Decombustion

Music, with its power to inspire emotion, conjure memories and create bonds, has played a significant role in the history of our community.   Sometimes this has been a part of the problem, when musical traditions have emphasised exclusion and conflict.  Often, however, the experience of sharing music, of singing, playing, listening and dancing, has brought people from different traditions together and inspired them to work for peace and a shared future.  One outstanding example of this reconciliation in action was the Miami Showband whose members, themselves from different traditions, brought together Catholic and Protestant young people throughout the worst times of the Troubles.  As we know, the young musicians paid a terrible and tragic price for their courage and vision.
Here in County Fermanagh, we have a rich and vibrant cross-community musical life, with dedicated musicians sharing their talent in many genres.  In celebration of this success, and of the commitment of our young people to a shared and non-violent future, the Fermanagh Churches Forum is hosting PeaceJam, a unique evening of inspiration and hope.  The event will take place on Saturday February 25th, at 8pm at the Westville Hotel, Enniskillen.
We are delighted to welcome as our guest speaker Stephen Travers of the Miami Showband, who will talk about his own experiences of the ways in which music can break down barriers, dismantle prejudice and bring people together.  Following Stephen’s talk, a buffet supper will be served, after which young Fermanagh musicians and rock bands will play until the early hours.  (The not-quite-so-young needn’t stay quite so long!)
Tickets for the event are £5, including supper, and are available now – email me at info@fermanaghchurchesforum.org - or on the door.  We look forward to seeing you for what promises to be a great night!

Last night I was reading Kester Brewin’s book Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures, when I came across this passage:

“The temporal nature of these moments runs against the culture of permanence that runs right through the Church. We speak of eternity, of an undying body of Christ, of the constancy of our witness in stone cathedrals that appear to have been there since the dawn of time. Our unending prayers end with ‘forever and ever, Amen’; our song and liturgy hang heavy, invested with hundreds of years of history. Tradition is good. It can be a healthy momentum that carries us straight when the winds of change blow hard. But central to our tradition is the story of a man whose ministry lasted but three years. He had the choice – he could have sustained a far longer time with his followers, could have delayed his necessary death for many years. Instead, he allowed himself to be cut off. What is it then about the temporary that is to be celebrated?” (p. 143)

The moments he is speaking of are cessations in violence, are feasts, festivals, miracles and what Hakim Bey called ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ such as the eighteenth century pirate utopias which flourished in the gaps between the maps and the earthly reality. To these, I think, could be added the temporary communities of radical politics, from the women’s peace camps of the 1980s through climate camps to this year’s Occupy movement. But it is only now, in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, that the two impulses of Christianity, the temporary and the permanent, have been brought into such fierce relief.

St Paul’s Cathedral, perhaps, contains some of what is best about permanence: architectural splendour, music, liturgy and art, but also what is worst. When people stopped being primarily hunter-gatherers and became farmers, a new imperative arose: to enclose, control, build and preserve. As the Church became established, in both its lower and upper-case meanings, the same kind of change took place. Buildings and structures, constructed to celebrate and facilitate the work of the Gospels, began to obstruct that very work, their own requirements for maintenance overshadowing the tasks which they were meant to serve. And so we reach the state of St Paul’s today, with a board of trustees embedded at the heart of the financial industry, and an admission charge of nearly £35 for a family of four. You can imagine how it happens: each step leading logically from the one before, all for sound reasons, until we find ourselves in a barricaded glittering temple with the Gospel going on outside.

It was brave and honest for members of the clergy at St Paul’s to resign rather than allow themselves to be complicit in the state violence that will, it seems inevitably, be used by the Etonian chaps against the occupiers. But how much more would it have said if, rather than working out their notice within the cathedral, they had furnished themselves with a cheap tent and sleeping bag and joined those in the square.

I’m not Anglican-bashing: as a Catholic convert I have chosen to belong to a church with far more cathedrals, bigger bank accounts, a more rigid structure and a far more shameful history of complicity with money and power. One of the very facets of Catholicism that drew me towards it, twenty-six years ago, was its tradition. And yet within that tradition, the two thousand year-long, ragged gaudy procession of believers, those whose light shines the fiercest are those; St Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, who are most truly pilgrims and strangers, hunter-gatherers of the faith, with no place to call their own.

It’s a difficult tension to hold, and so not surprising that Rowan Williams, with his finely-tuned sense of nuance and ambiguity, has so far remained mainly silent. Not surprising, but a little disappointing. For this is an opportunity for the Church to recalibrate itself, to reset the compass of its heart. As Kester Brewin concludes his chapter:

“The beauty of TAZ is that it injects hope into these overpowering situations. The forces at work against us are huge. The powerful own the maps and have legislated for every last inch. But in the interstitial spaces, under the radar of those who would want to configure the world for their own benefit, brief festivals of hope are taking place. They are temporary flashes of light in dark places, but long after they have gone the air hangs heavy with a generous odour, and those who thought they saw something different are, in miniscule ways, penetrated by the marvellous for a second and can never quite get rid of that feeling. ‘Hush’ says the Church, leaving its petrified walls and tiptoeing mischievously toward the public square, ‘I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it?’ (p.150)

I’d prepared something to say at Saturday’s Green Party NI AGM (see Slugger O’Toole for a full account) in support of the motion,

“The Green Party in Northern Ireland is opposed to all oil drilling in Northern Ireland particularly in areas of special scientific interest and opposes the licensing of exploratory or exploitation activities that atttempt to harness shale gas reservoirs using the process of hydraulic fracturing or fracking.”

As it turned out, however, we were by this time running so late that we risked missing our parsnip soup, and since no one appeared to oppose the motion, it was passed without the need for my thoughts.  So, for what they’re worth…

 

Six months ago, like most people,  I knew nothing about fracking.  Now I feel a bit like Homer Simpson – I don’t know how much old stuff has been pushed out of my brain ….  Because it’s a complicated issue.  Not because it’s technically complex – the process itself is frighteningly crude: they drill down a mile or so, across another mile or so, send down explosives and follow them with huge quantities of water, sand and those chemicals which may or may not be added (and in practice always are) at enormous pressures, to shatter the rock in all directions.  It’s about as subtle as a toddler having a tantrum.

And it isn’t complicated, either, because there are finely balanced arguments on both sides – this isn’t a GM foods or a nuclear power issue.  No, it’s complicated because there are just so many ramifications that affect so many areas.  With some campaigns you can say “Stop this and save the ozone layer” or “Stop this and save the dolphins”.  But with fracking it’s “Stop this and save – just about everything.”

So, since you don’t want to hear me talk about just about everything, I’ll stick to just one point.  The pro-fracking people say this is an economic issue.  And they’re right, it is.  Not in terms of jobs that the industry will bring  – the headline figures of 7 or 800 are a maximum, over several counties, north and south, and over half a century.  What that boils down to is probably a very few, temporary, low-skilled and low-paid construction jobs, a tiny fraction of the real careers that the renewable sector could bring.  No, the important thing about fracking is the jobs and the livelihoods that it will almost certainly take away.

For years Fermanagh has been building up its reputation and success as a tourist destination.  But not just any tourist destination – we don’t have an Irvinestown Disneyworld or a Lisnaskea branch of Centre Parks.  We don’t even have an Enniskillen Eye.  All we’ve got are loughs and forests and moutains.  And that’s what people come for – to walk and climb and fish and cycle and sail and paint.  They come because it’s quiet and peaceful and clean and beautiful.  And that’s what it won’t be if and when shale gas extraction goes ahead.

The industry calls their sites “wellpads” which sounds quite cosy, the sort of thing that Jeremy Fisher would perch on with his fishing rod.  But what they really mean are huge concreted industrial facilities.  They’re full of heavy machinery, pumps, processors, generators and so on,.  In America these usually operate 24hours a day, they create incredible noise and light pollution, serious air contamination, great clouds of smog and the foulest of smells. Just what you want for your next eco-holiday.  Then there are giant pits to collect rainwater, which of course belongs in the local water table, and more pits for the wastewater flowback which is by now strongly saline and contaminated with heavy metals and often radioactive materials.  And there are wells themselves, of course.  Initially there’ll be eight on each ‘pad’ rising to sixteen or more as time goes on.  And we’re not talking about just one or two sites – they’re planning on around a hundred in the Lough Allen basin alone.

These sites will of course be connected by new access roads and along these and our small country lanes will come the HGVs  bringing and taking away water and materials.  It’s been calculated that each wellpad (and remember, we may be talking about a hundred or more) will need over five thousand one-way, so ten thousand return trips by twenty-ton trucks and tankers.  Would you go on a cycling holiday in the middle of that?

And so where will these pads be built?  Some may be on farmland, which will then remain contaminated and unusable for decades or more.  But it seems likely that many of them will be built right in the forests, or what used to be forests.  A lot of people think that couldn’t happen, that the reason we have publicly-owned woodland is to keep it safe from this kind of exploitation.  That’s what I thought, so I emailed the Forest Service just to check with them. This is the entirety of their reply.

Hi Tanya,
Thank you for your email. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) is the Government department charged with the statutory responsibility and power to prospect or grant prospecting licences in relation to mineral and petroleum exploration.
Any licence issued by DETI entitles the licensee to carry out exploration on any land stipulated on the licence, including land managed by Forest Service, DARD.
Licensing this activity is a matter for Minerals and Petroleum Branch, Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, Colby House, Stranmillis Court, Belfast BT9 5BF.
Regards, Alex Brown (Forest Service)

That’s it.  What that tells me is that we can’t rely on  existing leglislation, we can’t rely on public bodies and we can’t rely on those who are charged with acting for the common good.  That’s why Northern Ireland needs a moratorium, and we need to pass this resolution.
I haven’t talked about Fermanagh’s other main industry, agriculture and the production of food for the rest of the country.  I haven’t talked about what happens if the smallest amount of benzene, say, gets into any dairy farmer’s milk, and the effect of that on the whole sector.  I haven’t talked about the myths that shale gas could somehow lower our carbon emissions  (it’s likely that its net emissions are actually higher than coal) or that it can act as a ‘transition fuel’ – transition to what? – we already have the technology, the skills and the resources to produce abundant renewable energy.

I haven’t talked about what happens at the end of a well’s active life when it’s capped off and abandoned, with its protective casing designed to last for a hundred years and nearby acquifers which are needed for thousands.  I haven’t talked about the effects on human and animal health, on drinking water and fish stocks.  I  haven’t talked about the likelihood of earthquakes and the effect of those on the Marble Arch Caves or of  the risks of explosion and fire and what that would do to the forests.  But I won’t.  I won’t talk about anything else.  I’ll just urge you to support this motion and to get involved in the worldwide campaign.  This isn’t a Nimby matter.  We’re not saying, like people do about wind farms,  yes this a good idea but it’s not appropriate here.  Fracking isn’t appropriate anywhere.  In America, where they’ve lived with the consequences, they’re coming to realise that.  The president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association said last month, talking about opponents of fracking:

“These nuts make up about 90% of our population, so we can’t really call them nuts any more.  They’re the mainstream.”

We in Northern Ireland need to learn from the experience of that mainstream. We need time, we need research and we need a proper framework that will protect our people, our landscape and our resources.  We need this resolution.

 

 

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as ‘fracking’, is big news all around the world, and especially on both sides of the Irish Sea.  It is a technique first used in conventional wells, where a mixture of water and sand was pumped at high pressure to extract the last vestiges of oil or gas.  Over the past decades the method has been developed, with the addition of powerful chemical agents, in order to obtain gas from deep layers of impermeable shale.

In contemporary shale oil operations, wells are dug deeply, typically several kilometres, into the earth and thence horizontally into the shale layer.  A pipe gun is sent down with explosives which are detonated to cause mini-earthquakes.  ‘Fracking fluid’, made up of water, sand and chemicals, follows at high pressure,  further fracturing the shale and allowing the gas, which is mainly methane, to escape.  Because shale is so impermeable, even using this method, a large number of wells have to be dug within the mined area.  Typically, a concreted site will contain up to sixteen wells, with a couple of kilometres between each site and around a hundred wells in total (though obviously operations can be significantly larger or smaller than this).  In addition to the wells themselves, the sites, which the industry call ‘pads’, also contain heavy machinery, ponds full of toxic waste liquid, storage and treatment facilities.  Networks of access roads link the sites   for the heavy goods vehicles bringing and removing water (each individual well requires millions of gallons of water), materials and waste products.  A conservative estimate is that one thousand return lorry journeys are required for the construction and maintenance of each well.

Obviously, this type of industrial operation has a significant effect upon the surrounding, usually rural, locality.  Its visual impact, often replacing forests and meadows, combines with the noise of twenty-four hour heavy machinery, noxious smells and clouds of smog, to transform the landscape.  But it is the unseen effects that are causing even more concern, especially in the United States where the industry has been operating for the longest.  Both human and animal (wildlife and livestock) health can be seriously damaged by the poisons contained in diesel exhaust gases, the chemicals contained in fracking fluids and the ‘mud’ used to lubricate the drill bits, by heavy metals and radioactive materials brought out of the shaft and by the escape of methane into air and domestic drinking water.  Meanwhile the huge quantities of water required leave local water tables depleted; the  fracturing process has been implicated in earthquakes and the highly flammable nature of the gas has led to serious fires and explosions.

As a result of these widespread problems, many American people, who once embraced shale gas as the answer to their energy dilemmas, are now speaking out against it, so much so that at an oil and gas conference in Denver this month, delegates were told that only 7% of the public view the industry favourably.  “The public do not believe us.” said the president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.  “We need someone else delivering our message for us.”  Speaking of those who oppose hydraulic fracturing, she said, “These nuts make up about 90% of our population, so we can’t really call them nuts any more.  They’re the mainstream.”

Now we on this side of the Atlantic are being faced with the same questions.  The company exploring the Blackpool area claims to have discovered a huge exploitable quantity of gas while licences have been granted for both the Republic and Northern Ireland, including the unspoilt lakeland region of County Fermanagh, incorporating lakes, mountains and the Marble Arch Caves Geopark.

How should Christians view this process?  Has God given us the gas hidden deep in the shale to use, if we can smash our way into it, however the industry and government see fit?  Does our desire to continue our oil-based way of life justify using this resource, no matter what the consequences?  Do we have any responsibility towards the earth, our brothers and sisters in its poorer regions, the other species with which we share it, and our children who will inherit it, or is looking after ourselves our divine mandate?

I have been looking into this subject recently and have identified three areas of Christian life and teaching which seem to me to be relevant to our thinking, and our consequent words and actions.  This is by no means an exhaustive analysis, but I hope that it may provide a starting-point for others to think, pray and act upon this vital contemporary issue.

 

Our stewardship of creation

Throughout the Old Testament we learn of God’s intimate care for his creation and of the special role and responsibility borne by the human race in sharing in this relationship.  It is we who are given the privilege of naming the species we discover, of looking out for the vulnerable, taming the strong and enabling them all to thrive and multiply.  The story of Noah is of an individual taking on this responsibility, ensuring that every type of creature, the entirety of what we  now call biodiversity, is kept safe and sustainable.  And at the end of the story the rainbow confirms God’s covenant not only with humankind but with “every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth”  (Genesis 9:16).
The New Testament gives us an even more compelling reason to cherish the universe and everything within it.  We learn that all things were made through Jesus, the Word, “and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). So there is nothing anywhere, no molecule of water or methane, no drop of oil or atom of oxygen that is not imbued with divine life.  As Jesus himself said of the sparrow, “not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father” (Matthew 10:30).

In the first millennia of human life on earth, our stewardship work was physically hard.  It was a struggle to find food, to grow crops, to raise livestock and to collect wood for fire.  Wild animals were as likely to kill us than we them, and forests were places of danger and disorientation.  But, gradually first, and in a sudden rush over the past century, the balance has shifted.  Now we are lords of creation, able to wipe out species, raze huge jungles, split atoms and delve deep into the earth for coal, oil and gas.   In our voracious appetite to set fire to these fossil fuels, which took millions of years to form, and which we burn in an instant, we have even changed the composition of our atmosphere, changing our climate critically and, for billions, tragically.  For we have learned little that is new about how to create and nurture, and much about how to destroy.  But our theology has not always kept up with our changed position.  We are still talking about taming and subduing nature, when it is more often our own greedy and violent impulses which really need to be tamed and subdued.

As the collective people of God, humankind has a shared duty to care for the whole earth and its inhabitants.  But individuals and local communities also have, I believe, a particular responsibility towards their own patch of the planet and its land and water, creatures and plants.  It is not enough to assume that this responsibility will be discharged by some government agency on our behalf.

Where, as here in Fermanagh, the landscape is exceptionally beautiful, with lakes, mountains and wide stretches of unspoilt woodland, we know from our own experience how it gives glory to God and brings peace and healing to tired souls.  There is something about looking out across a lough, with wildfowl quietly scuttering along its surface, that calms our turbulent thoughts and helps us to get our lives and priorities back into proportion.  Our noisy, stressful world needs such places, now more than ever, and we should be keeping them safe and available to those who need them most.

Not, of course, that our landscape is simply a backdrop to the drama of our souls.  It is home and habitat, shelter and nourishment to many species of wildlife, fish, birds and livestock.  As built development encroaches, and climate change alters breeding patterns and food availability, these few enclaves become more and more important in keeping the most vulnerable of God’s creatures alive.  Trees, plants and other vegetation naturally thrive within our wetlands and forests, forming part of complex, interdependent webs of life while the unfolding mysteries of our geological heritage humble us before the aeons of their creation.

It is also the source and treasure chest of our most valuable resources; more important than oil, gas, gold or diamonds: fresh water, healthy trees and fertile soil.  As glaciers melt and sea levels rise, unsalted water will become the world’s most precious commodity.  Woodland, absorbing carbon dioxide, and providing sustainable fuel, will be more and more sought-after.  And across the world spreading deserts and the effects of intensive chemical-based agriculture are already leaving the ground a barren dustbowl.  Soil that can nourish food will be worth more to our children than all the  precious stones in a jeweller’s catalogue.

Hydraulic fracturing operations threaten all these aspects of creation.  Our landscape, broken and scarred by concrete sites and their brutal machinery will bring no balm to the broken-hearted.  The sounds and smells of constant HGVs, pumps and processors will preclude peace and contemplation and instead of breathing the clear woodland air our visitors will cough on clouds of smog and dust.

There is a very real danger that the air and water will be poisoned, either by the chemicals used in the industry or the deep-buried materials suddenly brought to the surface.  Communities where this type of mining has begun have found dead and deformed animals, birds and fish, and their livestock stricken by hitherto unfamiliar diseases.  Evaporation tanks, as their name suggests, allow toxins to evaporate into the air, while the atmosphere is further contaminated by the high levels of diesel exhaust.

Water may be affected by the breaching of underground aquifers, by leaks and accidents, almost inevitable given the amounts involved, and by the removal of such huge quantities from the local water table. Because the water brought back up from the shaft contains high levels of salt and heavy metals, it cannot be treated and recycled like ordinary waste water but would require expensive desalination before it could safely be returned to the local water system.

Most of us would probably assume that, given this range and severity of risk, the shale gas industry would be very rigorously regulated.  Unfortunately this proves not to be the case.  In the United States, the industry is exempt from the rules which safeguard drinking water, and environmental protection agencies have proved largely unable or unwilling to investigate serious safety breaches.  In the UK the situation is similar, with a range of agencies on the fringes of involvement but none having much by way of actual responsiblity.  If we are concerned, therefore, it is going to be up to us as individuals, churches, community groups and networks to speak out on behalf of the creation we love.

 

Love of our neighbour

We are all acutely aware of the economic disasters which have overcome most of the world, including the United Kingdom and Ireland, and of the fact that those who are suffering most are those who are least to blame.  These are hard times when jobs are, for many, almost impossible to come by.  In these circumstances it is natural to greet with hope and optimism any suggestion of fresh employment possibilities, especially in rural areas.  Many will have seen headlines such as those in our local paper proclaiming ‘800 jobs’ and have felt their hearts lift.  But sadly the truth behind the headlines is unlikely to be so bright.

In our area the licensee’s stated estimate is of a maximum of 700 jobs (so the real figure could be very much lower) spread across all the locations, north and south of the border, where it proposes to mine, and over a period of fifty years.  Moreover, although the company has said thatit will give priority to local people in filling these positions, it would of course be illegal under EU law for it to do so.  These few jobs, if they materialise at all, are likely to be unskilled, low-paid and hazardous. (We have, of course, been reminded very recently of the tragically dangerous nature of all mining work.)  They are likely to bring no significant training or career opportunities and to be offered to those prepared to work with the least dignity for the lowest pay.

But if hydraulic fracturing is unlikely to provide a job for most of our neighbours, it is far more likely to take away the livelihoods of many others. The main industries of rural counties like Fermanagh are tourism and agriculture, with hundreds of small businesses: farms, hotels, B&Bs, restaurants, pubs, activity centres, shops etc. providing the bedrock of our community.  Most of these businesses depend, directly or indirectly, upon visitors; people from all over the world who come here to fish, climb, kayak, ramble or simply relax and enjoy the scenery and atmosphere of tranquility and calm.  How many will still come to see landscapes ravaged by concrete, to hear the roar of pumps and generators, to dodge huge tankers in our country lanes and to wonder what is lurking beneath the surfaces of our precious loughs and rivers?  If the tourists stop coming, the whole structure of our economic life, built up with so much hard work and commitment, will crumble and crash, each failure triggering the next, until every person in the county feels the blow.

It is the same for the farmers.  It only takes one instance of contamination of milk or of meat to bring about the collapse not just of the farm where it happens but of the entire sector across a wide geographical area.

And it isn’t only in their economic lives that our neighbours could suffer as a result of shale gas extraction.  There is growing evidence of health problems among people living near, or even some distance downwind, of this type of gas well.  And, as is usually the case, it is the most vulnerable; children, the elderly and those whose health is already delicate or compromised who experience the most painful and serious consequences.

If we are truly to love our neighbours, even in the narrowest of geographical senses, we must do more than simply salivate, Pavlovian-fashion, at the mention of potential jobs.  When the Good Samaritan came across the robbed man he treated him with dignity and compassion and ensured that all his needs were met, for health, shelter and companionship as well as for food and drink.  In the same way, viewing our own neighbours with respect means seeing them as complete human beings and not just as economic units, and acknowledging all they have to lose as well as what they might conceivably gain.  And as for our neighbours a little further away …

 

Being peacemakers

Over the past few years, Christians of all traditions have become increasingly aware of the huge challenges posed by climate change and peak oil and of the conflicts which these are stoking throughout the world.  Again, it is those societies principally responsible for the problems who suffer least from their effects, and those who have played the smallest part who reap the fiercest whirlwind.  We know now that to continue emitting greenhouse gases as we do will make huge swathes of our planet uninhabitable and create unbearable tensions between peoples and nations.

We know, too, that the oil upon which our whole way of life depends is rapidly running out.  Everyone is looking for a quick fix, some way that we can limp on, keeping tight hold of the consumer lifestyle to which we feel entitled.  Shale gas seems, at first glance, to offer this opportunity.  But gas is a fossil fuel as much as coal or oil and, because methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and because the extraction process is prone to a high frequency of leaks, its total emissions are probably higher than either.  The mining and use of shale gas will accelerate the process of climate change as well as threatening our supplies of the other resource for which the world is desperate; fresh, clean water.

The chairman of the company who hold the licence to operate here has described those who oppose his plans as ‘anti-development’.  But as moral beings, we can never be pro- or anti- development per se; it all depends on what is being developed and what it is going to become.  There are many types of development that would use our natural resources, not the dangerous and finite ones a kilometre below our feet, but the abundant and renewable energy of wind, waves and sun.  The island of Ireland, north and south, is rich in appropriate locations of wind, wave and tidal electricity generation which could power our world cleanly and justly.  It would use our traditions of engineering expertise and innovation and provide real, skilled and permanent jobs and export revenues.  All that is needed to make this sustainable development a reality is will, leadership and a little courage.

For we are not called either to despair or to false, head-in-the-sand  optimism.  There is hope for our world, an earth ‘charged’, as Hopkins wrote, ‘with the grandeur of God’, and a family of mankind each of whom bears his image.  But in order to realise this hope, we must look clearly at the pass to which we have come, and take our future path with great care.  The values of the Gospel call us to speak out against the turning of our Father’s house into a marketplace.  I believe that it is time to speak.

In County Fermanagh, the beautiful Irish lakeland region where I live, we’re in danger of being fracked. For those of you lucky enough not to know, fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the industrial process used to extract shale gas for commercial exploitation. Tamboran, the company who have an exploratory licence here ^[1] are holding an “Information Night” in a couple of days time to pat us peasants on the head and tell us that there’s nothing to worry about. To prepare myself I made a few notes based on the sorts of things they might want to say to us:-

 

Natural gas is a clean, green fuel.

So-called ‘natural’ gas is a fossil fuel just like conventional gas, oil or coal. It is made up mainly of methane together with other gases and requires extensive processing before it can be used as a fuel. Much of this processing takes place on site where its toxic elements are burned off into the air. It is therefore not an ‘alternative’, sustainable or renewable energy source remotely comparable to wind or solar power. ^[2] Methane is a greenhouse gas fifty-six times more powerful than carbon dioxide and, to make matters worse, the production of gas by fracking produces 30-50% more methane emissions than conventional gas. We are invited to see ‘natural’ gas from shale as a solution to the disastrous levels of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the burning of coal. In fact, however, this type of gas creates at least 120% and possibly 200% of the emissions attributable to coal. ^[3] Far from being an answer to the urgent problem of climate change it is potentially one of the worst elements of the problem.

 

Hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) has been used for over sixty years

The process was first used in the middle of the twentieth century but, crucially, not in its modern form for the extraction of shale gas. It was used in conventional oil and gas wells as they began to run dry, to push out the last vestiges of fuel. Fracking as it is now practised involves much higher pressures, longer durations, volumes of liquid and complex cocktails of chemicals. ^[4]

 

The process is safe and controlled

If all goes well, this type of extraction involves drilling down around six thousand feet to the shale layer then turning in a right angle and drilling between one and three thousand feet horizontally. This shaft is then cased in steel and concrete under high pressure. The drill is sent down again and drills into the shale beyond the cased section of the shaft. A pipe gun goes down next, firing explosives into the shale through perforations in its length. These explosives create mini-earthquakes, fracturing the rock. Fracturing (fracking) fluid is then pumped into the cracks at extremely high pressures, expanding them and causing new fractures to branch out deep into the shale layer. The gun is withdrawn and a temporary plug put into the shaft after which the process is repeated along its length. At each stage there is a huge quantity of mud and fluid to be pumped out of the well up to the surface together with whatever minerals and compounds they have collected on their way. When sufficient fractures have been created, the gas is pumped to the surface where VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and other chemicals are burned off into the air before the gas is transported away. ^[5] The whole business is characterised by machinery and explosives operating at very high pressures, using high quantities of fluid at great depths and great distances in geological formations whose precise nature and fluctuations cannot be foreseen. The CEO of Cuadrilla Resources, the company operating near Blackpool where recent earthquakes have been attributed to their fracking operations, has admitted that “You never have control. Fractures will always go into the path of least resistance.” ^[6]Another expert has explained that the attempt to crack the shale predictably is like “trying to hammer a dinner plate into equal pieces”.^[7]

 

We’re not going to use chemicals in our fracking fluid

This is a recent claim by Richard Moorman, CEO of Tamboran, made as a response to concerns raised by local people in the Republic and Northern Ireland, people he describes as “anti-developers”. ^[8]  It contrasts dramatically with his earlier comment that a “whole truckload of stuff” would be “going down”. Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering at Cornwell University, who has over thirty years experience as an expert in rock fracturing, has stated that it is “highly unlikely” that Tamboran will in fact be able to carry out these operations with, as Moorman claims, nothing but sand and water. As far as I can tell, no other company in the world involved in hydraulic fracturing of shale does so without using a complex and usually secret combination of highly dangerous chemicals.

In Colorado, for example, 245 chemicals have been identified as being used, 91% of which have at least one detrimental effect on human health. ^[9] Many are carcinogenic and/or cause reproductive damage. (The other 9% aren’t necessarily safe but there isn’t sufficient information to know one way or the other.) 35% of the products used contain endocrine disruptors which affect the development of the brain, thyroid, pancreas etc, especially in unborn and young children, even in the ratio of one part per trillion.

The “only water and sand” claim has been made elsewhere, including in Pennsylvania where the Department for Environmental Protection repeated the claim, saying to enquirers, “What do you have to be afraid of? It’s only sand and water.” ^[10] Later it was shown that the gas company involved had in fact used fearsomely toxic chemicals in their fracking fluid which a DEP official admitted was “nasty, nasty stuff”.

The potential for confusion and obfuscation in this area is assisted by several factors. First of all, the proportion of additives to the fracking fluid is very small in percentage terms – Cuadrilla, for example, say that their fluid is 99.75% water and sand. ^[11] This may well be true, assisted by the fact that water and sand are denser than many of the chemicals added to them, but it’s the remaining 0.25% that causes the problems. As the example of endocrine disruptors shows, it only takes minute proportions of poisons to injure and kill us and the huge amounts of fluid involved mean that the quantities involved are far from negligible. Incidentally, in an area characterised by an almost complete absence of regulation (see below) Dick Cheney’s Halliburton managed to break one of the very few fracking laws by including diesel in their fracking fluid. ^[12]

Secondly, fracking fluid is only one source of hazardous chemicals in the whole extraction process. During the initial stages of the well’s construction, “drilling muds” are used to lubricate the drill bit. These harmless-sounding muds can contain toxic substances including arsenic, barium and strontium. ^[13] There are also dangerous naturally-occurring compounds deep in the geological layers which are exposed during the drilling and fracking processes and brought into our environment via the opened fractures or in the discarded waste liquid brought out of the shaft. These include pyrite, an iron sulphide which upon exposure to air or water forms sulphuric acid and iron hydroxide, heavy metals and radioactive materials. ^[14] Mr. Moorman has stated that there are no radioactive elements in the rocks where Tamboran will be operating, ^[15] but it is difficult to know how he can possibly be sure of this, especially as no independent verification has been offered. As we will also see, there are other health implications of the most serious nature involved in the drilling and processing stages of the operation.

 

There’s no danger of water contamination

This claim has repeatedly been made by gas companies operating throughout the world and sadly has been refuted by repeated experience. Sometimes they assert that, because there is no groundwater in the particular shale formation, such contamination cannot take place. ^[16] But a moment’s thought will show that this is entirely irrelevant. The drill which tunnels out the initial shaft may easily pass through rock formations which contain groundwater and the chaotic fractures created by explosive and high-pressure fracking fluids aren’t well-behaved enough to respect geological boundaries. Indeed, in the Blackpool operations, the bore passed through an aquifer about which the company could have had no foreknowledge. ^[17] These types of contamination have potentially deadly effects upon domestic and community water supplies, and upon the wildlife and vegetation of water and wetland habitats. Water pollution has also been caused by documented spills of wastewater onto roads and into rivers. ^[18]

The film Gasland highlighted numerous cases of families whose drinking water had been contaminated by nearby gas extraction operations including dramatic cases of tap water which could be ignited as it ran into the sink. The gas industry cannot deny the flammability of this water, demonstrated as it is on countless videos and television programmes. Instead they have put forward irrelevant technicalities and non-sequiturs: One is that no case of water contamination has officially been proven as being caused by fracking (only because the official bodies refuse to investigate and it’s impossible to separate fracking from the rest of the production process). ^[19] When chemicals associated with fracking fluids and drilling muds are found in nearby domestic water supplies, the logical conclusion is that these are the probable sources. It is only the power of the gas companies which reverses the burden of proof.

Another favourite claim is that the methane found in the water is biogenic (produced by decomposing vegetation near the surface) not thermogenic (caused by pressure within deep rock formations). In fact it isn’t always biogenic, and even if it was, the important point is its migration path not its geological source. Whichever type of methane it is, it’s getting into the water via the ruptures opened up by the drilling operations. ^[20] The truth in the worst cases has often been bought – when gas companies agree to supply affected families with transported clean water they usually insist on a gagging clause so that nothing more can ever be said. As it has starkly been put, they “trade silence for water” ^[21] .

 

It won’t affect your landscape or daily lives

Read any account of the experiences of communities near fracking facilities to find out the truth. Like our region, these are usually rural areas with little or no previous industry, often with stunning natural scenery and resources and depending upon agriculture and tourism. Once the drilling operations begin, the former peace and beauty of the landscape are torn apart with criss-crossed roads, huge concrete pads, ugly buildings and machinery and open pits like wounds in the earth. But the visual effect, horrific though it is, is only the beginning. Local residents tell of enormous clouds of dust and smog, twenty-four hour operation of immensely noisy diesel compressors, pumps, wellheads and dehydrators, sites lit up all night like sports stadia and noxious smells so that “the whole valley stinks”. ^[22] It isn’t just those closest to the wells who are affected; the pollution, smells and noise travel long distances to make life unbearable for people miles away who have received no royalties or sweetening payments.

A typical well density is one per forty acres, which sounds light until you realise that it means around sixteen wells per square mile. Each well requires between two and nine million gallons of water, all of which has to be transported by lorry – a conservative estimate is that one thousand return trips will be made by truck or tanker per well. That’s thirty-two thousand journeys for each square mile. ^[23] The country roads of Virginia aren’t almost heaven any more. Then there’s the question of where the water’s going to come from…

And all that’s when things go according to plan. As we’ve seen, gas is flammable stuff, and flammable stuff burns from time to time. In Colorado there have been fires in wells; one with two hundred foot high flames. ^[24] They’re worried about how their small town fire department could cope, and so should we be. In Virginia in 2008 a pipeline carrying the gas exploded, producing a fireball half a mile long. ^[25] We all watched in horror earlier this year as fires broke out across our forests and Mr. Moorman foresees that Tamboran’s operations will take place primarily in wooded areas. Well, I suppose at least there won’t be that many trees left to burn once they’ve finished: in Pennsylvania the trees and vegetation started dying even after the exploratory well was dug, before any actual fracking began, owing to an escape of chlorides from the shale. ^[26]

 

There’s no danger to your health

As we’ve seen above, contamination of air and water supplies are tragically common as a result of gas extraction, either from chemicals used in the extraction processes or from the sudden release of deeply buried naturally-occurring substances. There are also serious health hazards resulting from the constant operation of heavy diesel machinery which pump nitrogen oxides and VOCs into the air at dangerous levels. ^[27] In combination with sunshine (and yes, we do get the occasional shaft of sunshine, even in Fermanagh) these oxides produce ozone which can plume over 200 miles and burns the tissue of our lungs, causing or exacerbating potentially fatal respiratory conditions. ‘Fugitive’ gases such as benzene (for which the safe level is none at all) also escape into the air in the vicinity of the wells. ^[28] As Dr. Ingraffea says, “There will be a few people who will derive very high wealth from this and everyone else bears the risk of human health concerns.” ^[29]

 

There’s no danger of earthquakes

The earthquakes near Blackpool were almost certainly caused by the nearby fracking operations ^[30] and it is highly likely that the recent quake on the east coast of the United States also resulted from the high level of fracking activity. The US Geological Survey have confirmed that fracking and similar processes can cause earthquakes. ^[31]

 

We’ll abide by all regulations

Cold comfort, I’m afraid, since there are so few. Unlike the coal and other established industries, fracking has grown up in the past couple of decades when governments throughout the world have been in the pocket of big business. It’s no coincidence that one of the big players in the field has been Halliburton whose connections at the heart of the US government have been notorious. The “Halliburton loophole” whereby the gas industry in the US is exempt from almost all environmental protection law ^[32] has its mirror in many other countries, including the UK where Caudrilla’s operations haven’t been subject to an environmental impact assessment, health impact assessment or life cycle analysis (of greenhouse gas emissions). ^[33] Sadly, we can’t rely on either national or local government to look after our interests or those of our vulnerable children.

 

We’ll protect your interests

In a recent letter to the Anglo-Celt newspaper, Mr. Moorman promised that “To the citizens of Ireland, we will always do our best for you in our operations.” ^[34] It would be an impressive sentiment if quite so many people hadn’t heard the same from gas companies seeking lucrative mining rights. Somehow it tends to fade away as soon as the agreements are signed. In Colorado all sorts of promises were made by the mining company that it was concerned about the well-being of local people. But now they are sadder and wiser. One resident said that the most important words you’ll ever hear from a gas man are “for now”. ^[35] It means nothing, and it means that they can change their minds whenever it suits them. In New York State, at one of the most productive and “successful” sites, the chastened landowners noted that the company carrying out the work there broke its promises about the extent of the area involved, the location of roads, the lining of wastewater holding ponds, the frequency with which the ponds were emptied, the length of time taken, the attitude of the employees, who were abusive and threatening, and most of all the restoration of the land at the end of the operation. “It began to feel as though something terrible had been unleashed.” ^[36] Mr. Moorman has promised that his boards of directors will sign declarations regarding the operating practices which Tamboran will use. ^[37] Very laudable, no doubt, but he knows that such declarations have no legal power whatsoever. As a commercial company, Tamboran’s paramount duty is to maximise profits for its shareholders. If the interests of Fermanagh’s people and wildlife stand in the way of these profits, which will he really choose?

 

It’ll bring prosperity to the region

In what ways could that happen? There are unlikely to be significant numbers of jobs available for local people and those that might appear would be unskilled and short term. Neither are contractors likely to spend substantial sums of money in the local economy. Landowners on whose property the initial wells are sunk may receive one-off and/or royalty payments (though they may, as in Montana, have to sue the gas company for them^[38] ) but these are unlikely to compensate them for the losses they will suffer. In the United States the licence agreements offered are recognised as being unfair on the landowner, who ought really to have the protection of a proper commercial lease, but the unequal balance of power between the parties precludes this. ^[39] Once the wells are in operation, the gas company has the right to continue as long as it wants to, and to drill as many additional wells as it chooses, regardless of the expiration of the initial lease or wishes of the landowner. The owner of the land is personally liable for any damage or injury caused by the drilling operations but is unable to obtain insurance against these enormous risks. Both landowners themselves and their neighbours see the value of their properties plummeting and find themselves unable to either sell or mortgage their land. Not exactly everyone’s idea of prosperity.

Here in Fermanagh the traditional industry has been agriculture and the developing source of income is tourism. We have little or no other sources of wealth. Both of these areas are likely to be very seriously impacted by fracking. Pollutants such as ozone dramatically reduce crop yields while others cause disease and death to livestock. As for tourism, Fermanagh’s immense and unique strength is the beauty, purity and unspoiled expanse of its lakes, forests and mountains, attracting fishermen, hikers, climbers, naturalists and artists. Would any of these come to view concrete pads, wellheads, polluted holding ponds, constant heavy goods traffic and dead animals and fish? Would those who walk the hills breathing in the clean air and silence rejoice in constant engine noise and diesel stink? Nowhere in the world can fracking operations co-exist with a thriving tourist industry, least of all here where the importance of our geological and natural heritage, enshrined in the Marble Arch Caves Global Geopark, has been recognised by the United Nations. We are in real danger of throwing away what is most precious, economically as well as spiritually, in return for nothing at all.

 

Other communities have benefited from fracking

No they haven’t. The only people who have benefited are the directors, and sometimes shareholders, of gas and oil companies. As people in Colorado, Montana, Virginia, New York and many other places will sadly testify, fracking destroys communities, lifestyles and landscapes. Some are learning: in Dryden, New York, a prosperous and independent community, the town council has banned gas drilling ^[40] and in South Africa, despite tempting inducements by Shell and other companies in the poor Karoo region, the government has placed a moratorium on future permits. ^[41] As they point out, the promise of much-needed jobs is temporary; the destruction of their unique environment would be chillingly permanent. Meanwhile our neighbours in the Irish Republic whose communities would also be affected by this proposal are actively opposing it: at a recent public meeting organised by the Lough Allen Conservation Society (unlikely to be an anarchist front) more than five hundred people attended, more than the building would hold, so many had to listen from outside.

 

The film Gasland has been discredited.

No it hasn’t. An anonymous document called “Debunking Gasland” was produced by Energy-in-Depth, a lobbying and PR firm funded by the American Petroleum Institute, but all the criticisms made have been fully replied to by the director and his panel of experts. ^[42] Some of those issues have been mentioned above (biogenic/thermogenic methane etc.)

If fracking were really safe, could allow our unique landscape to remain unspoiled and our people to benefit from a sustainable source of energy and income, there would be no reason to oppose it. Sadly, the experiences of communities across the world, particularly in the United States which has had the longest exposure to fracking operations is very different. We need to ask hard questions before it is too late.

Sources

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/in_arid_south_african_lands_fracking_controversy_emerges/2430/

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/31/shale-fail/

http://www.friendsoftheirishenvironment.net/index.php?do=paperstoday&action=view&id=14394

http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/settlements/09138/natural-gas-royalty.html

http://un-naturalgas.org/Affirming_Gasland_Sept_2010.pdf

http://un-naturalgas.org/

1. ^[1]   DETI. Petroleum Licensing in Northern Ireland. [online] Available at: <http://www.detini.gov.uk/deti-energy-index/minerals-and-petroleum/petroleum_licensing_2.htm> ↩
2. ^[2] Chenango Delaware Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group, 2008. Frequently Asked Questions. [online] Available at: <http://www.un-naturalgas.org/hydraulic_fracturing_a-z.htm#hydraulic%20fracturing> ↩
3. ^[3]   Monbiot, George. The UK’s lack of fracking regulation is insane. Guardian. [online] Available at: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/aug/31/fracking-issues-resolve> ↩
4. ^[4]   Fox, Josh. Affirming Gasland. [online] Available at: <http://un-naturalgas.org/Affirming_Gasland_Sept_2010.pdf> ↩
5. ^[5]   SMTLearningChannel, 2011. Hydraulic Fracturing – Shale Gas Natural Extraction. [video online] Available at: <http://youtu.be/lB3FOJjpy7s> ↩
6. ^[6] quoted Monbiot, op cit ↩
7. ^[7] quoted Chenango Delaware Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group, op cit ↩
8. ^[8] McCarney, Damien.
   Tamboran’s claims of chemical free frack fluid challenged by expert, 2011. Friends of the Irish Environment. [online] Available at: <http://www.friendsoftheirishenvironment.net/index.php?do=paperstoday&action=view&id=14394> ↩
9. ^[9] YogaBill, 2007. Rural Impact: What to Expect from the Gas Industry Part Two. [video online] Available at: ↩
10. ^[10] Bateman, Christopher. A colossal fracking mess, 2010. . Vanity Fair. [online] Available at: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/06/fracking-in-pennsylvania-201006 ↩
11. ^[11] quoted Monbiot, op cit ↩
12. ^[12] Bell, op cit ↩
13. ^[13] ibid ↩
14. ^[14] Chenango Delaware Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group, op cit ↩
15. ^[15] quoted McCarney, op cit ↩
16. ^[16] Monbiot, op cit ↩
17. ^[17] ibid ↩
18. ^[18] YogaBill, op cit ↩
19. ^[19] Bell, op cit ↩
20. ^[20] ibid ↩
21. ^[21] ibid ↩
22. ^[22] YogaBill, op cit ↩
23. ^[23] Chenango Delaware Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group, op cit ↩
24. ^[24] YogaBill, op cit ↩
25. ^[25] Chenango Delaware Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group, op cit ↩
26. ^[26] Bell, op cit ↩
27. ^[27] YogaBill, op cit ↩
28. ^[28] ibid ↩
29. ^[29] quoted, McCarney, op cit ↩
30. ^[30] Monbiot, op cit ↩
31. ^[31] Chenango Delaware Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group, op cit ↩
32. ^[32] Bell, op cit ↩
33. ^[33] Monbiot, op cit ↩
34. ^[34] quoted McCarney, op cit ↩
35. ^[35] YogaBill, op cit ↩
36. ^[36] Triquet, Antoine, post on Facebook group Protect Our Environment: No Fracking Here, available at https://www.facebook.com/groups/243550102336845/ ↩
37. ^[37] McCarney, op cit ↩
38. ^[38] Lawyers and Settlements, 2007, available at http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/settlements/09138/natural-gas-royalty.html ↩
39. ^[39] Triquet, op cit ↩
40. ^[40] Chenango Delaware Otsego Gas Drilling Oppostion Group, op cit ↩
41. ^[41] Pittock, Todd, 2011. In Arid South African Lands, Fracking Controversy Emerges, Yale Environment 360 [online] available at:http://e360.yale.edu/feature/in_arid_south_african_lands_fracking_controversy_emerges/2430/ ↩
42. ^[42] Bell, op cit ↩

I’ve got a lot of time for Marcus Brigstocke. On a CDD (comedian-donation-duration) scale, where Mark Steel merits a long weekend and Jim Davidson the minimum number of milliseconds required to activate an off switch, Marcus gets at least a leisurely Sunday lunch, probably followed by an afternoon’s croquet and winding-up with the leftovers enjoyed as a midnight feast. Not only was Giles Wemmbley-Hogg tea-down-the-nostrils funny, but on his TV show a couple of years ago he sacrificed the opportunity of flirting with some airheady celebrity in favour of interviewing Harriet Lamb of the Fairtrade Foundation. So, on the twin criteria of making me laugh and being a Thoroughly Good Egg, Marcus maintains a consistently high score.

(It’s this good-eggery which emboldens me to refer to him by his first name, despite our never having met. ‘Brigstocke’ would probably be more appropriate for a serious review, but comes across as somewhat peremptory – a cross between ‘brigadier’ and ‘lock, stock and barrel’ – while ‘MB’ sounds coy, ‘Mr. Brigstocke’ archaic and ‘the author’ as though I’ve forgotten his name and can’t be bothered to look it up. So Marcus it is, and I trust that he’ll forgive the informality.)

So, if I write that God Collar wasn’t quite so funny or quite so thoughtful as I’d hoped, you’ll understand that my initial expectations were very high indeed.

As the close relatives to whom I moan about these things will know, I’ve been slightly niggled over the past couple of years at the laziness with which several atheist comedians formulate their anti-religion routines. To do him credit, Marcus refers to this ‘low-hanging fruit’ himself and avoids its most indolent tropes. It isn’t (just to forestall any images of a Melanie Phillips-Daily Mail-What sort of society do we live in where I can’t go to work as a nursery teacher dressed as a freshly crucified corpse?) that I don’t think Christians ought to be ridiculed. Personally, I’d like to be ridiculed as satirically as possible, preferably with a bit of reviling and persecution thrown in. It seems, according to the Sermon on the Mount, to be one of the easier and less painful ways of achieving beatitude. (The others: being poor in spirit, mourning, being a peacemaker etc. involve considerably more hardship, or at least long hours sitting round a conference table punctuating treaties and eating Rich Tea biscuits. I’ve never liked Rich Tea biscuits.) Of course, the snag is that you have to be reviled etc. for actually doing what Jesus told you to, rather than for wearing polo shirts buttoned to the top or listening to Cliff Richard.

Be that as it may, we Christians (I won’t speak for believers in other faiths but I’m pretty sure that many would agree) have done, and are continuing to do, or at least condone, some pretty atrocious things; things which, on the whole, our founder and guide instructed us specifically not to do – live by the sword, lay up treasure on earth, harm little ones etc. Our failures in these areas, though rarely rib-ticklingly hilarious, are undoubtedly valid objects for no-holds-barred satire.

What annoys me isn’t the target itself but the imprecision of it and the inaccuracy of the weapons used. Blunderbusses are being employed to nudge pachyderms on their broad but insensitive bottoms where a catapulted pebble could catch that spot where it really hurts. Partly this results from an understandable ignorance. Because the most egregious horror committed by professional Christians in recent years is the Catholic sex abuse scandal, and the most howling faith-related scientific blunder anti-Darwinism, there is a tendency to characterise the typical believer as a paedophile-shielding creationist. In fact most Catholics have no problem with evolutionary or other fields of science. To borrow a device from Marcus himself, if you constructed a Venn diagram in which circle A contained Catholics and circle B creationists, the section AB would contain a fairly small number of people. A small number of people who, had they happened to be at the Glastonbury Festival (probably an unlikely scenario), would be wondering exactly what they’d done to become the specific butt of quite so many late-night jibes in the Cabaret Tent.

Marcus manages to avoid this particular combinational canard in favour of some more original reflections. Unfortunately, several of these are even more inaccurate. In his live show he speculated about the probable fate of believing audience members who were reluctant to identify themselves.

“I did take great delight in reminding them that they only had to deny it twice more before they were in a whole heap of trouble. They couldn’t be sure if I’d ask them twice more, but it’s a tough call, isn’t it? Slight awkwardness at a comedy show versus eternal damnation for thrice denying the Lord.” (p. 149)

A nice line, but diametrically wrong. In fact, according to John’s gospel, the follow-up to Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus in the Temple courtyard wasn’t condemnation but his threefold avowal of love after the resurrection and his being given the task ‘Feed my sheep’. So those who are tempted to leave their faith behind at the entrance to comedy clubs are far less likely to be flung onto everlasting barbecues and more likely to be forgiven and told to go on a sponsored run for Oxfam. Sweat yes, charcoal no.

Similarly, he gets the story of Sodom and Gomorrah the wrong way round, misremembering (could it really have been a prep school lesson?) that it was the visiting angels who wanted to rape Lot’s neighbours rather than vice-versa. It doesn’t take away the distasteful spectacle of Lot pimping out his virgin daughters, but does shed a slightly different light on the moral to be drawn. In fact it has been convincingly argued that the sin of Sodom wasn’t buggery at all but a failure of hospitality^[1], it being less than gracious to gang-rape visitors to your neighbourhood (as members of town-twinning committees worldwide will no doubt be relieved to hear). Under this interpretation, contemporary sodomites would include tabloid editors with ‘bogus asylum seeker’ headlines, men who complain about official leaflets in Punjabi and women who tut in the post office queue at people sending parcels home to Ghana or Lithuania.

I do realise, by the way, that most of the material in the book first appeared within Marcus’s live show, and that a comedian’s poetic licence is endorsed with generous allowances for hyperbole, embellishment and sheer fantasy. Far be it from me to censure anyone’s extended riff on what happened when the Angel Gabriel, Holy Roly^[2] and the Dalai Lama walked into a pub. But (and this may reveal a many-layered depth of uncoolness and decrepitude) I do have the feeling that when something is written down and put into an Actual Book, it ought, so far as possible, to be checked with its sources. And when the source is the Bible, which, as Marcus points out, “has been the number one bestseller since before even Bruce Forsyth was born”, it’s not that difficult to check. Some of the other rather lurid stories, such as the holey chair through which papal testicles are verified, do, I admit, require a little more research to disprove, such as, er, looking it up in Wikipedia.

Lecture over. One of the more endearing results of the confusion over what sort of book this is – polemic, humour, autobiography? – is an awful lot of digression. Most of these meanderings I like – there’s a long one on climate change which has little to do with the subject at hand but is currently so important that every newly published book should probably include a gratuitious global warming update. There’s another on iPhones with an unsettling gerbil image that is wholly impossible to forget (I’m trying very hard), then one about pilfering postmen which I didn’t enjoy; it had the air of a right-wing meme that had somehow crept in uninvited. After that came one about Marcus’s dyxlexia, which is a really sneaky thing to put into a book. When an author explains, in tear-jerking detail, how difficult it is for him even to read a book, never mind undergo the slogging agony of writing one, it’s hard to criticise it without feeling that one is slowly and deliberately crushing a kitten’s paw. Yowl.

On the subject of digressions, this may be the time to admit my full motivations for buying the book in the first place. One was the W H Smith voucher which required me to buy more than Watchmen, another our general family affection for young Marcus but the third, most compelling, was the picture on the back cover showing him as a slightly ginger cherub.

That’s the one. And this (specs and hair model’s own) is my son Rory.

Back to the book. If the stumbling blocks to faith in God include his Old Testament persona, the Vatican, jihad and Christian Voice’s bizarre persecution of Stewart Lee, I imagine that one of the principal barriers to wholehearted atheism is, for many, Professor Richard Dawkins. Like Marcus, I was rather excited after reading the introduction to The God Delusion, looking forward to the brave new world of Brightness to which the good doctor was going to lead me. Alas, we were both disappointed.

“Richard Dawkins says at the beginning of his book, ‘I would like everyone who reads this, by the time they put this book down, to be an atheist.’ Well, I was an atheist when I started reading The God Delusion; by the time I’d finished it I was an agnostic. I was going to read it again but I worried I might turn into a fundamentalist Christian.” (p. 156)

Not, it seems, that Marcus actually disagrees with any of Dawkins’ arguments, only with the interminably superior manner in which he makes them. There isn’t much about evolution in God Collar, but it does appear as one of the arguments against belief in God. I do think this is a red herring, rather like suggesting that, because Jesus talked about God clothing the lilies of the field, Christian faith and photosynthesis are intrinsically incompatible.

The creationists’ God is something like a man in a shed, tinkering with his latest project; more self-assembly than conception. If God is God, rather than a finite member of the Olympian or Norse dynasties, he is not only the man but also the shed, the ground on which they stand, the space and time within which they exist and all conceivable and inconceivable scientific processes, ideas and imaginings. ‘Intelligent design’ isn’t much better; it still contains the same anthropomorphic fallacy, that God’s act of creation must necessarily be analogous to our own, with discrete plans and processes and outcomes. If God is God, then nothing is too complex or too simple to be his work. All we are specifically told in the Christian gospels about creation is that:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (John, 1:1-3)

That Word is, Christians believe, the Son who lived in Palestine as Jesus of Nazareth. So there is no particle that has ever existed in the universe, in any universe, that is outside his specific action and love.

As Antony de Mello writes,

“We forget all too easily that one of the big lessons of the incarnation is that God is found in the ordinary. You wish to see God? Look at the face of the man next to you. You want to hear him? Listen to the cry of a baby, the loud laughter at a party, the wind rustling in the trees. You want to feel him? Stretch your hand out and hold someone. Or touch the chair you are sitting on or this book you are reading. Or just quieten yourself, become aware of the sensations in your body, sense his almighty power at work in you and feel how near he is to you. Emmanuel. God with us.”

( Sadhana: A Way to God – Christian Exercises in Eastern Form, pp 46-47)

This is the immensity of the Christian faith, not so much that Jesus died, certainly not in the reductionist doctrine that would turn his death into the crudest of passwords, but that he, the infinite God, lived on earth as we do as a finite collection of molecules and forces and all those jolly sounding quarks and bosons. All particles are God particles, and if matter matters so much, isn’t it a bit petty to be squabbling about dinosaurs?

Suffering is hard, much harder than evolution and any believer who isn’t regularly stumped and stymied by it hasn’t been doing much thinking. It looks as though Jesus was when he asked on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” There are a few things we can say. A huge part of the suffering in the world is caused by people, directly or indirectly, by war and greed and injustice and carcinogenic pollution and climate chaos. If we all lived as we should we might even survive earthquakes and tsunamis. But that only raises the question of why we don’t. Free will, yes, but why is it so easy to choose the bad paths? Couldn’t we have been created with a better default setting? We can believe that, in the life of an infinite soul, our time on earth is necessarily short and incomplete, but we still grieve, and rightly, when someone dies almost before they’ve started. We can know that the incarnate God, the God of the Sermon on the Mount, suffers with those who hunger and thirst and mourn, but we don’t know why his messengers don’t do more to feed them in the first place.

Which brings us on to what seems to lie at the heart of Marcus’s atheism (which is so hedged about with uncertainties to be, if he won’t mind my saying so and won’t have to give back his Dawkins T-shirt, scarcely more than tentatively agnostic) – the behaviour of religious institutions. As I’ve already indicated, I have a lot of sympathy for him here, but I’m not sure that the situation is quite so simple as he suggests. His basic argument is that, regardless of whether there actually is a God or not, it is wrong for us to lend our support to organisations which have carried out acts of inhumanity.

“You wouldn’t save your money at the Bank of Rape, so why pray at a church whose record on child abuse means I’d rather employ Gary Glitter as a nanny than send my kids to a Catholic school?” (p.72)

This is pretty much unanswerable (with the minor caveat that most child abuse of every sort happens in the secular context of the family) if you accept the basic consumerist assumption lying behind it, that just as a bank is a purveyor of financial services, so a church, mosque or temple is no more than a purveyor of religious ones. If this were the case then obviously we’d simply consult our Ethical Shopper and select the Buddhists or Quakers along with the Co-op Bank, Ecover and Yeo Valley organic yoghurts.

But it isn’t, not quite. Being a member of a faith tradition isn’t just a question of paying your dues and receiving certain spiritual and social benefits. The decision as to whether to join or leave involves many factors: history, theology, revelation, community and vocation. The ethical behaviour of your fellow-members may be one of these, but whom are you judging and how? How many Maximilian Kolbes count in the balance against a Brendan Smyth? After all, the point of a church is that it’s made up of sinners; if we weren’t then we wouldn’t need it.

What it’s rather more like is being a citizen of a country. Like Marcus, I’m English, though I haven’t lived there for a while, and I rejoice to be so when I think of Julian of Norwich, William Cobbett, Jane Austen and Show of Hands. Then I remember Cromwell in Ireland, the Opium Wars, Dresden and the invasion of Iraq. Hmm. Occasionally people renounce their citizenship of a country on a point of principle, but it doesn’t happen very often. Most of us stick with it, vote, join political parties or pressure groups, work for the common good and campaign for an end to the injustices perpetrated in our name. It’s not so different within a faith. The view of the religious social structure presented in God’s Collar is rigidly hierarchical:

“It appears to me like a human pyramid. In Christianity, the impressive triangle of political power looks like this. On the bottom, with their feet on the ground, are the rank-and-file believers, churchgoers who occasionally arrange flowers and dabble in light charity work. … One row above them are the ones who are mildly disapproving of the somewhat occasional attendance of the bottom row. The second tier are religiously observant. They pray, sing, attend church, run weekend Bible studies and read the Daily Mail without laughing. … Above them are the ‘active’ members of the church; they ruthlessly promote their passion for the Christian way of life … are judgemental and cherry-pick from the scriptures to suit the politics they grew up with. Above them, very near the top, are the ones who say, as Stephen Green from Christian Voice did, that the floods in New Orleans were God’s just punishment for homosexuality.” (p.239)

Of course, faith organisations have hierarchies, few more so that my own, but, again, it’s not so straightforward as Marcus suggests. For one thing, the guys (and yes, I’m afraid they’re mostly still guys) at the top aren’t necessarily the baddies. Within the Anglican and Catholic churches, for example, recent archbishops have included Desmond Tutu, Oscar Romero and Basil Hume as well as H.R. himself. Stephen Green, by the way, is not very near the top of anything except his own estimation. And does Marcus really think that there is a direct correlation between the involvement of the believer and his or her worsening behaviour, so that occasional churchgoers are decent enough chaps but by the time you’re on the cleaning rota you’re sunk into a ditch of depravity? And as for those reprobates who insist on ringing the bells ….

Of course, church hierarchies, like any other, afford opportunities for the abuse of power. People who want to do nasty, selfish, cruel things are always going to use the most powerful excuse they can to justify their actions. Just as, in a world where oil is running out, the unscrupulous backers of tar sands and fracking use the excuse of cheap energy and in a secular society dictators like Stalin and Mao used the good of the State, so, in a culture where people believe in God, divine sanction is invoked by those who want to consolidate their position. None of this proves the rightness or wrongness of fossil fuels, communism or theism, only that the powerful know their PR. No one ever got very far committing genocide, environmental destruction or wholesale theft on the grounds that Double Gloucester ought to be more widely available.

Over the past couple of millennia, religious structures have been the most stable and powerful and so have been the most successful at shielding crime and persecution. But in the hundred years or so that secular hierarchies have been thriving they haven’t done too badly at it either. Wherever you have hierarchical structures, you have power, power that tends to attract people who aren’t as nice as Marcus. You can say, as I do, that people who believe in a good and loving God ought to behave better, but there isn’t any evidence to suggest that not believing in God would encourage them to do so.

Incidentally, both Marcus and I clearly think that churches are hopelessly right-wing, but we probably ought to note that others think the absolute opposite. And, to do them justice, we have had Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Martin Luther King, David Sheppard and many other anti-apartheid campaigners, liberation theology, Jim Wallis and the Sojourners, John Dear, the increasingly radical Christian Aid… The conservatives certainly haven’t had it all their own way^[3].

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that some people are meant to be inside the church, nudging it in the right (all right, usually the left) direction and others outside heckling. (I realise that this mixed metaphor has turned the church into some sort of pedal-powered comedy bus, but I’m reasonably happy with the image now.) One of the most important things is for the nudgers and the hecklers to communicate with one another, and one of the silliest for them to waste energy turning that conversation into a slanging match. Some of the prime candidates for driving the bus, like Simone Weil, have been outside with Marcus and some of the best heckles have come from inside (try Googling ‘Partenia’ to see what I mean).

Marcus doesn’t like the Bible much, or the God that it portrays. Fair enough, neither do I to a large part; except that the Bible isn’t really, as he implies, a single entity telling a consistent narrative. Instead, it’s a collection of very disparate texts, some of which, like the Gospel of St John, are the bedrock of our faith while others, like large chunks of Leviticus, are frankly of no more than historical interest, and rather unpleasant interest at that. Sane Christians don’t give them equal weight any more than, if you were to come across a box of your great-granny’s bits and pieces you’d treasure her mildewed butter wrappers as much as her love letters. Not all of the Bible is ‘true’, not even as the metaphor with which Marcus accuses us of dodging the question; much of it is just stories. What matters is that, on the whole (with the odd blip) these stories show a progression from an early idea of a capricious and bloodthirsty master through the prophets’ realisation of his concern with justice and mercy to Christ’s parables of a wholly loving and forgiving Father. (The whole rounded off, I’ll admit, by a slightly random anti-imperialist hallucination in the form of the Book of Revelation.)

It’s therefore slightly disingenuous to treat the figure of God as though he’s a historical figure or a fully-drawn character like Peggotty or Horace Rumpole. The story of our understanding of God is less like the reading of a biography than a process of scientific discovery – we put a hypothesis forward, test it, refine it, put it through a pretty rigorous bout of peer-reviewing … And it’s still going on. Jesus put us right about the more egregious horrors of the Old Testament but we manage to ignore him, going on eye-for-eyeing, walking on the side of the road without the bloodstains and obsessing about the Sabbath. John Dear has estimated a hundred years of the church’s life as being equivalent to one in a human’s, which makes us somewhere near the beginning of our third year at university, old enough to know better but still not quite ready to leave the bar and start some serious revision.

To reject the idea of a God because tens of thousands of years ago the Mesopotamians told a good flood story and the Hebrews subsequently put Yahweh into it is a bit like avoiding bison because medieval bestiaries claimed that their farts could ignite a tree three acres away.^[4] Yes, it’s sad and pathetic that over-literal bits of the story lurk beneath the matted fur of internet trolls, giving them ever more bizarre excuses for disbelieving in climate change. But they interpret the flood story in such a way to reinforce their political and social prejudices, not the other way around. The tale can equally (I would say with more justification) be told as the story of a family who, having learned about an impending extreme weather event (direct revelation not being that much different from the New Scientist), took mitigating steps, despite tabloid scorn, and prevented wholesale biodiverse extinction.

Marcus does, however, like Jesus.

“Jesus was a friend to the meek and downtrodden, he promoted the redistribution of wealth, he came to heal the sick and forgive the sinner. He’d make the front cover of the Daily Mail at least once a week as the evil face of ‘Political Correctness gone mad!’ … I like the peaceful, loving, long-haired, bearded socialist dude I see in Christ. I’m not totally sure but I think he may have pitched a tent next to mine at Glastonbury a few years ago.” (pp. 237, 246)

The problem, so far as he is concerned, is that, having established the Old Testament God as a bad-tempered mafioso, he can’t reconcile the Father and Son figures and has to postulate a sort of Trinitarian Oedipus complex to explain the family relationship. This leads into plenty of comic riffing about McDonalds and the Osmonds but doesn’t actually help. One of the reasons, if we can be so reductive as to talk of reasons, for the Incarnation seems to be so that we can understand a little of what God is actually like. Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father”, which doesn’t make any sense if, like Marcus, you see the Father as a brutal monomaniac and the Son as a pacific hippy. In fact, in the bits of the Bible that atheists tend not to know about, prophets had been banging on for centuries about the fact that God preferred poor people, didn’t like sacrifices, wanted widows, orphans and refugees to be treated decently, was utterly fed up with the rich and powerful among his people but would forgive anyone who showed a bit of compassion. Sadly, no one wanted to hear it then any more that they do now. So God, the same God, not a dysfunctional relative, followed the old writer’s adage of ‘show, don’t tell’, clambered down to earth like a long-suffering drama teacher and bloody well acted out what he meant. And we know how that turned out.

Having been, probably, more critical than I meant to be of God Collar’s arguments for atheism, I should point out that there are lots of good things in it, lots of jolly enthusiasms for women, and sex and gay people as well as a lot more honest detail about his own history than he had to give us. In this respect the book is a bit back-to-front in literary terms; rather than beginning with the particular and extrapolating to the general, he starts with the big statements and only much later explains why it is that he makes them. It’s rather more like engaging in a conversation than reading a book; like meeting someone on a train and exchanging brisk platitudes only to discover that, owing to a points failure at Aberystwyth, you’re actually thrown into one another’s company for long enough to tell your life stories. I felt slightly embarrassed by the end that Marcus hadn’t had the opportunity to hear about my own disasters and doubts. That’s all he needs, poor man.

Before summing up, there are two small bees still niggling in my headwear which I’d like to liberate. The first is that most Christians don’t, these days, think that non-Christians go to hell. A few do, yes, but a few people think that electricity leaks out of wall sockets. It doesn’t stop the rest of us from switching on the toaster.

The second is the notion that religion is an escape from reality, comparable to alcohol, and/or a way of coping with the fear of death. Neither of these really work for me. It’s at the times that I engage most with my faith that I am most aware of the world and people around me. If I want to escape, to retreat into a comforting, self-centred, consequence-free zone, I don’t turn to God; I walk round a department store^[5]. The Gospels are crammed full of reality: thousands of individuals who are poor or sick or disabled or questioning or lost or over-excited, all seeking and receiving the attention of Jesus. He didn’t live in a pastel-coloured fantasy world and neither can we if we take the slightest notice of what he told us.

And as for death, nothing seems more comforting than the idea that it’s the end of consciousness, that our bodies simply decay into the earth and, with them, the collections of synapses that we once mistook for eternal souls. If we accept with equanimity that there was a time before we were conceived when we didn’t exist, isn’t it just as easy to contemplate our future non-existence? I’d quite often choose that oblivion in preference to the terrible clarity of seeing my mistakes from the vantage point of eternity. (And that will be the real judgement, I suspect.)

When it comes down to it, I don’t really believe that the significant gulf is between those who believe in something they call God and those who don’t. The one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that if there is a God, our ideas of him/her/it are ludicrously limited. It may well be, therefore, that to stop believing in our circumscribed conceptions is to step closer to a distant inkling of what a real God could be.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that a more important and telling question would be; if there was such a thing as an infinite, sustaining and worshippable being, what would you expect that being to be like? Marcus’s book, I think, shows that the kind of God he would like to believe in would be compassionate, tolerant, patient and generous. My faith is that God is indeed so, that Jesus lived to show us that, and that all the scary stories are just shadows on the wall, remnants of cruel fairy tales that shimmer into nothingness as the morning arrives. Or, at least, that’s what I choose to believe. As C. S. Lewis wrote, in the end we can do nothing else. Good luck on your journey, Marcus. As you say, we’ll all finish up in Birmingham at the end.

 

This post first appeared on The Pen and Inkblog at www.crystalbard.com

1. ^[1] see, among many others, http://rainbowallianceopenfaith.homestead.com/Sodom3.html ↩
2. ^[2] All right, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I’ve known him as Holy Roly since 1985, when he was my best friend’s dissertation supervisor and he’s done nothing to disprove it since ↩
3. ^[3] Though they do, on the whole, manage to monopolise the word ‘Christian’ which is presumably why Marcus spends some time exploring some of the more bizarre policies of the soi-disant Christian Party, including a return to corporal punishment in schools, a raising of the motorway speed limit with an amnesty for speeding offences and a limit on parking fines. It begins to sound more like the Irritated Motorists’ Party until you reach the Environment section and a surprisingly comprehensive commitment to greenhouse gas reduction. ↩
4. ^[4] See T. H. White The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the 12th Century ↩
5. ^[5] But then I don’t drink alcohol for comfort, either. Exhilaration, gluttony, friendship, obstinacy, merriment, boredom and absent-mindedness, yes, but when I’m miserable it has to be Lemsip. Maybe I’m just weird. ↩

Last week I had the honour of a guest post on Gladys Ganiel’s faith and politics blog.  My short piece, a response to her post about the Twelfth of July parades,  tried to look at the subject from a rural perspective and specifically mentioned the desire among musicians, and brass band players in particular, to forge cross-community links and take part in more joint and integrated events.

Within a few days I had the chance to see in practice what I had so blithely been talking about.  As anyone who rashly flings their opinions online will know, circumstances are rarely so helpful, and so I didn’t want to miss the opportunity.   The little town of Tempo, some ten miles from Enniskillen, has two silver bands, the mainly Protestant Tempo Silver Band and the mainly Catholic St. Mary’s Silver Band.  St. Mary’s celebrates its centenary this year and marked it with a ‘Monster Band Parade’ last night in which Tempo Silver and other local bands were invited to participate.

The only potential drawback, from my point of view, was that I had to cycle there and back.  Twenty-odd miles is a lot more than I usually manage in my potterings around town, but my husband, who does the trip at least once a week, assured me that I could manage.  To sweeten the pill he promised a Guinness and a Chinese takeaway from any establishments of my choice within the metropolis of Tempo (pop. 533).  As usual, gluttony took a slight lead over sloth and I agreed to give it a try.  The main road from Enniskillen to Tempo is a long, long upward slope past a straggle of small industrial units so we took the gentler back roads for the first few miles, giving way to passing cows, before joining the main road here, at Garvary church.

After that it was even easier,  without even bovine congestion, and as we coasted into Tempo I scarcely felt that I’d earned the promised black stuff.  I wasn’t going to admit it though, and made straight for the Milltown Manor before the rush.

They don’t serve food in the evenings,  and so we repaired to the Yummy Inn (no doubt a traditional Chinese name) across the road for something hotter and more conventionally nutritious.

A side road led to a pleasant little park with a picnic bench and here we whiled away the final minutes before the commencement of the Monster (shades of Daniel O’Connell?) Parade.

The parade was a great success, starting not too very long after its advertised commencement (we are, after five years, well accustomed to the concept of Fermanagh Time), and including:

St. Mary’s themselves, obviously, leading the way;

 

St. Patrick’s Pipe Band;

 

Tempo Silver Band, with small bandsmen on cymbals and triangle:

 

Coa Pipe Band (we’d passed the turning for Coa on our way, which indicates something of the richness of the musical tradition within a tiny area);

 

Ballyreagh Silver Band (we’d also cycled right past the hall where they practice);

 

St. Eugene’s Band from Omagh, whose website shows their own practical commitment to bridge-building:

“Our busiest time of year is at Christmas when we play carols at various locations culminating on Christmas morning when we play at Omagh Sacred Heart Church followed by attendance at one of the Omagh Presbyterian churches.”

 

some very young traditional Irish musicians;

 

 

 

 

 

 

a couple of lovingly maintained vintage cars,  some motor and quad bikes and frolicking around them all, a troupe of muppets, superheroes, Elvis and giant animals collecting donations and handing out sweets (we met a very elderly lady on our way back joyfully sucking her lemon lollipop).

The parade ended at the parish centre with  generously heaving tables of food, overflowing teapots and a bar (which sadly we had to foresake in the interests of wobbling home safely).  Later there was to be more music and a barbecue.  The whole evening was hugely enjoyable and characterized by enormous goodwill on the part of both musicians and spectators, a tangible expression of what is shared by the people of Fermanagh, so much deeper and more important than what sometimes divides us.

It doesn’t negate the problems that Northern Ireland has experienced, and which continue to threaten us (the policeman at the edge of several of the photos above can be seen cradling his gun – not a feature of most English village pageants) but provides a genuine and practical example of cooperation and generosity.  Like the successful Shared Education project which has brought thousands of schoolchildren together across traditional divides, this kind of initiative shows that it is often the smallest and most rural communities which can lead the way into a better future.

 

 

Life moves at a meandering sort of pace out here on the western cusp of the United Kingdom, leaning on the Here Be Dragons signs and wondering what unseasonable weather events the glories of climate change will bring us next.  So when I realised that our eldest son, Gawain and his fiancée Sue would be in Ennis on Thursday evening for a pre-tournament simul, I was struck by something of an inspiration. I should probably explain a couple of things first of all.

A ‘simul’ is a chess-players’ abbreviation for a simultaneous demonstration, one of those exhibitions in which an expert player takes on a roomful of opponents at the same time, strolling from board to board and trusting that his (or her, occasionally) instinct and experience will outweigh the numerical odds.  As a grandmaster and professional chess player, Gawain does quite a lot of these, and since Ennis is, as he puts it, ‘one of his home towns’, his adolescence having coincided with a particularly nomadic tendency  on our part, he was happy to combine the event with a degree of social reunion.  And since the simul was being held in a pub, the two birds were very neatly stoned.

The second thing to explain is that, despite the passing similarity of their names, Ennis and Enniskillen are, in Irish terms, a very long way away from one another.  This is not another Ballymena-Ballymoney tale.  Ennis, or Inis, is simply the Irish for ‘island’, Enniskillen being, more or less, an island in the middle of Lough Erne, while Ennis, in its Franciscan infancy, was surrounded by the River Fergus.  According to the road atlas, Ennis and Enniskillen are 153 miles apart, or 245 kilometres (Northern Ireland uses one and the Republic the other) as marked on the map here with tasteful red blobs.  Owing to the paradoxical nature of County Donegal, Northern Ireland is not always north of the South, but in this case it is, the top blob being Enniskillen and the bottom one Ennis.

150-odd (and sometimes, as you’ll see, very odd) miles doesn’t sound much, but as another glance at the map will suggest, despite the Celtic Tiger, peace dividend and frankly scary facility in winning Eurovision, the west of Ireland is still, thanks be to her holy saints, fundamentally a mid-1950s rural backwater.  Neither Ennis nor Enniskillen, according to the map legend (that’s a nice etymological oddity in itself) is even a Town, and only Cork in the entire left-hand half of the island counts as a Large Town. So it wasn’t a great surprise when, checking the Journey Planner on the Bus Eireann website, I found that it would take nearly seven hours to travel from one to the other by bus.  Fourteen hours return, on six buses, with a bit of hanging about in the middle.  Or, as I preferred to think of it, only fourteen  hours.  After all, seeing Gawain and Sue, who are currently based in London, usually involves a minimum, each way,  of a bus, a taxi, another bus, a ferry, another bus and several trains.  And before that they were in New Zealand…

So I did what you’re supposed to do with inspiration,  and by half-past eleven next morning was settling myself on the first bus, due westward from Enniskillen to Sligo.  This humble little route passes through some of the most beautiful countryside I’ve ever seen (and I’m counting the Alps, Tuscany and the Scottish Highlands) and I wanted to be sure of enjoying it to the utmost.  Accordingly, I selected a place on the left hand side of the bus, with a minimum of chewing gum stuck on to the seat back in front of me and a seat pre-reclined (I can never get the hang of adjusting them) for optimum comfort.  The secret of successful bus travel is to make yourself as much at home as is compatible with the comfort of your fellow-passengers, so it’s kind, if the bus is fairly empty, to choose a seat neither immediately in front of nor behind anyone else, and if that’s not possible, to avoid twanging the elasticated net behind their seat, kicking the fold-down foot rest or playing your iPod at high volume through leaky earphones.  We’re a tolerant lot, on the whole though, and if you insist on talking on your mobile phone, munching noisy crisps or slurping from suspicious cans (alcohol is forbidden on Irish buses), no one will make much of a fuss.

For one thing, there’s so much else to think about.  I’m almost sure that Bus Eireann windows aren’t actually enchanted.  It must just be something about being a bit higher up than usual, and having such a wide expanse of glass to look through, and not having to do anything but look (I had a book with me, but most of the Enniskillen-Sligo route is too bumpy for non-nauseous reading).  Whatever it was, we’d only travelled a couple of hundred yards when the first vignette of quintessential Irish life manifested itself in the form of three men in a boat.  Three men being neither Edwardian Londoners nor portly comedians but locals out for a morning’s fishing, and the boat being of the wooden rowing variety rather than the petrol-guzzling cruisers which generally dominate the lough.  Over the next few miles we passed donkeys, an elderly couple grappling with a very small tractor, caramel-brown cows and meadows starred with wildflowers.  We also, to be strictly accurate, passed quite a few half-built houses and wildly inappropriate apartment blocks, testaments to the property bubble that grew, and burst, on both sides of the border.

As we travelled westward, things, as is their wont, grew slightly more bizarre, not least as we reached the Rainbow Ballroom in Glenfarne.  It turns out, according to Wikipedia, that the Ballroom is in fact quite famous, having hosted the great names of the showbands era and insprired a story by William Trevor which was subsequently filmed by the BBC.  I’d never before seen it other than entirely deserted (Glenfarne has a population of three farmers and a elderly hen) but this time we were treated to the exhilarating experience of a real live Garda checkpoint.  (This was the week of the Queen’s historic visit to Ireland and the discovery of a bomb on a bus from Kildare so Bus Eireann customers were clearly prime terrorism suspects.)  A genial man in one of those shapeless cotton hats worn on 1970s camping trips ambled onto the bus and viewed the assembled passengers, by now consisting of a man in his seventies, a woman of around sixty and me.  His interrogation was swift and merciless. “All right, folks?”

We crumbled under the pressure, nodding shamelessly.  At least one of us even smiled.  The Fenians must have gyrated in their graves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Approaching Sligo, the landscape changed, grew starker and more dramatic as we passed by Glencar Lough, looking towards the Dartry Mountains.    There’s nothing to do here but gasp at the wonder of it.  Still, though, the little domestic details: a white cow paddling in a small stream.

 

Then, ahead, the first glimpse of the Atlantic, past the King’s Mountain to Drumcliff Bay.

In Sligo I had an hour between buses so dashed, in a sudden downpour, around a few charity shops, collecting books and, almost, a vibrant but sadly oversized green raincoat. There’s a café here where they make some of the best sandwiches in Ireland but I’d brought my own this time.  Anyway, I couldn’t risk missing the next bus, south down to Galway.  There’s always a tiny batsqueak of excitement about Sligo bus station; there’s surfing at Strandhill and sometimes the cosmopolitan whiff of an Australian accent.  The next bus was, in keeping, busier and slgihtly grander, with vinyl trim to the seats and, yes, an overweight man in a Star Wars T-shirt. We were in mainstream bus culture now. A long section of the journey, this one, and not nearly so photogenic, though smoother, so I could read – Peter Singer’s How Are We To Live? – I always seem to be reading Peter Singer around Sligo – last time it was his stunning The Life You Can Save – and only glance desultorily at the abandoned train track, sudden jubliation of lupins and the dreary 1950s religious theme park that is Knock and its crazy airport.

Galway bus station, cramped and chaotic, was busy at five o’clock but the final bus was close at hand.  The driver inspected my ticket with amusement.  “Enniskillen to Ennis?  Bit long, like, isn’t it?”  Galway has some new cycle lanes since I was here last, with provocative signs: Burn Fat Not Oil.  Past the stretched-out suburbs with their giant roundabouts and greying hotels, we were back in rural Ireland, with rabbits, lambs and, this time, shire horses ankle deep in the streams.  Through Gort,that quiet little town suddenly rejuvenated by its new Brazilian population and I was back in the Banner County, Daniel O’Connell’s County Clare.  Not much had changed in the five years since we moved away, and the street map I’d brought in case of a sudden mindblank stayed unfolded.

I’d booked a bed at the Rowan Tree Hostel, which has just won Hostelworld’s Best Irish Hostel award (voted for by customers) for the second year running, and I could see why.  It’s a fantastic place, perfectly located on the river at the edge of the town centre, with welcoming staff, bright, clean rooms, copious facilities and state-of-the-art security.  I’d paid for the cheapest option, a place in a 14-bed dorm and was upgraded to a 10-bed, which I shared with only three, silent and considerate, fellow guests.  I just had time to find my bunk (pre-allocated, avoiding awkwardness) dump the two bulging bags of books I’d bought in Sligo, have a quick wash and slip out again.  The pub where the simul was being held was, by one of those coincidences  by which we suspect that Providence smiles upon the slow traveller, only a few yards down the road, past the bridge from which we once, memorably, watched a family of baby otters, and the school where I taught English (TEFL variety) when we lived in Ennis.

The simul, in the comfortable surroundings of Tom Steele’s, more accustomed to the fiddle and flute than the fork and fianchetto, was a success, with the usual mix of local enthusiasts, wandering eccentrics and small boys with hovering mothers.  It finished rather earlier than these things generally do, probably because there were, unusually,  two grandmasters, Gawain and the excitingly named Vlad Jianu, making alternate moves.  This made the whole thing more tricky, as they had not only to evaluate the position on each board they came to, but also to work out what, and why, their colleague had previously played.  Despite their differing styles, however, they won every game and honour was thus satisfied.

 

 

Not quite so my hunger – I’d got the impression that either Tom Steele’s or its sister pub next door did food, and when this turned out not to be the case had to make do with a couple of pints.  Sure, but isn’t Guinness a meal in itself? And seeing sixty-four pieces on the board was a good excuse for my incompetence at the chess variants we played until the early hours of the morning.

A few, a very few, hours later I was briefly awoken, tucked up in the Rowan’s Tree’s excellent duvet, by a couple of quarrelling geese on the riverbank, not quite so silent or courteous as my room-mates.  I slept again, though, getting up in time for the breakfast included in the hostel rate, simple but copious: coffee, orange juice, cereal and toast, the kind of food you actually want when not befuddled by fancy hotels with their kippers and pomegranate juice.

After breakfast I had a wander round Ennis in the sporadic rain (sporadic rain being pretty standard this far west), discovering that not much had changed in five years except for the closure/relocation of a few estate agents (presumably owing to the resounding  property crash), construction of a pleasant pedestrian bridge (just visible behind the hostel in the last picture but two), closure of an electrical goods shop (see resounding p.c. above), opening of several small businesses with Brazilian, Central European and Afro-Caribbean themes (hurrah – showing where, and thanks to whom, any Irish recovery is likely to come) closure of the big toyshop (a possible decline in sacrament-related conspicuous consumption?) and, inevitably, a feckin’ Starbucks.

Thus updated, I met up with Gawain and Sue (here pictured on the aforementioned p.p. bridge) and we enjoyed a gentle stroll around the farmers’ market (bread, cheese, meat, jam, veg etc.) and browse about the excellent Scéal Eile Books, also new since we left Ennis, and just about exactly what a second-hand bookshop ought to be.

Alas, the time passed with its customary alacrity, and by lunchtime I was back on the bus to Galway, leaving G & S to triumph in the Ennis Open tournament over the coming weekend.  I finished the Singer, duly convinced that we ought to act ethically, though not necessarily for the reasons he gives, and moved onto lighter fare in the form of Rupert Christiansen’s admirable Complete Book of Aunts, certainly a Dahlia rather than an Agatha among books*.  At Galway I deviated, as the chess players (quite innocently) put it, and instead of going up to Sligo took a cross-country bus that runs from Galway to Belfast on Fridays and Sundays only, presumably for the benefit of students.  This was fairly crowded but pleasant enough, though the route, through Roscommon and Longford, showed Ireland rather at its most dismal, with boarded-up houses sprouting gardens of dock, sprawling suburbs of retail warehouses, a sad machinery auction and a half-shorn sheep in a front garden.   Longford, incredibly, has a hairdressing salon called The Hair Trapp, which I’m sure is delightful, stylish and professional, but does seem to illustrate the fact, as yet undiscovered by Apprentice candidates, than not every pun is a good idea.

Deposited in the familiar surroundings of Cavan bus station, the last leg of the journey was on the Dublin-Donegal route, bringing me into Enniskillen in time for a glass of wine and plate of noodles with M at the Linen Hall.  Where would we inpecunious travellers be without Wetherspoons?  So,

The Moral of the Tale: Even in countries with pretty useless public transport systems like Ireland, even in the rural, underpopulated areas of those countries, even with little time at your disposal, it’s still possible to travel considerable distances reliably, cheaply (€42 euro return, and it would have been less if I’d not been coming back on a Friday) and enjoyably by bus.  Viva Bus Eireann!

 

*Oh dear, don’t you?  Wodehouse, Jeeves, Bertie’s aged relatives – what a treat you have in store.

My latest novel, Summer 17, is now available from Amazon on Kindle format. I originally started writing it around thirteen years ago, after finishing Trotter’s Bottom, the third in the Ophelia O. trilogy. Then I went back to work as a solicitor, went to Italy, taught English, wrote Survival Guide for Chess Parents and Girotondo, came to Ireland, set up Crystal Bard Books and generally forgot about it until a couple of months ago when M discovered the draft on an old computer. So, it’s been revised, rewritten and brought to slightly belated birth in the brave new ebook era. Click here to find out more, download a sample or buy it for Kindle or Kindle for PC.

A few weeks ago I read on my friend Gladys’ blog that the informal, inter-faith Northern Ireland Thomas Merton Society was holding a one day retreat in Knockayd, a centre in the Glens of Antrim run by the Corrymeela Community.  Since I have, for more or less as long as I can remember, been reading and cherishing the works of Merton, and knew very little about Corrymeela except that it was a Good Thing, I resolved to try to attend.  This proved slightly more tricky in the execution than the intention, as although participants were travelling from across the north of Ireland, none were coming from our particular south-west corner of the north and Ulsterbus can’t envisage the possibility of anyone wanting to get to Belfast before eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning.   The expedition seemed entirely stymied until M, cutting through the Gordian knot with his customary panache, suggested that I stay in a nearby B&B on the Friday evening.

Eureka!  The B&B (in Ballycastle) was booked, Translink (Northern Ireland’s integrated (pause for slightly hollow laugh)public transport network)’s website extensively consulted and a fellow Mertonite delegated to ferry me the few miles to Knockayd.  As the trip to Ballycastle appeared to involve at least three buses and/or trains, I decided to make a few book-hunting stops en route.  This was faciliated by a form of bus ticket which used to be called, rather grandly, the Freedom of Northern Ireland, which sounds more like the kind of thing Mo Mowlam might have been awarded than a small blue piece of flimsy paper permitting one to travel, at no extra cost, all the way from Belleek to Bangor.  It turned out, however, that the FONI (probably best not pronounced aloud) has been replaced by a natty little smartcard called the iLink which, once purchased, is rechargeable for a day’s travel at less than the usual day return fare to Belfast. Jolly well done, Translink.

The operation of the iLink is most exciting. You merely place it on a piece of plastic nothingness on the bus, the sort of grey panel that, on a car dashboard, indicates that this is the economy model, without the integral DVD player-cum-chopstick holder, and miraculously a ticket splurges out from the machine beneath it.  The drivers seem pretty thrilled about it, too.  ‘For my next trick…’ said one, which, for Dungannon on a grey February morning, is pretty much Perrier award stuff. So, the journey:

Fit the First: Enniskillen to Dungannon.

Having taken an extraordinary leap of technological faith and brought no printed books whatsoever with me (rather akin to a Swedish alcoholic setting off on a Sunday without an emergency stash of vodka) I started reading some of the free sample chapters downloaded onto my Kindle.  The first was a book called Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark, which has been repeatedly recommended by one of the more conservative commentators on Gladys’ blog.  I might have been warned by the subtitle, which is How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success or by the fact that another of this gentleman’s voluminous outpourings is entitled God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades.  Undeterred (or, to be honest, slightly deterred but feeling that I should give the thing a fair hearing) I read that China had no science, Islam no theologians, and (obviously) that unfettered capitalism was Good for Everyone before reaching the end of the sample and declining Amazon’s kind invitation to download the rest. Janet Street-Porter’s memoirs, Why My Parents Were Awful and Why I Dumped My Friends (or words to that effect) were similarly sampled and despatched to whatever a Kindle has in place of a wastepaper basket.

Dungannon

There isn’t much to say about Dungannon except that the main street, which runs from the bus station up to the library, is steep. I marched up it, bought a vintage Hardy Boys mystery and copy of Frost At Christmas (which I’d recently listened to on my iPod without managing to turn off the Shuffle feature and in consequence knew most of what happened but not, as Eric Morecambe so cogently put it, necessarily in the right order) and marched down again. At this point I imagined that I had time to pop into Tesco to buy a packet of biscuits and can of wine (I know) for my supper.  What I hadn’t factored in was the number of elderly ladies before me at the checkouts who had just received money-off vouchers for a range of precisely delineated grocery items.  On the positive side, it was encouraging to discover that I can still run, albeit a matter of yards, and succeeded in boarding the next bus.

Fit the Second: Dungannon to Belfast

If there was very little to say about Dungannon, there is even less to note about the journey from thence to Belfast, most of which took place on a grey motorway under a sky of a slightly paler grey.  But I now know in what order Inspector Frost’s bodies were found.

Belfast

My standard dash from the bus station (behind the Europa hotel, famed for being the most bombed in the world shortly before we spent part of our honeymoon there) down Botanic Avenue (please feel free to adapt the Eddy Grant song and sing along at this point), honed over the past five years, was dramatically arrested by the appearance of a large new charity bookshop on Victoria Street.  Once I’d perused the well-stocked, if less than meticulously classified, shelves,  I only had time for a quick sprint (well, shuffle) to the War on Want shop and an apologetic nod towards Oxfam before getting back to the Europa for Bus Number Three.

Fit the Third: Belfast to Ballymena

This was uncharted territory, but sadly all I can recall of the journey is the very large lady who sat next to me as far as Antrim and seemed under the impression that my nose and shoulder were Ulsterbus-supplied armrests, and the hyperactive bus driver who, when he wasn’t engaged in criticising the driving of his fellow road-users, or in drumming complex rhythms on his dashboard, whistled, slightly sharp, Lord of All Hopefulness, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, All Things Bright and Beautiful and Daisy, Daisy.  The Battle Hymn of the Republic seemed to be his favourite; I suppose he imagined himself trampling the driver of the small blue car who had the temerity to try reversing into a parking space within fifty yards of us.

Ballymena

Ballymena has trains, upon which I could have used my iLink card if I’d known in advance.  As it was, this transport of delight must await another occasion.  It also has charity shops with a large proportion of comedy books in them.  I shall take the optimistic view that the residents of Ballymena are merry, light-hearted folk who enjoy laughing and enjoy providing their fellows with matter for laughter rather than that they take one look at their unwrapped Christmas presents, say, “Bah humbug, bloody Welsh/American* comedians” and order their underpaid clerks to dispatch the same immediately to Oxfam.  No, no.  Ballymena was a nice place, with a particularly fine, furniture-themed Red Cross shop and doubtless a very good reason for flying the Union flag from the shopping centre.

(*as they were, as shall be seen)

Before leaving the bus-and-train station, which is some distance from the town centre, I had double-checked the time of Bus Number Four, to Ballycastle and confirmed that it would leave at 3.45. This would give me plenty of time to mooch about the shops until half-past three before wandering back.  Foolish woman.  As the mother of two current teenagers, I really should have known better.  As I approached the bus station at twenty to four, the previously empty, echoing shelters were teeming with hundreds of multicoloured blazers (I mean, obviously, many different colours of blazer, not that the secondary schools of Ballymena have adopted a Joseph and his Dreamcoat theme for their uniforms).  By the time I had squeezed my way through these to the approximate location of the Ballycastle stop, the bus had long departed.  There was another one scheduled for a quarter to six, but having surveyed the range of leisure activities offered within the vicinity (sitting on a  metal chair, sitting on a different metal chair, buying a Mars bar, buying a packet of crisps) I decided to enquire further.

The enquiry office, conveniently located round a hidden corner and halfway down a darkened alley, had, oddly enough, few enquirers.  Me, in fact, outnumbered two-to-one by enquirees.  These, a friendly man and woman, obviously appreciative of human contact after many decades of isolation, kindly consulted a range of timetables on my behalf before concluding that I could recover one of my lost hours by catching the bus to Ballymoney and thence to Ballycastle.  For those of you less than familiar with Northern Ireland placenames, whose minds may be spinning slightly at this stage, I’ll briefly recap.  Having missed the bus from Ballymena to Ballycastle, I was now going to catch a bus from Ballymena to Ballymoney and thence to Ballycastle.  I’m sure that, to a native, it’s no more confusing than Newcastle, Newport and Newhaven in England and Wales, though it’s probably unlikely that anyone without a serious alphabetic compulsion would try to travel between those three by bus on a Friday afternoon. There was a danger, I was warned, that the tricky change at Ballymoney Town Hall might come unstuck, only five minutes being allowed for the passing of the baton, but it was a risk I was prepared to take, fortified by my iLink card, which meant that I wouldn’t have to pay any more, and the fact that there was another, albeit final, Ballymoney-Ballycastle bus an hour later.

Fit the Fourth: Ballymena to Ballymoney

We were on the country buses now, the ones that say Ulsterbus instead of Goldline on the side and where you have to take your luggage with you rather than stowing it in the special compartment.  Connoisseurs of Irish bus travel, by the way, will be aware that in the North you have to open the luggage compartment yourself, with much consequent hand engrimement, whereas in the Republic Bus Eireann coaches have an automatic mechanism accompanied by a disembodied voice, no doubt one of the supporting cast from Father Ted, who intones ‘Stand clear, luggage doors operate’ throughout the entire process.  There are those who claim to be able to hear a final ‘ing’ at the end of the ‘operate’, thus rendering the statement intelligible and almost grammatical, though I’ve never managed to discern it myself.  Just one of the ways in which the tragedy of a divided Ireland manifests itself even in these peaceful times.  During the wait at Ballymena station I’d started reading Keith Barret’s Making Divorce Work: In 9 Easy Steps ,Keith Barret, being, for those who get out too much, Rob Brydon, and the book a slightly padded-out version of his very funny stage show.

Ballymoney

Grown older and wiser during the day’s earlier time-scrambles (as we chess players call them) I resisted the temptation to employ my six minutes (yes, the bus arrived early) in Ballymoney in any extensive exploration of the metropolis, contenting myself instead with photographing the Town Hall and shivering.  Several teenagers used me as a windbreak (memo: should perhaps have resisted the chocolate bar at Ballymena) providing further anecdotal evidence of the negative magnetism between persons of 12-24 years and the molecules comprising a coat.

Fit the Fifth: Ballymoney to Ballycastle

A real country bus now, heading through real countryside towards the sea.  Hooray!  I was slightly disconcerted when the remaining other passengers all got off before Ballycastle, leaving me and the driver alone as the bus plunged and rose, apparently at random, along seaside streets. I hoped that he wasn’t expecting me to ring the bell before the final stop, Marine Corner, as I had no idea when we were likely to be there.  I imagined him absent-mindedly taking me, along with the bus, home with him for tea, and my having my usual problems understanding when Ulster people ask whether I want butter on my sandwiches.  Fortunately, however, we stopped at last, at the sort of concrete turning circle on the seafront that I remembered from long-ago bus trips to Scarborough, and the convenient confirmation of the Marine Hotel beside us.

Ballycastle

By some fluke of Fate, or Google, if the two entities are still functionally separate, I had chosen a B&B only few yards uphill from the Marine Hotel.  Up, however, was certainly the apposite adjective, and I was a little out of breath by the time the landlord opened the door to me.  The Ardaghmore is, I’m virtually certain, the nicest B&B I’ve ever stayed in, even better than the excellent one in Pitlochry whose name I’ve forgotten, and certainly than the slightly odd one with the cross-examining landlady ‘Where have you been?  Where did you eat?  Which fish and chip shop?’ we stayed in last time we visited the Antrim coast and the name of which I wouldn’t tell you even if I could remember it.  The Ardaghmore, however was lovely: spacious room with interesting but not tricksy furniture, stunning view of the sea and the ferry to Rathlin Island,  delightful owners, friendly and very helpful without being in the slightest intrusive and lots of thoughtful bits and pieces like fresh milk, a powerful hairdryer and binoculars on the windowsill.  Not that I availed myself of the latter: the sky, grey all day, was growing steadily darker and mistier, and the biting little breeze I’d encountered in Bally -er- money was working its way up into something distinctly galeish.  I abandoned any thoughts of further exploration and hunkered down with my hard-won cheesy biscuits, discounted fruit salad and a Dilbert cartoon book.  Later in the evening the Dilbert, completed, was exchanged for Mark Watson’s excellent Crap at the Environment(see what I mean about the Welsh thing?) and, gratefully, sleep.

Incidentally, according to the AA, the most direct route from Enniskillen to Ballycastle is 104 miles.  Going via Dungannon, Belfast, Ballymena and Ballymoney the journey is 146 miles.  I calculate, therefore, that travelling by bus and using my magic iLink card granted me a free 42 miles, coincidentally, of course, the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.  If that’s not a clinching argument for not having a car . . .

Next morning looked optimistic from the start, with a narrow sliver of blue in the white sky which gradually widened to allow an extravagant and unseasonable outpouring of sunshine.  After an excellent vegetarian breakfast, complete with scones and an interesting chat with a birdwatching couple from Southampton, I made a brief survey of the Irish Sea before being collected by Una, a fellow retreat attendee and associate member of the Corrymeela Community.  My vague idea of walking to Knocklayd if a lift had not been easily forthcoming was revealed not to have the brightest I’ve ever had, especially accompanied by a suitcase of books, not least because Knocklayd is a mountain.  Well, a mountain in Irish terms; it’s 514m, which, I appreciate, is barely a pimple to a Himalayan.  It’s an extremely pretty small mountain (all right, hill) though, and the Knocklayd centre is fetchingly perched halfway up, surrounded by grazing sheep and interesting bumps in the ground which I’m sure would mean all sorts of exciting things to a geologist.

There were twelve of us at the retreat, including Scott Peddie, the organiser, who is a Non-Subscribing Presbyterian minister (which means, I gather, that they don’t have to sign up to certain doctrinal statements rather than that they don’t put anything in the collection plate), monks of the Cistercian and Buddhist varieties and an eclectic and interesting group of lay people.  After coffee and more scones (the residents of Ballycastle must have wills of iron not to end up like barrage balloons) we watched, if watched is exactly the word, maybe experienced, a meditative presentation prepared by Scott using Cistercian chant, photographs of the natural world and quotations from Merton’s works.  It was a perfect opening.  Afterwards came an open discussion, on contemplation, prayer, meditation, surrender, the life and works of Merton and the necessity of feeding cattle.  I think everyone contributed, and each with humility, honesty and humour – I’ve rarely received so much richness and depth from a group conversation.

As the weather was by now unseasonably stunning, we went outside, walking alone or in small groups, talking, listening, looking and simply being.  The transparency of the world, and God shining through, about which Merton wrote, could not have been better illustrated.  The rest of the day continued in the same way, a balance of talk and prayer, ending with a meditation led by the Buddhist monk, wishing good and freedom from suffering for all our brothers and sisters and the sentient creatures of the earth.  I thought of Robbie, our border terrier and promised to be less impatient with him (a resolution, by the way, that I have already broken, as he dripped milk across the floor this morning).

At the close of the retreat two of the members kindly gave me lifts down to Belfast and I caught the bus (with sad lack of enterprise just one bus this time) back home to Enniskillen.  I finished the Mark Watson on the way and began the last of my Ballymena comedy hoard, A. J. Jacobs’  The Year of Living Biblically.  I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it was a good two days.