General view of the anti-G8 march in Belfast City Centre, Northern Ireland on the eve of a meeting of world leaders in Co Fermanagh

(You can follow Brian Rowan on Twitter by clicking here)

On Monday morning as the city’s clocks ticked towards eleven a chunk of Belfast began to breathe and move again.

For hours it had been wrapped in a kind of suffocating and smothering security blanket.

During these G8 days, we are watching unprecedented policing –security that in the eyes of many will have been over-the-top.

This is a ‘what-if’ operation shaped by worst case scenarios.

It is about hoping for the best while at the same time preparing for the worst.

For decades, this city lived in the shadow of threat and on Monday it had a President on its patch.

So, in some places, everything stopped or moved in the slow wheel turns and steps measured and dictated by security need.

The express train from Holywood to Belfast was anything but.

When it wasn’t stopped, it travelled at snail’s pace – at 5mph between the halt at Sydenham and Central Station.

More than once the conductor apologised, but what could he do on this day and in these security circumstances.

On the way to the station I noticed a Durham Constabulary police van in a convoy of vehicles – another reminder that this operation is not just about the PSNI and Northern Ireland.

This is big stage, and in that wider frame, there is much more to think and worry about.

Many of the world’s most-powerful leaders are here and, until they leave, absolutely no chances will be taken.

So the police numbers and other ‘hidden security assets’ in this operation are designed as a deterrent – to frighten off any threats or violence.

“Boredom equals success,” a senior police officer commented – meaning a lack of incidents will mean this huge policing mission has been accomplished, but these days are about so much more than security and all its paraphernalia.

On Monday, just minutes after the Obama convoy sped off from the Waterfront Hall, I bumped into the former Presbyterian Moderator Norman Hamilton in a city centre coffee shop.

He had been inside the hall for the President’s speech – a “magic and brilliant” moment to use his words.

“There were some very pointed comments about the road still to travel delivered in a warm and encouraging way,” he told me.

In what he had to say, Obama was pointing and pushing this place towards its next steps, talking both to our young people and to the conflict generation, reminding them in his many references to the walls that still divide us of an incomplete and unfinished peace.

The President name checked Sylvia Gordon of Groundwork NI and the initiative in a north Belfast park to begin to open up those walls by making a gate for people to walk through.

It is a project that involved many, and we shouldn’t take these things for granted.

There are still small minded people including some who want to unpick that good work that is happening in north Belfast and elsewhere.

“People need to understand the difficulty that we have trying to promote this work,” John Bunting of the North Belfast Community Development and Transition Group told this website.

“There are people in our community taking risks and there are people who don’t want to move on,” he continued.

“The gate is not the only initiative.

“You have shared housing on the Limestone interface, the Cityside project, the Duncairn Partnership and the ‘Events for All’ initiative,” he said.

He is describing jigsaw pieces in a process of peace building, but there are bigger challenges on that road Obama says we still have to travel.

The past, the needs of victims many of whom have been forgotten, marches, flags, shared housing and education as part of a shared future are things that still need to be discussed and agreed.

So, a part of these G8 days is about what this place still needs to do to develop and build its peace.

On Saturday outside the City Hall I watched a peculiar interface take shape as visiting police officers created a human wall between loyalist flag protesters and the bigger anti-G8 rally.

Some loyalists taunted those ‘mutual aid’ officers with chants of PSNI/IRA scum.

It was small minded and unthinking and it undermines the genuine concerns of the PUL community.

There are big issues still to be addressed, and they won’t be decided on the streets.

The leaders of loyalism and unionism have negotiated on bigger issues.

They need to talk these things through with others – these issues which are the unfinished business of the developing peace.

Much of the focus of recent days has been on security as Northern Ireland hosts the G8 Summit.

It has been a world stage, and there has been world attention on a place that is seen as peace success story, but we need to remember something.

Obama is right when he talks about the fragility of peace, and John Bunting is right when he describes the risks involved.

Beyond these headline days made by the presence of world leaders this place needs to think about how it completes its peace.

We have all seen and smiled at that fun picture of Gerry Adams holding Sammy Wilson’s arm up during a Mexican wave inside the Waterfront Hall.

On a more serious note, it’s time for the leaders of this place to put their hands up for the next challenges.

It’s not about self-interest and playing to small crowds.

It’s about doing what leaders are meant to do.

(You can follow Brian Rowan on Twitter by clicking here)

President Barack Obama at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.

(You can follow Brian John Spencer on Twitter by clicking here)

It doesn’t matter what anyone else says. Fifteen years after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland is a different, better place. Its capital city like any other in Europe: a bustling metropolitan centre lined with coffee shops and boutiques; stocked with an ambitious, well educated and outward looking people. The surrounding towns, provincial villages and scattered communities aren’t much different.

“Chic” as Obama put it.

And whether the people are Protestant or catholic they generally want for one thing: to be normal, to prosper and to get one with life. But then of course there’s a problem. The jackboot thugs, unmentionables and extravagantly delinquent types wreck all this “chic”-ness for everyone else.

Fanatical loyalists purport to support the union, but then don’t vote and then go buck mad when a consequence of their political apathy backfires and their union flag is removed from city hall. And in their spasms of apoplectic rage they do nothing but drag the union flag and all that is good about unionism through the mud. Fanatical republicans do much the same and in the pursuit of “liberation” desecrate everything that republican principles stand for.

But there’s hope. There must be.

And if you take one thing away from the Obama address at the Water Front Hall it’s this: if you want stability and prosperity in this province, you’re going to have to get off the fence and wage peace.  As Obama said, quoting Helen McCann: “Peace is harder than war.” Obama continued:

“It’s within your power to bring about change.  Whether you take a stand against violence and hatred and tell extremists on both sides that no matter how many times they attack the peace, they will not succeed. That is in your hands. That’s up to you”

“The terms of peace may be made by political leaders but the fate of peace is up to all of us.”

That means that the silent majority need to wake up from their slumber.  I’ve spoken about the “chic”, middle class and their tendency for coasting before: when in March a blowhard mobocracy were driving Northern Ireland back into the past, the cappuccino drinking middle class were snuggling up at a TED event at Stormont.

But the informed, civilised and “chic” majority must come out of this cosiness. Next time loyalists make violence the rule of the game and then say that PSNI are a corrupt force because they get heavy-handed, then the “chic” section of Northern Ireland needs to say no. When fanatics use language about politics that is completely foreign to mainstream thinking, then the “chic” class needs to say no. When people break the law and march in contravention of the Public Procession Act then the “chic” middle class needs to say no. When the Orange Order and bands march headlong into a catholic area in the full knowledge there’ll be violence, then we the “chic” class needs to say no. When Stephen Farry cheers graduates into university in the face of facts that say there’s no jobs, we the “chic” class need to say no. When 25% of our young people are unemployed, we the “chic” class need to say no. Because of course: “jobs and opportunities are central to peace” (Obama).

The silent majority needs to stand against the shrill minority of anarcho-republicans and anarcho-loyalists who live in a pre-1998 world and say a very firm “no, this is our country too.”

The mute majority must break its silence. Christopher Hitchens  said that ‘silent majorities do not make history’ (‘King Billy’s Scattered Legions’, New Statesman, 1972). But we can show this false.

And how the majority do this?  Well as Obama made clear, and as others did on the subsequent radio and television debate, and as people said on social media: we need to empower the young – let them drive and determine the public debate and discourse.

Our current leadership are locked in a curdled mess of old enmities and unbending prejudices - as Napoleon said: “To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.” Objectively our leaders may be physically in the 21^st Century, but the minds of Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness and other politicans are locked in the 60s and 70s.

And so Alex Kane is absolutely correct when he said on Twitter that “the present generation of politicians… can’t be the vehicle for next steps forward.”

Hannah Nelson of Methodist College Belfast introduces Michelle Obama during her visit to the Waterfront Hall, Belfast.

Let’s give the people like Hannah Nelson an actual space in society. We need people like her to be an anchor, a reference point and a communication conduit for and into the majority normalised section of Northern Ireland. Otherwise we pass our destiny and fortunes into the hands of extremists.

Young people like Hannah Nelson can be our Malala Yousafzai. Just as Malala rallied against the no-brained, sewer suckers in Pakistan that wanted to turn the country back into a tyrannical theocracy, so we need someone to stand up to the jackboot lunatics who seek to push our Province back into the dark ages of the 70s and 80s.

This may appear like swivel-eyed thinking, of course would to a parochial Northern Ireland, but new thinking, ambitious measures and extraordinary leaps of faith are required in this new age.

(You can follow Brian John Spencer on Twitter by clicking here)

(You can follow Dan McGinn on Twitter by clicking here)

About three years ago, at the height of ‘Twilight’ mania and the popular HBO series ‘True Blood’, a clinical psychologist Dr Belisa Vranich posed the question in the Huffington Post: why have vampire stories consistently fascinated audiences?

She came up with 10 reasons, which can be summarised as follows.

Vampire stories resonate with teenagers because they are always loners but not lonely – they are creatures who are different from the rest of society and function without ever needing to conform or seek the approval of their contemporaries.

Vampires are minimalists who have no need for fancy gadgetry, weaponry or technology.

Vampires always look cool, with colours that never go out of fashion.

Vampires have fangs and resort to arguably the most primitive and compellingly shocking form of violence – assaulting people with their mouths.

Vampires are intelligent and in some stories have telepathic powers.

Vampires are powerful in an understated way unlike the burly action heroes or superheroes that dominate our movie screens.

Vampires are fearless, surviving all kinds of disasters and persecutions.

Vampires only care about themselves and their own needs – most notably their lust for blood.

Vampires are sensitive, tormented souls – expressing their emotions, sensuality and sensitivity in a grandiose way.

Vampires are the archetypal bad boys – they are evil, yet sexy.

Over the last four years, it has been difficult to escape vampires on the big screen – whether it was Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s ‘Dark Shadows’, Adam Sandlier voicing a vampire in the iffy animated comedy ‘Hotel Transylvania’ or Tomas Alfredson’s acclaimed Swedish drama, ‘Let the Right One In’.

Much of this was down to the success of the ‘Twilight’ movies and ‘True Blood’ and, before that, Joss Whedon’s popular TV series, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and Francis Coppola’s adaptation of ‘Bram Stoner’s Dracula’.

But there is no doubt Neil Jordan also played his part, with his lavish 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s ‘Interview with The Vampire’ starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dundst, Antonio Banderas and Stephen Rea earning him his biggest box office hit.

Jordan has returned to the genre in 2013 with his new movie, ‘Byzantium’, teaming up again with producer Stephen Woolley, but typically he has given the format a new twist – a feminine twist.

The principal characters are a mother and daughter vampire duo, on the run from a shadowy band of vampires known as The Brotherhood.

Saoirse Ronan in Byzantium

Clara (played by Gemma Arterton) and her daughter Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) have been forced to move from town to town over the centuries after Clara escaped a brothel during the Napoleonic era and discovered the key to potential vampire immortality in the Aran Islands.

The Brotherhood reluctantly accepts Clara but turns against her when she breaks their rule that no other female should be admitted into their exclusive vampire circle. She does this by taking Eleanor to the west coast of Ireland to become a vampire.

The voluptuous Clara uses her body and hundreds of years experience in the sex trade to earn a living for them as they move from location to location but she also coldly satisfies her vampire bloodlust by killing the corrupt or anyone who threatens to expose their true identity.

Clara is also a protective mother to the teenage Eleanor but their relationship is turbulent.

By way of contrast, Eleanor only exercises her need to sup blood through mercy killings of elderly people seeking a release from the ravages of old age and infirmity.

At the start of the film, Eleanor and Clara are forced to flee a council estate in the middle of a typically wet English winter to a dreary seaside town.

There, while trying to earn cash as a prostitute, Clara stumbles upon a lonely soul Noah (Daniel Mays), who is grieving for his mother, and takes advantage of him by moving into ‘Byzantium’ – a rundown seaside boarding house that used to be a hotel.

Noah has run the business into the ground but spotting an opportunity to scrape a living, Clara turns it into a brothel.

While wandering through the town, Eleanor strikes up a friendship with Frank (Caleb Landry Jones), an awkward young waiter who is studying in a local college and has been recovering from leukaemia.

She enrols in a storytelling class but disturbs her tutor (Tom Hollander) and the principal (Maria Doyle Kennedy) when she writes during an autobiographical assignment about how she became a vampire.

While hugely impressed by the quality of her writing, Hollander’s character fears Eleanor has made the tale up as a cry for help.

With the Brotherhood also closing in on the duo, Jordan ratchets up the tension with all the experience he can muster as an accomplished and classy filmmaker.

‘Byzantium’ is a typically brooding work from the Sligo born author and director, working from a lively script by Moira Buffini based on her play ‘A Vampire Story’.

As with other Jordan works, sex and death looms large with Gemma Arterton’s character literally embodying both.

But it is also a coming of age drama and a film about sexual politics – with Clara, in particular, struggling to overcome male oppression.

Jordan returns to the supernatural myths of ‘The Company of Wolves’ but there are flashes too of other Jordan movies – most notably the seedy sex trade depicted in ‘Mona Lisa’, the double lives adopted by the lead characters in ‘We’re No Angels’ and ‘The Crying Game’, the awkward teenage seaside resort friendship in ‘The Miracle’, the dysfunctional family dynamics of ‘The Butcher Boy’, a female character caught in a cycle of violence like ‘The Brave One’ and a sense of foreboding similar to that which dominated ‘Mona Lisa’ and ‘In Dreams’.

Sean Bobbitt’s lush cinematography, in particular, recalls ‘In Dreams’ with its gorgeous reds but he also brilliantly captures the cheap neon lights of the sleepy, wet seaside resort in winter.

As in previous movies, Jordan tips a nod to the British Hammer horror tradition and to Alfred Hitchcock – most notably ‘Psycho’ and ‘The Birds’.

Powered along by a strong screenplay, ‘Byzantium’ also works because of the strength of its two female leads.

Saoirse Ronan turns in yet another flawless performance – perfectly capturing the torment of Eleanor who has been condemned to live for centuries as a perpetual teenager and is desperate to break free.

Gemma Arterton convinces as the wily and savage Clara – using her sexual allure to devastating effect.

The camera fetishises Arterton’s body and, in particular, her cleavage – leaving Jordan and Bobbitt open to criticism that it is too lascivious.

However this is not some cheap saucy postcard performance.

Gemma Arterton shows much more depth and impressively conveys a mother’s profound love and self-sacrifice for her child  - even if Clara’s protectionist instincts towards Eleanor are sometimes oppressive and occasionally psychotic.

Of all the characters, Clara appears to embody all 10 of Dr Vranich’s reasons for the enduring popularity of the vampire genre and Arterton seems to relish it.

Tom Hollander, Daniel Mays and Maria Doyle Kennedy also deliver perfectly judged supporting performances.

There are decent turns too from Jonny Lee Miller as the lecherous and corrupt Napoleonic era British Army Captain Ruthven, Sam Reilly as his military colleague Darvell and Israeli actor, Uri Gavriel as the menacing Brotherhood heavy, Savella.

But oddly, as in Jordan’s ‘The Miracle’, if there is one flawed performance it is that of the male teenage love interest, Caleb Landry Jones whose sickly but rather stiff Frank sports a rather bizarre Dutch (or is it Danish?) accent.

Landry Jones’ performance isn’t terrible. It’s just a minor disappointment in an otherwise entertaining and quirky film.

By the time this review appears, ‘Byzantium’ may well have disappeared from Northern Ireland’s multiplexes but catch it when it screens again at the Queen’s Film Theatre between June 21 and 27.

It deserves to be seen on the big screen and, while it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it certainly has enough stirring set pieces and themes that will linger in the brain for some time.

(You can follow Dan McGinn on Twitter by clicking here)

(You can follow Dan McGinn on Twitter by clicking here)

In the previous article about the career of Neil Jordan, we saw how the Sligo born director flirted with Hollywood early in his career and got badly burned.

After returning to Britain and Ireland for more modest projects, he produced an Oscar winning screenplay as well as directing ‘The Crying Game’ – one of the most talked about movies of 1992.

This earned him a second act in Hollywood – a challenge he seized with relish, delivering his biggest box office success with ‘Interview With The Vampire’.

Jordan had now reached the stage of his career where he was given more freedom to express himself and he found a co-producer in the form of David Geffen who was prepared to throw money at his projects.

With his latest movie ‘Byzantium’ about to hit the screens, we consider in this final part of this two part retrospective, the realisation of a personal dream to make the ambitious epic ‘Michael Collins’ right through to his last movie, the modest and whimsical Co Cork fishing tale, ‘Ondine’.

Michael Collins (1996)

In the wake of the IRA and loyalist ceasefires, David Geffen and Warner Brothers gave the green light to Jordan’s ambitious historical epic about the 1920s IRA leader, Michael Collins.

Hollywood had for a long time toyed with the idea of Collins’ biopic, with Eoghan Harris working on a screenplay with Michael Cimmino of ‘The Deer Hunter’ for Gabriel Byrne and Kevin Costner also interested at one stage and even scouting locations.

However, emboldened by his recent box office successes, Jordan cast Liam Neeson as Collins (fresh from his success with Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schinder’s List’), Alan Rickman as Eamon de Valera, Julia Roberts as the hero’s love interest Kitty Kiernan, Aidan Quinn as Harry Boland and Stephen Rea as Ned Broy, an IRA intelligence gatherer working in Dublin Castle.

Inevitably, with emotions still raw about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Jordan’s screenplay did come under fire in some quarters for taking liberties with historical fact but the fact is it is a handsome biopic that is beautifully filmed by Chris Menges and astutely edited by Tony Lawson and J Patrick Duffner.

Liam Neeson is magnetic in the lead role and is complemented by Stephen Rea’s intelligent performance as Broy, Ian Hart as Joe O’Reilly, Gerard McSorley as Cathal Brugha, Aidan Quinn as Boland, Brendan Gleeson as Liam Tobin, Sean McGinley and Gary Whelan as RIC detectives, Charles Dance as the British intelligence head Soames, newcomer Jonathan Rhys Myers turn as an anti-Treaty gunman and Alan Rickman’s mannered turn as Dev.

The story is expertly handled with some memorable set pieces – the IRA’s execution of the Cairo Gang as Collins and Kitty Kiernan languish in a hotel suite is powerfully portrayed with a montage of killings reminiscent of Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’. The pursuit of Harry Boland through the Dublin sewers when Civil War breaks out is heartbreaking and the final sequences of Coloin’s fateful trip to West Cork are hugely affecting.

Jordan makes no bones that his sympathies lie with Collins and not Dev but despite winning a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival as well as Best Actor, his film failed to ignite at the box office or garner Oscar nominations and only made slightly more than its $25 million budget.

The Butcher Boy (1997)

The director’s next venture was a bold adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s disturbing but riproaringly funny Booker Prize shortlisted novel ‘The Butcher Boy’.

Newcomer Eamonn Owens is sensational as the delinquent Clones boy, Francie Brady in early 1960s Ireland, whose imagination runs wild with thoughts of aliens, Communists and nuclear explosions.

Unfortunately, Francie’s parents have a turbulent marriage with his trumpet playing father Benny, played by Stephen Rea, resorting to the bottle and bouts of violence while his mother, played by Aisling O’Sullivan, is prone to obsessive compulsive behaviour and bouts of depression.

Against this mix, Francie becomes obsessed with Fiona Shaw’s respectable Mrs Nugent, waging a personal vendetta against her and her high achieving son Philip (Andrew Fullerton) – an obsession that constantly lands him in trouble.

Arguably Jordan’s strongest movie, it scooped the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival but had difficulty finding an audience outside arthouse cinemas despite some magnificent writing by Jordan and McCabe, ingenious editing by Tony Lawson and wonderful cinematography by Adrian Biddle.

The film lands some telling blows on pillars of small town Irish society – most notably the Catholic Church – and is very much in the tradition of great European films about growing pains. it recalls, in particular, Francois Truffaut’s masterful Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows).

As well as Owens’ spellbinding lead performance as Francie, Rea and O’Sullivan are heartbreaking as his parents and there are wonderful supporting turns from Alan Boyle as Francie’s close friend Joe Purcell, Ian Hart as Uncle Alo, Brendan Gleeson as Father Bubbles, Sinead O’Connor as the Virgin Mary, Sean McGinley as the local Garda Sergeant, a creepy Milo O’Shea as a paedophile priest and a wonderfully irreverent turn from Tom Hickey as a gardener.

Like the novel, Jordan’s movie oscillates between laugh out loud sequences and moments of genuine horror as he delves into a very disturbed mind.

The End of The Affair (1999)

It was back to London for Neil Jordan for this exquisite adaptation of Graham Greene’s classic 1951 novel about an adulterous Wartime affair.

Told in flashback, we see Ralph Fiennes’  novelist Maurice Bendrix embark on a relationship during World War II with Julianne Moore’s Sarah Miles who is married to Stephen Rea’s buttoned up civil servant Henry.

Confiding in Bendrix that he believes Sarah is having an affair with someone, Henry asks Ian Hart’s bumbling private detective Parkis to investigate.

However Bendrix is rattled when he discovers that Sarah has also been secretly meeting a Catholic priest, Jason Isaac’s Father Richard Smythe.

Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Roger Pratt who was Oscar nominated for his work, the film features a stirring musical score by Michael Nyman and again is intelligently edited by Tony Lawson.

Fiennes is suitably intense as Bendrix and Moore was deservedly Oscar nominated for her performance as the troubled Sarah.

Rea also steikes the right note as Henry but there are pitch perfect performances too from Jason Isaacs, Ian Hart, James Bolam and Sam Bould as Parkis’s birthmarked son, Lance.

Returning to his favourite themes of religion, sexual obsession and secret lives, Jordan picked up a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay but was surprisingly overlooked in the Academy Award nominations in the Best Director and Adapted Screenplay categories.

The film, released by Columbia Pictures, deserved a better fate at the box office – not even managing to recoup half of its $25 million budget.

In Dreams (1999)

Jordan released a second film that year for Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Dreamworks Pictures – a disturbing psycho-thriller with echoes of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and the themes he first explored in ‘The Company of Wolves’.

Annette Bening and Aidan Quinn play a couple who move to New England after difficulties in their marriage but their lives are turned upside own when their daughter is kidnapped during a school pageant and murdered.

Bening’s character Claire is haunted a by premonitions about a serial killer, Robert Downey Jr’s Vivian Thompson but as her behaviour grows increasingly frantic and erratic, she is committed to a psychiatric institution.

She escapes the institution after having more premonitions about Thompson’s next victim and she goes to hunt him down before it is too late.

Working from a complex script penned with ‘Withnail & I’ director Bruce Robinson, Neil Jordan’s movie is a head spinning cocktail of references to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ingredients from several Hitchcock movies (‘Rebecca’, ‘Psycho’, ‘Marnie’ all feature), horror movies (like ‘The Omen’ and ‘The Eyes of Laura Mars’) and Jordan’s previous works (‘Company of Wolves’, ‘The Crying Game’, ‘We’re No Angels’ and ‘The Butcher Boy’).

Rich in symbolism, there’s the constant appearance of red apples throughout the movie which is beautifully filmed in autumnal colours by Iranian cinematographer Darius Khondji.

By no means perfect, the film is boosted by Bening’s powerful central performance and she is ably supported by Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea and Dennis Boutsikaris as psychiatric doctors and Paul Guilfoyle as a detective.

However, the film’s biggest weakness is Robert Downey Jr’s undisciplined, over the top performance as Vivian Thompson which unhinges what is otherwise a challenging and interesting dark film.

Made for $30 million, ‘In Dreams’ struggled critically and commercially – taking just $12 million at the box office.

The Good Thief (2002)

Jordan relocated to the South of France for his next movie for a remake of Jean Pierre Melville’s 1951 cult gangster film ‘Bob Le Flambeur’ (which also influenced Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ series of movies).

Nick Nolte is perfectly cast as a heroin addicted down at heel gambler with a good heart who is involved in a plot to rob paintings from a casino that involves two heists – one real and one not.

He assembles a team comprising of Serb director Emir Kusturica’s Vladimir, Said Taghmaoui’s Paolo and Gerard Darmon’s Raoul, Ouassini Embarek’s former drug dealer Said, Nutsa Kukhianidze’s former prostitute Anne and Mark and Michael Polish’s identical twins, Albert and Bertram.

He plans the heist under the nose of Tcheky Karyo’s detective Roger who likes Bob and would rather prevent the robbery than arrest him.

Ralph Fiennes also turns up as a menacing art dealer in a feature that is stylishly shot by Chris Menges, beautifully adapted by Jordan with a witty script and delightfully acted by its international cast.

Nolte courted controversy by claiming that he took heroin before going to work on set.

But despite being critically well received, the $30 million film continued Jordan’s downward spiral commercially – falling short of returning even a fifth of its investment.

Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

It was back on home turf for Jordan and Woolley’s next collaboration, with an adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s darkly comic Booker Prize 1998 shortlisted novel.

It’s not hard to understand why Neil Jordan was drawn to teaming up again with McCabe on a screen adaptation of ‘Breakfast On Pluto’ – it had the same irreverent tone towards smalltown Irish values and the Catholic Church as ‘The Butcher Boy’ and Jordan’s ‘The Miracle’ and it touched on the themes of sexual identity and the Troubles that were in ‘The Crying Game’ as well as the sex trade that featured in ‘Mona Lisa’.

In a Golden Globe nominated performance, Cillian Murphy is terrific as the transgender Patrick ‘Kitten’ Braden from a borderland town who was abandoned as a baby by his/her mother on the steps of the parochial house of a priest who may be his/her father (played by Liam Neeson).

Raised by an unloving foster mother, Kitten gets into trouble at school for speculating that he/she may have been the result of an affair between Father Liam and his young housekeeper, Elly Bergin (played by Eva Birthistle). Kitten runs away with a glam rock band, fronted by Gavin Friday’s Billy Hatchet, who is a gunrunner for the IRA which some of Kitten’s childhood friends are now involved with.

When Kitten falls foul of the IRA for disposing of a weapons cache, he/she flees to London embarking on a fruitless search for his/her mother – initially getting a job as a Womble, as a magician’s assistant but then sliding into prostitution.

The film is packed with wonderful performances from Neeson’s good priest to Brendan Gleeson’s big hearted ex-pat, John-Joe, Stephen Rea’s magician Bertie to Gavin Friday’s rock star Billy, Eva Birthistle’s Elly to Ruth Negga and Laurence Kinlan as his childhood friends, Charlie and Irwin, Ruth McCabe as Ma Braden, Liam Cunningham as a biker, Dominic Cooper as a squaddie and Ian Hart as a detective.

Shot in Dublin and Belfast (where the Frames snooker club is used to double for a London nightclub and the Crumlin Road Jail), ‘Breakfast On Pluto’ was well received by critics but was always going to be too complex and challenging to be a box office hit.

The Brave One (2007)

Jordan and Woolley parted ways as the director teamed up with action producer Joel Silver and Susan Downey for this stylish thriller about a New Yorker who is traumatised when she and her fiancé are attacked while walking their dog near Central Park.

Jodie Foster plays talk radio host Erica Bain who purchases a gun after her fiancé David, played by Naveen Andrews, dies.

Erica soon finds herself confronting and killing the perpetrators of violent incidents she stumbles across  in the city while at the same time trying to hunt down those that killed her fiancé and avenge his murder.

Working from a decent script by Cynthia Mort, Roderick and Bruce A Taylor, the movie and Foster’s Erica in particular echo the trauma suffered and the compulsion for vengeance previously seen in Jordan’s debut movie ‘Angel’.

The film is also reminiscent of Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’, which featured Foster as underage prostitute, with Erica in one sequence rescuing a prostitute from a violent pimp – a moment which has shades of ‘Mona Lisa’ as well.

Foster’s performance dominates the movie but is nicely counterbalanced by Terrence Howard as Detective Mercer who is assigned to the investigation into the mugging that killed David and who befriends her.

The director keeps us on the edge of our seats as to how Erica will be able to reconcile her double life and also her feelings about the mounting body count she leaves in her wake.

The film performed creditably at the box office, making back its $70 million budget but it attracted mixed reviews despite Foster picking up a Golden Globe nomination for her performance.

Ondine (2009)

Jordan’s follow-up was back in his homeland, with Colin Farrell on board as Syracuse, a recovering alcoholic and down on his luck fisherman in Co Cork, whose daughter Annie (played by newcomer Alison Barry) is confined to a wheelchair and suffers from kidney failure.

Separated from his wife Maura, played by Dervla Kirwan, Syracuse one day encounters in his fishing net a disorientated young Romanian girl, Alicja Bachleda’s Ondine who appears to have been working as a drug mule.

Initially Ondine brings him good luck at sea and the two become romantically drawn to each other but Annie believes she may be a selkie, a mythical seal who turns into a human.

Online and Syracuse’s happiness, however, is put at risk by a sinister man who she was working for who hangs around the docks.

Written by Jordan and exquisitely shot in dark, lush colours by Christopher Doyle, ‘Ondine’ is a beguiling adult fairytale powered by Farrell and Bachleda’s spirited and engaging performances and there is a delightful interplay between the lead actor and Alison Barry as Annie.

In his 11th screen collaboration with the director, Stephen Rea shows a deft comic touch in his scenes as the local parish priest with Farrell and there are decent turns too from Kirwan, Don Wycherley and Emil Hostina as Vladic.

With a soundtrack featuring Icelandic band Sigur Ross and Lisa Hannigan, ‘Ondine’ is a modest, whimsical film that draws on Jordan’s fascination with dual identities and mythology but turns into a darker thriller in its final third, evoking the same sense of threat to its protagonists as those in ‘Mona Lisa’ and ‘The Crying Game’.

(You can follow Dan McGinn on Twitter by clicking here)

Danny Morrison

Sentences in novels don’t come more arresting than “Once Rudi had kissed her it was the beginning and the end of his life.” It’s also the sentence around which the plot of this book revolves.

Danny Morrison’s fourth novel is a retelling of Hermann Hesse’s 1915 love story, Knulp, hence the second part of its title. Although updated in time and place, Rudi is a similar central character to Hesse’s original – a vagabond who seems unable to settle in any one place. He starts off as a student, a poet and a pacifist reflecting on the Second World War, but as the novel progresses his life falls apart and he becomes a drinker who is willing to sell anything to pay for alcohol.

The cause of this disintegration is love. Or rather, his rejection by Isabel, the woman he loves. His redemption comes as he tells the story of his life to a young friend, Rebecca.

Like many of the characters in Carson McCullers’ classic novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Rudi may be surrounded by people but he is essentially a loner. And like most of us as he progresses through the years, he’s trying to make sense of his own existence and the existence of those around him.

While the Second World War casts a shadow over the earlier part of the book, readers may be surprised – given Danny Morrison’s history – that our own more recent conflict doesn’t play a more major role in the latter sections of the story. I suspect this is because politics would have contaminated the central plank of the plot – namely that love is pretty much all we have, in all its triumphs and cruelties.

Rudi is an Everyman whose story reflects the experience of all of us. Life is hard, he seems to be telling us, but the effort is worth it.

Towards the end of the novel, he has a conversation that raises the central question asked by his historical forebear, Knulp – namely why he has not done anything of consequence in his life. The answer, of course, is that – like all of us – he has, in however small a way.

Rudi is a sad and quite emotional novel, but the moments of darkness are balanced by rays of light. Just like life itself, in fact.

The deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness MLA delivers the keynote address at the conference “Belfast: A City of Equals on an Island of Equals” at the Europa Hotel.

(You can follow Brian Rowan on Twitter by clicking here)

The story on Friday was not just about the handful of loyalist protesters outside the Europa Hotel – it was about the people who were inside.

Yes, it was a Sinn Fein organised event, under the heading: ‘Belfast a City of Equals on an island of Equals’, but this wasn’t an occasion when republicans spoke to themselves.

A big part of this conference was about listening to others not of their community; others including the Chief Constable Matt Baggott, victims’ campaigner Alan McBride, former PUP leader Dawn Purvis, one-time soldier Glenn Bradley, clergymen Harold Good, Norman Hamilton and Gary Mason and Kate Turner of the Healing Through Remembering project.

At this conference, people spoke with great clarity on a whole range of issues – the flag decision in Belfast, suspicion about what republicans are really interested in when it comes to explorations of the past, the reality and meaning of sectarianism and the need to examine not just one community’s truth, suffering and history, but the other truths, sufferings and histories.

There was nothing that was not said or could not have been said, and Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams and Declan Kearney listened; listened in a place once described in the headlines of the world’s most bombed hotel.

I chaired the conference, and opened the event by thinking back on that period.

“I would say that there are many in this room who still remember the days of rushed evacuations from this place – when people were given just minutes to get out.

“So, I think it’s an illustration of the journey this place is on that in 2013 republicans have spent not minutes, but weeks, trying to persuade people into this hotel today and into this conversation on the unfinished business of the peace process.”

Today’s news, I suggested, is not about ‘get out’, but ‘get in’.

Of course there were those who stayed away, including the Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt, who was to have been one of the keynote speakers.

He pulled out offended by a careless “so what” comment from the Sinn Fein education minister John O’Dowd in the heat of a television discussion.

Loyalist leaders also declined invitations – one using the protest outside as a reason for not attending.

It sounded more like an excuse.

There was once a time in this process when loyalists walked at the front into difficult conversations and negotiations, and did so when others ran away.

They need to get back to the front of the line, and not be spooked by a few protesters.

It is time for leadership in addressing the unfinished business of the peace process – those issues of identity, cultural expression, equality, mutual respect, parity of esteem and the past.

Chief Constable Matt Baggott pictured at the conference.

The Queen’s University academic Professor Peter Shirlow made a presentation to the conference and, as part of his preparation, gathered opinions of Sinn Fein; opinions that included the following.

That Sinn Fein talks to a script, thinks in a box, they don’t listen, they broadcast and there is no right to reply and people question the constant referrals to the past.

What was stopping a unionist or a loyalist leader saying those things on Friday?

Part of the problem was that this was a Sinn Fein organised conference, with one source speaking of “the choreography having to be right” to make a wider conversation possible.

Martin McGuinness responded to this by saying unionists should organise the next conference, or “better still” it should be jointly organised.

Only a few weeks ago the PUP issued an opening statement on reconciliation which is to be followed up by other documents.

On Friday Mike Nesbitt wrote in the Belfast Telegraph addressing the unfinished business in this process, and Harold Good urged republicans to respond without delay to that article.

So, everyone knows there is the need for a bigger conversation, and the challenge for the architects is to design a model and a realistic agenda for that discussion to take place.

My firm opinion is that this is work for international facilitators listening to key figures here and then shaping the process.

One thing we need to understand is what is meant by dealing with the past.

On Friday Martin McGuinness argued that the real challenge was to learn from it and not be trapped in it.

There needs to a better understanding of victims’ needs – not just those who speak loudest.

On Friday, I said we also need to remember that we are not alone in having to face these next issues and the next challenges, and I quoted the Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish, who lost three of his daughters and a niece when an Israeli shell struck his family apartment.

In his book ‘I Shall Not Hate’ he wrote:

“Arguing over who did what and who suffered more is not going to get us anywhere.

“You can’t respect someone you don’t know.

“So let’s get to know one another by listening and opening our eyes to the other side.

“We need to encourage respect and equality,” he wrote.

So, here, we need to stop singling individuals out for blame – ex-prisoners and others.

We need to find the best mechanisms for unlocking information and answers, need to understand that culture is not about the different sides shoving flags down peoples throats, and we need help.

Help from people not trapped in the raw emotion of what happened here, people who can figure out the next steps and the best ways of taking them together.

In this constant tug-of-war between a United Kingdom and a United Ireland, we are ignoring and relegating other things that in the here-and-now need more urgent thinking.

We often talk about standing in the shoes of others, but too often we like the comfortable fit of our own.

It is time to walk and talk together before we poison another generation.

(You can follow Brian Rowan on Twitter by clicking here)

Martii Ahtisaari

Through the concept of al-mahjar, the Boston-based poet, Kahlil Gibran, reminded people that travelling into a shared space, such as a city, was viewed as a journey offering hope and prosperity for people attempting to escape poverty, conflict, religious and tribal repression.

As we begin to travel into our ‘second generation’ post-conflict peacebuilding process, through the ‘Together: Building a United Community’ (BUC) strategy, we now need to imbue our journey with this ancient Lebanese tradition, of al-mahjar, in order to create the hope and prosperity needed to make these new post-conflict peacebuilding goals both efficacious and transformative.

And yet, hope, is not enough!

While cognisant of the ‘bogus gods’ and ‘authentic mammon’ that have shaped and hindered our progress, from war to peace, so far, we now need to implement the BUC shared vision, with extreme prejudice, in order to deliver “a united community, based on equality of opportunity, the desirability of good relations and reconciliation – one which is strengthened by its diversity, where cultural expression is celebrated and embraced and where everyone can live, learn, work and socialise together, free from prejudice, hate and intolerance”.

As its authors note, making this BUC vision flesh will not happen overnight. However the time for talking about talking is at an end: and as we have learnt over the past 15 years, such strategic policy outputs cannot be delivered nor directed by our elected representatives, their SpAd’s or departments, alone.

If we are serious in moving towards a ‘second generation’ post-conflict peacebuilding programme that can tackle the underlying causes of our conflict, we all now need to begin to work collaboratively, to deliver a Tsunami of employment, youth, urban regeneration and economic development programmes, projects and processes, at the local level, over the coming days, weeks and months.

To finesse this ‘second generation’ post-conflict peacebuilding process we can draw inspiration and guidance from the former President of Finland and Nobel Peace prizewinner, Martii Ahtisaari.

In his inaugural speech at the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice, in the Queen’s University Belfast, President Ahtisaari argued, that in making this new journey, we will need to ‘move beyond understanding mediation and conflict resolution as a redistribution of political and economic power’ towards a more egalitarian vision, of a ‘fair society rather than a welfare state’.

President Ahtisaari believes such an option, of sharing political, economic and social wealth outcomes with those most in need, is achievable if we can establish an ethos of ‘responsible egalitarianism’ within and between our diverse identities, political and institutional elites, the business community and civil society.

In many regards President Ahtisaari’s promotion of ‘responsible egalitarianism’ provides us with a shared ethos, to help illuminate our path and motivate us all towards a more inclusive ‘second generation’ post-conflict peacebuilding programme that offers employment, inclusion and social well-being for all those in need.

With the BUC strategy’s shared vision, and Ahtisaari’s ethos for ‘responsible egalitarianism’ it may now be possible to deliver a new beginning, with al-mahjar, to re-energize our post-conflict peacebuilding project: to begin to address, in earnest, the underlying causes of our conflict, manifesting as competitive sectarianism, poverty, inequality, deprivation, social and cultural exclusion, low educational attainment, unemployment and a constructively ambiguous lack of truth and reconciliation from our macro, meso and micro political and institutional elites.

However, as the summer recess approaches Stormont’s Assembly, and its Executive, where the ‘bogus gods’ and ‘authentic mammon’ prepare to challenge us in the summer hum, of sectarian tension, we now need to move quickly and build momentum for delivery of the BUC strategy before our hopes are once again left to wither on the vine, post facto G8.

With reputable ‘shovel ready’ youth projects, such as Public Achievement, Springboard, Springvale Learning, St. Columbs Park House and the Inner North Belfast Youth Platform, to name but a few, OFMDFM civil servants and public institutions can immediately resource these groups and organisations to actively engage and recruit our young people into a range of skills development and capacity-building programmes, projects and processes, over the summer months.

Our mainstream media can also begin to challenge our academic institutions, business leaders, Partnership Boards and civil society organisations, to move beyond the conference halls and, through public design competitions, draft and resource local area regeneration plans for communities and contested spaces most in need.

Our local social media and film-makers can even create ‘action-development’ programmes to promote, critique and share learning, on how we can transparently succeed, and fail, in our attempts to regenerate and re-engage interface areas and marginalised communities through ‘responsible egalitarianism’.

Public broadcasters can help promote and utilize ‘best practice’ examples of physical and social regeneration, in action, and experts from other conflict and de-industrialized regeneration zones can help us transparently draft, design, develop and deliver, live on TV, post-conflict peacebuilding programmes at the local level.

This transparent, responsible, egalitarian approach, to the redistribution of political and economic power, can also help our public institutions, academics, social media, civil society and business leaders, take ownership of the BUC strategy and drive it to fruition.

Waiting for our politicians and their SpAds to design and deliver such plans are no longer a realistic option. Political institutions and civil society organisations can learn from the positive and progressive leadership provided by the PSNI and University of Ulster, through their Cardiff Initiative, and also become proactive in developing and co-producing deliverable outcomes for those survivors of conflict identified in the BUC, CSI and Agenda for Peace strategies.

If we are serious in commencing this journey, to offer hope and prosperity for people attempting to escape poverty, conflict, religious and tribal repression, then we need to follow the advice of President Ahtisaari and now move beyond understanding ‘mediation and conflict resolution as a redistribution of political and economic power’, towards the construction of a ‘fair society’ rather than a shared out sectarian welfare state.

If our political and institutional elites cannot engage our creative and constructive peace building practitioners in this ‘second generation’ post-conflict peacebuilding programme then they will ultimately be judged to have ‘passed’ the BUC: and condemn us all to an acceptable level of poverty, ill-health, unemployment, resource competition and electorally contained sectarian conflict zones.

If we can somehow overcome our political and tribal identity prejudices and engage all our people in programmes of post-conflict peacebuilding then we might yet buck the trend, in failed peace processes, and realize a post-conflict society that practices ‘responsible egalitarianism’, with al mahjar, to inspire the world.

If the BUC strategy can transform our political system, where our elected representatives, and their SpAds, re-enthuse their pax practice through the inclusive pulse taking and change making ethos of ‘responsible egalitarianism’,  we may soon begin to realize we are all now on a journey: travelling into a shared space, such as this small city-state of 1.82m human beings, to provide hope and prosperity for people attempting to escape poverty, conflict, religious and tribal repression.

Can we do this?  Al-mahjar…

(You can follow Brian John Spencer on Twitter by clicking here)

The Good Friday Agreement has its detractors, but since 1998 much has changed in Northern Ireland.

Brian Rowan speaking at the event ‘Beyond the Wall’ with William ‘Plum’ Smith and Sean ‘Spike’ Murray said of the accord: “there’s been lots of progress; we’re in a much better place.”

But much remains to be done.

Duncan Morrow in the Irish Times recently spoke of political stalemate and storm clouds; and he himself asked: ‘where next?’

I’m not sure.

However Pete Shirlow came onto something when speaking on Capitol Hill. He stated the obvious and said that we’re living through a two speed peace process: one where the green and orange communities live in a perpetual cycle of claim and counterclaim; the other where a post-nationalist class lives as citizens of the global village.

The post-nationalist community is important. Jeffrey Peel spoke of them and their effect on Northern Ireland:

‘This society is normalising. It’s more accepting, more tolerant, less incendiary than it ever was. The Internet has made it more included in a global culture that moderates extremes and creates debate. The Internet has made this place less insular in a way that no other local cultural development could ever have hoped.’

They’ve elevated themselves above the past, the sectarian mudslinging and mindlessly partisan politics. These people are the future.

So it’s the first deprived grouping upon whom we need to focus. They represent our bloody past. It’s this community that’s holding back Northern Ireland. Stating the obvious a little but it needs said.

I don’t want to go too deeply into this question bar to ask: why are they holding Northern Ireland back? Why are some people living in the pre-1998 world where radicalised Catholics hate Protestants and radicalised Protestants hate Catholics?

To my mind it’s because, as Eamonn Mallie said, ‘many minds have not been decommissioned’.

This is the deadly overhang of the Troubles: that men and women still hate. Radicals on both sides of the community may have put aside their weapons of terror, but they haven’t set aside their old prejudices.

These prejudices and hatreds, propped up by deprivation, are then passed onto their children. As I’ve said before on this website: young people in Northern Ireland are taught to hate.

Just look at the young and highly impressionable children who marched in a dissident republican parade in Ardoyne this Easter, dressed in full paramilitary regalia.

No wonder Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris has said that it is “difficult to see an end” to dissident republican violence.

The same problem exists on the loyalist side of the community.

The video below probably captures why we are the way we are in Northern Ireland better than words could ever hope to do so. The video clip is a segment from a documentary by American news outlet Vice called, The European Capitol of Terrorism: Belfast, Ireland.

Vice correspondent: “For all the Americans out there, what’s the celebration (11^th/12^th July)? Why are you doing it?”

Children: ……………………… silence*

Child 1: “I dono [sic].” children laugh*

Child 2: “Battle of the Boyne and all that action there…”

Child 3: “Bit of fun”.

When I saw this I felt sad. Sad that young people in Northern Ireland should harbour such nihilistic and narrow horizons.

But the video is important nonetheless: the segment gets to the heart of the issue. It tells us two things.

Firstly, our young children in Northern Ireland are being indoctrinated to hate. Whether they are loyalist or republican – young people in Northern Ireland are being indoctrinated and radicalised.

Secondly, our young people in Northern Ireland give expression to this prejudice as recreational sectarianism. As they grow they engage in recreational rioting and graduate into the ranks of paramilitarism.

As Trevor Ringland has suggested many times – we need less talking shops on the history – we need more workshops. By that I mean early intervention on our young people and problem families, good education and meaningful job opportunities.

As Montesquieu said: ‘peace is the natural effect of trade.’

(You can follow Brian John Spencer on Twitter by clicking here)

Although Sinn Féin are sometimes seen in media and academic circles as almost Stalinesque in their management of party politics and agenda setting, their most recent attempts at policy direction suggest a party in disarray.

This is no more in evidence than in the area of dealing with the past. (Of course, the ineptitude may be just what Sinn Féin wants its opponents to think to lull them into a false sense of security.)

It is true, as Henry McDonald has suggested, that the party has developed a commemoration programme that operates on an ‘industrial scale’. Although it lost some hardliners, it has also been relatively successful in managing long-term change processes involving acceptance of devolution and policing reform.

They have been relatively successful too in promoting the idea that the present dispensation is transitional – as opposed to the possibility that the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement has actually solidified partition.

Sinn Féin’s Historic Ghosts

Yet the party was rather flatfooted in its response to the empirical and moral challenges posed by the memory of the Hunger Strikes. As regards the empirical questions: within the movement, spokespersons indulged in blatant emotionalism to keep the concerns of families in check, while in the press they obfuscated over the nature of their strategy in prolonging the strike.

As Rogelio Alonso points out in his incisive analysis of the Provisional republican movement, the moral question of whether Bobby Sands et al died for cross-border cooperation has never really been faced up to by Sinn Féin; it remains lurking like a traumatic memory or half-repressed guilt in their development of a narrative of peace.

The uncertainty over dealing with the past resurfaced over the appointment of Mary McArdle as special advisor to the Minister for Arts, Culture and Leisure. The legislation to prevent similar situations from occurring in the future has been rejected by Sinn Féin. For instance, it described the idea that ex-prisoners should show remorse for their actions as equivalent to demanding ‘sackcloth and ashes’ treatment.

The role of special advisors falls under notions of political patronage – they are not elected and not accountable, except to their ministers. It is therefore a deeply political role.

The dual strategy of claiming victimhood for terrorists while delegitimising an attempt to restore scrutiny to the democratic process is an attempt to forestall debate, to de-politicise. It is also craven and cynical – and that is exactly where the holes in Sinn Féin’s policy direction appear.

Sinn Féin and the Maze

The strategy is replicated in the party’s inevitable welcoming of the announcement to go forward with the establishment of a Conflict Resolution Centre on the site of the Maze. Seanna Walsh, for example, has deployed a rather ambiguous use of the word ‘sanitise’, in asking why anyone would want to airbrush the history of the site.

As Alex Kane has pointed out, this notion misses the point: politicisation has already occurred through the decision to spend taxpayers’ money.

Walsh believes the fact that stories need to be told justifies the project: ‘All sorts of interesting conversations began as a result of those cups of tea [in the gaol]. However, it would be surprising if these stories deviated far from the norm: 1. ‘Big Ian made me do it’; 2. ‘I wanted revenge because the “Brits” beat up my da/brother/me/ransacked our house/shot innocent people’.

The plea to education is as ridiculous as the narrative of prison to peace is inane: Are we supposed to educate our children that they shouldn’t shoot unarmed men at their breakfast in case they might go to gaol? The Maze does not contain universal stories of righteous opposition to oppression. It is not Robben Island and the IRA is not the ANC.

Peaceful, justifiable opposition to discrimination once did occur in Northern Ireland and the civil rights movement made serious advances towards equality; the terrorists’ campaigns stymied and killed those advances. The danger in airbrushing history and morality remains real and present, and is often cloaked in half-baked banalities about lesson-learning, lesson-sharing.

Narrating the Troubles

An alternative reading of the prison-to-peace narrative might conclude with the moral that peace is a privilege, not a right. In other words: terror pays, and it is only when terror is acquiesced that governance (of a sort) can begin.

The Maze then is less a lesson to share with the outside world, but becomes rather another stick to beat the citizens of Northern Ireland over the head with: ‘Don’t expect too much; don’t raise your hopes of anything but a divided society; peace necessitates ethical compromises’.

Republican stories of repression-response or loyalist ideas about elite manipulation of the working class are easy sells; they are much easier tales to tell and to hear than histories about mobilising against discrimination or testimonies of those left struggling with the trauma inflicted by terrorists.

In part, it is the inability to recognise this gap that causes so much offence. Finola Meredith writing in the Belfast Telegraph points out that there are ‘precedents’ for the Maze project.

Berlin has a museum, she explains, on the grounds of the SS and Gestapo headquarters. But her parallel is arguably misleading, the Topography of Terror, as the museum is known, makes a particular effort to differentiate between victims and perpetrators – deliberately using those very straightforward terms.

The ways in which Sinn Féin have approached the Maze debate in Northern Ireland does little to convince that the Conflict Transformation Centre will contribute much to knowledge about either conflict or transformation.

Sinn Fein Chairman Declan Kearney

Sinn Féin on the Past

As a party of government, Sinn Féin cannot plausibly continue to pursue ethnicised, particularistic agendas. Until now, its policy seems to be to ‘bank’ concessions in the debate over dealing with the past such as the Maze decision and move forward, drawing on their capital and returns to continually hollow-out the Northern state.

The cracks show when it speaks to different audiences – praising anti-Thatcher protests or ignoring dissident attacks one day while rolling out Martin McGuinness the next to issue strong condemnations. And the illogicality of its policy is gradually catching up with it as Adams’ recent interview on RTÉ revealed.

The cracks also show when the party speaks of reconciliation. Reconciliation as set out in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is ill-defined but nevertheless is substantially different from that inherent in Sinn Féin’s policy: where the former is inclusive and premised on the sacrifice of almost 4,000 lives, the later consists in survivors of the conflict reconciling themselves to a republican vision.

Sinn Féin’s reaching out to unionism strategy is a nonsense and the reheated Hume-isms of its Agreed-New-Ireland-Reconciliation strategy are in tatters. When Declan Kearney speaks of ‘generosity’, ‘acknowledgement’, ‘understanding’, his words do not ring true. Or rather, they only ring true in the glib sentimentality of a Seanna Walsh.

As a party of government Sinn Féin needs to address this deficit. Its myopia is offensive on many levels – I am emphatically not suggesting that Bloody Sunday was anything but an atrocity; rather, Sinn Féin’s return to it and other outrages renders them nothing more than totemic totems as somehow justifying the PIRA murder campaign needs to end for ethical reasons.

It should also end for political ones: Sinn Féin’s strategy is positively contributing to the undermining of democratic functionality and thus counterproductive to fostering peace.

The problem of course is that Sinn Féin needs to repaint the past to avoid facing up to the compromises it has made. Of course, to do so would be to admit that the IRA’s decision to take a war to the ‘Brits’ was profoundly misguided; to admit the political and strategic vacancy of the decision to continue that war after the fall of Stormont and during the Sunningdale Assembly; to admit the moral degeneracy of prolonging its campaign despite the rising death counts during the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In short, such a change in policy direction would be to admit republicans’ key and unjustifiable role in the perpetuation of murder and mayhem and the subsequent abandonment (except in rhetoric) by Sinn Féin of their vacuous, undemocratic and imperialising project.

Lost in a Maze

However, this can only go on for so long. Indulging the party may stave off the inevitable collapse but unless Sinn Féin begins to articulate a vision of politics based on social responsibility rather than craven self-interest, a vision of society based on pluralism, inclusion and accountability rather than universal blame and exculpation then it will continue to run into delusional dead-ends.

Despite the Orwellian-sounding Maze project, Northern Ireland has not yet entered a Bizarro world where language becomes strips of meaning and history can be rewritten to serve contemporary needs.

Sinn Féin’s credibility gap will continue to grow unless the party changes course – no amount of conflict transformation rhetoric or multi-million pound peace projects can plaster over the bloodied past.

At the beginning of the Belfast conference 28-30 May 2013 in the Culloden Hotel, organised by the Nobel Women’s Initiative and called Moving Beyond Militarism and War: Women-Drive Solutions for a Non-Violent World - it is worth being reminded why the issues are so very important.

The key lies in the distinction between sexual violence and gendered violence.  Korea’s ‘comfort women’, a group which to me seem so inappropriately named, who are in the news at the moment because of their demand for reparation from the Japanese government, represent an example of sexual violence, where the women were subjected to sexual violation by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War as a matter of policy.

Sexual violence of this sort is ancient and associated with all wars; it is also still going on. Modern day analysts refer to it as ‘military rape’. It is about the satisfaction of combatants’ sexual drives by means of force and fear.

Gendered violence is something different altogether. It means attacking women not for reasons of sex but of politics. Because of the stereotypical cultural association of women with the nation, women are seen as the bearers of the next generation, the carriers of the tribe, ethnic or national group, and the intent in war to violate that group, or indeed to eliminate it, results in women being special targets for attack, giving them particular victim experiences.

When gendered violence is combined with the new forms of war in late modernity, women are often subject to atrocious and brutal attack. New forms of war are those that draw no distinction between civilians and combatants, where there is no restricted combat zone geographically determined, and in which the human body is turned into a site of conflict and is subjected to horrendous atrocity in a return to almost pre-modern, de-technological warfare.

Women’s bodies are particularly vulnerable as battle sites because gendered violence links these bodies to political and national genocide. Hence the barbaric atrocities that get vented on women’s bodies in new forms of war.

This gives women also particular post-conflict victim experiences – bodily mutilations, children born of rape, AIDS, cultural and social ostracism and rejection.  The empowerment of women in peace processes is important in order to ensure these victim experiences are recognised and made key issues of post-conflict policy.

The empowerment of women in peace processes is important also to give women a voice in politics so that sexual and gendered violence can be made humanitarian war crimes and the cultural stereotypes that sustain them can be challenged politically.

What we must not do is perpetuate cultural stereotypes in which we allege that women are ‘natural’ healers, that somehow peace is ‘instinctive’ to women. We must not dishonour women at the very point when we acknowledge their contribution by wrongly suggesting that their role in building peace is innate rather than cultural.

Empowering women is a political imperative not a biological one.

(You can follow Professor John D Brewer on Twitter by clicking here)