Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
I think of a freckly, fair haired lad
of fifteen, an Irish Traveller –
from that nomadic, hard grafting culture
spawned by the Great Famine. As he ran
from danger across a playing field
he tripped and was killed by two youths, fellow
Catholics with Irish surnames, one of whom
allegedly said, as he stamped with both feet
on the boy’s head, ‘He’s only a fucking
Gypsy.’ The judge did not consider the crime
racist. (Possibly the manifold
ironies had leached into his judgement
and atrophied it).
The dying corporal was spread eagled
in his underpants, his executioners
and judges – a mob of fathers and sons –
dressed, as he had been, undercover,
in trainers, denims and a sweater.
Civil war, for almost a generation,
had burgeoned. Solutions receded. Rights
gained were matched by rights removed: all our freedoms
lessened so neighbours might vote, have jobs,
houses. Things did not make sense, only words.
‘Derry’ was a political statement.
‘Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.’ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.
I am contemplating, in the Walker Art Gallery,
Liverpool, the statue of William Huskisson, once
the city’s Tory MP and sometime President of the Board of Trade
but much better known as the world’s first railway fatality
at the opening of the line to fetch cotton quickly and cheaply
from the Mersey’s docks to the mills of South East Lancashire.
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS