O’Conall Street

I have been scanning the internet for a good sum up of the week from a thoughtful journlaist. I read my way across the United States and there were a few pieces of note including David Brook’s New York Times article.

Sometimes the quality is right on your doorstep and like the faithful milkman of old, Jim Fitzpartick of the BBC NI’s Politics Show, dropped a great read through his weekly e-zine yesterday afternoon. If you have not already seen it read it below:

 On the eve of his assassination in April 1968, Dr Martin Luther King Jnr spoke to striking sanitation workers in Memphis about their particular cause and the wider struggle for civil rights in America:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.

“But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

The following evening as Dr King stood on the balcony of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, he was shot dead.

Personal scars

At the time Robert Kennedy was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. He still bore the personal scars of his own brother’s assassination.  It fell to him now to break this terrible news to supporters on an airport runway in Indianapolis.  His impromptu speech is credited with going some way to constraining the inevitable violence that ensued across the country.

“My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus and he once wrote:

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

“So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King — yeah, it’s true — but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love — a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

“We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past, but we — and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.

Justice for all

“But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
“And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

Two months later, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy – whose life had been transformed by the assassination of his President brother - was himself killed by an assassin’s bullet.
On Tuesday night, an hour after receiving a call from his opponent conceding defeat, and forty years on from the tumultuous events of 1968, Barack Obama stood in front of an estimated 200,000 people in Grant Park, Chicago:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

“It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.

“It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

“We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

“It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America….

“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.

“I promise you, we as a people will get there.”

It’s no surprise then, but remains the most moving image of the day, to see the Rev Jesse Jackson, who was on the balcony with Martin Luther King when he was shot, stand in Grand Park weeping as the President Elect addressed the crowd.

In May 2007, in front of an invited audience in Parliament Buildings, Ian Paisley delivered the defining speech of his career as he prepared to enter government with his hitherto sworn political enemies.

A wonderful healing

“I believe that Northern Ireland has come to a time of peace, a time when hate will no longer rule.  How good it will be to be part of a wonderful healing in our province.  Today we have begun to plant and we await the harvest.”

Barack Obama is undoubtedly the best political orator in a generation. Of course, man does not live by words alone – even if our politicians do a good job of eating them at times. The current stalemate in our own Executive demonstrates how hope can fade and words are rendered hollow. But that shouldn’t take away from the sheer joy of hearing language put to use with such style.  And should the harvest ever come, the intervening famine will be forgotten.

The months ahead will test Barack Obama and his promises like no other President before.  But in an era of “dumbing down”, he has reminded us that political rhetoric can still be sophisticated, beautiful, powerful and compelling.  And for me, that makes all the difference.

Today 15,000 children will sit down to begin, for the last time, the most discredited selection exam in Europe. There is not a single credible political or academic voice in these islands which believes the eleven plus to be a viable solution to the selection dilemma, yet there is a real crisis about what will replace it.

The Programme for Governmentmentions “children” 45 times in 59 pages and explicitly commits the Executive to “Encourage all our children to realise their potential by improving access to formal and non formal education and provision tailored to the needs of disadvantaged children and young people.” Its does not however mention “primary education”, “selection” or the “eleven plus” once. In fact the whole document ignores the crisis that already existed at the time of its writing about what to do with our children’s future despite another lofty  commitment to: “Educate and develop our young people to the highest possible standards to deliver improved outcomes for all young people, including measurable reductions in the gap in educational outcomes between highest and lowest attainers.”

On Monday the four main churches united to call for a meaningful debate about empowering students and their parents to choose at fourteen. That they felt it necessary to intervene in this was is a total indictment of northern politics.

In their statement the clerics said primary school children were picking up on their parents confusion about what would happen when the 11-plus ends.

“It is clear that there are strong yet unreconciled convictions about the best system of education for the future. Each viewpoint seems to cancel out the other and, in the absence of consensus, we risk heading to an abyss of unregulated arrangements.”

Calling on politicians to do the job they are being paid to do, the statement continued:

“We ask our politicians, and others, to stand back from established positions and to create the space necessary so that, through dialogue between those with different outlooks, the best way forward may be found for all children.”

That we find ourselves in this place is a tragedy of unspeakable terms. In Tim McGarry’s words at the end of last night’s BBC Hearts and Minds; “Sarah Palin is the only person in the world who makes Caitriona Ruane look like a competent politician.”

My son is one of 30,000 P5 and P6 students now in educational limbo. They deserve better from their Minister and from the Executive. These millennium kids were born into great optimism and hope, the promise of new North with a shared future.

They are being failed by grown ups.

Three words:‘E Pluribus Unum’.

‘From Many We are One’ appeared frequently in President Elect Obama’s speeches over the past year and I fully predict it will be uttered in his innaguration address next January.

These few words sum up his message to Ireland. Cast aside the politics of conflict. Move on from the language of division and the ballot box will reward you.  Stick to the positive rhetoric of cooperation and consensus and support it with a policy programme built on the twin pillars of enterprise and social justice. 

I first heard those words spoken in our own context twenty five years ago. They were at the heart of John Hume’s single transferable speech. Many will laugh off the sloganisation of progressive politics but few will deny their profoundness.

Question for assembly -  You think this could work here?

Back home SF has made it’s first PR boo boo of the Obama presidency. Releasing a picture of Gerry Adams, Rita O’Hare with President Elect Obama has backfired with a negative front page in today’s Irish News.

Tomorrow O’Conall Street moves back home and education will be back on the agenda. The churches united yesterday to show some leadership on this issue. That’s Obama politics at its best.  

A couple of good articles on the issue in the Irish News and the Belfast Telegraph sum up the public’s disillusionment with our Education Minister.

We are just tidying up the pieces after the happiest breakfast in Belfast for over a decade. Susan Elliot, Consul General of the United States of America here in Northern Ireland hosted some 200 politicians, business people, academics and the press for the dawn celebration of Obama’s victory.

I cannot remember a mood like this since the breakfast on Good Friday 1998 when hope and history rhymed here in our small region. There was not a local party absent, not a media outlet missing. The magical tapestry that is the North came together to mark this moment in history.

We could not have been more proud here at Weber Shandwick to be associated with the event.  

As for Barack Obama. The dream is ending, a new dawn has arrived and the work must begin.

What JFK did for religion in America, Obama is about to do for race.

Today is the day the US will elect a man half the country could have owned as a slave 200 years ago.

Get up tomorrow, buy a paper and put it in the memento box. It will be your own little piece of history.

Here at Weber Shandwick in Belfast we are very excited to be sponsoring the US Consulate’s election breakfast tomorrow morning. Over 200 politicians, business types and members of the press will watch the results come in over a bagel and some coffee.  BBC Radio Ulster will be broadcasting live from what I hope will be dawn celebrations. All we need to do now is find a McCain supporter!

But what if it’s a tie? CNN has the answer

We may well be on the eve of history, a moment in time we will likely to recount to our grandchildren.

Tomorrow America goes to the polls and Barack Obama’s campaign for change looks likely to triumph. He could win the election by millions or conceivably loose it by thousandsalthough the latest polls are as encouraging as you could hope for. Anxiety is reported to be the predominant mood amongst Democratic strategists.

More than 20 million Americans have already voted and registration is at historic levels in many key states. The queues in Ohio were four and a half hours long yesterday. We would never tolerate this in Europe yet millions are patiently waiting because in the words of a black woman interviewed on last night’s 10 O’Clock news ‘it’s time for change’. Worryingly for the Democrats, the long lines may deter many young people who must vote if Obama is to be sure of victory.

There can be no doubting that this election, the first of truly digital age, has triggered online conversations which are mobilising the young, ethnic minorities and independents in a way which is rewriting the campaigning handbook. Elections will never be the same again.

Obama and McCain both have articles in today’s Wall Street Journal making a final case to the establishment. The real fight is on the Internet, the broadcast media and the streets. Online Obama is posting a new YouTube  video nearly every three hours and with 386,000 videos, many backing his case, the battle for cyberspace has been won by his blue American army but will it get the elusive youth vote out?.

Anna Quindlen at Newsweek gives the last word to America’s future generations.

Analysts have learned to be skeptical of the so-called youth vote, but all signs suggest that this may be the moment when the country begins to create a new cadre of lifelong voters.

Evidence of this good news is both statistical and anecdotal. Turnout by young voters in the 2008 primaries and caucuses was nearly twice that of eight years before. Rock the Vote has signed up 2.3 million this year, as opposed to 1.4 million in 2004, which at the time was a watershed. On a more-micro level, the chairman of the Department of Government and Politics at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, who has taken students to the Inauguration every four years, told a reporter that in the past it took months to fill a single bus. This year he is chartering two, since the first one filled within days.

The last big bump among young voters came in 1972, the first presidential election after the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. Despite revisionist history that suggests that all young people then were antiwar and counterculture, the youth vote split pretty evenly between George McGovern and Richard Nixon. Roughly half of those casting their first vote chose a man who was trounced on election night, and the other half chose a man who had to resign the presidency in disgrace less than two years later.

It’s difficult to figure out how much effect this had on voter turnout in the decades that followed, but the undeniable fact is that Americans have exercised the franchise less vigorously than a participatory democracy might wish. There are dozens of documents in my filing cabinet about proposals to change that, from turning voting into a lottery—civic responsibility and a million bucks!—to moving Election Day to the weekend.

That particular file has grown dusty this year. Primary turnouts reached historic highs, including among new voters. The onetime collateral issues that concern them—and that were often ignored by elected officials—have gone mainstream: gay rights, the environment, the cost of a college education. And the terrorist attacks of September 11, as well as their generation’s racial and ethnic diversity, reinforced their sense of themselves as engaged citizens of the world. These are the millennials, more pragmatic and optimistic than their parents.

Ben Lazarus, co-chair of Yale for Obama, says that the voters of his generation are inclined to move politics out of the long stall of baby-boomer disenchantment. “Our idea of our own American identity is much more open and progressive,” he says. “And I think that goes for both sides. Most young conservatives are just as interested in recalibrating the American identity as liberals. Nobody my age has any interest in litigating the late 1960s over and over and over again.”

Unionists united for the morning.

Forgotten were Peter Robinson’s attacks on the UUP, the Tory’s disgust with the DUP, the UUP’s confused feelings about the Tory’s and everyone’s distrust of Jim Allister. The streets of Belfast filled up to welcome RIR soldiers home from Iraq and Afghanistan. In the end SF and eirigi’s protests were civilized (SF) and contained (eirigi).

The city can wake up tomorrow and get back to building a better future.

I am sure normal hostilities will resume within unionism too.

I will be on BBC Radio Ulster’s Seven Days Programme at lunchtime. One of the topics will be the Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross phone prank which went so bably wrong.

Meantime across the Atlantic, two Canadian comedians have pranked Sarah Palin and ended up in a seven minute conversation with her while the pretending to be French President, Nicolas Sarcozy. It well worth a listen:

Down Royal is the place to be today if you like the sport of kings. The blogosphere is the place to be if you want to follow the race to the White House.

Good debate on CNN below:

Here are our top ten Halloween happenings for 2008.

1- Russell Brand wont have to dress down today.
2- John McCain is trick or treating for ‘emergency funds’.
3- There will be no apple-bobbing around the Executive table.
4- Stormont is hosting the annual pin the blame on the donkey (donkey can be: Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness, Jim Allister, Caitriona Ruane, the Brits or whoever you like).
5- Derry is getting another bridge to accommodate the invading hordes.
6- Teachers call off strike in time for mid term break.
7- The South’s Greens are behaving like zombies.
8- Johnatan Ross is now afraid to say boo to a ghost.
9- Cleric calls for witch trial of Education Minister
10- Ten years ago the PM said:

Tony Blair was under pressure last night to intervene in the crisis over the setting up of an executive of ministers for the new Northern Ireland Assembly.

With tomorrow’s deadline for the establishment of the body set to pass without a breakthrough, efforts are intensifying on all sides to try to find a solution.

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams called on Mr Tony Blair to step in to break the stalemate.

In a separate move, it was disclosed that the Irish Prime Minister, Mr Bertie Ahern, was ready to take part in intensive discussions in Belfast next week. First Minister David Trimble held an hour-long private meeting with Mr Adams yesterday - described as “frank and hard-nosed” - but afterwards the gulf between the two parties seemed as wide as ever.

The UUP leader accused the Sinn Fein president of failing to do his duty over weapons decommissioning. “There is no sign of Mr Adams being prepared to seriously engage and to fulfil his obligations under the agreement,” Mr Trimble said.

“It is his failure that is causing us a problem, there are no other problems.”

Mr Adams claimed the First Minister had gone back on the agreement and said he would be contacting Mr Blair as a matter of urgency.

“I feel I have a responsibility to spell out very clearly to the British Prime Minister that he also signed up to this agreement and that the Ulster Unionist Party is preventing the implementation of the agreement which he signed up to,” said Mr Adams.

Under the terms of the Good Friday agreement, an executive of ministers and a north-south council should have been in place by October 31.

However, Mr Trimble has insisted the IRA begin decommissioning its weapons before he will sit down with Sinn Fein in an executive. With no sign of any movement on weapons, the process is stalled.

Mr Ahern, at a meeting of business leaders in Balbriggan, County Dublin, yesterday, emphasised the urgency of getting meaningful structures for cross-border co-operation “up and running as soon as possible”.

The potential for significantly increased trade had been boosted by the Good Friday agreement, he said, and that should be carried through. “Peace is the greatest prosperity builder of all,” he said.

Downing Street said work would continue on trying to drive forward all parts of the Good Friday agreement. “There have been difficulties in the past and they have been overcome,” a spokesman said.

Lets do the time warp again…..

Happy Halloween!!!!