Marking Time

Around the time of the Good Friday Agreement and for a few years after, I developed an unhealthy interest in the politics of Northern Ireland. I followed all the news stories, the sub-plots, the sideshows, and the distractions. I bought obscure books on the subject, explored imaginative and fanciful solutions, and learned several different versions of history.

Whatever your opinion on the merits of the Good Friday Agreement and its potential to solve the problem you have to admit that it’s a curious and unique beast and - in the early days at least - it was a very interesting subject to throw your two cents at.

And throw them I did. Sometime in 1999 I started following the Peace In Northern Ireland discussion forum hosted on the CNN website. It was a reasonably civilised forum, and probably one of the most balanced given the dominance of pro-Nationalist and pro-Sinn Féin opinion on the internet at the time. It was mainly made up of Irish-Americans who were for the most part sympathetic to Sinn Féin but there was a sprinkling of Northern Ireland ex-pats, the odd Briton poking a stick in the hornets nest, and a few native Irish too, representing a diversity of the political spectrum. In fact the debates between the native Irish were most enlightening given that it was they who were bringing their real experience of the situation to the forum.

After a year or two of lurking I started contributing under a pseudonym. My contributions weren’t exactly earth shattering, more closer to the ‘why can’t we all just get on with real life and stop the fantasy politics’ line than the more popular Mopery line . (An aside: MOPE = Most Oppressed People Ever. Mopery = The act of indulging yourself in the fantasy that you and ‘your people’ are the MOPE).

One of the more reasonable and thoughtful contributors to the CNN board was Mick Fealty, now the main man behind Ireland’s best known political blog, Slugger O’Toole. Most people think of Mick as ‘Slugger’. But he’s not. And Slugger’s not the character from The Irish Rover either (at least not directly) as the Wikipedia entry incorrectly states.

Slugger O’ Toole (or if I recall correctly “slugger o’toole” - no caps) was actually another poster on the CNN Discussion Forum. In fact, slugger was the pseudonym of Tim Murphy, an Irish-American nationalist/republican who posted regularly under his own name. But slugger was no republican fellow-traveller. Not by a long shot. He was a caricature of the most unrepentant, unreconstructed, Orange bigot you could find, a cross between Twenty Major and Ian Paisley, if you can imagine.

The original title of the Slugger O’Toole blog was Letter to Slugger O’Toole. I think it also had a sub-heading “from an idea by Tim Murphy” or something like that. I liked the idea of the blog being a letter to slugger. I imagined poor lonely slugger in his alternative Ulster receiving strange correspondence from Mick Fealty describing what was going on in this foreign place; the real Ulster. I don’t know why Mick changed the title. I suppose it’s too much of an in-joke given that only a handful of people knew the real slugger.

As for my own interest in Northern politics, it seemed the more I learned the less interesting the subject became. The tragedy is that so much pain and suffering and squandered potential has resulted from a fight over national allegiances that have no real relevance or usefulness anymore.

Mark Waters marked time at 9:31 pm on January 18th, 2006 .

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