Eamonn McCann on Eamonn McCann

Controversialist and serial rights protester Eamonn McCann has revealed he once considered becoming a priest.

McCann confesses “strangely enough at the very beginning of my career at St Columb’s (in Derry) I had that in my mind. I remember at the age of eleven piping  up one day to say I thought I might become a priest but within a couple of years, certainly by the time I was fourteen/ fifteen I had lost all belief in religion.”

The uncompromising ‘left-wing’ activist in a wide ranging interview above, spanning almost seven decades of his life, spells out why he has Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney in his sights more than half century after being at school together in St Columb’s College.

He tells too of why he was chucked out of Queen’s university because of what he calls “alcoholic rascality.”

McCann, 68, accuses Seamus Heaney of meting out ‘corporal punishment’ to him: “I shared a few years with Seamus Heaney. He was the head prefect in his last year in St Columb’s. He was very disciplinarian as a head prefect. He once thumped me on the ear” he added.

Asked “was he justified?” McCann, answers meditatively “absolutely he wasn’t justified.”

Pushed to say whether he still bears a grudge against Heaney, Mc Cann replies “I sort of do hold it against him. I have always, when I meet him, – I have always meant to bring it up with him and the next time I see him I will tackle him about the brutal behaviour towards myself for simply disrupting the senior study.”

So how does he think  Heaney would view him today?  “He would see me as somebody who did nothing for the tranquility of the learning at St Columb’s. Seamus was always very assiduous at his studies and was well known as a very bright boy indeed in St Columb’s. ”

Mr Heaney is forewarned and ought to keep his bodyguard by his side.

The precocious Bogside boy who got his eleven plus was particularly fond of the Classics, and wants them reinstated to all curricula.

Eamonn McCann, modest in the rôle he played, was responsible for bringing the secret 1993 Hume/Adams talks to public attention. He chooses to give the credit for the story to an acquaintance of his who spotted Gerry Adams going into the former SDLP leader’s home on a Saturday morning while in the city selling ‘Socialist Worker.’ He in turn tipped Ed Moloney of the Sunday Tribune off and Moloney verified the story in a call to John Hume. The rest is history.

McCann speaks for the first time about the background to his being ‘sent down’ in Queen’s University in his final year where he was studying philosophy and psychology.

He said “all the silly things that I did were all done in drink. I drank far too much at Queen’s. I was sent down because at the end of a dinner I did knock off drink (a consignment of wine.) I wasn’t the only one involved. There was a mob of us involved in that incident of alcoholic rascality.”

He  was chucked out of Queen’s without getting a chance to take his finals. He defiantly protests all these years later ” I don’t believe the average student would have been sent down – I tell you what- if it had happened after a rugby match there would have been very few repercussions.

“There was still a lingering resentment against scruffs from the Bogside, scruffs from Ardoyne and indeed from the Shankill.”

The larger than life left winger confesses to admiring John Hume and numbers him among his friends.

In a comment on his non qualifications he adds “the only thing I am qualified to do in formal terms, is tree pruning.” He received a junior national certificate in ‘arbora  culture’ and worked in London with thirteen Englishmen employed by the Greater London Council,  an experience which rid him, he argues, of any antipathy  towards English people.

McCann had two children, Kitty and Luke with former Irish Times columnist Mary Holland, the first English journalist to bring the plight of nationalists to the outside world starting on October 5. 1968 when trouble flared during a civil rights march in Derry’s Duke Street.’ It was there that Eamonn McCann met the late Miss Holland dressed in a black mink coat and smoking a cheroot. That triggered a very special relationship.