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Anthony McIntyre  ⚑ For much of 1973 the IRA in the Lower Ormeau Road area was led by a man about two years older than myself, Shughie Magee. 

At sixteen, somebody a brace of years senior often seemed to belong to the adult world, the younger ones, not quite there, grappling with the transition. On the ladder out of adolescence different peer groups perch on each rung. Yet, at two years short of twenty, those who thought themselves men were only teenagers, still finding their way in a world rapidly turned upside down by violent political turbulence. 

As with many named Hugh, Belfast people for some reason would insert the letter S in front of the name, so Hughie became Shughie. My father used to tell a joke about it.

A woman brings her son into the shop and asks for a school cap with the letter S emblazoned on the front.
The shopkeeper tells her he has every letter in stock but S.
The woman says to her son, 'come on wee Shughie, we will try somewhere else

The two year age gap placed Shughie Magee in a different peer group from myself. I was friends with his brother Willie. My association with Shughie was not as a result of the IRA but arose out of our peer group winding his up just to get a chase through Lavinia and Pevril Streets and their associated alleyways, at times darting in and out of the various rooms - even hiding beneath the floorboards - in the derelict Orchard building at the top of Lavinia Street where it met the main thoroughfare of the Ormeau Road. 

It was a building popular with young people who would congregate outside it to while away the evening hours. Scruff Millen often held court there before, in April 1973, at the age of 23 falling to loyalist assassins on the prowl a mere hundred yards away in Belmore Street. War, that ruthless apex predator remorselessly devouring the young. 

When arrested and interned Shughie Magee was only 18 years of age. It says something about the youthfulness of the guerrilla army that hit back against the British and unionist governments and their Repressive State Apparatuses. In that period the average age of IRA volunteers killed on active service was reported to be 20. The Disney dramatization of the era, Say Nothing, captured the youth at war phenomenon in graphic terms. Young people fuelled by a blend of idealism and resentment took the war to the British and Unionist regimes.

It is no exaggeration to say that Shughie Magee led the IRA's war against the British state in South Belfast, including the commercial bombing campaign in Belfast city centre. This led to him becoming a much hunted figure for the British Army, who constantly stopped young people asking if they knew him. They would tell people in pubs to pass a message onto Shughie that he would be shot on sight. As the efforts to take him intensified, young people getting harassed at the street corners would exercise bragging rights to the military foot patrols that they couldn’t catch a cold. So when he took a chance and was caught in bed in his mother's home, a despondency set in, alloyed in part by a sense of relief that the Brits didn't carry out their threat. He was in Long Kesh, not Milltown, a prisoner not a martyr. 

I was a beneficiary of Shughie's absence, on occasion sleeping in his vacant bed while on the run as a sixteen year old, the recipient of the hospitality on offer from Shughie's mother, Agnes.

After release from my second prison sentence, myself and Shughie were both in our thirties, youth long since evaporated. By that point he had gone on to marry and have children. When I would call into the Hatfield Bar and see him quietly sipping his pint of Guinness, I would on occasion join him, the thought crossing my mind that teens frequenting the pub would just see a guy at the end of the bar having a quiet pint. They had no idea of the effort put into the armed struggle, the risks faced, the imprisonment endured, the stress his family was placed under, dreading the knock to the door, the harbinger of the news they least wanted to hear.

There are parts of the IRA that will remain unexplored territory until those that made it happen, people like Shughie Magee, are written into its history rather than forgotten about. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Shughie Magee

Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭  Maud Gonne McBride was born Edith Maud Gonne at Tongham near Aldershot in England 21st December 1886 and died on 27 April 1953 Dublin, Ireland. 

From her early years Gonne suffered from Tuberculosis which remained an unpleasant companion throughout her life. 

Most Irish historians write favourably of Gonne as an angel to the poor and a close friend of James Connolly. Gonne worked with Connolly on many occasions not least Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee protests in 1897 which included a mock funeral, and in the soup kitchens during the 1913/14 Dublin Lockout where she was hailed an Angel to the locked out and striking workers. But there was a side to Maud Gonne which James Connolly would probably have been unaware and would have been repugnant to his views. Anti-Semitism was to remain a stain on Gonne’s character throughout her life and was a position from which she never shifted. This was the opposite to James Connolly’s views. 

To the Irish Poet, William Butler Yeats, she was a ‘Goddess’ whom he worshiped to the point of humiliation. To militant socialists and Irish nationalists this ‘revolutionary woman’ was an ‘icon’ while to thousands of hungry schoolchildren during the 1913/14 Dublin Lockout she was the woman who brought them a square meal.

James Connolly was strongly opposed to any form of sectarianism and anti-Semitism, seeing them as two sides of the same vile coin. Gonne, however, was an ardent anti-Semite, hating Jews with an ugly grimace. In 1887 aged twenty-one, after an attack of TB, she went to ‘Royat’ in France convalescing and it was while in the land of fine wines she met an unsavoury far-right fascist character, Lucien Millevoye, who was a supporter of far-right French politician Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger who had held the rank of General in the French Army. Boulanger was involved in prosecuting the Dreyfus affair and campaigned for the maximum penalty for the Jewish French Army Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, after the captain was accused and found guilty of passing secrets to the Germans. Boulanger wanted the maximum penalty for Dreyfus simply because he was Jewish and not because he thought the man was guilty. Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devils Island. Alfred Dreyfus was later exonerated of all charges in 1906 and resumed his career in the French Army fighting in the First World War.

While in France Maud Gonne, who shared Millevoye’s politics, entered into an affair with the fascist, often having sex in semi-public places, perhaps not quite the Goddess Yeats thought! She had kept her anti-Semitism hidden from Connolly perhaps knowing the Marxist’s views on this form of anti-Jewish hatred. The surface of Gonne’s politics would not have had to be scratched very hard to reveal her true colours but nobody, not even Connolly, gave such an issue a second thought. Her work, certainly against British imperialism, and support for the poor of Dublin was second to none, an undeniable fact yet, alas, tarnished with closer examination.

Maude Gonne had two children to Lucien Millevoye, Georges Silvere, who died of meningitis at the age of one in 1891, and Iseult Lucille Germaine (1894-1954) who too later became a figure of W.B. Yeats attraction and, like her mother, Yeats proposed marriage to Iseult who turned him down. Did Iseult inherit her mother’s anti-Semitic politics? Later on Iseult had a rapport with the head of the Nazi Foreign Office, Eduard Hempel, but does this mean she shared the Nazi Party Minister’s views? Many questions could be asked, too many for this article. “Maud Gonne may have been sympathetic to the nationalist objectives which Connolly sought to achieve but she was opposed to his socialist politics” (James Connolly A Full Life Donal Nevin P.90). In a letter,1927, to her, Yeats wrote: “when I knew you first you were anti-Dreyfus and all for authoritative government – Boulanger – and so on; and I was Dreyfussard (sic) & more or less communist under the influence of William Morris.” Gonne’s reply was: “In the old days when you were Dreyfus you use to think it fine the thesis ‘Better France perish, than one man suffer injustice!’ I hold that Dreyfus was an uninteresting Jew & too much money was spent in his cause for it to be an honest cause & that greater injustice triumphed every day when poor men were sent to jail for theft of food and clothing for their families & I would prefer to raise the cry for them. Being a nationalist, I sympathised with French nationalists who objected to the Jews and international finance interfering in their country & upsetting their institutions” (James Connolly A Full Life: Donal Nevin P.90-91). As can be gleaned from this letter Maud Gonne’s anti-Semitism had not mellowed with time. Had she referred to raising the “cry” for the “injustice” suffered by the poor against the rich in general that would have made sense to any socialist. The fact she emphasised Dreyfus’s Jewishness highlighted her grotesque anti-Semitism.

“As a result of the successful anti-Jubilee demonstration he had organised, Maud Gonne invited Connolly to submit an article for the journal which she edited in Paris” (Nevin P.93). L’Irlande Libre was the Journal which she edited and Connolly, along with Michael Davitt, W.B. Yeats, William Field MP, and Lucien Millevoye along with Gonne herself all contributed and it is the last contributor, Lucien Millevoye, who raises questions. Either Connolly just viewed this man, a fascist, in all probability unknown to Connolly, as just another who contributed among many to Gonne’s journal? My view is Connolly had no cause to give Lucien Millevoye more than a passing thought as one who writes for Maud’s publication. James Connolly never met Lucien Millevoye so why would he have given the man any serious thought? He had not been furnished with the knowledge of Maud Gonne’s relationship with him so to Connolly he was just another individual who contributed to the journal. No doubt Gonne kept Millevoye and his views shared by her, a closely guarded secret from Connolly and other socialists in Ireland.

Millevoye died in 1918 but the ideology he followed lived on and almost conquered all of Europe starting in Italy when in 1922 Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister after his march on Rome. Eleven years later a far more aggressive form of fascism, in its generic sense, Nazism, became the government in Germany. Despite Maud Gonne’s anti-Semitism she did not support the Nazis during the Second World War. In fact she is on record as saying “she would not have been a Nazi even if she had lived in Germany during that period.” 

It is clear to see Maud Gonne was a very enigmatic figure. Socialistic in her concern for the poor, a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union – the suffragettes – she opposed British rule in Ireland yet, despite all these progressive political positions she let herself down enormously with her anti-Semitic views. Maud Gonne was not alone in the WSPU with her anti-Semitic views and some of the Suffragettes joined Ormonde Winter, former head of British intelligence at Dublin Castle, in a new British fascist party in England. This should not be confused with Oswald Moseley’s anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists which succeeded Winter’s small group. Maud Gonne had two children to a French Fascist who, in all probability had he lived, would, along with French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, have supported the Nazis and advocated a military alliance between France and Nazi Germany, and she masterly kept this a secret in Ireland. The question is, how? Had Millevoye lived longer could he have impacted further on Maud Gonne’s political views? This is unlikely because her and Millevoye separated in 1900, eighteen years before his death, and Maud Gonne married Major Sean MacBride in 1903. She had a child, a boy also named Sean, with MacBride who himself would go on to have an impact on Irish political life. Sean MacBride Junior would become an IRA Chief of Staff and would form part of the coalition government when the Republic of Ireland was declared in 1948 (for the 26 Counties, enacted 1949) as the head of the Clann na Poblachta party. MacBride had also been active in Sinn Fein and the left-wing Saor Eire (Free Ireland).

Despite Maud Gonne’s dislike of Hitler’s Nazism in Germany the same could not be said of her view, at least initially, of Mussolini in Italy. To begin with she supported the Italian fascist leader however as time evolved, she began to question his authoritarian government and crushing of civil liberties. This is somewhat ironic because, according to Yeats’ letter in 1927, she once supported “authoritative government – Boulanger – and so on” this was in reference to her and Millevoye’s support for the French far-right activist. She must have known fascism was authoritarian and crushed civil liberties, particularly the right to organise in trade unions. Perhaps her own views were mellowing but not, it would appear, on anti-Semitism and that is an important negative from a socialist perception! 

Maud Gonne was one of the more enigmatic figures in Irish history, starting with her relationship with the fascist anti-Semite in France Lucien Millevoye. She was perhaps the last person it must have been thought to hold fascist views given all her other positive affiliations. Then on the 17th February 1903 she converted to Catholicism and on the 21st of the same month she married Sean MacBride. Was this an act in itself of rebellion by Maud? W.B. Yeats begged her not to marry MacBride as did Arthur Griffith but she went ahead regardless. Maud Gonne was one of Ireland’s enigmas, and an enigma she will remain . But, enigma or not, her anti-Semitic views tend to be masked by some historians! The question is why is a side to one of Ireland’s best known activists rarely spoken?

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Maud Gonne McBride – Saint Or Sinner?

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Forty

 

A Morning Thought @ 3020

The Independent 🏴 Written by Richard Jolly.

The fan favourite who achieved more than he ever dreamed possible.

The caption is more poignant now, even as the words have proved horribly wrong. “Yes to forever,” wrote Diogo Jota, accompanying social-media pictures of his wedding to his long-time partner Rute Cardoso. Within two weeks, Jota’s forever had ended, the Liverpool and Portugal forward killed in a car crash in Spain, along with his brother Andre Silva. His new wife is already a widow, his three young children left without a father.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Cristiano Ronaldo, his Portugal captain. There is a feeling of shock whenever a life is suddenly cruelly cut short, and Jota was just 28. It is still greater when someone has seemed as full of life as Jota did. He was often a smiling figure; “someone with an infectious joy,” Pedro Proenca, head of the Portuguese Football Federation, said. He was popular wherever he went. “Diogo was adored by our fans, loved by his teammates and cherished by everyone who worked with him during his time at Wolves,” his previous club said. Wolves described themselves as “heartbroken”, Liverpool as “devastated”.

Continue @ The Independent.

Diogo Jota

Cam Ogie ✍ According to statements by the U.S. president, Washington claims to have “captured” Venezuela’s head of state and removed him from the country following military action.

Venezuelan authorities dispute the account and demand proof. Those facts matter. But even accepting the U.S. claim at face value, the precedent it asserts is extraordinary — and profoundly destabilizing.

Because if “capturing” a sitting head of state by foreign force is now acceptable, then the entire grammar of international order collapses.

Imagine, for a moment, if South Africa announced it had bombed Tel Aviv and “captured” Benjamin Netanyahu for the sake of democracy. Or if a rival power struck Moscow and seized Vladimir Putin in the name of human rights. Or if a regional bloc attacked Kyiv to “capture” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, claiming it was necessary to stabilize Ukraine.

No Western government would treat such acts as law enforcement. They would call them what they are: acts of war, violations of sovereignty, and kidnappings masquerading as moral necessity/crusades.

Yet when the United States does it — or claims to — the language shifts. “Capture.” “Stabilization.” “Restoring democracy.” The euphemisms are not accidental; they are the grease that allows violence to pass as virtue.

This is the core hypocrisy of the so-called “free world.” Democracy is invoked not as a principle, but as a permission slip.

Regime change doesn’t produce democracy — it produces factions.

History is unambiguous on this point. Externally imposed regime change does not deliver stable democracy. It shatters institutions and replaces politics with force. Once the state is decapitated or delegitimized from the outside, society fractures inward.

The United States has already tested this logic— repeatedly, and the result was catastrophic

In Chile, U.S. backing of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende did not “save democracy.” It dismantled it, ushering in years of dictatorship, repression, and social trauma whose effects lasted generations.

Iraq shows exactly where this logic leads. In Iraq, the 2003 invasion was explicitly framed around regime removal and the pursuit of Saddam Hussein. His eventual capture was presented as a decisive moment that would bring order, legitimacy, and democratic renewal.

Instead, it marked the implosion of the Iraqi state. The 2003 invasion obliterated state institutions under the banner of freedom. What followed was not democracy, but sectarian fragmentation, militias, insurgencies, and a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and permanently destabilized the region.

By dismantling core institutions and forcibly removing leadership, the invasion shattered Iraq’s political centre. Saddam Hussein’s capture did not end violence; it accelerated fragmentation. Militias formed along sectarian and factional lines, rival authorities emerged, and civil society collapsed under the weight of insurgency, reprisals, and foreign occupation. What followed was a prolonged civil war, mass displacement, and the rise of extremist groups that fed on the vacuum left behind.

The lesson was clear then, and it remains clear now: decapitating a state does not create democracy — it creates factions.

In Libya, the 2011 NATO intervention removed Muammar Gaddafi without constructing a viable state to replace him. The result was not liberation but a collapsed country carved into rival governments, militias, and proxy battlefields — a civil war that still has no resolution.

The pattern is consistent: once an external power decides who rules, internal factions organize around violence rather than consent. Armed groups replace civic institutions. Legitimacy becomes a weapon. Civil society disintegrates.

To pretend Venezuela would be immune to this logic is not optimism; it is denial.

Regime change replaces politics with force.

Externally imposed regime change follows a consistent pattern. Once foreign powers decide who governs, legitimacy ceases to flow from domestic consent and instead becomes a function of force and external backing. Political disputes are no longer resolved through institutions but through arms.

Venezuela is not immune to this logic. Removing or abducting a head of state does not heal political divisions — it radicalizes them. It invites splits within the military, emboldens rival claimants to power, and dramatically increases the risk of civil conflict.

Those who speak casually about “liberation” will not be the ones living with the consequences. Ordinary people will.

Sanctions, bombs, and abductions are not democratic tools.

Washington and its allies insist that such actions are necessary because the targeted government is “illegitimate.” But legitimacy is not established by foreign recognition or removed by foreign bombs. It emerges — or collapses — through domestic political processes.

When the U.S. imposes sanctions that devastate civilian life, then points to the resulting hardship as proof of failure, it is not diagnosing collapse — it is engineering it. When it signals support for regime change, it invites internal actors to pursue power through force rather than compromise. When it attacks state infrastructure or claims to have removed leadership, it accelerates the slide toward civil conflict.

This is not democracy promotion. It is political demolition.

And looming behind the moral rhetoric is the motive Washington rarely states plainly: control. Venezuela’s strategic crime is not that it violates democratic norms — the U.S. maintains close relationships with far more repressive governments when it suits its interests. Venezuela’s crime is that it insists on sovereignty over its resources and political alignment.

A U.S.-favoured replacement guarantees nothing – there is no guarantee that replacing Nicolás Maduro with María Corina Machado would bring stability, economic recovery, or expanded civil freedoms.

Leadership change alone does not repair shattered institutions or reconcile a polarized society. Political alignment matters. Machado has aligned herself closely with U.S. foreign policy priorities, including strong support for Israel during its war on Gaza — a campaign that leading human rights organizations, UN officials, and legal scholars have described as genocidal, and which the International Court of Justice has ruled presents a plausible risk of genocide under international law. She has also publicly supported relocating Venezuela’s embassy to Jerusalem in line with the U.S. position.

Whatever one’s view of these stances, they underscore a basic reality: installing a U.S.-aligned leader does not equal democracy. In deeply divided societies, externally favoured replacements often deepen fractures rather than resolve them.

Democracy as slogan, not principle - A rule that applies only to enemies is not a rule.

If international norms apply only to adversaries, then they are not norms at all — they are tools of domination. A world where powerful states can bomb capitals and abduct leaders while invoking democracy is not a rules-based order. It is a hierarchy enforced by force.

That world is unstable by definition.

Because once such behaviour is normalized, others will imitate it. Precedent is contagious. And when every power claims the right to decide who governs whom, diplomacy collapses into permanent crisis.

If democracy is to mean anything, it must include a simple principle: no state has the right to decide another nation’s leadership at gunpoint.

Anything less is not freedom. It is empire — stripped of its slogans, finally honest about its methods even as it continues to lie about why.

⏩ Cam Ogie is a Gaelic games enthusiast. 

If This Is “Democracy,” Then Words No Longer Mean Anything

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Thirty Nine

 

A Morning Thought @ 3019

Dixie Elliot  ⚑ I didn't really know Brendan McLaughlin other than that he was a Derry man who had been in a different block during the blanket protest.

 
Brendan McLauglin
When I say a Derry man I mean that he came from Greysteel which is a few miles outside Derry on the road to Limavady. Greysteel was virtually unknown until the night of the 30th October 1993 when Loyalist gunmen burst into the Rising Sun Bar murdering eight people and wounding nineteen. Two of which were Protestants. 

Brendan joined the ranks of the IRA at the very beginning of the war in 1970. He was forced to go on the run in August 1972. His mother died on Christmas Eve 1973 and he was unable to attend her funeral due to the presence of the Crown Forces. In 1974 he was sentenced to four months in Portlaoise prison for failing to account for his movements. He was released in August of that year.

Brendan was eventually captured by the British outside Greysteel in 1976, along with his brother Michael and Tom McFeely from Dungiven. He was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for possession of a .22 rifle and joined the blanket protest in H5 where he was put into a cell adjoining that of Joe McDonnell, who would die on hunger strike in July 1981. 

Tom McFeely would be be one of the seven men who embarked on the first hunger strike in October 1980. When that hunger strike ended in December without having achieved the Five Demands Bobby Sands immediately and on the night began putting the plans in place for a second hunger strike which would begin in March 1981. 

Brendan bravely put his name forward to be included in that hunger strike and was eventually selected to replace Francis Hughes who had died on May 12th. Within a week Brendan suffered a perforated ulcer. He was forced to come off it after 14 days having been given 24 hours to live.

He was released from the H Blocks on the 5th November 1984 having served eight-and-a-half years of his twelve-year sentence, due to lost remission. Only five months after his release his brother Michael died while collecting for the PDF. Brendan formed a band in his memory, the Michael McLaughlin Memorial Flute Band. 

Brendan McLaughlin was a principled Republican and for this reason he followed Ruairí Ó Brádaigh from the 1986 Ard Fheis and walked away from the lies of Adams and McGuinness as they took the Republican Movement down a path which eventually ended in a humiliating defeat. A defeat which Adams and McGuinness dressed up as a peace process. But peace and indeed a political path was always there for the taking, as John Hume often pointed out during the 1970s and 80s, only to be ridiculed by the same leadership who eventually took it. 

Brendan remained with Sinn Féin Poblachtach - Republican Sinn Féin - even after he suffered a stroke in April 1999 and was confined to a wheelchair. He often attended commemorations and was a regular at the annual hunger strike commemoration held every August in Bundoran right up until his death. 

I have made reference to Brendan's release from Portlaoise in August 1974. Two months later on October 30th 16 year-old IRA volunteer Michael 'Ben' Meehan was killed while on active service, when a bomb exploded prematurely while he held it on his lap in the rear of a car at a petrol station on the Strand Road. Despite being in the driver's seat, volunteer Denis 'Sa' Gallagher, who was a month off his 17th birthday, survived the blast and managed to free himself from the wreckage of the car. Sa and a third volunteer, who had been outside the car urging civilians to move away, made their way down the Strand Road towards a group of people who were gathered outside The Carraig Bar. Sa recognised a school teacher he knew and asked him to take them both to Shantallow, which he did.

Brendan was the first IRA volunteer to appear on the scene and without waiting on orders he told Sa to get into the boot of a car so that he could take him across the border to have his facial wounds treated. As they drew closer to the British army checkpoint Brendan stopped the car and told Sa to get in with him. When they pulled up at the checkpoint a British soldier opened the boot and looked inside. He then went to the driver's side, looked in and asked Brendan where they were going to and he told him Buncrana. The soldier then waved them on.

Óglach Brendan Mclaughlin passed away on the 7th December 2025. His comrades in Republican Sinn Féin placed the National Flag on his coffin. I attended the funeral and recognised Tom McFeely so I stood with him for a while and chatted. Brendan was laid to rest in the Star of the Sea Cemetery, Faughanvale. 

His two sons, Michael and Brendan and his stepson Jamie are grieving for a father. His wife Loretta has lost a husband but they can rest assured that Brendan was a fearless and committed Republican who never shied away from what had to be done. He was a father and a husband to be proud of.

I measc laochra na bhFíníní go raibh sé. 

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie


Brendan McLaughlin

Dr John Coulter ✍ The UK’s farming industry enters the New Year with the impressive victory over the Labour Government by forcing the latter into yet another humiliating U-turn over the Family Farm Inheritance Tax, which in its original form, could have seen numerous Ulster farms go to the wall financially.

In hard cash terms, the Government has been forced to increase the threshold for inheritance tax on farms from £1 million to £2.5 million - a massive climbdown by Labour by any standards.

It has also given the entire agricultural industry another impetus to make one tremendous push in 2026 to get the entire family farm tax completely abolished.

The whole campaign throughout last year has reminded me of my days half a century ago as a young teenage preacher’s kid and my at times uneasy relationship with a farming organisation known as the Young Farmers’ Club (YFC).

Agriculture is - and always has been - one of the main industries in that north east Ulster Bible Belt, but as the Presbyterian minister’s son, I had absolutely no interest in farming and its associate organisations.

During Boys’ Brigade camps, when us country lads first came in contact with a tee-shirt printing shop, while I got my schoolboy nickname - Budgie - emblazoned on my tee-shirt, most of the other BB boys got the make of a tractor on theirs’.

Indeed, your dad’s tractor preference crossed the sectarian divide in the Seventies. There were fights on our school bus - not between Catholics and Protestants, or between rival schools.

The main fights centred around those lads - both Catholic and Protestant - whose dads farmed used a Massey Ferguson, and those lads whose dads drove a Universal or a Ford!

The answer to a question which could get you a right kicking was certainly not - what religion are you? The key question was - what make of tractor does yer da drive?

Being the Presbyterian minister’s son, dad didn’t even have a tractor so I was exempt from joining one of the so-called ‘tractor gangs’! Indeed, in later years when dad began building a new manse and borrowed a retired farmer’s tractor, when I said the make of vehicle, the ‘tractor gangs’ just laughed as they said it was a ‘vintage’!

But in that north east Ulster Bible Belt, the overwhelming majority of my farming friends joined their local YFC. Such was the attractiveness of the YFC, even some chums whose dads were not farmers signed up.

I personally could not see the point of me joining as I had no interest in agriculture – apart from the occasional bout of paid potato gathering in October, or strawberry picking in the summer.

Every year, some club would write to me kindly inviting me to join. Some of my fellow preacher’s kids did join a club, but I suspect that was more to placate their parents or a club rather than any burning desire to develop their agricultural skills and knowledge.

My friends talked about their stock judging skills. I tended to adopt a very flippant view of what they saw as an essential youthful art. For me, when you’ve seen one sheep’s ass, you’ve seen them all!

It would not be until I became a full-time journalist covering the annual agricultural shows that I would gain a proper understanding of how important such activities were to developing a new generation of farmer.

This was especially emphasised to me as during my time as a staff journalist at the Belfast News Letter, when the annual North Antrim Agricultural Show in Ballymoney became an essential part of my reporting duties.

The clubs who invited me to join all tended to meet on Monday evenings – but that was a big homework night for me personally, and the start of the school week’s training for cross country.

The last thing I wanted to do was go to a farming club and discuss sheep, cows, crops or tractors all evening. It became a source of mutual irritation that I would not ‘join the club’. Some of their leaders could not understand my unwillingness to sign up, especially as some other preacher’s kids had joined.

I did not want to be rude and tell them – I find farming boring! What has judging sheep got to do with heavy metal? I was more interested in talking about the latest AC/DC, Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin albums, or who might want to join the line-up of my own heavy rock band, The Clergy.

There was also a perception that clubs in the Seventies located in that north east Ulster Bible Belt had two key factions. One was involved with stock judging, competitions and drama; the other was a hard-drinking, partying lot.

Of course, I must emphasise that as I write this in 2026, I’m talking about perceptions from over 50 years ago. I’m sure the now outdated perceptions of YFC activities from the Sixties and Seventies are no longer relevant!

In later years as a tabloid journalist, I also had the perception that the YFCs, no matter what the rows and rivalries, had the abilities to ‘close ranks’ every time us nosey hacks tried to probe allegations of fights at barn dances!

Unfortunately, the latter’s boozing activities were getting the former’s craft and competition factions a bad name. It was another excuse for not getting involved in the club. I always harboured the suspicion the leaders just wanted my name; just to say: ‘Oh the minister’s son is one of our members’.

The worst times were after church on Sundays after dad had taken services in predominantly farming congregations. For weeks on end, some member of a club would approach me and politely invite me to meetings. I generally always had an excuse, usually to do with schoolboy cross country training.

A few clubs in that later 20th century era, unfortunately, had been getting an alleged poor reputation for heavy drinking at so-called ladies’ night functions, which generally descended into binge-boozing sessions.

Finally, one Sunday in the mid-Seventies, one leader from a particular club asked me point blank after a church service why I refused to join the YFC.

Frustrated with his persistence, I blurted out: “Because I don’t drink beer!” A totally daft and childish answer I know, but it did the trick.

However, it almost got me a hammering in that church in the process. That particular YFC leader knew I was making a jibe about the organisation’s alleged problems with binge drinking.

He momentarily lost his cool, grabbed me by my jacket lapels and slammed me up against the church wall. Then he realised what he was doing. He set me down and walked away.

Never again was I invited to join the YFC. But it came at a price. The movement effectively shunned me for daring to talk about the unspeakable. Alleged booze-bingeing was to be quietly whispered - not mentioned loudly openly in public, and especially by a preacher’s kid!

Maybe if I had joined, I would have had a better chance of dating a particular farmer’s daughter that I had a teenage crush on in those days half a century ago. In my puppy love mis-spent youth, she epitomised the most beautiful woman in the world.

She knew I had the mother of all crushes on her, but could I persuade her to go on a date with me? Not a chance. She was the one girl that telling I was a preacher’s kid would not work. I could have been the son of the Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly and she would have said ‘no’.

Some girls would simply go out with me, not because I was a hunk male model, but merely to keep on the right side of their mums and grannies. It allowed these women to boast that their daughter or grand-daughter was ‘dating the minister’s son’.

Having dodged membership of the clubs, there was, I must confess, only one YFC event which I thoroughly enjoyed - a club’s annual concert, which allowed club members to demonstrate their talents at singing and drama.

Such events could give the annual Presbyterian Sunday school soirees a run for their money in terms of variety acts. And, of course, there was those delicious YFC suppers afterwards.

In spite of my constant opposition to joining a club, I generally was given a ‘by ball’ in terms of attending such YFC events because dad would have been invited to either give the opening devotions, say grace before the supper, or give the epilogue.

I had an alternative motive - the annual YFC concerts provided me with perfect opportunities to ‘chat up’ a few farmers’ daughters and arrange some dates!

And, equally importantly, enjoy the endless supply of Presbyterian egg and onion homemade sandwiches on offer during the supper. For one night only, jibes about ‘heavy drinking’ would be forgotten by one and all and the minister’s son could become a ‘farm boy’ for the evening. Yeeehaaaaa! Now where did I park that tractor?
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Counting Sheep! Past Memories Of Young Farmers’ Clubs

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Thirty Eight

 

A Morning Thought @ 3018

Anthony McIntyre  ⚑ We live in a precarious world, one where the rich behind the latest imperial carve up are abandoning even feign fidelity to international law and a rules-based global system. 

Increasingly, right wing capitalist nation states - Russia, the US and Israel - are deferring to the only law they respect: might is right.

With the US invasion of Venezuela my mind drifted to an old tutor of mine who died at the end of August. Bill Moffett in his role as an Open University tutor guided me through the final year of an honours degree which I completed a year before release. Each night after lock up, from February to October, and over eight years, I immersed myself in studying for a general degree in politics with the bulk of it in international relations. Throughout 1991 Bill was the tutor on the Global Politics course. Once a month he would come into the H Blocks. I'd arrive in the classroom between the wings and the circle with his beverage of choice and biscuits. The hour following was devoted to coursework accompanied by probing conversation. 

I loved working with Bill. He was warm and erudite, totally lacking intellectual arrogance. He didn't concern himself with the misplaced comma, the absent semicolon. His forte was intellectual, never seeking to impose a schoolmarmish regime. While, like all my tutors, he most likely struggled with my handwriting, he never complained about it and always gave me strong grades. He finished off where the brilliant Jenny Meegan, my first tutor, had started when I first set out on a degree course in February 1984.

Initially the prison education system was viewed with suspicion by republican prisoners. In Long Kesh it was effectively boycotted but after the blanket protest, prisoners in both the Cages and the Blocks began engaging with it. Many emerged with degrees. It could not have been easy for the tutors coming into the jail. The prison staff would often seek to fill their heads with horror stories about the type of person they would be educating. Whatever the political and personal view of the tutors, I think the prisoners won their respect and that was reciprocated. The tutors of the Open University displayed a commitment to education that republican prisoners found themselves at ease with, many of whom had familiarised themselves with the groundbreaking work of Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich. And so it was with Bill - he placed the emphasis on learning, teaching was merely an aid to that.

Bill was the last of my OU tutors and one that I have fond memories of. I guess it is safe to say I learned much more from him than he did from me. I think where I may have hit the spot with him was reinforcing a view that republican prisoners were not mindless gunmen and bombers as the NIO liked to caricature us. 

Around two years ago Bill's daughter Jenny got in touch with me, telling me that her dad had spoken to her quite a bit about our interactions. He said he would like to read my book Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism. Delighted to be able to return a long standing favour, I managed to obtain a copy, signed it and posted it off to him.

Then we had a chat on the phone. It was so pleasing to be back in touch with Bill because I was forever grateful to him for providing what soccer aficionados call 'an assist' to my intellectual development. In 1991 Bill had a firm grasp of the foreign policy of the then superpowers. The year he tutored me also happened to be the one in which the sole superpower rival to the US threw the towel in, causing a shift from a bipolar world to a unipolar one, with the US now the supreme global hegemon, much as it always wanted. While I was certain he would have had tightly reasoned views on the turn that world affairs were taking in recent times, he was in and around 90 years of age, so there was no way I was going to bother him with my curiosity about the state of global politics. 

Prior to his illness Jenny and her husband Dru called to the house one Sunday afternoon. They were on their way to the airport and it was convenient to drop in on us in Drogheda which is close to the main Belfast-Dublin arterial route. It was a most rewarding feeling for me to have met Bill's daughter. When Bill passed Jenny sent me a link so that I could watch the funeral service online. On the morning of the funeral somebody called to the house and by the time they had left I rushed to get online but had problems signing in which Jenny had previously said might happen. To my regret I missed the service.

There was a great bond within the H-Blocks. Even today many former blanketmen keep in touch, meet up for drinks and so on. Many of us like to echo the August 1994 sentiment of Bernadette McAliskey that the good guys lost. Bill Moffett made such an impression on me, demonstrating that republican prisoners were not the only good guys to cross the portal of the H Blocks. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Bill Moffett

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