Peace in NI bought by 'fraud and lying', says McAliskey

Peace has been bought in Northern Ireland by "perjury, fraud, corruption, cheating and lying", according to socialist and community activist Bernadette McAliskey.

In what "sane, civilised community" would anyone be suggesting that the "three male groupings" involved in several decades of conflict would "now make up a police force," Ms McAliskey told the Cúirt Forum in Galway.

Ms McAliskey, north Belfast playwright Gary Mitchell and Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic were speaking in the Town Hall Theatre at the weekend on the theme of "outsider/insider". The forum, presented by Cúirt International Festival of Literature in association with The Irish Times, was chaired by Lelia Doolan, currently chair of the Solas arthouse cinema project in Galway.

Ms McAliskey, who was the youngest person to be elected to the British parliament when she was 21 in 1969, described how she and her husband Michael had decided not to move house after they survived an assassination attempt at their home in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, in 1981.

"Now I'd walk away from the North in the morning and clean the dust off my feet," she said.

Award-winning playwright Gary Mitchell - forced to leave north Belfast along with his extended family because of paramilitary anger over his portrayal of the loyalist community - said he would like to support a "true police force where people solved crimes".

Describing the police response to the attacks on his home and that of his relatives, he said that the North required a "proper society" which allowed someone like him to work. "Otherwise no more plays will be put on where they really need to be - at the heart of the loyalist community", he said.

Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic, who was forced into exile in 1993, described how she had been found "guilty" of writing against "a collective passion called nationalism". It was two years into the war in former Yugoslavia, and she and four female colleagues were accused by the media of "conspiring against Croatia". She subsequently left the country and settled in Amsterdam.

Both Ms McAliskey and Mr Mitchell were highly critical of the "overwhelming" power of the media. In Mr Mitchell's view, there was a "real truth" and an "agreed truth", and when the "agreed truth becomes accepted, the real truth becomes a lie".

The media was reporting the "agreed truth", and the real truth "doesn't get a look in", he argued.

Ms McAliskey said that what she did not like about the media was its "total egotistical arrogance", and its private ownership by "self-important, greedy people who think they are guardians of society", and who were "well paid and very illiterate".

"The media thinks that if you are not within its sights, you don't exist," she said. But it was "surprising how much you can get away with when they are not looking at you". She added that the "new outside" in Ireland were the immigrants. Referring to the behaviour of many Irish employers, she said that it was "just as well that no one really believes in hell, or they'd roast in it for what they are doing".

Ms Ugresic said that Europe was "full of people coming from somewhere, leaving their homelands in search of other places". She contrasted the fear fomented when people believed their own employment was at threat from the "Polish plumber" with the "invisible movement" of people with disposable income, like "the Dutch going to Bulgaria for sun and cheap property".