weeks, but by now most of the troops are used to the sun. On the winter tour the status symbol of a tan is harder

to get. After the winter rain, soldiers grab every minute of spare time to lie in the sun so that they'll impress the folks at home when they get back. A medical orderly approaches the lads. "Anyone here A positive?" Tibnin hospital needs some blood. A donor is found and hurried off to give his blood. During the night there was a 'medevac' from the Irish AO to Tyre hospital. A local woman had gynaecological complications, but having been driven to Tyre hospital by the UN she gave birth to a baby girl. Some of the troops think it was twins, others swear it was triplets. We sit on the small whitewashed rocks that border the pathways between the billets. The lads complain about the beer. They've been promised for the last few years that Guinness would be brought out, but there's still no sign of it coming. They talk about the hard work, the heat, the mosquitoes. At this time of the afternoon the soldiers wear nothing but a pair of shorts. They have very dark suntans and they're proud of them. Someone talks about the post, and how a person's morale is transformed when they get a letter from home. But it takes a week for a letter to get from Ireland, and another week for a reply to get back, "so if the wife wants to know something it takes two weeks before you can tell her and by then it's out of date. You're 3000 miles away from Ireland when you come out here, and it gets further and further as the six months go by." They say that during the winter South Lebanon looks like the west of Ireland, but now in mid-summer the grass is scorched brown. Standing on the balcony of the officers mess there is a panoramic view of the rugged hills and valleys of the Irish area of operations. An Israeli flag flies over a building on a hill to the right. This is "IDF House", headquarters of the Israeli army in the Irish area of operations. The soldiers in IDF House regularly fire at nothing in particular in the valley below their position. Early in the morning they have patrols, which involve jeeps driving around the area at high speed. Everyone gets out of the way. The previous week a car bomb exploded 100 yards away from IDF House. The three men who were in the car were killed instantly, but the Israelis fired several hundred rounds of machine gun fire into the car just to make sure. They sealed off the area for some time before allowing the Irish in to pick up the pieces. They made no move to help. Straight in front of us are Landsdowne House and Courttown House, headquarters of the Dublin A company at Haddatah, a half a mile away from IDF House. On the left is Hill 880 and the town of Brashit. Hill 880 is the highest point in the Irish AO, and the five sol. diers there spend a week in isolation at a time. Access to hill 880 is along a winding uphill dirt track, and cars approaching can be seen ten minutes before they arrive. There are no surprise inspections on Hill 880. The town of Brashit is hostile to the UN and is the home of a Christian Militia leader who is said to terrorise the locals and faces several murder charges, including, it is said, one of setting fire to his wife. Then there is an outpost on a hill called the Black Hole. There was a hole on a hill and two cubicles were put on it to be used as toilets. The hole got very full, so someone decided to go into one of the cubicles, pour petrol into it and light it. It is called the black hole because there was someone in the other cubicle.

HOWLING ~OISE CmfES FROM THE MINARET OF THE MOSQUE in e \"J!a."ee of Ayte Zut down below us. This is the Imam (moslem priest) calling the faithful to pray. This happens me times a day in every village. "Jaysus", says one soldier, "yer man is off again." In the past the Imam used to come out to the door of the mosque and sing lines from the Koran. Now there is a loudspeaker system on top of the minaret, and the sound is a tape recording. They say that in recent years some UN soldiers got into a mosque and changed the tape, they say that in the early hours of the morning the Beatles sang for the people of South Lebanon. They say that the locals were not amused at all. "This is a mingi shop", reads the wall of the garage like

building in the village of Haddatah. The shop is run by a woman called Laura. It's not her real name but all the Irish call her that. All shops that sell radios, tape recorders and almost anything else in the Irish AO are called mingi shops. When the Irish served with the United Nations in the Congo in the 1960s, local traders used to try to sell anything by shouting "mingi, mingi", the Swahili word for lots of or plenty. 20 years later this word has moved to South Lebanon. People talk of mingi tapes and mingi combs the local electricity service is known as mingi power. A mingi man approaches the gate of Camp Shamrock laden with jewellery. Like all mingi men, he survives by parrot-learning all phrases that the Irish teach him. The Irish teach him some new words at the gate, and he wanders off towards the officers quarters shouting "ya fuckin' bollocks". The six years of Irish presence in South Lebanon have had their effect on local culture. Instead of using the Arabic word for no "lah", the locals have learned the Irish version "big fuckin' lah". The local units of currency, lira, are known as lebs in all the local shops. One local fourteenyear-old gives his career plans in perfect Dublinese: "I'm going to bleedin' Ireland to join the army and come back here on me bleedin' holidays." "The Irish are in high morality." So says the Muchtar of Tibnin through the local interpreter. F awas Fawas. On

the walls of his home are two Oglaigh na hEireann plaques, presented by former Chiefs of Staff. Beside these is a picture of the Muchtar with the UNIFIL force commander, General Bill O'Callaghan, and towering above them all is a picture of the Christian Lebanese President, Amin Gemayel. The Muchtar , like eighty per cent of his villagers is a Shi'ite moslem. The Irish are lucky that the Muchtar thinks they are in hi::b morality. Stories abound of soldiers from other contingents who weren't in such high morality, particularly in relation to modesty and women. Some of them will never recover, especially the French soldier, who, the Iads say, had his goolies cut off before being tied on top of a lamppost by the irate family of a local girl. The Irish go to great pains not to offend against local customs. During Ramadan, when all moslems must abstain from food, drink and sex between the hours of sunrise and sunset, the few drinking houses in the Irish AO are out of bounds to the soldiers. When the Irish want to sunbathe they find a spot where they cannot be seen from outside the camp before exposing themselves. "Their women are beautiful - but you daren't touch them," says one disconsolate soldier ill reluctant self restraint. But adaptation to a different moral code works both ways, as a visit to the well stocked Tibnin shop known as Porno Joe's testifies. It's five o'clock and after the mid-afternoon heat, walking is becoming more comfortable. Groups of teenage girls saunter along the road away from Tibnin, then turn before Camp Shamrock and go back again. The local men drive their cars up to the top of the hill past Camp Shamrock, turn, and tear down the road into Tibnin past the women, who pretend not to notice. They do handbrake turns, burn their tyres and raise clouds of dust. This is a type of mating ritual which the Irish can watch from a discreet distance. They call it the virgin parade. It happens every evening.

OMETIMES THE TROOPS WRITE THINGS ON THE WALL ABOUT the assistant adjutant, Lieutenant Flynn. The assistant adjutant features in a cartoon on the wall at Al Yatun. She occasionally crops up in conversations in the canteen, as do Captain Keating, Corporal Holly, Private Gallagher, and Captain O'Loughlin. The Irish women in South Lebanon have got used to it. Corporal Holly looks very young and very small. She sits behind a typewriter in the sandbag protected headquarters. She gets embarrassed as an officer comes in to say that "she's our darling here", and a sergeant comes in to say that "life would be very dull without her". Everyone passing through the room quickens their pace pointedly so as not to be seen to be listening. Corporal Holly can shut them up when she beats them at darts in the canteen. She gets better accommodation than he men, because she gets to stay with the women officers, nd the officers are inclined to treat the women a bit better ~an the men: One of the men looks at his watch and tells us where to

find Marie Flynn. "You'll catch her sunning herself," he says with a grin "if you're lucky." He knows the exact spot. Behind the medical aid post, Lieutenant Marie Flynn is sunning herself. She talks of how the women used to be more confined when the Irish went to Lebanon first, for fear of offending the conservative moslems. She talks of how the female officers and NCOs are closer than the men because they have sorrie common experiences that the men wouldn't have. She tells of how she did much of her training in Britain's Sandhurst military academy because there were no women's toilets in the Curragh. It was dark in Tibnin at nine 0 'clock and yer man was off again. The solemn voice of the Imam of Tibnin could be heard in every part of the town as the four man Irish foot patrol made its way through the outskirts of Tibnin to the "Berri quarter", where the family home of Shi'ite Amal leader Nabih Berri is situated. An Irish tank sits outside the house for about two hours each night. The four soldiers move along the road, crouching at every turning before running across one by one. The only sound is that of the crickets, and of course yer man. The winding streets of Tibnin are becoming more populated as people come out to buy food after the day's fasting. One young man raises his hands in mock horror at the sight of the Irish. Another shouts "On the big Irish ball," and a third says "all this just for some photographs." Something makes a big bang. The soldiers duck down, looking around furtively. After a few seconds they move on. Another bang. A noise like that on a South Lebanese night is unnerving, but it's only the kids letting off firecrackers. A snarling dog comes running to the Irish soldiers and has two guns pointed at him. Most Lebanese dogs look unhealthy and emaciated, and there was a time when all dogs and cats wandering into the Irish camp were shot on sight. Soldiers tell horror stories of the eleven stomach injections necessary to treat rabies and these two are taking no chances. The dog barks around them and the soldiers cock their guns. The owner comes out of his house and rescues his hound. The hot morning sun beats down on the tiny village of Haddatah. A handful of local children on the narrow potholed road look towards the adjoining open space. An old peasant farmer with an overladen donkey makes his way past and into the village. The seven-man pipe band strikes up "20 Men from Dublin Town" as Lieutenant Colonel McQuillan makes his way through the lines offorty blue-beretted green-uniformed Irish troops. It's inspection time in the Irish Battalion. For a period of a week boots are polished, buildings cleaned out and uniforms ironed as the Commanding Officer tours the entire Irish AO. The tune has finished before he has got through them all, so the orange kilted drummers and bagpipers play "20 Men from Dublin Town" again, as the CO moves from the soldiers to the assorted UN jeeps and armoured personnel carriers. The troops don't move a muscle until the inspection is over and the officers retire into the big old house that serves as A Company Headquarters for tea and 7 Up. The band pack up and prepare to move on to the next inspection where they will again play "20 Men from Dublin Town". A Private turns and says: "It's not a bad place you know, but you get tired of looking at Arabs and mingi men."

1. Gordon Thomas Receives A Phone Call!

Early in 1983 when the dust had settled on Irish politics and the country seemed destined for four years of stable government RTE's Today Tonight team decided it was time to consider introducing less serious items into some of their programmes. A few short pieces not necessarily tied to current affairs might be a good thing, it was suggested. Someone came up with the idea of doing an item on Gordon Thomas and his new book "Pontiff". Thomas would always be willing to cooperate with RTE; the station had done an item on Thomas's previous book and it had gone down well. It was decided that "Pontiff" would be a good ten-minute item on a dull night. Paul Loughlin, a producer on Today Tonight, and Eleanor Donovan, a production assistant, approached Gordon Thomas and he agreed to meet them. In the 1969 Budget, Charles Haughey, then Minister for Finance, had introduced a tax free status for writers and artists, including writers and artists from abroad who would decide to come to live in Ireland. Over the previous fifteen years many had taken advantage of the scheme, including Frederick Forsyth, author of "The Day Of The Jackal". But perhaps the one who got most publicity was Gordon Thomas. With his partner Max Morgan Witts, he had written a large number of books on subjects of popular interest, such as the Wall Street Crash and the bombing of Guernica. Thomas settled well in Ireland and seemed to enjoy the country. He wrote regularly for newspapers here and was a regular contributor to RTE radio and television programmes. His house was in Ashford in Co Wicklow in an area where a number of other tax-free foreign writers also lived. Thomas was generous to several Irish publishers, allowing them to publish his work without the usual fees and advances that an author such as he would have commanded elsewhere. It was in the columns of the Sunday Press that Gordon Thomas's work appeared most often. In 1982 he wrote a series of articles in which he explained that the rumours about President Hillery's infidelity to his wife were put about in Ireland by the KGB in order to undermine the effect of the Pope's visit. It was Thursday March 17, St Patrick's Day, when the two members of the Today Tonight team went to see Thomas. Later they would think it was an extraordinary coincidence that they were in his house when the first telephone call came and the first connection made. The man who rang would not give his name but he needed Thomas's help in something. If Thomas could help him he would give his name. For the moment he would just call himself Bill. Thomas listened, he was interested, yes he thought he could help. Paul Loughlin and Eleanor Donovan from Today Tonight were in the room and they heard Gordon Thomas arranging that the caller would ring back the following Saturday morning. He would probably know by then what the problem was and if he could do anything to help. Over the next few days Loughlin and Donovan would cease to be interested in doing a short item for Today Tonight on Gordon Thomas's writing of "Pontiff'. They would become interested in the story of the man who made the telephone call. Every programme has to have a name: this one would be identified by those working on it as "Sidelines". Even still in Today Tonight it is recognised as a

In March 1983 a 'Today Tonight' programme on the connection between an Irish woman and a plot to kill the Pope was watched by the largest audience 'Today Tonight' has ever had. The following two Sundays the Sunday Press ran major articles on Marie McCarthy (photo inset) and claimed she had information which proved that the CIA was involved in the plot to kill the Pope. Magill has established that she had no such information and that there was no connection whatsoever between Marie McCarthy and the plot to kill the Pope. In this article we trace her background and outline how she came to spend the night of March 22 1983 in Gordon Thomas's house in Ashford, Co Wicklow. And what happened afterwards: How within a week she was forced to use a different name and identity; how 'Today Tonight' and the Sunday Press damaged an innocent woman.

"sexy story". It had a woman, a few men, some guns, the CIA, secret documents, a car crash, the Special Branch, an assassin, Beirut, a Spanish jail. But above all, more than all these ingredients, it had the Pope.

Beirut 1980. Everybody believed that everybody else was up to something. No one seemed to be who they said they were. So that when Marie McCarthy, who ran a restaurant in the cellar of the Wilner House Hotel, used to joke with Garry Korkola, who came there to eat most nights, that his career as "a dealer in electronics" didn't sound very plausible to her, that surely he was a CIA man, he used to shrug his shoulders and laugh. Korkola was wanted in the United States for running guns into Central America. He had skipped bail before he was sentenced to 53 years in prison. He was also a legitimate arms dealer and has done business with most governments in the West, including the Irish government and the British government. Marie McCarthy had come to Lebanon by a circuitous route. She had left her native Cappoquin at the age of seventeen and travelled for a number of years, finding jobs all over the place: in Dublin, Jersey, London, France, Spain, South Africa, New York. In New York she worked for the United Nations, later transferring to South Lebanon where she dealt with complaints from the native population against UN forces. Her work involved regular visits to Beirut and it was there she met a Dutchman called Gerrit, an engineer who was attached to the UNIFIL forces in Lebanon. They became involved and Marie McCarthy decided to leave the UN and move to Beirut. She found bits and pieces to do. First, through a brother in Dublin she found some work as an advertising agent. Then she organised travel for groups of soldiers serving in the Lebanon by shopping around for the cheapest prices. But it wasn't enough. A friend ran the Wilner House Hotel in Beirut and he took her down one day to look at the dining room in the basement: she agreed to take it over. It was the sort of thing she was good at: meeting people, going from table to table to make sure everything was all right, keeping the thing going. The opening of the restaurant was a big event with representatives from all shades of opinion in Beirut attending. A friend of Marie McCarthy's arrived to know if he could bring someone else along who hadn't been invited. This man was Garry Korkola who had just arrived in Beirut. So every night Korkola would have his meal - he was staying in the hotel upstairs - and then sit at the table Marie McCarthy reserved for herself and have a drink with . her. They became friends. And when Marie's boyfriend Gerrit came back from a business trip he liked Garry Korkola as well and Korkola continued to sit at the owner's table when he had finished his meal. Korkola often mentioned a friend of his called Jim, who he made out to be this amazing character living in Damascus. Jim proved a great source of conversation and anecdote in the September and October of 1980. Neither Marie McCarthy nor Gerrit was aware that Garry Korkola was a wanted man in the United States nor did they know who Jim was. Jim arrived in November to stay in the hotel with his "wife" Ruth and he proved to be just

as much fun as Korkola had promised. He talked about being in the CIA and how he was kicked out in 1972. He found out that Marie had worked for the United Nations and insisted that he had worked for the United Nations as well. Nobody would believe him when he said that he had been Idi Amin's representative there. Jim told them all about the night he was having dinner with Amin and Amin was discussing what he was going to do with an enemy when suddenly the enemy's head was brought in on a platter. Some of the stuff he was telling them was true; but no one was sure how much. He came about three or four times to the restaurant and then went

back to Damascus where he seemed to be living. He had made his mark. It was only later that Marie and Gerrit found out that his real name wasn't Jim, that he was in fact Frank Terpil who was wanted in the United States for various arms offences and for his connections with Idi Amin and Ghaddifi. Beirut was like the set for a movie. People were constantly running into the restaurant saying that there was a battle raging just down the street, then everyone would hear it coming nearer and then it would stop and maybe start again. Everyone who came in was asked if they knew what was going on outside. Things were being more and more dangerous and unpredictable. It was time to get out. Marie was also having trouble with her back and didn't think much of the treatment she was getting in Beirut. She

went TO London with Gerrit who got a job as a consultant. he attended Dr Ken Kennedy for her back and was cured. o by the summer of 1981 she was able to work in London. When Gerrit went back to Beirut, as he did for a few ~Y5 in September, he met Garry Korkola who had taken over their flat in Beirut. For the first time Korkola told Gerrie the trouble he was in. One of the things he said he ed to do was to clear his name in public, or discuss h.3 case with the American people outside the confines of ourtroom. A newspaper interview, or even better a television interview. Marie knew Mike Wallace, who presents the "Sixty Minutes" programme on CBS, from the time she lived in New York. She rang him and told him that he could interview Korkola and Frank Terpil; he rang her back; he was interested. Marie and Gerrit were responsible for setting up the interview with the two men which was done in their old flat in Beirut and was due to be broadcast on Sunday 7 ovember. On Saturday they got a phone call from Mike Wallace: there was a problem. Had they not heard? Korkola had been kidnapped or at least was missing and so was Frank Terpil, who was also interviewed on the "Sixty Minutes" programme (in fact Terpil had hogged the programme). McCarthy and Gerrit made a few phone calls and established that the two had indeed been kidnapped. Mike Wallace didn't know if there was a connection between his show and the kidnappings. Eventually he decided to go ahead with the show. They had liked Korkola and they were concerned about his welfare. Marie and Gerrit also felt responsible for setting up the CBS interviews. One call they made was to Garry Korkola's wife Donna in the United States who was extremely worried about her husband and determined to go to Beirut to search for him, even though she had been there on a previous occasion and was scared to death due to the presence of various armed militias. Marie and Gerrit decided to go to Beirut with Donna Korkola to see if they could locate the two men. The visit was fruitless and they left after ten days as nothing further could be achieved. Donna Korkola suggested that Marie take Garry Korkola's address book which was lying around the flat and maybe contact some of his associates to see if they would know anything about his whereabouts. A few months earlier Marie and Gerrit had been given a letter by Korkola to give to a contact in Scotland Yard. Through this and through conversations with him they were aware that Korkola had contacts everywhere. During the plane journey to Beirut Donna Korkola had informed Marie and Gerrit that Frank Terpil had a wife called Marilyn who was living in Wales and from whom he had not been divorced. Sometime afterwards, Marilyn. Terpil, who had been in touch with Donna Korkola,phoned Marie and Gerrit out of the blue, introduced herself on the phone and wanted to know if they knew where her husband was. Even after Korkola and Terpil were released - who hey were kidnapped by and why remains unclear, Korkola was released on New Year's Day and Terpil early in 1982 Marilyn would phone Marie and Gerrit in London every six veeks or so. Once she said she would be down in London and maybe they should meet; they met in a London hotel. ~larilyn was very interested in finding out about the other woman who was with her husband, among other things. In the spring of 1982 news came that Garry Korkola -,..: been arrested by Spanish police at an arms fair and was

awaiting extradition in a Madrid prison. Finally, the Spanish authorities agreed to extradite him if the Americans would agree to give him a new trial. They heard no more from him. Towards the end of the year Marilyn Terpil contacted Marie and Gerrit to say she had sold up and was going back to the United States. She wanted to stay with them the night before she went; she also wanted to leave her car with them and might want them to sell it for her. Marie McCarthy's mother in Cappoquin had had one stroke and had just suffered two heart attacks so in January 1983 when Marilyn had left, Gerrit suggested that they go to Ireland in Marilyn's car to see Marie's mother. They took the ferry over to Rosslare and were driving on the road between Rosslare and New Ross. They were approaching a garage. The price of a gallon of petrol was written up clearly. Gerrit gasped in surprise; he was shocked at the price. So shocked indeed that he missed the sign which warned of a dangerous bend and crashed Marilyn Terpil's BMW into a bridge.

There are five McCarthys. Marie is the youngest. John lives in Bray where he works in advertising. Betty lives in Geneva where she is married. Billy works for his own company in Dublin and Joan lives in Cappoquin. Joan has always lived in the town. She married Michael Lacey, on the hurling team the last time Waterford won an All-Ireland, and has seven children. When Marie and Gerrit left Cappoquin for London in January 1983 they left instructions with Joan that a local mechanic John Lucas would go up to New Ross and get the car. He meant to go one week, then the next. Time passed. The gardai in New Ross became interested in the car which had seemingly been abandoned. They took the number to check the identity of the owner. The owner was Marilyn Terpil, wife of international gun runner, fugitive, friend of Idi Arnin , Frank Terpil. The gardai had no name or address for the two people who had been in the car when it crashed. The only thing the gardai knew was that the two people had taken a taxi to Cappoquin. So the gardai, in their infinite wisdom, began. a house to house search in Cappoquin looking for an English couple who had visited the town in January. They finally arrived at Joan Lacey's house and began to ask questions. Was she sure that the man who had been with her sister was Dutch or was it possible that he might have been an American ... Joan phoned Marie and asked her what in the name of God was going on. John Lucas, the mechanic, went to New Ross to pick up the car only to be taken to Waterford by gardai and questioned for two hours. Among other things he was asked if he knew anything about Idi Amin. He came back to Cappoquin and went to see Joan. Joan phoned Marie once more and asked her what in the name of God was going on.

John McCarthy, Marie's older brother who works in advertising in Bray, had been away with his wife and child in the

Canary Islands when Marie and Gerrit came over to see his mother in Cappoquin. So he hadn't seen them. However, they contacted him after the John Lucas/Idi Amin incident in Waterford. They asked him to find out what the gardai wanted to know about the car. John McCarthy didn't know what to do. He couldn't just phone up the gardai and ask them straight out. Anyway, he didn't know any gardai, Frank Kilfeather of the Irish Times was a friend of his so he phoned him to ask him what to do. Kilfeather wasn't there. He phoned back a few times. Kilfeather still wasn't in. He really didn't know what to do. He had the thing on his mind and wanted to get something done about it as soon as possible. The previous week he had been driving into town when he heard Mike Murphy interviewing Gordon Thomas. Thomas was talking about his book on the Pope and seemed to know what he was talking about. He would understand who Frank Terpil was and he would have contacts among the gardai. He decided to phone Thomas and ask him if he could help. He didn't want to give his name on the phone. In the end he called himself Bill; the minute he said it he knew it was a mistake. He had a brother called Bill, but once he gave the code name he decided not to complicate things by changing it. His brother Bill was to take a dim view of what would happen over the coming week and has not spoken to John McCarthy since then. John McCarthy arranged to phone Gordon Thomas the following Saturday morning. It was the weekend of the Ireland-England rugby match and John McCarthy had friends staying with him for the match but he managed to phone Thomas on Saturday

morning as arranged. Thomas told him that his sister was in a very serious situation, that he had spoken to contacts in Washington. John :\1cCanhy became very worried. Marie had no phone at home; so John couldn't contact her over the weekend. On Saturday night he went to see Thomas in Ashford. There was another man in the room who was introduced as an associate of Thomas. He was called Paul Loughlin. Gordon Thomas told John McCarthy that his sister's life was in danger and he mentioned the possibility of her ending up like Calvi on Brackfriars Bridge. John McCarthy became very concerned but he still couldn't contact his sister. On Sunday he went to see Thomas again. Thomas told him that the situation was really serious and that he himself, John McCarthy, could even be in danger. They decided that they would phone Marie from Thomas's house the next morning. "You don't understand how big this is," Thomas said to John McCarthy. It was Monday morning and McCarthy was going to phone his sister to tell her that she was in big trouble and she'd better come to Ireland. Thomas suggested that they film John telling Marie to come home so that they would have a record of what happened if the worst came to the worst. John spoke to her first and told her that there were fears for her safety and that she should come home. Thomas spoke to her as well and said he would send a plane forher. It was arranged that she would bring what documents she had relating to Garry Korkola and Frank Terpil, When John McCarthy came off the phone having been filmed speaking to his sister he was approached by Eleanor Donovan of RTE's Today Tonight who was in the room when the filming was done. She gave him a form to sign. He saw RTE's name on the form, Up to this he had not been aware that RTE had anything to do with what was going on, although RTE say they had made him aware of this. He asked what the hell this had to do with RTE. If his sister was in danger, he felt that she would surely be in even more danger if RTE were to broadcast her problems to the world. John McCarthy left Thomas's house, went home and tried unsuccessfully to contact Marie. He didn't know what to do. It seemed to him that he should have been told that RTE was there when he phoned his sister. He tried to phone a solicitor friend to ask for advice but Gerry Sheehan, who he knew from tennis, wasn't there. John McCarthy's wife Martha phoned a friend who was a former barrister and he recommended solicitor Roger Ballagh, McCarthy went to see Ballagh. Loughlin and Donovan flew to London. If Marie was flying in on a private plane to Dublin Airport that night, then it was important to meet her and tell her about RTE's involvement. The private plane, he knew, was to fly from Heathrow to Dublin. 11cCarthy and his wife went to the airport to wait for Marie. The night wore on. They became the last people waiting

in the airport building. It was after midnight. Yes, the air port still expected a small private plane coming from Heath row. It would be in around one. Around one they saw it land and they could see Marie descend on to the runway They waited at the arrivals gate for her. They waited there for two hours but she didn't appear. They drove back to Bray.

"I have nothing. How can they think that?" Marie McCarthy was talking to Gordon Thomas on the phone. He was telling her that she was being sought by the Special Branch, Scotland Yard, the CIA. They were looking for information about Frank Terpil, they were looking for documents. She was also in danger from the other side because of what she knew about Terpil. There were two phone calls that day, Monday 21 March. The second was Thomas on his own who told her not to go to the police, that they would plant stuff on her, that it was better to com e to Ireland first, that he could help her, that he couldn't really talk to her on the phone but he knew a lot more about the trouble she was in. She was puzzled. Gerrit was away so she couldn't talk to him. She had no documents of any significance in her possession. She had met Frank Terpil only three or four times and on those occasions she didn't even know he was Frank Terpil. But if the police in Ireland were looking for her then she should go there and clear matters up. She arranged to go to the Rembrandt Hotel that night at eight o'clock and meet two people Thomas was sending to pick her up. The Rembrandt Hotel in Thurloe Place opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum was used regularly by the Today Tonight team at that time. When Paul Loughlin and Eleanor Donovan came into the hotel they found Marie McCarthy already there. Loughlin went to the bar to get drinks. "Do you work for Gordon Thomas?" she asked Eleanor Donovan. "Well sort of," was the reply. Marie asked her what she meant by "sort of'. "I do sometimes but I don't really work for him full time," she said. "Well, who do you work for?" she asked again. But there was no information forthcoming. Marie McCarthy said that if they wouldn't tell her who they were that she was going to go. She reached for her coat. Eleanor Donovan was anxious that she didn't go until Paul came back from the bar. Paul would tell her everything. Immediately Paul came back he told her that they were from Today Tonight and explained that this was an Irish current affairs programme. Marie McCarthy said that as far as she was concerned there was no story until she went to Ireland and found out what the police wanted her for.

They agreed that they would do nothing 'until Marie McCarthy saw the police in Ireland. Loughlin added that they were not those sort of journalists who would go ahead with any old story. He added that Gordon Thomas had told them that she was in very great danger and was being sought by the CIA and Scotland Yard. Paul Loughlin also said that he had been down in New Ross that day for a look at the crashed car and there were four Special Branch men guarding it. Marie McCarthy was still uneasy about the two representatives from Today Tonight, as they were with her. After a while she decided, no, she'd go over later in the week and talk to the police. She didn't want to go to Dublin on a private plane that night. Her boyfriend was away, she was slightly confused, she wanted to think. Her two companions had a problem: Today Tonight had hired a private plane which was waiting at Heathrow. If Marie McCarthy didn't come with them the expense of hiring the plane would have been in vain. Paul asked Eleanor to try and get Gordon Thomas on the phone from the hotel. She came back a few minutes later and called Paul to the phone. After a while the two of them came back and told Marie that Gordon Thomas had said that since they left Dublin he had received new information and things were worse. There was no doubt at all but her life was definitely in danger. She decided to go to Dublin with them after all. She phoned the night security guard at work to leave a message saying that she wouldn't be in the following day. She did not say where she was going. They hailed a taxi outside the hotel. As it was turning around Marie McCarthy noticed that Paul Loughlin seemed to be speaking to two men who were standing close by. She asked him who these men were. "It's okay," he told her, "they are the cameramen with us." She became agitated about the possibility of being filmed, but was assured that there was no problem as they had already given their promise that there would be no story whatsoever until she had cleared things up with the police and then only with her permission. Marie McCarthy and Eleanor Donovan liked each other less and less. McCarthy seemed really scared in the small plane and Donovan wondered how someone who had reputedly been all over the world could be so afraid of flying. She thought McCarthy was faking it. There was a strong wind and it was a difficult flight in the small plane. It was after one when they reached Dublin Airport. There were two cars waiting on the tarmac. One was a taxi which took Marie McCarthy and Eleanor Donovan to Ashford. Paul Loughlin went separately to RTE. They did not go through the airport building. McCarthy suggested that she was tired and wouldn't it be better if she stayed in her brother's house in Bray and see Thomas in the morning. Eleanor Donovan told her that the Special Branch was watching her brother's house.

It was almost two thirty when they arrived at Thomas's house. He was standing at the door in his gown. There were two huge dogs at his side. Until vious day Marie McCarthy had never heard of Thomas and even at this stage was unaware that written a book about the Pope. "You are so stupid," he said to her the minute got out of the taxi. "Everything you do is making

Gordon dressing the preGordon he had she had it worse

in Washington that Gerrit, her boyfriend, was in the CIA. Marie simply knew this wasn't true and from this moment on she became suspicious of Thomas and his sources. He was still talking and it was getting late. "Of course you realise," he said, "that this Pope is the most political of all Popes." Marie McCarthy did not understand why Thomas was telling her this in the middle of the night. Thomas then told her it would be wiser of her to let him see her papers before the police did. She refused. Paul Loughlin had by this time arrived and he and Eleanor Donovan left. Marie McCarthy wanted to go to bed. Thomas helped her to make up the bed in the back bedroom. She was shaking, she couldn't sleep. After a while Thomas rushed into the room and said he had just received a call from London in which someone said: "We know you have Marie McCarthy there," and hung up. He asked her who she had told she was coming to his house and she said nobody. He asked her again to see her papers, but again she refused. When he returned he was almost hysterical. He had had another call. This time it was from the police and they were on their way down from Dublin to arrest her. Marie McCarthy broke down. She began to cry. She told Thomas that she wasn't worried about herself as she would be able to clear everything up with the police, but she was worried about the effect any controversy would have on her mother. Thomas patted her hand and told her she was just a frightened little girl worried about her sick mother. Again he asked her if he could look at her papers. She was still crying, she told him no, she wanted to talk to the police when they came.

Paul Loughlin .for yourself." Marie was tired and frightened; she didn't understand. What did he mean? He told her. She'd dyed her hair; someone would notice that she was trying to disguise herself. True, she'd dyed her hair. But she'd always dyed her hair, from her twenties onwards when she had started to go grey. She couldn't understand what he meant. He had told her on the phone that his contacts had told him that Frank Terpil was in the United States. Now he began to ask her about Terpil and where he was. She said she didn't know. He insisted. Eleanor Donovan was in the room all this time. "He could be down the road for all I know," Marie said, Thomas listened to this carefully. He asked if she meant that he was seeking an Irish passport. The next thing Thomas said came as a surprise. He told Marie McCarthy that he had heard from high level sources

It became bright. At eight o'clock Gordon Thomas came back and said Marie had better get up quickly before the police arrived. She noticed her papers were gone. As soon as she left her room she noticed them on a table in the house. She felt sick. Thomas's children were running around the house, his wife was in hospital at that time. Breakfast was served. Marie sat at the table and Thomas talked but she couldn't eat. He wanted her to come for a walk around the garden, she wanted to call the police. He said she was behaving in a very stupid way for a supposedly intelligent woman and she should talk to him and tell her full story before she went to the police. They went into Thomas's office and Thomas introduced her to Denis Bergin, his personal photographer. The phone rang; it was John McCarthy looking for Marie. Marie told John she would see him as soon as she could. She didn't want to wait for him to arrive. She wanted to get out there and then. Thomas told him not to come down. Marie said she wanted to call the police in Waterford to talk to them

about the car. Thomas said there wouldn't be anyone at the police station until 9.30. She phoned anyway, the garda who answered the phone in Waterford didn't know about Marie or the car but said he would ring back. She noticed that Denis Bergin had his cameras with him and began fiddling with them; she insisted that she didn't want to be photographed. Two Spanish journalists arrived for an interview with Thomas; they had also been there when John McCarthy was there the previous day. Thomas suggested that Bergin should try and take a photograph of the Spanish photographer photographing him. McCarthy noticed that Bergin was trying to get her into the photo as well and moved away. When she really insisted that she wanted to leave, Bergin said his car was broken, she said she would take a taxi but Thomas said there were no taxis in the area. Thomas said it would look to the Special Branch as though she was running away and what would he tell the Waterford police when they phoned back. Marie said she would ring them from her brother's house. She asked the Spanish journalist if she would drive her, but just then Paul Loughlin arrived. Thomas walked out of the door ahead of her towards the car. McCarthy noticed Denis Bergin taking a photograph of the two of them. This photograph would later be printed in the Sunday Press. Marie McCarthy also noticed the television cameramen in front of the car. She wanted to go. She roared at Gordon Thomas and told him he was a tramp. "Paul, get this woman out of here," he said. "I want nothing more to do with her. She is crazy." When she got into Loughlin's car, she put her coat over her face as the cameras were still pointing at her. Loughlin told her that she had been filmed the previous night in the hotel in London. They didn't speak until they got to Bray. "Who next are you going to try and sell your story to?" Loughlin asked. "I have not tried to sell my story to anybody," she said. He dropped her at her brother's house and waited in the car. Nobody came to the door. Marie went over to the car: "Why are you waiting?" she asked. He told her he was waiting to see if she wanted to get back into the car since there was nobody there. She refused. She went to a neighbour's, said who she was and asked to use the phone. The neighbour didn't have a phone but insisted that Marie come in. Eventually it was ascertained that the McCarthys' au pair was in fact in John McCarthy's house but had been told not to answer the door. Marie went into the house and rang Thomas to know If her brother was there; Thomas said he wasn't. She rang the gardai in Waterford and asked if they knew anything about her at this stage, they didn't butsaid they would ring her at the new number she gave. She then rang the Special Branch. She wanted to talk to somebody and explained it was urgent. She couldn't explain on the phone. They would have to send someone out.

She wanted to talk to someone in person. It was urgent. Detective Gay Tiernan from the Special Branch arrived at around half past twelve. John McCarthy and his wife had arrived back before that. Marie McCarthy told him the story of her life and the details of the past few days. She gave him the documents she had brought with her from Thomas's house. Tiernan told her he had never heard of her, but there were a lot of men in the Special Branch and he would have to check. At five o'clock Thomas rang John McCarthy to say that Marie had forgotten some papers and when John offered to collect them Thomas said he would only give them to Marie personally or to the police. That night at about ten Gay Tiernan returned with a colleague to say that Marie McCarthy was not wanted by the police in Washington, the UK or Ireland other than the police in Waterford about the car. He returned her file and said she had no reason to worry and he was unable to understand what the fuss was about. They went to bed much relieved. The next day was Wednesday and Joan phoned once more from Cappoquin to know what in the name of God was going on. She was genuinely disturbed. This time the Today Tonight team had been down in Cappoquin and had tried to interview her. They told her that Marie had worked in a restaurant for Frank Terpil and had been involved in gun-running. Later in the day a local garda who was a friend of the family came to the house to say that he had heard from the gardai in Waterford that a big story was going to break on RTE on Friday night about gun running and that there was a connection with the McCarthy family from Cappoquin and be prepared for some problems. Joan didn't know what to say. Marie rang Gay Tiernan again in the Special Branch but he was off. She spoke to a Detective Michael Gaynor and he agreed to come out and see her. He arrived with a colleague at about nine. Marie told them that Thomas still had some papers belonging to her and that these were important as they related to the ownership of the car. Michael Gaynor suggested that she phone Thomas and ask for them. It was agreed that he would listen on the extension in the upstairs bedroom. Thomas was not at home. He was in Hunter's Hotel in Ashford. The phone there was engaged. They waited for a while and then decided to call Thomas's house and ask for him to phone when he got home. The phone was answered by Thomas himself. "Is that you, Gordon?" "Yes, who is that?" "Marie McCarthy, just hold on a minute." Marie McCarthy ran into the livingroom and told Detective Mick Gaynor of the Special Branch that she had Gordon Thomas and he was to go to the extension. Marie asked Thomas if she could come and collect the papers. He told her she was dangerous, he was afraid of her,

he didn't want her near him. She told him she wanted the papers. He said he had personally taken them to Dublin Castle that morning. Who did he give them to? "I'm telling you nothing, you are dangerous," he said. She asked if she was still in trouble with the Special Branch. "Yes, you are in big trouble with the Special Branch," he replied. She asked him again for the name of the man he gave the papers to. He refused. At this stage Michael Gaynor interrupted the conversation. He told Thomas who he was and asked him to give the name of the man he gave the papers to. Thomas kept saying he couldn't hear. Detective Gaynor gave his name three times and said he was from the Special Branch. Thomas then denied he said he brought them to Dublin Castle and said he had posted them to Dublin Castle. He was then asked what address he had put on the envelope. Then he said he had not posted them to the Castle but had posted them to London to Marie McCarthy's address. Gaynor pointed out to him that he had given three different accounts of what he had done with the papers. He told him he was sending someone down to him. Thomas said his gate would be locked. Gaynor said there would be someone down within an hour and Thomas could open his gate. Thomas made a number of phone calls. He rang Paul Loughlin in RTE who sent a camera crew out to film the arrival of the police. He also rang his solicitor Donough o 'Connor who tried to talk to Marie McCarthy just after midnight but John McCarthy hung up on him. Thomas also rang John McCarthy: "John, are you still impersonating a Special Branch man," he said. He also rang Wicklow Garda Station to report an anonymous telephone call he had received and he linked Marie McCarthy with this. When two detectives arrived the following morning to question Marie McCarthy about it she told them the whole story. That night, Thursday, a number of men from the Special Branch arrived and Marie McCarthy and her brother gave them a full statement. The police left at half past one. The McCarthys were relieved that their ordeal was over.

Their ordeal was not over, however, and they realised this as soon as they turned on the television the following day, Friday. RTE was advertising that evening's Today Tonight. What was the connection between a car crash in New Ross and the attempted assassination of the Pope? asked the trailer for the programme. Marie and John McCarthy were horrified and contacted Roger Ballagh to ask him to check with RTE that the programme was not about them and if it concerned them to make clear to RTE that they had not cooperated. He phoned Today Tonight and was told that the programme not only had national but international significance and the public had a right to know.

It was the largest audience a Today Tonight programme has ever had. It was also one of the most incoherent programmes Today Tonight has made. It did not establish that Marie McCarthy knew Frank Terpil, nor that Terpil had trained the Pope's assassin, nor that Marie McCarthy was in danger. It failed to make any point at all. Marie McCarthy was in her brother's house in Bray when the programme was shown, presented by Pat Kenny with great gusto; she cried all during the programme. The main problem was her mother: herself and John hoped that her mother wouldn't see it. Her mother was in Dublin visiting their other brother. She did see it. She was really shocked at the implication that her daughter had been involved in an attempt to assassinate the Pope. She knew nothing about the events of the previous few days. The McCarthys in Bray stayed up all night talking about the programme, and what it was going to mean. How would the family be viewed in Cappoquin or: anywhere else. How could they face their mother? One sister, Betty, has still not spoken to them nor has one brother, Billy. Various representatives of the media turned up in Cappoquin to interview Joan, the sister of what they called the "Pope plot girl". A local nun said to a relative that Marie had always been bold and it was her mother's fault for not imposing more discipline on her as a child. John and Marie wondered if they could ever go back to Cappoquin again. On Saturday John bought the Evening Press. There was more. A big ad for more revelations about the Pope and the car crash in the next day's Sunday Press. They couldn't wait. Once more Roger Ballagh was contacted. He phoned Vincent Jennings, the editor of the Sunday Press. Jennings told him that the article was going ahead. Ballagh, he told him, could read it on Sunday and sue on Monday, but he could not interfere with the article. John's wife Martha went looking for the Sunday Press in Bray on Saturday night. She couldn't find it and drove into Dublin to get it. They were eagerly waiting for the paper when she got home. "What Has A Car Crash In Wexford To Do With A Plot To Kill The Pope?" asked the headline on page six. It was a big headline right across the page with a big photo of Marie McCarthy and Gordon Thomas, taken on Tuesday morning, at the top of the page. Some things in the article were definitely wrong: Marie McCarthy could not have guided Gordon Thomas through her papers for "twelve hours"; she was only in his house for seven hours. Gerrit is not "burly", he is skinny. The dossier she brought with her was not green; it was black. Marie left Thomas's house on Tuesday morning March 22 alright and he adds: "She did not tell me where she was going". She did; she told him she was going to her brother's house just up the road in Bray. And two days later he spoke to her and a member of the Special Branch on the phone from there. "If she reads this," he wrote, "she should really give herself up." Give herself up?

The file Marie McCarthy brought to Dublin with her contained a lot of information about Frank Terpil. She had collected press cuttings about his career over a period of time. She found some photographs and a fake will Terpil had written in Beirut. But there was nothing new about Terpil in the file, nothing that any police force anywhere would be interested in. Also in the file were a few things relating to Garry Korkola, who was not alleged to have had any involvement in the plot to kill the Pope, thus this information, an address book from Beirut, a few letters - could not have been any use to those interested in the plot to kill the Pope. The opening paragraph' of the article reads: "A car mishap on an Irish road has raised the shattering spectre that the US Central Intelligence Agency is implicated in the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II in Rome in May 1981." From reading the article in the Sunday Press it is impossible to see how this conclusion is drawn. The article reproduces a list of toys in Marie's possession which,the article says, were "a cover for an arms manifest" The list was, in fact, a list of toys for a children's party which was to be held in South Lebanon at Christmas 1979. The day before the Sunday Press article came out Marie McCarthy contacted the Sunday Independent to tell them that the story on Today Tonight and the story being advertised by the Sunday Press were rubbish. The Indo responded by printing her denials with a lead story under the banner headline: "Irish Girl Denies Pope Plot Link". There was also a large photograph of Frank Terpil. This was replied to the following week in the Sunday Press by Gordon Thomas who outlined what he believed had happened in his relations with Marie and John McCarthy. "The Sunday Independent," he wrote, "engaged in the kind of reporting of the story that simply gives journalists a bad name." John McCarthy came to him, he said, with a story about his sister who was frightened for her life, McCarthy was immediately told of the RTE involvement and agreed to it, Marie McCarthy told of her close relationship with Frank Terpil, Thomas was able to conclude from what she told that Terpil had been in the CIA when they trained Ali Agca to shoot. He at no stage gives any evidence of how he was able to conclude this nor 32 MAGILL AUGUST 1984

why he should believe it if she had told him. "In all four conversations with John McCarthy and his sister, Loughlin and myself were told that she knew Terpil and his wife Marilyn 'intimately'." This suggests that Marie knew Terpil and his wife together. Indeed they are referred to in other parts of the Thomas article as the "Terpils". Marie had never met them together; they lived apart; anyway, she knew neither of them intimately. By the time the second Sunday Press article appeared Marie was be-

. yond caring anyway. She had managed to meet her mother and explain that there was no truth in the stories. She had lain low. Her brother John, who makes his living from a connection with a semi-state body, was approached by the' body who investigated his account of what happened and after a while found it to be satisfactory. He had been worried about this, he could have lost his job because of the programme. On the Sunday night after the Today Tonight programme, the day of the first Sunday Press article, a senior

rr

garda in the Special Branch drove out to the McCarthys' house in Bray and told them that he was sitting at home thinking about what the media had done to them and had decided to come out in his own time, off duty, to say that if there was ever anything he could do for them to help them prove that what had been printed about them was untrue, he would. On Thursday Marie went to London. All the way on the train she had to talk to the woman beside her using another name and another identity. She was afraid in case anyone would

recognise who she was. Her telephone number had been printed in the Sunday Press and her address had been given on Today Tonight so she moved flat and put the furniture into storage. She lost her deposit on the flat but that was the least of her worries. She told the people she was working for that she couldn't work for them any more. At first she didn't explain why, but when she did they gave her their full support. The Sunday Press said she had been in hiding since the car crash; they knew she had been at work every day as usual. Gerrit came

back and she explained what had happened. The best thing to do was to get away for a while. She went to the Canary Islands for a fortnight, but only stayed for a week. She couldn't stop thinking about it. The editor of the Sunday Press, Vincent Jennings, stands over the Sunday Press articles. Today Tonight is embarrassed by the programme: "If you came in and said the world was ending and mentioned that Gordon Thomas was the source," one producer on the programme says, "you would be moved to the Angelus."

TRACK AND FIELD MEN

Above: Steve Ovett Right: Thierry Vigneron World record holder Pole Vault (The events are held in two sessions. The morning session is 9.30-13.00 local time [17.30-21.00 in Ireland} and the evening session is from 16.0020.15 local time (midnight-4.00 in Ireland.)
100 Metres (Heats: Fri 3, morning; Semi-final and Final: Sat 4, evening) Olympic Champion 1980: Alan Wells (GB); World Champion 1983: Carl Lewis (US); World Record: Calvin Smith (US) 9.93 sec. Carl Lewis, the World Champion looks unbeatable in this event. With all due respect to the opposition, the main

challenge to Lewis at the Games is the record set by the legendary Jesse Owens in 1936, of four gold medals. In the sprint, his main opposition will come from team-mate! Graddy and Ron Brown The surprise omission

United States and Skamrahl of WestGermany.

and Weber

800 Metres (Lst Round: Fri 3, evening; 2nd Round: Sat 4, evening; Semifinal: Sun 5, evening; Final: Mon 6, evening)

Olympic Champion: Steve Ovett (GB); World Champion: Willi Wulbeck (FRG); World Record: Sebastian Coe (GB) 1.41.73
Will Coe and Ovett be completely fit? Judging by recent results the answer seems to be yes and in that case the title seems to lie between them. The distance suits Coe better but a bad tactical race in 1980 cost him the title as Ovett outran him down the final straight. Willi Wulbeck of West Germany took the title in Helsinki last year when both Coe and Ovett were missing from the event. This time the tables may be turned because Wulbeck is injured and may not be able to compete. Outsiders who could surprise the British pair are Rob Druppers of Holland and J oao Cruz of Brazil, second and third respectively in Helsinki. Cruz confirmed his form, winning the American Collegiate Championship this year. Danger to Coe and Ovett could also come from Peter Elliott, the third British runner who probably feels he has a point to make after being denied a place in the 1500 metres despite beating Coe in the official British trials. Favouring Coe was obviously a good decision but in time-honoured fashion was badly handled. 1500 Metres (1 st Round: Thurs 9, evening; Semi-final: Friday 10, evening; Final: Sat 11, evening)

g
-g
~ Ee

1'5

from the American squad is world record holder Calvin Smith who finished' fourth in the American trials where only the first three qualify for the Olympics. Smith will gain some consolation by taking the fourth spot on the sprint relay team. His world record, set at altitude in Colorado Springs also looks safe. 200 Metres (Heats: Mon 6, morning; Semi-final and final: Wed 8, evening) Olympic Champion: Pietro Mennea

(Italy); World Champion: Calvin Smith (US); World Record: Pietro Mennea (Italy) 19.72 sec.
The second leg of Lewis' foursome could be the most difficult, though Smith and Elliott Quow, the Americans who came first and second in Helsinki will both be missing this time. Mennea finally won the gold medal in Moscow after a third place in 1972 and fourth in 1976. He will be the principal challenger this time again. In 1968 the medal ceremony for this event led to controversy when the Americans Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) staged a Black Power protest while the national anthem was being played. As a result of their actions the two athletes were vilified in America and it was years before they were welcomed back to the fold. Smith eventually became an athletics coach at Santa Monica while John Carlos spent the following years taking menial jobs and gambling. He then turned to working with the children of the Los Angeles ghettoes and set up a foundation to help them. The ultimate irony is that John Carlos was appointed by the organising committee of this year's games as a liaison with the black ghettoes and to help promote the games. 400 Metres (Lst Round: Sat 4, morning; Semi-final: Mon 6, evening; Final: Wed 8, evening)

Olympic Champion: Sebastian Coe (GB); World Champion: Steve Cram (GB); World Record: Steve Ovett (GB) 3.30.77. Best times by Irish: Frank 0 'Mara: 3.37.7; Marcus O'Sullivan 3.37.4 (2nd in US Collegiate Championships); Paul Donovan: 3.38.4 (4th in US Collegiate Championships) Olympic Champion: Victor Markin (USSR); World Champion: Bert Cameron (Jam); World Record: Lee Evans (US) 43.86 sec.
The US has dominated this event since 1956. The only hiccup came in 1976 when a tall, serene runner from Cuba stunned them. Alberto Juantorena won both the 400 and 800 metres with almost contemptuous ease. Juantorena has been unfortunate with injuries since that time, the latest example coming in the World Championships last year. After his heat in the 800 metres Juantorena ran on the kerb at the side of the track and twisted his ankle so badly he broke it. Bert Cameron will be favourite for the event but will be challenged strongly by the athletes who followed him home in Helsinki, Sunder Nix of the The field for the 1500 metres is dominated by the British trio, Coe, Ovett and Cram. In 1980 Coe came through off the final bend and gained revenge for his defeat in the 800m. Ovett finished fourth, a placing he repeated in the World Championships last year when Cram took the gold medal, Although all three have had injury pro blems this year they are coming back to form just in time, especially in the case of Sebastian Coe. Ovett has had to miss a lot of races in recent months and may feel this lack of competitive practice when the big event comes around. The main' challenge to the British trio could come from the Americans, Sidney Maree and Steve Scott. Maree, the black South African who now holds American citizenship is a very fast runner but there

are questions about his ability in a high class field in a major championship. Scott, on the other hand is respected by the British and his second place in Helsinki'last year gave proof of his ability, went to Said Aquita of Morocco who has been running good times this summer and is obviously in good form, It is a very open race and the determining factor may be whether anybody is prepared to set a fast pace throughout. Most 1500m races these days are settled by a sprint from three hundred metres out and positioning on the final bend. If somebody has the nerve to attack early he may just be able to upset the favourites. Ireland's contingent of three is led by Frank Q'Mara, a semi-finalist in the World Championships. Joining him in Los Angeles will be Paul Donovan of Arkansas University and Marcus O'Sullivan who trains at Villanova, the alma mater of Ireland's earlier 1500 metre heroes, Eamonn Coghlan and Ronnie Delaney. It was the famous coach Jumbo Elliott who had guided Coghlan to his exploits including the unfortunate fourth place finish in the Games of 1976. Elliott was also the man who masterminded Delaney's famous triumph at Melbourne in 1956. At the end of his race Delaney fell to his knees in prayer. The winner of this year's race, whoever he is, is far more likely to run for the television cameras, displaying prominently the markings on his running gear. 5000 Metres (1st Round: Wed 8, evening; Semi-final: Thurs 9, evening; Final: Sat 11, evening) Olympic Champion: . Marits Yifter (Eth); World Champion: Eamonn Coghlan (Ire); World Record: David Moorcroft (GB) 13.00.41. Best times by Irish: Ray Flynn: 13.19.71 Coghlan is out. The Ethiopians, Kedir and Bulti are out. Schildhauer of East Germany, runner up in both 5000 and 10000 metres at Helsinki misses the games because of the boycott. From a spectator's viewpoint, the 5000 metres has become the centrepiece of the track and field events and even with so many of the leading favourites missing it promises to be an exciting event. It is a tragedy for Coghlan that his injuries have forced him to miss this, probably his last opportunity to compensate for the disappointments of 1976 and 1980. Ray Flynn now takes up the Irish challenge alone. After a fine career as a miler and 1500 metre runner, Flynn decided that the longer distance suited him better and that career as one of the leading milers will stand him in good stead in a fast finish of this event. Flynn could be Ireland's best prospect for a medal. Flynn is probably going to come up against one of the great

.'.

names in middle distance running, Henry Rono. The great Kenyan is now in serious training for these Games after missing the- last two Olympics due to circumstances beyond his control and deciding to give the World Championships a miss. He will probably be going in both 5000 and 10000 and attempting to revive the glories of the few months in 1978 when he set four world records. The two Portugjiese runners, Leiato and Mamede are extremely fast but their ability to compete in major championship races is questionable. Perhaps, though, the man they will all have to beat is Martti Vainio, the latest in a long line of great Finnish middle-distance runners. The record stretches back to Paavo Nurmi who won nine gold medals up till 1928 and set 29 world records over distances from 1500 to 20000 metres. In Berlin in 1936 all three medals over 5000 metres were won by Finns. In 1972 and 1976 Lasse Viren became the first man to complete the double of gold medals in 5000 and 10000 in two successive Games. Viren's success inspired rumours that he was guilty of blood boosting (removing blood from the body, freezing it and when the blood level is back to normal reinjecting the original blood) and other diabolical schemes. In reply Viren merely pointed out that the Olympics were the only races that counted and that in his determination to reach a peak for them he didn't try too hard for the four years in between. Finland's 1980 representative was rather disappointing only winning bronze in the 5000 and silver in the 10000. Vanio was third in the World Championships behind Coghlan and was fourth in the 10000 metres. If his timing is as good as Viren's in training, he just might be the man to watch. 10000 Metres (lst Round: Fri 3, evening; Final: Mon 6, evening) Olympic Champion: Marits Yifter (Eth); World Champion: Alberto Cova (Italy); World Record: Henry Rono (Kenya) 27.22.4. Best time by Irish: John Treacy: 27.48.7 John Treacy, seventh in the 5000 metres in Moscow moves up to the longer distance this year (as well as taking part in the Marathon) and will be hoping that this is reflected in a higher placing as well. Like the 5000 metres this should be an open event. In Helsinki last year Alberto Cova pipped Schildhauer the East German in a sprint finish that would have done justice to the 1500 metres. The Ethiopians made the pace for most of the race but it wasn't fast enough to take the sprint out of the Europeans. Although the Ethiopians won't 1;Jethere this year the lesson 42 MAGILL AUGUST 1984

will have been learned by the others who were caught out in Helsinki such as Fernando Mamede of Portugal and Martti Vainio of Finland. Again, like the 5000 metres the presence of Henry Rono, whose world record has stood since 1978 will cast a shadow over the rest of the field. The story of the 10000 metres would not be complete without mention of Olmeus Charles from Haiti who put up possibly the worst performance ever in the Olympics in this event in 1976. Baby Doc Duvalie decided to give some of his friends a holiday in Canada for the duration of the Games but failed to enquire about their athletic prowess. Mr Charles took forty-two minutes to complete the race, fourteen minutes behind the winner and eight and a half minutes behind the second last finisher. Insisting on finishing the race, Mr Charles ran the last six laps on his own and held up the following event for some considerable time. Marathon (Sun 12, morning) Olympic Champion: Wladyslaw Czierpinski (Pol); World Champion: Robert de Castella (Aus); World Record: Alberto Salazar (US) 2 hrs.08.13. Best times by Irish: Gerry Kiernan: 2 hrs. 13.20; Dick Hooper: 2 hrs. 12.50 De Castella is the man to beat. Not only is he world champion but he is the most consistent performer over the last number of years. It will be a very strong field with Alberto Salazar the world record holder regaining his form this summer; .Toshihika Seko of Japan, winner of' the prestigious Fukuoka marathon last year; and Carlos Lopes who won the World Cross Country championship in March, having previously won it as long ago as 1976. John Treacy, fresh from the 10000 metres will be taking on the double and will be joined by Gerry Kiernan and Dick Hooper. Should the unheard of occur and John Treacy win both of his events he would still not equal the remarkable record of Emil Zatopek , the Czech runner who in 1952 won the 5000, 10000 and Marathon, having four years previously won the 10000 and come second in the 5000. Zatopek had a unique style of running which gave him the appearance of always being on the verge of collapse. Asked about this style Zato pek replied, "I was not talented enough to run and smile at the same time." 3000 Metres Steeplechase (1 st Round: Mon 6, evening; Semi-final: Wed 8, evening; Final: Fri 10, evening) Olympic Champion: B. Malinowski (Pol); World Champion: Patriz llg (PRG); World Record: Henry Rono (Kenya) 8.05.04. Best time by Irish: Liam O'Brien: 8.27.24

This is traditionally a race where the winner comes as something of a surprise. In 1968 a Kenyan by the name of Amos Biwott appeared from nowhere and had them laughing in the aisles at his eccentric style. He had the last laugh when he convincingly won the final in front of the better stylists. He was followed by his compatriot Kogo, and Kenya also took gold and silver in 1972 with Kip Keino and Ben Jipcho , Keino was well known as a 1500 and 5000 runner having won gold at the former and silver in the latter in 1968. For good measure he had already won the silver medal in the 1500 in 1972. Keino admitted after the race that his style was no good but that he'd had fun jumping the hurdles. That's the trouble with those Kenyans. They have no style and they have lots of fun but they still keep winning. The favourite for the event this year will be Henry Marsh from America. He was also favourite at Helsinki last year when he fell at the last hurdle in a desperate attempt to catch the eventual winner Patriz Ilg from West Germany. It may again be between those two but keep an eye out for anyone who comes from Kenya and looks awkward.
110 Metres Hurdles (First Round: Sun 5, morning; Semi-Final & Final: Mon 6, evening) Olympic Champion: Tomas Munkelt (GDR); World Champion: Greg Foster (US); World Record: Renaldo Nehemiah (US) 12.93 Olympic champion Munkelt was the only East European to really challenge. Again the Americans should dominate the event and.the boycott should play no part since Munkelt, the Olympic champion looked out of his depth when finishing fifth in Helsinki. Bryggare, the Finn finished second in that event and may again spoil possible hopes of an American clean sweep. Helsinki bronze medallist Willie Gault won't be there this time. Shortly after the Helsinki championships he gave up plans to take' part in the Olympics to 'accept a million dollar offer to play American football with Chicago Cubs. A case of an offer he couldn't refuse. 400 Metres Hurdles (lst Round: Fri 3, morning; Semi-Final: Sat 4, evening; Final: Sun 5, evening) Olympic Champion: Volker Beck (GDR); World Champion: Ed Moses (US); World Record: Ed Moses (US) 47.00 . Unbeaten since 1977. 102 consecutive wins. Olympic champion of 1976. World Champion of 1983. World record holder. Ed Moses has dominated this event in a way that no one else has ever done and it is impossible to see anyone breaking that sequence now.

Harald Schmid was the last man to beat him. He should get the silver this time although he may be beaten out by another American, Danny Harris, an eighteen year old who ran a world junior best in finishing second to Moses in the American trials. 4xl00 Metres Relay (lst Round: Fri 10, morning; Semi-Final: Sat 11, morning; Final: Sat 11, evening) Olympic Champion: USSR; World Champion: US; World Record: US,
37.86

In the World Championships last year it was almost a benefit performance by the Americans as they smashed the world record. Lewis running the last leg left the opposition behind. It is difficult to see any other result this time. Britain and Italy will probably fight out the minor placings in the absence of the Russians. 4x400 Metres Relay (1 st Round: Fri 10, morning; Semi-Final: Fri' 10, evening; Final: Sat 11, evening) Olympic Champion: USSR; World Champion: USSR; World Record: US 2.56.16 In Helsinki Calvin Smith fell on the third leg which put the Americans out of contention. West Germany and Great Britain, medallists behind Russia may be fighting for silver and bronze again, this time behind the Americans. High Jump (Qualifying: Fri 10, morning; Final: Sat 11, evening) Olympic Champion: Gerd Wessig (GDR); World Champion: Oleg Aveedenko (USSR); World Record: Zhu Jian Hua (China) 2.38 metres Is ping pong diplomacy for the high jump? Zhu is favourite to win the People's Republic of China its first athletic gold medal but while it will be an extremely popular victory it will be straining the home crowd's good will as he has to beat Dwight Stones, a perennial favourite in American athletics. Stones has already won bronze medals in 1972 and 1976 but has never quite been able to make it to the top. He may be destined to tread the same path as John Thomas, his predecessor as American champion who won bronze in 1960 and silver in 1964. Fortunately Stones has not had to endure the abuse and ridicule heaped on Thomas when he failed to win, as the hot favourite, in 1960. The third medal place could go to Eric Frommeyer of West Germany. Long Jump (Qualifying: Sun 5, evening; Final: Mon 6, evening) Olympic Champion: Pierre Dombrowski (Pol); World Champion: Carl Lewis (US); World Record: Bob Beamon (US) 8.90m Since his rise to the top Carl Lewis has had numerous challengers in the sprint events, but in the long jump

there has been only one and that is now sixteen years old. In the rarefied atmosphere of Mexico City in the Olympics of 196 8 Bob Beamon leapt 8.90m or 29'2Yz", an unheard of distance then and now. Except for Lewis who has been creeping closer and closer to that target. Lewis himself feels that he can make 30 feet but he would dearly love to break that record at these games. At Berlin, the Carl Lewis of the Thirties, Jesse Owens was also an odds-on favourite to win the gold but Hitler was confident that Germany had just the man to prove the theory of Aryan superiority in Luz Long. However, when Lewis had fouled his first two jumps in qualifying and was in danger of being eliminated Long came up to him and encouraged him. It was the boost Owens needed and he went on to win. As he won the first person to congratulate him was Luz Long and they corresponded until Long was killed in the war.

record holder, Sergei Bubka and of course the Poles. The French, traditionally strong in this event will be there with Vigneron, who never does himself justice at major events, Abada, sixth at Helsinki and Quinon. The Americans, Mark Tully and Earl Bell can also be expected to perform better than at Helsinki. Triple Jump (Qualifying: Fri 3, morning; Final: Sat 4, evening) Olympic Champion: Jaak Uudmae (USSR); World Champion: Zdislaw Hoffman (GDR); World Record: Joao de Oliveira (Bra) 17.89m In the absence of the East Europeans the Americans should have little problem picking up at least two of the medals. Willie Banks and Mike Conley will lead their challenge and presumably Banks will have his Walkman with him which he wears all the time that he isn't jumping. Keith Connor of Great Britain was the world's best in 1983 but performed miserably in Helsinki. He will push the Americans hard as will the Nigerian Ajayi Agbebaku who took the bronze medal at Helsinki. Shot (Qualifying: Sat 11, morning; Final: Sat 11, evening) Olympic Champion: Kiselyev (USSR); World Champion: U. Sarul (Pol); World Record: Udo Beyer (GDR) 22.22m World record holder Udo Beyer misses out on a chance to win his third Olympic medal (gold in 1976, bronze in 1980) but the absence of five of the top six in last year's World Championships should leave Dave Laut of America in a pretty comfortable position in a totally devalued competition. Discus (Qualifying: Wed 8, morning; Final: Fri 10, evening) Olympic Champion: Victor Rashchupkin (USSR); World Champion: Ivan Buger (Tch); World Record: Yuri Dumchev (USSR) 71.86m Again the absence of the East Europeans devalues the competition. Only Huumonen (Finland) of the top seven throwers in Helsinki will be taking part in Los Angeles. Hammer (Qualifying: Sun 5, morning; Final: Mon 6, evening) Olympic Champion: Yuri Sedykh (USSR); World Champion: Sergei Litvinov (USSR); World Record: Yuri Sedykh (USSR) 86.34m. Best distances by Irish: Declan Hegarty: 76. 34m; Conor McCullough: 72.06m The two leading hammer throwers need no introduction to Irish sports fans after their amazing displays. in Cork a few weeks ago. Sedykh has been the leading hammer thrower in the world since he won his first Olympic title in Montreal, 1976. For the last four years Litvinov has been swapping records and championships MAGILL AUGUST 1984 43

] .s ~
l7.l t'""

ell

Martin Girvan (GB) Pole Vault (Qualifying: Mon 6, morning; FincH:Wed 8, evening) Olympic Champion: Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz (Pol); World Champion: Sergei Bubka (USSR); World Record: Sergei Bubka (USSR) 5.90m This is usually one of the highlights of the track and field events. In the pressure of competition it is also one where previous records can be rendered meaningless. In Mexico in 1968 the event lasted for hours and ended with three jumpers tied at the same height. Seagren of America won because he had fewer failures. In 1972 the positions were reversed; Nordwig , third in Mexico, won with Seagren second. In 1976 the world record holder Dave Roberts could only come third. Kozakiewicz of Poland, another favourite finished eleventh but came back to win in 1980 with Slusarski also of Poland who had won in 1976, second. The great loss for these games will be the young Russian world

with him in a two man event. Of course, neither will be at Los Angeles and will have to continue their rivalry on a, smaller stage, to their and the public's loss. Judging by the .arnounts that the Russians ate there are few Irish people who could afford to challenge them for the title and considering Ireland's lack of success in field events it is strange to recount that Ireland's only two-time champion came in this event with Pat O'Callaghan who won in 1928 in Amsterdam and again at Los Angeles in 1932. He would have had Jimmy Magee in palpitations since he only produced the winning throw on the last two throws both years. The favourite for this event is Thinen of Finland with a best throw of 80m. Javelin (Qualifying: Sat 4, morning; Final: Sun 5, evening) Olympic Champion: D. Kula (USSR); World Champion: D. Michel (GDR); World Record: Tom Petranoff (US) 99.72m Kula having won the last Olympic gold could only come third at Helsinki. He won't be in Los Angeles and nor will the winner at Helsinki, Michel. This leaves the gold medal fairly easy for Petranoff. The Olympic record is held by Miklos Nemeth of Hungary, who also holds another record, being one of the only father/ son duos to win gold at the Olympics. His father, Imre won the hammer event in 1948. Montreal in 1976 was Miklos' third attempt and the two previous times he had failed badly when he was a favourite. In 1976 he was not .considered a prospect at all but with his first throw set a new world record, sufficient to win the gold. For the record he reverted to normal in 1980 and finished Sth. In 1980 another record of sorts was set by Bruce Kennedy. Born in Rhodesia he had qualified for the Games for that country in 1972 but a threatened boycott by black African countries forced Rhodesia to withdraw from the Games. Precisely the same situation arose in 1976 forcing Kennedy to miss his second Olympiad. By 1980, Kennedy had moved to America and become an American citizen. He finished second in the American trial that year and finally was getting his chance to take part. Until Carter pulled the plug and he went down for the third time. Decathlon (Wed 8 morning: 100m, long jump; Wed 8 evening: high jump, 400m; Thurs 9 morning: Discus, pole vault, 110m hurdles; Thurs 9, evening: javelin, 1500m) Olympic Champion: Daley Thomson (GB); World Champion: Daley Thomson (GB); World Record: Jurgen Hingsen (FRG) 8779 points

The decathlete is the all-round athlete par excellence. He must compete in ten events over two days and it is a test of stamina as well as ability. Thomson and Hingsen have been doing battle for the last four years with Thomson coming out ahead in the major championships. It will almost certainly be between these two again this time. Probably the greatest of all decathletes was Jim Thorpe who was part Irish, part French and part Red Indian. In 1912 he went to Stockholm and won the Pentathlon (in the days when men also did a Pentathlon), took part in the high jump, the long jump and then won the decathlon. On his return to the States Thorpe was greeted with a tickertape parade in New York but the following year had his medals taken away because, having received money for playing baseball at which he was also more than proficient, he was officially a professional. Despite pleas for clemency his titles

In the absence of the East Germans and to a lesser extent, the Russians, the women's athletics tournament has been totally debased. One of the great disappointments comes in the women's sprints where Marlies Gohr and Evelyn Ashford were scheduled to take up their intriguing rivalry once more. In Helsinki last year Ashford pulled up with a leg injury in the final so the decision as to who was best wasn't answered. Now, once again the victory will be somewhat hollow should Ashford win as expected. The main challenge to Ashford will corne from Marlene Ottey of Jamaica. 200 Metres (I st & 2nd Rounds: Wed 8, morning; Semi-Final & Final: Thurs 9, evening) Olympic Champion: Barbara Wockel (GDR); World Champion: Marita Koch (GDR); World Record: Manta Koch (GDR) 21.71 Koch, Ashford and Wockel, Olympic champion at the last two Games are all missing from this event. The gold should be there for the taking for Marlene Ottey, the Jamaican Commonwealth champion and it provides a great opportunity for Kathy Cook of Great Britain to add another medal to her World Championship bronze. 400 Metres (1st Round: Fri 3, morning; 2nd Round: Sat 4, morning; Semi-Final: Sun 5, evening; Final: Mon 6, evening) Olympic Champion: Marita Koch (GDR); World Champion: Jarmil Kratochkilova (Cz); World Record: Jarmil Kratochkilova (Cz) 47.99 Before the boycott this was a no contest. Kratochkilova, silver medallist in Moscow in 1980 broke through Marita Koch's domination of this event in stunning fashion. She won with considerable ease smashing the world record in the process. She also won the 800 metres easily and her domination of her events was complete. Her build once again raised the question of East European training tactics and possible use of illicit drugs. Eastern Europe has dominated this event almost since its institution and the winner in Montreal in 1976 was possibly the greatest of all the women runners. Irena Szewinska came from Poland and won her first medals at the ,1964 Garnes in Tokyo, a silver in the 200 and the long jump and a gold in the 4xlOO relay. In 1968 she took gold in the 200 and bronze in the 100. A bronze medal in the 200 in 1972 convinced her that her speed was gone and she switched to the 400 and proceeded to win the gold ill 1976 at thirty years of age. Szewinska took part also in Moscow but was injured in the heats. Bussmann of West Germany and Payne of Canada fight it out for the gold MAGILL AUGUST 1984 45
;

g
C;

~ ~
ll:I

Daley Thompson (GB) were taken away. It was not until 1982 that he was posthumously reinstated as champion. He also had less luck in the movies than is common among decathletes. He died in poverty having sold his life story and seen a film of his life starring Burt Lancaster made in Hollywood. Bruce Jenner, who won the Olympic title in 1976 went on to star in 'Can't Stop the Music'. It is a matter of taste as to whether this is due reward for a talented athlete. Denis Weaver, better known as McCloud in the television series of that name, finished sixth in the US trials in 1948.

WOMEN
100 Metres (1st Round: Sat 4, morning; Semi-Final & Final: Sun 5, evening) Olympic Champion: Ludmilla Kondraty ewa (USSR); World Champion: Marlies Gohr (GDR); World Record: Evelyn Ashford (US) 10.79

1'

with Chandra Cheeseborough of the United States, another sprinter who has found the longer distance preferable. 800 Metres (lst Round: Fri 3, evening; Semi-Final: Sat 4, evening; Final: Mon 6, evening) Olympic Champion: N. Olizarenko (URS); World Champion: Jarmil Kratochkilova (Cz); World Record: Jarmil Kratochkilova (Cz) 1.53.28. Best time by Irish: Caroline 0 'Shea:' 2.00.7 Of the top ten performers at this event only one will be competing in LA. This is Melinta, also an East European but since Rumania are defying the boycott she will be able to compete. Although the absence of the top runners will make the competition more open it also makes it irrelevant. Caroline O'Shea will represent Ireland. 1500 Metres (lst Round: Wed 8, morning; Semi-Final: Thurs 9, evening; Final: Sat 11, evening) Olympic Champion: Tamara Kazankina (USSR); World Champion: Mary Decker (US); World Record: Tatyana Kazankina (USSR) 3.52.47 Another great contest in prospect until the boycott robbed the event of the participation of the strong Russian team. They would have been thirsting for revenge after the dramatic race at Helsinki when Mary Decker stunned them in a magnificent finish. Up until then the event had been dominated by Kazankina who won the Olympic event on the last two occasions. Now the event doesn't even have Decker. Beaten for the first time in four years in the American Olympic trials she has decided to concentrate on the 3000 metres. Anyone competing in both events will have to run six races in six days including a 1500 and 3000 on the same day. Not even Decker would be able to overcome that kind of schedule. 3000 Metres (1 st Round: Mon 6, morning; Semi-Final: Wed 8, evening; Final: Fri 10, evening) Olympic Champion: New event this year; World Champion: Mary Decker (US); World Record: Svetlana Ulmasova (USSR) 8.26.78. Best times by Irish: Monica Joyce: 8.49.1; Roisin Smyth: 8.57.0 Again the Russians have dominated this event since its introduction and saw their domination broken in the inaugural World Championships last year. In this, the first time the distance has been included in the Olympic programme, the attention switches from the Russians to the clash between Decker and the South African prodigy Zola Budd. An English Sunday newspaper has invested enormous amounts of money in bringing Budd to England, establishing her English antecedents and keeping her from other journalists 46 MAGILL AUGUST 1984

who wish to interview her. She was granted British citizenship in remarkably quick time giving rise to a certain amount of fuss. All this has apparently gone over the 17 year old's head and she merely goes on doing what she does best - running extremely fast. Last year she broke Decker's world record over 5000 metres. Decker's experience should carry her through but it promises to be a fascinating struggle. Roisin Smyth and Monica Joyce, Ireland's representatives, have been showing good form lately and we can expect a 'good performance from them. 100 Metres Hurdles (Ist Round: Thurs 9, morning; Semi-Final: Fri 10, evening; Final: Fri 10, evening) Olympic Champion: V. Komisova (USSR); World Champion: Bettina Jahn (GDR); World Record: Gratzyna Rabsztyn (Pol) 12,36 The result will be fairly meaningless in terms of world rankings, Only two of the eight finalists in the World Championships will be taking part. These two should contest the gold medal, Shirley 'Strong of Great Britain who 'smokes, drinks and chases women' according to the lead in an English newspaper interview and Barbara FitzGerald-Brown who has been married since the championships in Helsinki. 400 Metres Hurdles (lst Round: Sun 5, morning; Semi-Final: Mon 6, evening; Final: Wed 8, evening) Olympic Champion: New event this year; World Champion: Eketerina Fesenko (USSR); World Record: Anna Ambrosiene (USSR) 54.02. Best time by Irish: Mary Parr: 58.3 Another race totally dominated by Russia and East Germany. In the absence of the world's best Debbie Flintoff from Australia who is Commonwealth Champion could make recompense for a poor performance in Helsinki. Other contenders are Skoglund of Sweden (6th in Helsinki) and Morley (7th). Mary Parr left her qualification very late - the day before she was due to leave for Los Angeles. Marathon (Sun 5, morning) Olympic Champion: New event this year; World Champion: Grete Waitz (Nor); World Record: Joan Benoit (US) 2.22.43. Best times by Irish: Carey May: 2 hrs 29 min; Regina Joyce: 2 hrs 32 min The woman to beat must be Grete Waitz, the world champion who has broken the world record no less than four times. She is also world cross country champion five times. Interestingly, her closest challenger could be another Norwegian, Ingrid Kristiansen who broke the world 5000

metres record in Oslo a month ago. More pertinently, she set the second fastest time recorded in the Marathon in May. Joan Benoit who currently holds the world record will also be a strong contender. Ireland's representatives will, as at Helsinki, be Carey May and Regina Joyce. Regina Joyce who eventually finished seventh attacked from early on in a very brave performance and led up until the 30km mark when she found the pressure of running on her own too much. The experience gained from that effort should make Joyce's challenge even stronger this time. Carey May's l Sth position in Helsinki was a disappointment since she has the seventh fastest time in the event to her credit. This is likely to be Ireland's best event for women. Regina Joyce in particular is running well and recently smashed the Irish 10000 metres record. 4x100 Metres Relay (lst Round: Fri 10, morning; Semi-Final: Sat 11, morning; Final: Sat 11, evening) Olympic Champion: GDR; World Champion: GDR; World Record: GDR 41.53 East Germany have so dominated this event since the seventies that everyone else has merely been running for silver. That silver will become gold for someone this time around. Great Britain came second at Helsinki and on that form should be favourites although Jamaica are sure to produce a very strong team. 4x400 Metres Relay (Lst Round: Fri 10, morning; Semi-Final: Fri 10, morning; Final: Sat 11, evening) Olympic Champion: USSR; World Champion: GDR; World Record: GDR 3.15.92 As if to impress on the ultimate winners in Los Angeles the invalidity of their title, the East Germans set a new world record during their national trials about a month ago, breaking their own record by over three seconds. The worth of the 1984 gold medals diminish in value in proportion to the distance the East German women put between themselves and their opposition. For the record Canada and US, 4th and 5th respectively in Helsinki will probably fight out the medals with West Germany. High Jump (Qualifying: Thurs 9, morning; Final: Fri 10, evening) Olympic Champion: Sara Simeoni (Ita); World Champion: Tamara Bykova (USSR); World Record: Tamara Bykova (USSR) The absence of Bykova means there will be no repeat of the spellbinding contest in Helsinki when the Russian girl defeated West Germany's Ulrike Meyfarth, the previous world record holder. In Bykova's absence the challenge to Meyfarth will be taken up by

...

Louise Ritter, bronze medallist in Helsinki and Pam Spencer both of the United States. It is to be hoped that the 1980 Olympic champion Simeoni from Italy will also be fit to defend her title. She unfortunately injured herself in the qualifying round in Helsinki and had to withdraw. This promises to be one of the highlights of the women's track and field events. Long Jump (Qualifying: Wed 8, evening; Final: Thurs 9, evening)
Olympic Champion: T. (USSR); World Champion: (CDR); World Record: Cusimir (Rum) 7.43m Kolpakova H. Daute Anisoara

world in this event won't be taking part. The gold medal will be a pleasant bonus for the winner. Discus (Qualifying: Fri 10, morning; Final: Sat 11, evening)
Olympic Champion: E. Jahl (CDR); World Champion: Martina Opitz (CDR); World Record: Galina Savinkova (USSR) 73.26

At long last. A reigning world record holder will actually be present at the Olympics, thanks to Rumania's decision to attend. Cusimir was surprised by Daute, the young East German in Helsinki and had to settle for the silver. She won't wish for the same result this time. If anyone is to beat her it could be Carole Lewis, Carl's sister, bronze medallist in Helsinki. Shot (Qualifying: Fri 3, morning; Final: Fri 3, evening)
Olympic Champion: Illiona Slupianek (CDR); World Champion: Helena Fibingerova (Cze); World Record: Illiona Slupianek (CDR) 22.45

The same applies here as for the shot only more so. Only two of the twelve finalists in Helsinki came from outside Eastern Europe, the Dutch woman Stalman and Meg Ritchie of Great Britain. Ritchie is probably favourite for the event, although should she WID her effort is unlikely to come within five metres of Savinkova's world best. Patricia Walsh represents Ireland and she has been the most consistent Irish performer of recent years, but will struggle to qualify for the final. Her qualifying throw for the Games was only 57.60m. Javelin (Qualifying: Sun 5, morning; Final: Mon 6, evening)
Olympic Champion: Maria Colon (Cuba); World Champion: Tina Lillak (Fin); World Record: Tina Lillak (Fin)

considered the host country's best chance of a gold medal but was trailing badly until her very last throw sailed out to win the gold. The crowd were delirious and in fact the only person who may have begrudged Lillak the gold was Fatima Whitbread the English thrower who had led the final up until that moment and seemed assured of the gold. This event has surprisingly been practically unaffected by the boycott and the top four from Helsinki will be fighting it out again Lillak, Whitbread , Anna Verouli of Greece and Tessa Sanderson of Great Britain. Another fine contest in prospect. Heptathlon (Fri 3, morning: 100m hurdles, highjump; Fri 3, evening: shot, 200m; Sat 4, morning: long jump; Sat 4, evening: javelin, 800m)
Olympic Champion: New' event this year; World Champion: Ramona Neubert (CDR); World Record: Ramona Neubert (CDR) 6836 points

The top six or seven athletes in the

74.76 Tina Lillak was the most romantic winner of the World Championships last year. As world champion she was

The women's equivalent of the men's decathlon, this used to be the pentathlon up until the last Olympics. The seven events that have to be completed are 100m hurdles, 220m, 800m, High Jump, Shot, Long Jump, Javelin. The top ten performers are all East European.

An interview by Aidan Dunne Aidan Dunne: You were born in County Kilkenny. How long did you live there? Tony O'Malley: I was born in Callan. I left when I was about nineteen or twenty, to a job in the old Munster and Leinster Bank. I was sent over to Ennis in County Clare for five years. That was a long time before I started painting. I was with the bank for about fifteen years. This was interrupted by. a long period of illness: T.B. I was out ofaction on and off for about eight or nine years. It was while I was out with T.B. that I started to paint. I'd go back home between stages at the sanatorium, and I began to paint then. The first painting I made was in 1945. I didn't call it art. It was just something I did. It could as easily have been poetry. I felt that my total ignorance of painting was somehow an asset to me. I began, around 1950, to exhibit in the Oireachtas and the Living Art. Were you friendly with other artists at the time? The only other artist I knew well at the time was my friend Richard Kingston. I did know some painters in St Ives in Cornwall, and I took a trip over there, without any intention of leaving Ireland or anything. But I managed to get a studio there. Who did you know in St Ives? Oh, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Brian Winter, Barbara Hepworth and so on. I was generally senior to them in age. Anyway I settled into painting there. I'd do a lot of work at home on paper and bring it back to St Ives to work it into paintings. Do you still follow that pattern? Yes. I'm doing a lot of drawings there at the moment for later work. Since '75 we've had a house in .Callan where we generally spend the summer. It's not a spectacular landscape, but because it's IXlY native ground I find it very fruitful. 11 can find things I knew there as a boy, which have a personal meaning for me. I'm a believer in that. I'm not a painter of foreign landscape, because I can't look at it just objectively, I have to get underneath the skin of it. You've also been spending some time in the Bahamas eaen winter? Yes. We go there to Jane's family, on Paradise Island. I paint there out of doors. All the big canvases here were done that way. And, in fact, a lot of my early work was done outdoors. The Bahamas are a strange place for a painter. The people are interesting, they're It is, yes. A painting that comes out of Ireland is more subjective. I get a greater feeling of reality from it. Here, even commonplace things that are neglected by most people are important to me. When I draw or paint here there's something added to it. Which location do you prefer, which work? I think the dark ones have always taken me over. The bright ones I enjoy doing, the experience of it, but the dark ones are more obsessive. Like whittling down a lot of words into a sparse, narrow poem. That interests me: the intensity. I'm not really a spontaneous painter. When I began, years ago, I was able to sit down and splash out, but I distrust that kind of approach. I like a more disciplined kind of painting. Are you a slow worker? musical, but I'm a landscape painter and I'm not interested in the landscape there for its own sake, but the light. An object becomes a luminous thing. No matter how bright you paint it looks dull by comparison with the reality. It's easy to distinguish your Irish work from the Bahamian work.

Well it takes me a long time to do a painting because I usually carry on about five or six at the one time. I leave a painting to one side when I feel I can't go any further with it. Technically, it needs something I can't specify and I don't want to impose on it. I'm the servant of the painting. It's a form of self-discovery. I get pleasure from the achievement of a painting but not from the actual struggle, which seems to disappear as soon as it's resolved; I'm a stumbling kind of worker, really. Jane works with me. We have a big studio, about sixty feet long. I've never had a facility for painting, for every one I do there's usually a heap of drawings around it, Objective drawings: stilllifes, self portraits - there are bits of self portraits in many of the paintings. But, I'm in my late sixties and painting is still a mystery to me. How long would you spend on an individual work, from start to finish? About six months. I don't question the process, I work by instinct. I'm an expressionist, while I feel the international style is too intellectual. I've always liked Van Gogh. I felt that was the spirit. My own views were borne out in St Ives my men like Bernard Leach, who had a Japanese approach to his own work. I met Japanese friends of his who bought my paintings because they felt that they fitted in with their ideas. The paintings as event, an inward thing. Another person who was important for me was Padraig Fallon, who lived in

Cornwall for a while. He was a poet who never professed to know anything about painting, but he knew you were doing something that was equivalent to what he was doing in poetry. He was a great help to me. Knowing people like Lanyon in St Ives gave me the feeling that I could do anything. There's a good sense of community there? There is. With quite a lot of artists living there, with their families, there's a general acceptance of painting, sculpture and poetry, without what you might call competitiveness. It's good that way. As a painter, you feel you belong to a family. No jealousy, each person accepted in their own right. Do you have a studio in Callan? The house is' our studio, we live and work there. I've never been interested in houses as such. I suppose because I spent so much time in digs early on. Ennis, Mountrath, Kenmare, Dublin, all over the place, I lived out of a suitcase. In the late forties and early fifties, if you said to the landlady that you were painting in your bedroom, she'd throw you out, When I was in Enniscorthy, I kept all my painting materials in a trunk. The lid was the easel. There was a lingering smell of turps of course, but I'd pack everything away and shove it under the bed. That was before I got a flat and was able to make a mess.

Do you find a readier acceptance of the kind of expressionist painting you do now than ten years ago? Yes. There are cycles in painting. There will always be new waves, but more waves than tidemarks. The water falls back and nothing is left. Younger painters will always be interested in technological innovation. I think it's quite valid. We are moving into another time, Perhaps painting will soon be regarded as a rare kind of bird. But then, many people said easel painting was finished. I never had an easel, myself. My view of painting is traditional. It's always hard to achieve an image. There is a reality underlying appearances. I must find it and confront it. In that sense, I, suppose painting is about the metamorphosis of things well known, And it's a kind of dialogue with a bit of board or canvas, and when it speaks back to me it works. When that happens I've gotten something out of it. A major retrospective of the work of Tony O'Malley is showing at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Trinity College, Dublin, from Monday July 30th to August 25th. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, written by Brian Fallon, art critic of the Irish Times, and containing 16 colour plates. It provides an excellent insight not only into 0 'Malley's work but also Irish and Cornish art from the post-war years on. It costs 5.00.

Bloody heat. Bloody bus strike. A ClE management that sends redundancy notices to men dying of cancer. You wonder why there's a bus strike. Bloody ClE. Bloody bees. Stupid neighbour comes across a nest of bees. Pours boiling water on them, beats them away with a stick. Angry bees take to the skies, send out scouts, scouts come back guy over there needs some sleep, let's nest in his bedroom. Five in the morning - zoom-zoom, buzz-buzz, achtung , run. Send for man with beemask and squirty thing. Go gettem, kill the little bastards. Charge! He did. 19.50. Bloody bees. Bloody neighbours. Bloody bank manager. Bloody Lee Dunne. On the radio again talking again about how he beat the bottle again, man. Thought we were shut of him. No, man, y 'know, the bottom line, man, it's a bitch, man. Bloody radio. Bloody Lord Henry. Animals, he says, from the North, he says. Scratch a liberal. It's time that honest Fine Gaelers like Oliver J. Flanagan hunted this little wimp out of that once-great party. Bloody heat. Bloody holidays. Everyone going off or coming back with sombreros or chocolate bloody Eiffel Towers. Me sitting here hitting little keys. Let's pray for an epidemic of dysentry. Bloody rumours of a bloody general election. Why bother? Swop one

shower for another and they'll do the same anyway. Put the present shower back again and they'll say they have "a mandate". Nothing as dangerous as politicians with "a mandate". They'll use it to scrape the butter off your bread. Anyone remember being asked to "Vote far Me and I'll put a tax on your water"? Bloody liars. Bloody Irish Times Summer Series. Come summer and the hacks are dragooned into writing long boring pieces about out-of-the-way places that nobody ever goes to except hacks in search of someplace boring to write about. Remember when they had their Great Airports series? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Next year, Great Lamp-posts of Dublin. Or a series on Our Favourite Culde-sacs. Bloody journalists. Bloody Indo. Begrudging little bits of articles and editorials about Nicky Kelly. Quite entitled, of course. Free press and all that. If Kelly robbed the train he should be in jail. If he didn't, ah, well, doesn't that mean that someone else should be in jail, like maybe the people who put Kelly away in the first place? That's what we say. Vindicate Kelly or put him back in jail. None of this humanitarian nonsense. He's the one calling for the inquiry, you'll note, not the Indo. And if the Indo wants to write about the case it should get up off its arse and do some work and not write opinionated rubbish that is factually inaccurate. (Advert. Round Up The Usual Suspects, 4.95, from your friendly local bockstore.) Bloody journalists. Bloody heat.

Bloody Olympics. Liars running and hopping and skipping and jumping. Amateurs. Yeah. Bloody hypocrites. Bloody Wimbledon just over, ambitious freaks poncing around dressed in advertising hoardings. Bloody sport. If it's not Wimbledon it's the bloody Olympics and if it's not that it's the bloody World Cup. And in between it's showjumping bloody showjumping. Coghlan for Gold in '88? Dick Spring. I ask you. Dick bloody Spring. Who is kidding bloody who, right? Newman's People. God! The bloody price of drink. A new Secretary of bloody State for Northern Ireland. Maybe. Know what that means? Gets off the plane in Belfast and announces "a new political initiative". Know what that means? Another promising political career down the tubes. Remember rolling devolution? Maybe sliding devolution this time, or weaving devolution, or zig-zaggingdevolution. Bloody idiots. Michael 0 'Bloody Halloran, new "Lord Mayor" (God save us all) of Dublin. Instead of Mary Frehill. He may be your First Citizen but he's not bloody mine. Fiver to the first person to pull his chain until his face turns blue. Bloody heat. Earthquakes. Don't start me on bloody earthq uakes.

AD DONALL 0 MORAIN CHOsen to practise law, when he was called to the Bar in 1946, he would now be earning 80,000 a year and disclosing half of it to the Tax Commissioners. Instead, he chose to be a fool for Ireland, and the Tax Commissioners know all too well that his income is modest and his worldly possessions few. But no tax man could assess his earnings in fun and his expenditure in service. His moral legacy, reckoned in achievement, will amount to a huge estate. Though 0 Morain left Kerry in 1935, at the age of 13, to go to school in Dublin, no one could mistake him for anything but a Kerryman still. His language is vibrant with ringing Kerry consonants dancing round open Kerry vowels. His penetrating dark eyes are a warning to the wary, and his wolf-grin reminds the unwary of their failure to take the warning. Kerry cuteness is something he has never unlearned; he has it in a measure almost equal to Kerry generosity. He has acquired much sophistication in the ways of cities and in the nice bitchery of the cocktail hour, but give him a gun and a fishing-rod and he is off to Kerry at dawn. Behind the focused eyes and the wolf-grin, he is thinking ..a favourite thought: "I like a good night's fishing." Interpret that as you may. There is a logic in Donall 0 Morain's life that comes out of his family background. He was born in Waterville on 6 September 1923, son of Micheal 0 Morain, an army officer turned farmer, and of Eibhlin Ni Loingsigh, a teacher. His mother was a sister of Fionan Lynch, a companion of Michael Collins who later became a Government Minister and finally a Judge. Donall's mother died when he was two. When he went to school in Dublin, it was to live with his grandmother and his aunt, Brid Ni Loingsigh; both were teachers; the latter was the author of many children's books. After six years in Colaiste Mhuire, he went on scholarship to UCD, where he read economics and history and where he became involved in An Cumann Gaelach and An Comhchaidreamh, out of which came the magazine Comhar. In 1946, the year after he graduated from UCD, he was called to the Bar. The reason he never practised law, he says, was that he disliked the prospect of changing his brief from day to day. He points to parliamentary politics as another example of constantly shifting ground. "I didn't like the prospect of changing stance from day to day. I didn't want to become a pro-

fessional liar; it creates a state of mind that didn't appeal to me." Turning his back on the Bar, he became managing editor ("with virtually no experience") of The R GDA TA Review, the journal of the retail trade. In 1949, Donall 0 Morain married Maire Beaumont, whose father, Sean Beaumont, was a mathematics lecturer in TCn, Irish editor of The Irish Press and founder of An tEireannach, the first weekly newspaper in Irish. Mrs o Morain is a grandniece of Eoin and James McNeill .. Through his marriage, therefore, Donall 0 Morain's stake in the linguistic, cultural and historical life of the country was increased. From 1950 to 1957, while still in business, he was Honorary Controlling Director of Comhar. He was the author of the leading article in that magazine, in May 1951, which opposed the hierarchy on the Mother and Child Scheme - a piece of legislation proposed by Dr Noel Browne, part of which visualised pre-natal training for pregnant women. Comhar and The Irish Times were among the few publications to take the side of enlightenment. "I was read off every second altar," 0 Morain says, "over what has become the orthodoxy of today." The episode was one of the earlier public . indications of the steel of which 0 Morain is made. For twelve years, from 1951 to 1953, he was General Manager of Hugh McLaughlin's publishing and printing company. Hugh McLaughlin was the man who, in later life, was . associated with the launching of The Sunday World, and who, a few years ago, conceived The Daily News, which he aborted after three weeks. While with McLaughlin, 0 Morain managed and edited a range of trade journals. "Through printing of football pool fixtures and results," he says, "I gained experience in pool management."

T WAS THIS EXPERIENCE THAT caused him, in 1953, to propose the establishment of Gael-Linn, to be financed by a football pool on Gaelic games. For ten years, he was Honorary Controlling Director of Gael-Linn and Chairman of the Board of Trustees. From 1963 to the present time, he has been Chief Executive of Gael-Linn (as well as Ceannasai, which is an honorary title). He must be elected every third year. A close observer of the organisation says, "0 Morain could be thrown out at any time by the Board, most of whom are sober." Indeed, just

such an attempt was made last year; the struggle was protracted an d nasty, but Donall weathered it as successfully as he has weathered many a scrape. Knowledge of the struggle was widespread among journalists for a long time, but nothing was printed about it until it was almost over. This might be taken as an indication of the respect in which 0 Morain is held, and of the belief that a man who had given thirty years of unselfish devotion to the Irish language was being baited by snarling dogs, some of whose grounds for snarling were a little less than credible. Donall 0 Morain has his thumb in ... many pies. He has been Chairman of Convocation of NUl for the past thirty years. In 1958, he masterminded the Gael-Linn application for the television franchise, for which he negotiated the financial and technical backing with the Munster and Leinster Bank, with NBC of America and with Roy Thompson, the lTV franchise holder in Britain who said that commercial television was a licence to print money. The American, Ed Roth, who was the first Director-General of RTE, was to have been employed by Gael-Linn, if it had got the franchise, "to get the damn thing electronically on the road," o Morain says. When Roy Thompson came over to talk about the Gael-Linn application, Donal asked him why a man with his huge media empire should be interested in Ireland. In the back sheds of Hugh McLaughlin's printing works, Thompson replied, "One more pound in my fist and one more feather in my cap." Of such metal are moguls and tycoons made. In 1960, 0 Morain planned the publication of a Sunday tabloid newspaper, which was to have been printed by The Irish Times. Two things stopped the venture: commercial distribution was then impossible; and there was a drop in Gael-Linn income when the Government cut off its lottery operation in the USA because it was considered harmful to the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake. From 1958 to 1964, Donall 0 Morain was a mem ber of the Government's Language Commission. From 1965 to 1974, he was a member of the Department of Finance's Central Advisory Committee on Irish. He was on the RTE Authority from 1965 to . 1972 (for the last two years of that period as Chairman), until Gerry Collins fired himself and the Authority. From 1973 to 1976, he was Chairman of the Authority again, until, this time, he was dropped by Conor Cruise O'Brien. He was the first Chairman of Comhairle Raidio na Gaeltachta, from 1971 to 1976. In 1979, he was awarded an LL.D. (honoris causa) by the

NUL
Gael-Linn has applied for a whack of the local, commercial radio system, which the Government is taking such a long time to establish. And on 2 September, when Anois hits the streets, Donall 0 Morain will have realised his old ambition to publish a tabloid Sunday newspaper in Irish - an in colour, forby!

HOSE, THEN, ARE THE OUTER events of a full life and some of the preoccupations of a complex man. Let us now try to gauge the effects of those events and attempt to penetrate the psychology of the man. Gael-Linn was never an Irishlanguage organisation in the sense in which the Gaelic League and some others were. For one thing, it did not have nationwide membership, but rather was a small, tightly-controlled body which collected money and promoted Irish-language activities with the money. As well as that, it has always been its policy to do something practical for Irish speakers rather than merely bitching about the loss of the language and pleading for its revival. A close observer of Donall o Morain over many years says, "GaelLinn actually did things for the language, unlike the Gaelic League and many of the others. " So, we come back to the beginning and to the organisation of the pools based on Gaelic games - hurling, football and handball. (For anyone who has forgotten, it may be pointed out that "linn" is the Irish for "pool"; as a prepositional pronoun, the word means "with us" - a subtlety that must have been in the mind of 0 Morain.) When he had conceived the idea of the pools, and had it approved by An Comhchaidreamti (the organisation of Irish-speaking university students), Donall 0 Morain took it to the GAA, which sniffed at it and found it acceptable, and thus began the long association between Gael-Linn and Gaelic games. o Morain harnessed the Irish 0 bsession with gambling and generated money for The Cause. From there on, Gael-Linn grew and grew; it was a commercial enterprise from the beginning and remains so to the present day; it was a pioneering organisation in several ways. In 1954, Gael-Linn introduced the first 'school-term' Gaeltacht scholarships. In 1955,it went into the production of records and, later, cassettes.

His penetrating dark eyes are a warning to the wary, and his wolf-grin reminds the unwary of their failure to take the warning. Kerry cuteness is something he has never unlearned; he has it in a measure almost equal to Kerry generosity. He has acquired much sophistication in the ways of cities and in the nice bitchery of the cocktail hour, but give him a gun and a fishing-rod and he is off to Kerry at dawn.
Irish-language theatre, and commissioned Brendan Behan to write An Giall, which later reverberated about the planet as The Hostage. From 1957 to 1960, film shorts were produced for exhibition in cinemas; these grew into a major weekly newsreel, called Amharc Eireann ; for which Padraic 0 Raghallaigh did the voiceover. Once television came, the newsreel went out of production. Padraic 0 Raghallaigh also presented a radio programme for GaelLinn, from 1955 to 1964. It ran at eight o'clock on Monday mornings, live. At six o'clock in the morning, Riobard MacGorain arrived at Padraic's house with the GAA results from the day before; then, a script had to be written before going on air. In 1960, George Morrison produced Mise Eire for Gael-Linn. Donall 0

Morain describes it as "the first actuality film epic anywhere." It was followed three years later by Saoirse? which took up the history of Ireland after the Treaty. Both films made a deep impression on cinema audiences, as did Sean 0 Riada's symphonic theme music. It is sometimes said that George Morrison, Padraic 0 Raghallaigh, Breandan 0 hEithir and others were badly rewarded by Gael-Linn for the work they did for it; perhaps they were. It is conceded, though, that Donall 0 Morain himself has never been highly paid by the organisation that he founded and, to a considerable extent, controls. Gael-Linn is highly commercial and highly profit-motivated, but there is a total ban on the distribution of profits, which are ploughed back into the organisation. It generates money for educational purposes, and 0 Morain points out that, at the time of its foundation, there was virtually no economic promotion of the Gaeltacht. Gaeltarra Eireann then existed only in name and was part of the Department of Lands. Among the Gaeltacht industries in which Gael-Linn is involved are handknits, lobsters and oysters. There was no lobster boat in the Gaeltacht when Gael-Linn moved in. Bord Iascaigh Mhara insisted on new boats, the cheapest of which was then 3,500. When a curragh cost 50, this was too great a psychological leap for local fishermen to make. Gael-Linn bought liner lifeboats and converted them at 400 each. With that flagrant look in his eye, 0 Morain says, "We own Ireland's largest non-public oysterbeds." And we all know the reputation oysters have. Under Donall 0 Morain's chairmanship, Raidio na Gaeltachta may have been rushed on air before all the broadcasting problems - not to mention the huge local political problems - had been ironed out. Thus, life was hell for the first Ceannaire who went there, Padraic 0 Raghallaigh, who at one time had to have police protection. Things were so rough in Casla for the first few years that the new service took a huge toll of the energy and of the health of two or three Ceannairi.

LL FORMS OF BROADCASting - indeed, all the communications media - interest 0 Morain deeply. He misses very little in the newspapers, and his concern for RTE has hardly diminished since he was on the Authority; some would say that

the need for concern is now greater than it has ever been and that the public service ideal is dying fast in RTE. Though he wants a commercial radio channel, 0 Morain also wants public broadcasting to keep, or regain, its old strengths. Donall 0 Morain was a highly vocal critic of RTE, especially of its policy on the Irish language, before he became a' member of the Authority. Once he was on the Authority, and especially when he became Chairman, others were as critical of him as he had been on the outside. He found the Authority a coalition of individuals, whom it was hard to move all in one direction. As Chief Executive of GaelLinn, he made decisions and had them implemented, but he had to struggle with persons of varying views on the RTE Authority and try to bring them with him. In addition, he probably found that the constituency for Irish language programming was not as great as he had imagined. Here is one of his comments on the situation: "I can say broadly that there never had been a majority of the Authority in favour of the type of programming which I personally or Gael-Linn would try to foster. >f In October 1971, Gerry Collins, as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, served a direction on RTE under Section 3 1 of the broadcasting legislation. The Government was transmitting a message to RTE indicating its displeasure with broadcast matter, most likely with RTE coverage of Northern Ireland and with persons having access to the airwaves. It is impossible to be specific about the exact reason for its displeasure, however, as the Government refused point blank to elaborate on its direction, though RTE asked it to do so. Thirteen months later, the Minister fired the entire Authority and replaced it with persons of such political persuasion as it thought it could rely upon to toe the Government line. The RTE coverage of Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s was more elaborate and more intense

than it is now. That intensity possibly reached its highest pitch on the day of the 'Bloody Sunday' funerals in Derry. The radio coverage was especially ardent, and some believe that it led directly to the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin. That event happened between the time the Section 31 direction was issued and the firing of the Authority. A certain school of thought might have blamed Donall 0 Morain for failing to read the signs of the times, or for misreading them, but no one would accuse him of deliberately flouting a ministerial direction for political reasons. His youthful politics would have been grounded in Cumann na rrGael, but the views of the mature man are both more radical and, curiously, more moderate than the politics he inherited. Because he was a friend of the late George Colley, some thought 0 Morain a supporter of the Colley wing of Fianna Fail. This is unlikely. Though a perceived member of the Establishment, 0 Morain is something of a controlled iconoclast. His politics, as I evaluate it, is close to the philosophy of Wolfe Tone before it was perverted into ultranationalism. 0 Morain genuinely believes in the right of the dissenter. And yet, on this very point, his philosophy deserted him when the Language Freedom Movement clashed with Irish language supporters in the Mansion House in the late 1960s. He turned vicious that night - a night that was far from his finest. Anyway, back to RTE, to which 0 Morain returned as Chairman half a year after he was fired. Conor Cruise o 'Brien, the new Minister, reappointed him. Three years later, when O'Brien came to appoint a new Authority, he dropped 0 Morain. When he is asked why this happened, he says, "I was the victim of a major conspiracy." The conspirators were inside RTE, he claims, and their motivation was "power complexes". The executive at that time was "playing games with the Board". Some believed that O'Brien dropped

Morain because, as Chairman of the Board, he was in constant contact with the Minister but failed to bear the Minister's thoughts to the Board and have them translated into action. For the time being, Donall 0 Morain's final word on the matter is that "when time passes and all the personalities have long since retired, perhaps one could be justified in disclosing all I could disclose, and also give opinions as to conspiracies and so on." Those last quotations .are taken from a previously published interview I did with Donall 0 Morain. When I did that interview, I sat for five hours in front of him knowing little about .. the private man but listening to the public man carefully chisel his answers to my questions. In Irish or in English, o Morain's language is precise, muscular and stylish. When we had finished that earlier interview, we went for a drink, and only then did I get a glimpse of the private man. It is only when you get behind the burning eyes and the wolf-grin of Donati 0 Morain that you know why he chose to be a wild Kerryman in the Mansion House in face of the plausible arguments of the Language Freedom Movement. As a wild Kerryman, half tamed by Dublin, his rugged Kerry sensibilities were offended not so much by the arguments of the LFM as by its epicene and vapid leadership. The private Donall 0 Morain is convivial, gallant, watchful, adventurous and generous. Only his adversaries are honoured with his deviousness; his friends must make do' with the straightest of straight dealing. He is a practical visionary, receptive to ideas. He is a good Irishman who has no need to thump his craw. With his business acumen, he could have made millions; instead, he has become the acceptable face of Irish culture bridging the gulf between modernism and atavism. Doctor 0 Morain (to give him his proper handle at last) enjoys that good night's fishing as much in a late-night Dublin restaurant as in a Kerry stream. He says he is not gregarious: it is a cross he is learning to bear.

hoping for vacant seats at the end. Another bus moved off, its occupants listening with vacant faces to Walkmans or else smirking in triumph and comfort through the tinted glass. "I hate those people" moaned a waiting girl. This was her boyfriend's Bottler cue. "Y ouze all tink yez are grate," he drawled goodnaturedly at the faces, "but ye know, yez aren't." Then he scowled at a curly-headed chap. "When did you come?" he asked aggressively. "Oh, about ten minutes ago." "How come you're this far up the line? we've been waiting two hours." The curly-headed-one shrugged and looked vaguely hurt. A taximan pulled alongside the kerb and offered to take five people to Slane for 30. He was inundated with takers and eventually squeezed in six. Money doesn't talk, it swears. By 12.50 the last of the buses was leaving. It soon filled with people anxiously listening for the News At One. No further trouble at Slane. Relief all round and back to the newspapers. Don't Ya Tell Henry The Sunday Tribune wanted to talk to Lord Henry Mountcharles about Dylan, but he wasn't having any. He wanted to talk about the rise of Sinn Fein and the parallels he could see between this country and the Weimar Republic. Not so much the parallels between the Fine Gael and Weimar governments, as to equate the Nazis and the Proves, In the bad old days landlords had to huddle in private and worry about the rise in popular protest; but now they can confide their innermost thoughts to the nation in the Sunday Tribune. Million Dollar Bash The bus dropped its human cargo a mile outside Slane. The walk uphill into the village illustrated how easy it is for the farmer and the cowboy to be friends, especially when the farmers are all cowboys. It cost you 2 to park your car in with dozens of others in a field of yellow stubble - pitching a tent was 2 extra. Black marketeers offered concert tickets at 15, just 2.50 over the official rate. No tout would make his fortune in Slane. Buff-coloured programmes which looked like leftovers from a Croke Park final retailed for a pound. Clammy-faced cooks sold fish-andchips for 1.50 from smoky vans. C D stalls offered "plenty of goodness" in whole peanuts and pure applejuice. Beautiful people held out earrings and bracelets and tried to touch your perfect money with their minds. And from the back of every second car along the route, somebody was selling two-litre bottles of lemonade, which a .fAGILLAUGUST 1984

few drank but most poured instantly away. A quizzical onlooker asked if this was Maurice Pratt's latest scheme, but soon all was explained. Harp was retailing at a pound a bottle and bottles were banned from the concert. It was simply easier to have the local publicans fill the plastic bottles with beer on draught. Gates of Eden The crowd filed in six-deep past teeshirted bouncers, who checked for bottles, knives and ice-packs. Santana were boring the pants off everyone with protracted instrumentals which allowed each member of the group to become famous for a quarter of an hour of redundant virtuosity. Beneath the stage, silly little no-minds held up their hands so that everybody could see them clapping. It was 2.50pm. Some would still be wedged in there at 9 o'clock. A passer-by asked how they cope with the call of nature, and remarked that behind the goal at Anfield they simply roll up the Echo. Santana had been and gone. Not that anyone had noticed. The Jokerman knows that if you surround yourself with dullards, your act will always appear brilliant. Changing of the Guard So Dylan's next set of fall-guys came on, UB 40 by name - a good band who have made an honest living by rescuing Neil Diamond songs from the clutches of Neil Diamond. Reversing the customary trajectory of hit songs, they steal the white man's menopausal music and repackage it for r.eggae- loving Carribbeans. It's still a bad deal in return for all those songs the white man stole, but it beats unemployment in one of Thatcher's ghost towns. And UB 40 voiced their protest: Nobody knows me But I'm always there A statistical reminder Of a world that doesn't care. And five thousand registered members of Young Fine Gael roared their endorsement. Nobody knows the radical right like the radical right. Today the barricades and boot boys tomorrow the twenty-fifty liquidation in the office for articled clerks. Forever Young Upon Housing Project Hill, you could have both fortune and fame, or, at least, comfort and a reasonable view. Leftovers from the Sixties wheeled baby-buggies and laid plates down on rugs on which they had once laid their wives. Professors of politics rubbed shoulders with social workers whom they hadn't seen for fifteen years. When we meet again, introduced as friends, please don't let on; that you knew me when I was hungry and it

was your world. Wives of prosperous provincial dentists met schoolteachers whom they had almost married. The muesli-eating classes were having a field day, but they were having it about a quarter of a mile from the stage. A stoned man fell laterally each time he tried to walk up the hill. "The Pope got more, the Pope got more," he growled at the throng. "Yes, but he didn't charge twelvefifty." The Pope (to give him his due) .did supply more porta cabins and lavatories than Lord Henry. Former Chelsea girls queued for what seemed like hours to gain access to a 100. Their husbands simply headed for the woods, where they ran an even-money chance of being accosted by some mystery tramp with vacuumed eyes who wanted to make a deal. How does it [eel? "Hi Daddy", mocked a teenage girl. "Get knotted . . . this is my music ... you are the invaders ... you are the crashers . . . you don't follow a word of it." Daddy's friends applauded and at least one thought of Scott Fitzgerald's remark that an artist writes for the youth of today, the critics of tomorrow, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. The schoolmasters were all on the hill peering through binoculars to see if the Good Samaritan was dressed for the feast, Like The Rolling Stones? He was - in high boots, black coat and Frank Sinatra mascara. At first, it was just like the Adelphi in '66 - he scowled and said nothing for half an hour. But he sang like the devil. Highway 61 Revisited, Maggie's Farm, All Along the Watchtower, Just Like a Woman. The crowd in front of the stage waved and surged. Every thirty seconds someone in danger of being crushed on the railing was pulled over it to safety by roadies. Photographers hung precariously from stage turrets in search of crazy angles: Securitymen hosed down the yips every fifteen minutes, but not once did Dylan deign to emulate Jagger and grab the hose himself. Nor was there any catwalk or physical titillation. The song and dance man had shed half his act. This was clutter-free Radio Dylan. Suddenly he seemed to get hoarse. He laughed giddily, introduced his guitarist for a number and then walked off. By now the stagefront yips were mostly bored. They had had a taste of Dylan and they didn't like him. (They didn't like him any better at the Adelphi eighteen years earlier when he sang with his back to the audience, or when he turned up the alreadyblaring amplification to annoy them, or when he sang the inscrutable Desolation Row after they had pleaded for the hit-parade-song Positively Fourth Street) But the muesli-eaters on the

hill were terrified. Was he gone dry at the end of his tour? Or just up to his old tricks again? It would be just like Dylan to quit after an hour. And it was just like them to recall that he owed them a few songs from his abbreviated night in '66. Why does Dylan always do Ireland last? asked somebody. Maybe, said someone else, they pay him less. It was all a bit worrying. The Second Coming Back out he came for Part Two, only this time he was to sing unaccompanied on acoustic guitar. The song full of first-liners Hard Rain. Then It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding. Up on Housing Project Hill the crowd were going all pensive and gooey. You didn't want it to happen, but those goddam goose-pimples just had to come. A handsome woman in a maroon dress stood upright to the music, resting her hands on the shoulders of her ten-year-old son, initiating him in a holy sacrament. Then, at the end, the merest ripple of applause from the hill, and total silence from the yips. "Thank you," drawled the savage and sarcastic bard. "A very decent crowd, just like home," he added, lest these barbed and bitter subtleties be wasted on the evening air. They were ... and always will be, because .Dylan songs were written for solitary .bitter souls in lonely rooms and not for mobs of throbbing yahoos at rock concerts. And how deviously he defeated the yahoos who tried to join in the choruses, by altering the pacing, the phrasing and even the melodic line. On and on he went, singing everything - everything, that is, except Born Again Songs. Not that messianic imagery was lacking in the songs which remained, but on this hot July night Bob Dylan was acknowledging no higher God than himself. He had come to the conclusion that he himself was God, because every time he talked to the Almight it seemed as if he was talking to himself: In a little hilltop village They gambled for my clothes I offered her salvation And she gave me a lethal dose. I offered up my innocence, Got repaid with scorn. 'Come in', she says, 'I'll give ya Shelter from the storm'. The sexualisation of Calvary was complete: She.walked up to me so gracefully And took my crown of thorns. 'Come in', she says, 'I'll give ya Shelter from the storm'. It was indeed the Second Coming. And as he launched into ever more labyrinthine lyrics, abandoning the obvious beats, the yips up front yearned for something simple, or at least something that sounded like it did

on the record. Tonight a mid-life Dylan was remaking himself to the outrage of the very young. Tonight youth was restraining reckless middle age - and losing hands down. The yobbos stopped their abortive chants and waves, and opted instead for the sound of one hand clapping. Up on the hill there was quiet appreciation and relief. The intellectual vanguard of Bewleys and the Bailey had scored

.were guests in the castle. Peering through the wire fence which kept the ordinary middle classes at a safe distance from the castle, the faithful departing could catch tantalising glimpses of the great and almost great. The media johnnies from Montrose were slumming it on Pimms. A feminist wit rolled smokes for a Fine Gael fuhrer. A Noted Northern Socialist swapped pleasantries with Lord Henry, and was invited to stay the night. Half the occupants of the front bench stared out at the glass menagerie of Almost Beautiful People which was staring in at them. Hard-chaws from the NUJ rubbed shoulders with the acid-head school of cultural criticism. Dick Burke thought of better days and recalled at two year's distance the photo-call with Mick Jagger. ("Dick and Mick" - now there's a handy example of the metaphysical conceit, by which heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.) Something is happening, but ya don't know what it is, do ya, Mister Jones? The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain describes in his classic novel of childhood Tom Sawyer how Tom and some other boys run away from home to a place called Jackson's Island, a kind of Rousseauistic Butlins where they can smoke, swear and sleep under the stars. After a while, however, the fun begins to pall and the boys become anxious lest the authorities give them up as lost. But they do not want their idyll to end, so Tom hits on a plan. He sneaks a written message back to his Aunt Polly's kitchen. It reads: "We ain't dead we are only off being pirates. " The all-American wicked rebel is not really wicked or a rebel at all, but simply a high-spirited lad who wants the freedom to strike a defiant pose before he conforms. Tom is the original version of all those cleaned-up hooligans whom we have come to know and love in the American century - of Elvis Presley who wagged his outlawed hips for a year before having his hair cut and joining the army; of Jack Kerouac who scored with angelheaded hipsters on a thousand highways before going back to memere's house to be respectable and die; of James Dean the rebel without a cause, who tried for revolution and settled for Natalie Wood; and of Bob Dylan, who called out the armies of protest, and when they had assembled, slunk off around the corner and married a nice Methodist girl. Whose loss he now mourns. The ultimate rebel phoney. It's all right, rna; we ain't dead - we are just off being pirates. It .should be the motto of Young Fine Gael. These days the rebels are all superstraights. MAGILL AUGUST 1984 59

a rare but significant victory over the heads of the SFX. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue Like the Almighty, Dylan said goodbye twice ... and came again in glory with Van Morrison. Their harmonised chorus on It's All Over Now, Baby Blue was jeopardised only by the fact that one of them may be unable to sing. The voice once likened to the howl of a dog whose leg was ensnared on barbed wire joined in uneasy combination with one of the legendary Masters of Rock. It was an awkwardly beautiful moment when they lost the occasional note ... and lost it again on the classic Morrison version of Tupelo Honey. But nobody cared. Those who had left after the First Going must have cursed their foolishness when they read of this dynamic duo next day; but everybody knew that the real end would come with Blowin' in the Wind. After God on Our Side. Which is not sung in Germany. But then Hurricane was not sung in Ireland, in case certain people might get ideas. Certain people who

""' ~ ~ ~ .~

&i
Cl

"" ~

THERE is nothing in the report of the British House of Commons Public . Accounts Committee on the de Lorean scam which was not forseen back in 1979 when the Detroit dope dealer was pushing his project in the North. That de Lorean was a crook; that the car wouldn't work; that even if it did there was no possible market for it; that under the company structure envisaged the tens of millions of pounds the British Government was pumping in would give it no effective share of control; and that the entire enterprise would end in a shambles: all this was accurately forecast and argued in detail in a pamphlet published as an edition of the "Belfast Bulletin" by the Workers' Research Centre early in 1979. The pamphlet was mainly written by Ed Maloney, now Northern editor of The Irish Times. Copies were presented to the Northern Ireland Office, the Northern Ireland Development Agency, Northern members of parliament and every newspaper in Belfast and Dublin. For his pains Maloney came under fierce attack, not least from the Workers' Party, whose "economic affairs" supremo, Eamonn Smullen, accused him of being in league with the Provos in an effort to deter investment from west Belfast. Smullen waxed lyrical about the de Lorean project and its potential for "proletarianising " the lurnpen masses on the Falls. Which might help explain how come the party of the proletariat has been shiftily silent about the affair in recent weeks.

Garret. Why on earth should the downtrodden PAYE workers payout up to 11,665 a year (the advertised salary), to provide Garret FitzGerald and Peter Prendergast with this handy little facility? This is not a civil service job. It is a Fine Gael job. Fine Gael should pay for it. I trust we will not have to wait until the Dail reopens after the summerlong holiday for somebody to kick up hell about this latest example of Coalition cheek. The public coffers are not a slush-fund for the Fine Gael party.

*****
JIM Fixx, author of the best-selling "The Complete Book of Running", has snuffed it from a heart attack while jogging in Vermont. Quite took my breath away, that piece of news.

Nicky

Kelly

which Christy Moore wrote about him and recorded some time back. As far as we know RTE played the song only once, at a time when Kelly happened to be listening to the radio. The local radio in Portlaoise, Radio Screw, was never hesitant about playing the song. Even better, Kelly could hear the warders singing it from time to time. It seems that the record was on the juke box in the staff canteen.

*****

*****
ON July 18 the civil service commission advertised in the daily press for a "Media Researcher" at the Department of the Taoiseach. Cushy numbers' being hard to come by these days, I phoned Dr FitzGerald's department to find out the score. "We know nothing about it," I was told. "That ad was placed by the commission." I phoned the commission and they did know because they had in front of them the job specification sent down by the Department of the Taoiseach with the request that the ad be placed. The media researcher will be required to keep files of news items and comment appearing in the press, to monitor radio and television news and current affairs programmes and to obtain sound or video tapes of certain of these for filing, to maintain and index a picture file, to compile a weekly summary of news and political comment and much else along the same lines. In other words, to keep tabs on what the hacks are saying about

*****
NOT, to be fair to them, that the Workers' Party were alone in denouncing opponents of the de Lorean ripoff. Far from it. And unlike Lord Fitt of Hell's Bells they aren't persisting in defending the project. On breakfast TV the day after the publication of the PAC report, Fitt was still arguing that Roy Mason had been right to fling money into the fraud. Is there nothing this man won't do to get on television? I do believe he'd even talk with Henry Kelly.

*****
EVEN in the depths of Portlaoise prison Nicky Kelly had no trouble hearing "The Wicklow Boy", the song

I FIND it strange that the Oireachtas committee on marital breakdown hasn't paid more attention to abortion. Surely divorce could be handled in the same way? All that is necessary is for the Free State to recognise foreign divorces. Citizens could pop over to England, get divorced and pop back. I am assured that this would not require a change in the Constitution. Simple. And what, after all, is England there for?

"professional, salaried" women in the latest statistics. I understand that many arrive at abortion clinics in London and Liverpool with the simple explanation that: "The nuns sent me". In light of which it is crystal clear we must look for a different explanation for the earthquake.

*****
AMID all this talk about prison security nobody seems to have mentioned that for a number of months now it has been possible to open the cell doors in St Patrick's with a bucket handle. This is known to the prisoners, the prison officers and to the Department of Justice. The prison officers believe that the Department is in the process of arranging for a man to be sent up to have a look at the problem. He's expected "after the holidays". And another thing. This business of a prisoner in Mountjoy going for the throat of a priest during Mass ...

*****
"THE plane flies up; my thoughts remain below." This Henry Kelly guesting in The Irish' Times Saturday Column (July 21) describing a departure from Berlin. Chrissakes Henry, the plane would hardly fly down. Kelly's three thousand word column was possibly the most sustained piece of self-regarding, semi-literate banality ever printed in a "quality" newspaper. Entirely typical was an account of how Kelly entertained guests of the TVam weekend programme who had just participated in a "lookalike " contest: "I stand on the canal bank in the sunshine and have my picture taken with Koiak, Elizabeth Taylor and Sue Ellen because, when they're being nice, ordinary, normal people they want a photo with me which is damn decent of them and I love it."

MS Maureen Cairnduff, who I'm told works as a '~hostess", is involved in compiling a list of the "1,000 most influential people in Ireland". My sources indicate that she is daily in receipt of anguished phone calls from persons anxious to be included and nervous that they might not. Many of these people offer bribes and blandishments, others burst into tears and say that it will break their mothers' hearts if they are left out, a few issue direct threats. But I am told that Ms Cairnduff is unswayed by these entreaties; and fair play to her. As to the criteria she uses, we can deduce what we like from the fact that Jim Hand is in, but Michael Hand out, Hal Roche is in. Joe Mulholland and Ma Baker are "under consideration". Bono is in but not Brush Shiels, which seems very odd. I have informed Ms Cairnduff that if she includes me in I'll come to one of her parties.

<'.

*****
REMEMBER Lord Widgery, the fellow who arrived in a British Army helicopter to enquire into Bloody Sunday? And then told a pack of lies about it? Well, he was mad. This emerges from an article in the Guardian (July 2) which has attracted suspiciously little .attention, The late Lord Widgery, it seems, was middling daft when he was appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1971. As time went on he experienced more and more difficulty hearing or speaking and made less and less sense when he did manage to speak and less and less sense of what he heard when he did manage to hear. He also had' a habit of falling asleep during cases. By 1980, when he retired, he was generally accounted mad as a march hare. The reason he retained his position so long can be traced to the traditional solidarity of lawyers and other judges who combined to cover up for the oldloon for years. Couldn't happen here.

*****
IF Eileen Flynn had had an abortion instead of a baby she wouldn't have been turfed out of her job by the nuns. We know from their pronouncements during the referendum campaign last year that the RC clergy's line on women who have had abortions is that they should be swamped with sympathy and understanding and given every opportunity to get their Christian act together again with no big guilt trip laid on them. Had Ms Flynn got rid of the kid, come back and confessed all, not only would she still be in secure and pensionable employment, squadrons of nuns operating in relays would even now be making lovebom bing runs over her place of residence. I wouldn't doubt that this conclusion has already been drawn by a goodly number of unmarried teachers in RC schools and that this accounts for the disproportionate number of

.zI

1::
~ ~ ~ .~ ~ ~

I seem to remember that during the last Mountjoy riots Minister Michael Noonan told an interviewer that there were men in the prison "who would cut your throat in the church and walk out smiling. " To the best of my knowledge nobody ever took a weapon to anybody's throat in the church in Mountjoy until Michael Noonan raised the idea.

*****
ALSO from the Guardian: "A police officer kicked a man so hard that the sole of his boot came off, it was claimed at Leeds County court. The man, Mr John Marshall, aged 57, was accused of criminal damage to a police boot." Also couldn't happen here.