I’ve moved!

Friends (and so forth):

My blog has moved over to http://katemccabe.com! Please visit me there….

Danny Cassidy in the news again, this time in the NY Times

Alright, I know I’ve blogged about Cassidy’s book numerous times. Perhaps I feel a bit of connection to him, though we’ve never met, because a) we have some mutual friends, b) I am trying to learn Irish, c) my pops is a fluent speaker, and of course d) the book and its thesis rules. (Note: This is my blog, not my master’s thesis, and the word “rules” is most appropriate here.) In any case, the following article ran in Thursday’s New York Times, and is now the number three most-emailed article on their website. Even if you are not interested in learning Irish yourself, or in things Irish generally, you’ll be surprised to learn that many of the words that you use on a regular basis have their roots in the Irish language. Read it!

Humdinger of a Project: Tracing Slang to Ireland, by Corey Kilgannon

Growing up Irish in Queens and on Long Island, Daniel Cassidy was nicknamed Glom.

“I used to ask my mother, ‘Why Glom?’ and she’d say, ‘Because you’re always grabbing, always taking things,’” he said, imitating his mother’s accent and limited patience, shaped by a lifetime in Irish neighborhoods in New York City.

It was not exactly an etymological explanation, and Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having “unknown origin.”

“Glom” seemed to come from the Irish word “glam,” meaning to grab or to snatch. He found the word “balbhán,” meaning a silent person, and he surmised that it was why his quiet grandfather was called the similarly pronounced Boliver.

He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word “gimmick” seemed to come from “camag,” meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick.

Could “scam” have derived from the expression “’S cam é,” meaning a trick or a deception? Similarly, “slum” seemed similar to an expression meaning “It is poverty.” “Dork” resembled “dorc,” which Mr. Cassidy’s dictionary called “a small lumpish person.” As for “twerp,” the Irish word for dwarf is “duirb.”

Mr. Cassidy, 63, began compiling a lexicon of hundreds of Irish-inspired slang words and recently published them in a book called “How the Irish Invented Slang,” which last month won the 2007 American Book Award for nonfiction, and which he is in New York this week promoting.

“The whole project started with a hunch — hunch, from the Irish word ‘aithint,’ meaning recognition or perception,” the verbose Mr. Cassidy said in an interview on Monday at O’Lunney’s, a bar and restaurant on West 45th Street. He has worked as a merchant seaman, a labor organizer and a screenwriter, and he lives in San Francisco, where he teaches Irish studies at the New College of California.

He pulled out his pocket Irish dictionary and began pointing out words that he said had been Americanized by the millions of Irish immigrants who turned New York into an extension of the Ghaeltacht, or Irish-speaking regions of Ireland.

“Even growing up around it, little shards of the language stayed alive in our mouths and came out as slang,” he said, spouting a string of words that sounded straight out of a James Cagney movie.

“Snazzy” comes from “snasach,” which means polished, glossy or elegant. The word “scram” comes from “scaraim,” meaning “I get away.” The word “swell” comes from “sóúil,” meaning luxurious, rich and prosperous, and “sucker” comes from “sách úr,” or, loosely, fat cat.

There is “Say uncle!” (“anacal” means mercy), “razzmatazz,” and “malarkey,” and even expressions like “gee whiz” and “holy cow” and “holy mackerel” are Anglicized versions of Irish expressions, he said. So are “doozy,” “hokum,” “humdinger,” “jerk,” “punk,” “swanky,” “grifter,” “bailiwick,” “sap,” “mug,” “wallop,” “helter-skelter,” “shack,” “shanty,” “slob,” “slacker” and “knack.”

Mr. Cassidy chatted with an Irish-born worker at O’Lunney’s, Ronan O’Reilly, 21, who said he grew up in County Meath speaking Irish. He nodded in agreement as Mr. Cassidy explained that Irish survived in New York as slang.

“It was a back-room language, whispered in kitchens and spoken in the saloons,” Mr. Cassidy said.

Mr. O’Reilly nodded and said, “Sometimes my friends and I will use it amongst ourselves, sort of like an underground language.

“Some of your words here sound like they are taken straight from Irish, even expressions directly translated, like ‘top of the morning’ or ‘thanks a million,’” he continued. “In Ireland, we pick up American slang from TV, like the word ‘buddy.’”

Mr. Cassidy laughed. “Buddy,” he contends, actually comes from “bodach,” Irish for a strong, lusty youth.

Another employee came up, Lawrence Rapp, 25, who said he was an Irishman from London, where the art of rhyming slang is practiced.

“If you have to piddle, you say ‘Jimmy Riddle,’” he said.

Mr. Rapp said Londoners often used the word “geezer” to describe people, and Mr. Cassidy pointed out that the term derives from the Irish word “gaosmhar,” or wise person.

“Even the word ‘dude’ comes from the Irish word ‘dúid,’ or a foolish-looking fellow, a dolt,” Mr. Cassidy said. “They called the guys dudes who came down to the Five Points section of Manhattan to chase the colleens.”

He showed a passage in his book that notes that the Feb. 25, 1883, edition of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the coining of the word “dude,” referring to, among other things, a man who “wears trousers of extreme tightness.”

“You dig?” he said. “‘Dig,’ as in ‘tuig,’ or understand.”

Roy lives! Lyn is awesome!

And yet, thanks to Begg, thanks to quick-acting EMTs Lyn McCabe and Jen Clados at the Ridgefield Half Marathon, Shapiro and the others survived their near-death experiences.”It wasn’t just me. It was everyone else jumping in to help, too,” Begg said. “To have a critical situation like we had, where all of a sudden people you don’t know just come together and jump into roles, it was amazing.”People were assisting with crowd control and starting IVs — there were nurses and techs — everyone just did their job. There were no egos. It was an impromptu MASH unit all three times.”

Remember last month when I told you that my sister was a hero (see My sister helped save someone’s life yesterday)? Well, we just found out today that the man she helped, Roy Van Eick, made a full recovery! What great news, and what a great sister. Hahaha. What’s even more amazing is that the rate of recovery for something like this is ridiculously low–just 5 percent! Read on:

And on Oct. 7 at the Ridgefield Half Marathon, Begg saved another man, Stamford resident Roy Van Eick, who grew up in Danbury, after he went into full cardiac arrest at the 31�„2-mile mark of the race.

“It was a real hot day, but this guy was a pretty experienced runner,” said Begg, who was also running in the race. “When he went down, there were some people around him who tried to give him CPR.

“When I showed up, it was basically the same thing again — mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions. With the help of paramedics, we shocked him three times, started an IV, and gave him cardiac medications and other medications.”

Like Shapiro and Kerwin, Van Eick made a complete recovery, which is a statistical rarity. The survival rate for full cardiac arrest outside of a medical setting is just five percent, Begg said.

Too bad there aren’t more Lyns to go around.

camels, bison and bears, oh my!

I saw a camel in South Dakota, grazing on some delicious grass by the side of the road. An actual camel. No, it wasn’t a yellow-colored bison, and no, I wasn’t on anything–though it did seem like a hallucination.

Max and I are on a road trip with our friend Matt, who is moving to San Francisco. It’s only been a few days, but we’ve seen so many extraordinary things–sights so breathtaking that we each feel lucky to have experienced them, and then there is always something else around each corner. (No, the camel was not one of them. Camels should not live in South Dakota.) We went hiking in the Badlands on Tuesday, and one of the first comments I made upon beginning the hike was, “Wow, I really feel like I am walking on the surface of the moon–you know, minus the zero gravity and lack of oxygen.” Then Matt informed me that they say that the Badlands is the one place on the earth that most closely resembles the surface of the moon. It was really great. Then, on our way out of the park, we happened across fields just full of chirping prairie dogs! They were everywhere, poking their heads in and out, running over to others’ holes and having meetings, wiggling their butts at us while they ran up to the road and crossed to the other side. You can’t get much cuter than a prairie dog.

Devil’s Tower was amazing as well, quite surreal–you could feel the energy surrounding the place. We arrived around sundown, and it was so exhilarating to see the rock stand out against the fading sun and then the moonlight. So calm, so peaceful (and luckily there were no climbers there!). We spent Tuesday night in Sheridan, Wyoming, and after stopping off at the T-Rex Museum along the way, we made it to Yellowstone with just enough time to make it to the middle of the park before the sun went down. Yellowstone is so, so beautiful–words cannot really describe. We were unable to camp there this evening because all of the campgrounds in this part of the country are closed at this time of year, there is snow on the ground, and it gets into the teens at night.

Oh, and then there’s the bears. They’re all over! (And apparently in their “super-eating” phase, or hyperphlagia, as they prepare for hibernation.) About 3/4 of a mile outside of the park, I thought to myself, “It would be so great if I just saw a bear out there on the side of the road. Not 5 seconds later, there he was, about 500 feet or so in from the road, just ambling along, occasionally looking over at us. Wow. A real, live grizzly bear living in the wild. Awesome. Ok, and maybe a bit scary. When we told the ranger at the gate about it, he seemed pretty excited. Then we asked him about how safe it was to go hiking in the park because of the bears…and he laughed a bit and gave us the most disconcerting response. Basically made us even more nervous about the bears–without coming right out and telling us we could really get attacked. Hahaha (I laugh, as I write my final blog post.).

Not too long after we saw the bear, we came upon three bison just moseying along the road in the left lane. I never would have thought we’d get so close. Bison are huge animals! And they were right there, just walking along, minding their own business as we rolled past. It was unbelievable. How grateful we all felt to be so close to such majestic creatures, living in their natural habitat. Later, we saw what we believe to be a caribou, and maybe a wolf (and lots of deer).

Driving through the park at night was like driving through a silent film. The landscape was so incredible that it didn’t seem real.

Well, I’m off to bed now. We’re staying in Montana tonight, but will go back into the park to hike and see Old Faithful tomorrow. Here’s to hoping we don’t get attacked by bears or anything else!

“Pity we don’t have a kiln…”

When my friend Mclean suggested that we have a pizza party using Andrew’s kiln, naturally my first thought was of Mr. Belvedere. Though I imagine I must have watched many episodes of the show when I was young, the only one I remember was when Kevin had to make the turkey for Thanksgiving. Having little to no cooking experience, Kevin did not realize how long a whole turkey takes to cook–so he cut corners to save time. The turkey was a dried-out disaster, and when Mr. Belvedere discovered that Kevin had turned the oven up from 250 to 500 degrees (thinking the turkey would cook twice as fast!), Mr. Belvedere said dryly, “Pity we don’t have a kiln, we could’ve had the turkey yesterday!” Perhaps not quite so funny on my blog, but it was so funny to me then that to this day that’s the only think I remember about the show. And my mom and sister–of course–said the exact same thing to me when I told them what I’d be doing…

Here are a few photos from tonight’s kiln pizza party. I like to think of the first one as the “spirits of the kiln,” but others might like to call it a “sweet ceramic bowl that Brian made with some tomatoes and basil in it.” Next is a picture of the lovely pizza kiln–you might notice that it doesn’t exactly look like something you’d want to put food into, but I suppose that was precisely the point. (There was talk of using the pottery wheel to throw the dough, but I don’t think anyone had enough energy to introduce that variable into the game.) The third shot is of our first pizza inside the kiln. It was Brian’s idea to crack an egg in the middle. I think that’s pretty gross, and it actually felt like rubber when it was finished. As I’m sure you can imagine from looking at the picture, the hardest part of cooking pizza in a kiln is figuring out how to get it out when it is done without seriously injuring yourself (though I suppose this adds to the appeal?) The final picture is of one of our final products, which was actually the second pizza that we made.  Needless to say, they were delicious.

In case you are interested in trying this, here are some things we learned about baking pizzas in a kiln. First, make sure to preheat the kiln before you start baking.  Kilns certainly don’t take a long time to get hot, but we found that the pizzas cooked much more evenly after the first.  (Our biggest lesson was that kilns don’t really cook pizzas very evenly, and the bottom is really the last to cook).   Try not to peek in at the pizza while it is cooking too much, because that will affect how well the pizza bakes.  You may want to do a test pizza.  Oh, and think a little bit about how you are going to get the pizza out, because we (“we” as in not me) were just basically sticking our arms in there very carefully with a fork.  No burns, but maybe a bit of singed arm hair…

Call for Aegis’ expulsion from Iraq

Article by David Granville from the Irish Democrat:

THE MOTHER of the Peter McBride, the Belfast teenager murdered by two Scots Guardsmen on 4 September 1992, has appealed to the Iraqi government to cancel the contracts of private security firm Aegis Defence Services and to expel it from the country.

Jean McBride’s appeal follows a decision in September by the Iraqi interior ministry to expel another leading private security contractor, Blackwater, after it was confirmed that the company’s personnel had opened fire on civilians in the predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of Mansour in western Baghdad, killing eight civilians and wounding a further 13.

Her family has waged a vigourous campaign on both sides of the Atlantic and won the support of a number of British and Irish MPs. Despite this, British government ministers and defence officials have consistently refused to back campaigners’ calls for Peter McBride’s killers to be thrown out of the army. At a time when it is still possible for serving soldiers to be cashiered for a string of relative minor offences, it’s

not difficult to see why the McBride family regard the decision to allow the two guardsmen, whose convictions for murder have not been quashed, to resume their army careers, as adding insult to injury.

In recent years, the McBride campaign has widened its scope by also focussing on the career of Aegis chief executive Tim Spicer, who was the British army officer in charge of the two guardsmen convicted of her son’s murder.

Spicer has always refused to accept that his soldiers did anything wrong in shooting an unarmed teenager in the back in broad daylight and is on public record as saying that they should not even have been charged, let alone brought to trial.

Since leaving the British army in 1995, Spicer has moved into the murky and highly lucrative world of private ‘security’ – that’s mercenary to you and me – provision, where the activities of his various companies have resulted in a string of investigations and official reprimands. Unfortunately, tacit British government approval has ensured that such misdemeanours have not restricted his business opportunities, especially in Iraq.

The McBride family and human rights campaigners have not been so forgiving. In the years since his son’s murder, Jean McBride has repeatedly told anyone who would listen that Tim Spicer is unfit to to be in charge of men in a conflict situation. She is now urging the Iraqi government to “show the door to Aegis” as they have done to Blackwater.

Speaking after the Iraqi government announced that it was expelling Blackwater and revoking the company’s license to work in the country, Jean McBride explained that she had written to the Ambassador to Britain and Ireland, Dr Salah Al-Shaikhl, pointing out that Aegis employees had been filmed firing at Iraqi civilians in 2005 and that neither the company nor the Pentagon had bothered to carry out a proper investigation.

Following representations from the McBride family, prominent US lawmakers, including Democratic presidential candidate hopeful, Barack Obama, have joined the call for an inquiry into the awarding, and re-awarding, of ‘security’ contracts in Iraq to Aegis.

The family has welcomed the recent announcement, made in the wake of the Blackwater revelations, that the oversight and government reform committee of the US Congress is to hold formal hearings on the use of private security companies in Iraq. It could be a small step on the road to justice.

Further details about the activities of Aegis, Tim Spicer and the McBride family campaign can be found on the website of the Pat Finucane Centre at www.patfinucanecentre.org

The above article originally appeared in the Morning Star on 01/10/07 (that’s 1st October…)

IAUC covers new ground in cross-community dialogue at 2007 convention

Irish American Unity Conference (IAUC) President John Fogarty hailed the success of this year’s national convention in Boston, calling it a ground-breaking effort on behalf of Irish America in the encouragement and facilitation of cross-community dialogue in the north of Ireland. This year’s convention brought together members of both the unionist and nationalist communities, including academics, community workers, politicians and political ex-prisoners. Speakers included Dr. Pete Shirlow, Raymond Stewart, Terry Kirby, Bobby Lavery, Matt Morrison, Paul Harkin, Gerry McHugh, Roy Garland, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, Raymond McCord, Nuala O’Loan and Father Aiden Troy. Participants took part in public and private discourse throughout the weekend, speaking forthrightly and respectfully without diluting their beliefs or holding back their opinions in order to be polite.

Speaking at the close of the convention, President Fogarty said, “In order to move forward and come together, we need to recognize each other’s positions and allow time for understanding, even if we do not agree. Through dialogue we might develop the level of understanding necessary to produce genuine visions of a common future in the north of Ireland that is both inclusive and just. As witnessed in Boston this weekend, the Irish peace process does not simply belong to the political parties, it belongs to the people.”

Though political parties are at the center of representative democracy, it is the belief of the IAUC that political agendas very often slow down or even halt the process of engagement. The honest discourse which was witnessed and participated in at this year’s convention reinforced the notion that ordinary people, motivated by the desire to secure a safe and egalitarian future for all our people, can create a parallel avenue for advancement; can create a situation atmospherically which supports and facilitates the ability of the political parties to interface to the benefit of all.

President Fogarty went on to say, “The IAUC appreciates the difficult and often painful work necessary to bring about true and lasting political change, and we will continue to use our resources to encourage such discussion in the future. Irish America has played such an integral role in the Irish peace process, and we should continue to be used as a tool to lay the groundwork for political and socioeconomic change in Ireland in any way that we can.”

Unionists spark heated debate at IAUC convention

 

Unionists spark heated debate at IAUC convention
By Irish Echo Staff

(Pictured from the left are: republican ex-prisoner Terry Kirby, IAUC President John Fogarty, IAUC Treasurer Gretchen Bales, and IAUC Chairman of the Board Dr. Robert C. Linnon)

 

Unionist voices at the Irish American Unity Conference annual convention in Boston last weekend brought a new dimension to the annual gathering of the pro-United Ireland activists.

The most heated exchanges of the day followed repeated assertions by Raymond McCord that the IRA ex-prisoners present were “terrorists”.

McCord, whose son Raymond was murdered by a loyalist gang leader who was a police agent, rebutted claims by former republican prisoner Gabriel Megahey that the IRA had acted in defense of embattled nationalist communities in 1969.

“I have acted in defense of my family,” said McCord. “I have beaten up loyalist paramilitaries who threatened my family but when did the IRA’s defense become putting bombs in pubs in the middle of Belfast?”

On several occasions, McCord challenged his audience to tell him how his three grandchildren would be better off in a united Ireland.

“Convince me they’ll be better off and I’ll vote for a united Ireland,” he said.

However, McCord remained unimpressed by the answers he received.

“No one here has answered my question satisfactorily,” he told Saturday’s closing session of the convention.

Ulster Unionist Roy Garland said dialogue was the cornerstone of continuing reconciliation in Northern Ireland. He had harsh condemnation for Dr. Ian Paisley’s DUP, recalling that Ian Paisley Jr., now a minister in the Northern Ireland Executive, had demanded Garland be drummed out of the UUP for being pictured with Gerry Adams and Albert Reynolds.

Fr. Aidan Troy, the North Belfast priest who famously defended schoolchildren who were the focus of angry loyalist pickets outside Holy Cross school told the convention that education was crucial to the future of Northern Ireland.

“The key to carrying the process forward is education,” he said.

Responding to questions about the need to encourage integrated education, Troy defended the right of parents to chose a Catholic education for their children.

“But I would like to see the Catholic hierarchy come forward and to say, what contribution can we make to integrated education. However, we can’t expect the children at integrated schools to carry the burden of integrating their communities if at home their parents and grandparents are carrying a contrary message,” he said.

Traffic light at Tipperary Hill, Syracuse, NY

While reading about traffic lights on Wikipedia this morning, Max came across this funny story about a traffic light in Syracuse, NY:

In the 1920s, after continued destruction of a standard traffic light, the City of Syracuse, New York in the United States gave up and installed a traffic light with green on the top. Residents of Irish descent had objected to the fact that “British” red was placed above “Irish” green.

This photo is from the Wikipedia entry, and was taken in 2005–which leads me to believe that it has never been changed back.

Changing Times, Changing Realities by Inez McCormack

The following article by Inez McCormack was printed in last week’s Irish Echo and kicks off a new campaign to organize Irish America’s participation in a new drive to encourage and support equitable investment in the “new Northern Ireland”:

This should be a time for change and hope for all who live in the North. I am writing this article for two reasons- one is to honour the significant contribution made by Irish Americans and others such as President Clinton and New York City Comptroller Thompson in making hope for just and inclusive change into tangible realities of peace and opportunity. The other is to argue that this time and these opportunities will not come again and we must now once and for all grasp them to build an inclusive and modern future. For over 30 years now I have argued for real, measurable change that people can feel, taste and touch in their daily lives. This core foundation for such a future, based upon equality, resonates with three decades of lost opportunities in implementing necessary and agreed change.

Strategies and interventions that bring the legacy of a difficult and divided past into such a future need to be built on both what has successfully worked in making change and on what is the agreed mandate of the people as the context for that change. That mandate has been given expression in the Good Friday Agreement, now more than ten years old. It is not too much, to expect that the inclusive equality provisions of that agreement are implemented with urgency and finality. They are also the key building blocks for stable economic and social development

Irish Americans are being asked by me AMONG others to support and call for investment in the north to build prosperity and support peace in this time of historic hope. There are now clearly emerging opportunities for profitable investments in billion dollar commitments to build new infrastructure within the next decade. There is a determination and commitment by all political parties in the new devolved administration to bring external investment and new companies to the North and encourage the growth of local small and medium size companies to take advantage of new opportunities as well as increase trade and investment between North and South on the island.

Twenty years ago Irish America responded to calls to make fairness in employment a reality here. Together we argued it was neither feasible nor acceptable to have a society and economy based upon exclusion and discrimination. Those who then ran Northern Ireland rejected our arguments, claiming that there was not a problem. But the stark realities revealed by official census figures showed brutal patterns of exclusion, discrimination and poverty experienced overwhelmingly, though far from exclusively, by Catholics. At that time I described the plight of unemployed Protestants as disastrous, and that of Catholics as catastrophic. Instead of tackling this economic disadvantage based upon objective need, the authorities used all their resources to attack the messengers. We were accused of scaring off investment, worsening sectarian division and destabilising the possibilities for peace. These were the alibis that time was not ripe for change.

Voices for peaceful and just change from within Northern Ireland, unaided by powerful external support, were ruthlessly swept aside. Irish Americans steadfastly refused to accept any of these arguments, particularly the doctrine of unripe time. Through the MacBride Principles campaign they declared they were no longer prepared to have American dollars support discriminatory practices. Together we went one step further. The MacBride Principles required that Americans investment in Northern Ireland should actively promote affirmative action and produce measurable change, I recall with great gratitude the chorus of support for such change ultimately reaching the highest office in the United States. Such voices from an early stage included the City and State Comptrollers office in New York, Irish American organisations, and a growing number of state and city legislatures who passed and implemented the MacBride principles. That campaign and pressure led to new and tough affirmative action domestic legislation and disciplines on expenditure of public monies. The MacBride legislation is still there as a guarantor of real change: American companies were and are required still to show how state and city pension funds are promoting the reality of fair employment in Northern Ireland.

Irish American pressure to mainstream and promote equality of opportunity, and to insist upon implementation of tough policies played a major role in the interventions of the Clinton administration. George Mitchell, amongst others, saw the importance of inclusive economic and social opportunity in creating confidence that peace could work , especially for the communities and areas of greatest deprivation that had suffered most in the conflict. Such measures then became part of the Good Friday Agreement. Indeed, the promise in the Agreement to bring forward “a range of measures aimed at combating unemployment and progressively eliminating the differential in employment rates between the two communities by targeting objective need” was one of the few explicit commitments in the document.

Continuing resistance to accept responsibility for structural change by placing the causes of disadvantage on the shoulders of those who experience it — the blame the victim approach — was rejected by the political parties and the people in Northern Ireland. Subsequently, the recent St. Andrew’s agreement reinforced this commitment by agreeing objective need as the prerequisite for allocation of resources and investment.

I write this not to bring up old history or old problems but to emphasize the huge contribution of those who argued that fairness in action was not only right in itself but crucial to building prosperity, and would contribute to the potential for building an inclusive peace from which all would benefit and all could own . They also argued that a sustainable business model must effectively integrate economic, social and environmental practices.

This seems so obvious and modest a proposal now. Yet the inability to accept responsibility in implementing that change, in spite of its huge democratic mandate backed up by statutory imperative, remains deep and systemic. The patterns of exclusion that spurred us to action have widened in the decade since the Good Friday Agreement. This is the unstable and unhelpful legacy bequeathed to the fledgling political institutions in Northern Ireland.

The reason I address Irish America now – and of course the coalition that so powerfully joined with us to argue that peace was not possible without justice and equality – is to ask all of those who helped to create the potential for peaceful change to now ensure that in the hope in which so much has been invested is implemented. This requires that economic investment, both internal and external, is used and measured deliberately and consciously to make those hopes for fundamental and irreversible change into reality.

The current reality is, that ten years on from the Good Friday Agreement and a few months into the historic political accommodation that we have all worked and hoped for the patterns of disadvantage are widening. The last decade has been a time of increased investment and growing prosperity. Yet as in the eighties government’s own figures show an ever increasing gap between the haves and the have nots within both communities and growing differential in disadvantage experienced between the Catholic and Protestant communities in the decade since the Good Friday Agreement.

This growing inequality is a direct consequence of deliberately ignoring the commitments in law and policy on fairness and opportunity. Instead of the last decade being used to integrate economic and social development and using these tools of change agreed by the mandate of the people to lay solid foundations to underpin an inclusive peace and a stable economic base, the patterns of past investment and resource allocation are virtually undisturbed.

The ever widening gap means those suffering the greatest deprivation, again predominantly Catholic, but also with a significant number of Protestants, are spectators of prosperity not participants.

New policies and laws were agreed based on the need for structural change and on the urgent requirement for structural measures . They simply have not been implemented in a way that measured action against impact. Our campaign for targets and timetables, so carefully constructed to produce real change within a reasonable time span, has been met with inaction.

The recent report by the Committee on Administration of Justice – Rhetoric and Reality – spelt out this failure in cold terms and hard figures.

The evidence in the report came from figures and facts analysed in four government reports. So these continuing patterns of unacceptable realities are well known. There is simply no evidence that resource allocation and policy are being directed to change them, as required by the Good Friday Agreement, the St Andrew’s Agreement and the law of the land in Northern Ireland. In fact the current allocation of resource and investment is virtually in inverse proportion to these figures. Resources are going to where they went before in the old status quo and the mandate of the people for a new and inclusive status quo has been ignored.

The data produced by the government’s own body the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, the Northern Ireland Multiple Deprivation Measure 2005 gives the following results. Based on their analysis of a range of factors, including income, employment, and access to services, NI was divided up into almost 900 equally sized areas in order to map out “regional inequalities”.

• Out of 900 areas in total, 19 of the top 20 most deprived areas are in North and West Belfast or Derry.
• Of the top 100 most deprived areas in NI out of a total of 900, over three quarters are within North and West Belfast or Derry.
• Of the top 50 wealthiest areas in NI, none are in North and West Belfast or Derry.
• In fact, of the top 100 wealthiest areas in NI out of a total of 900, only one, is in North and West Belfast or Derry, namely, the Covehill part of North Belfast, which is an historically affluent part of the city, surrounded by some of the poorest areas that suffered both economically and physically during the conflict.

As I know only too well from work I have been involved with there recently, the population there has not sniffed the changes that they were promised and that they could expect in relation to investment and opportunity.

What this data shows is serious geographic and regional differences in terms of inequality in Northern Ireland. Moreover, these regional inequalities also provide a proxy measure for community inequalities. Cleary there are correlations between where these poorer areas are, and the profile of the people who live in them.

A report by the Special EU Programmes body also showed that there is a direct link between how poor an area is, and the proportion of Catholics living in the area.

Catholics make up 19.5% of the population in the 500 most affluent areas in NI.

Catholics make up 72% of the inhabitants in the 500 most deprived areas in NI.

With irrefutable detail these cold hard facts and statistics reveal the depth of daily realties of humiliation and exclusion experienced by those outside the golden bubble of the new good times.

Bringing a difficult past into a new and inclusive future is not easy. But if we do not learn from the lessons of the past then the new future we are all working for is destabilised from the beginning . There is a depressing sense of déjà vu about what is happening. In the eighties government figures showed that over 45% of Catholics, and around 25% of Protestant males were without work. The campaigning that we carried out over those two decades was meant to ensure that those in power faced up to their responsibility to shift the figures. They had the resources – moral, legal, and economic, to do so. Yet many of those excluded in that past are excluded still. The gap between their realities and growing prosperity of some areas and communities are the stark and undeniable reminder in the last decade that new times of peace and hope brought them crumbs not comfort.

Based upon our shared experience of the possibilities of change, there are a number of practical and effective steps that the devolved administration can take now in modernising the economy and stabilising the peace. Public resource allocation can be planned as envisaged in a way that requires govt departments to measure and structure their actions against their impact on reducing inequality and building prosperity .Tools of public procurement that integrate practical equality and social requirements can be effectively used to involve the long term unemployed and economically inactive and thus build a new skills base.

New York City Comptroller Thompson, on his recent visit to Belfast declared his support for a sustainable business model that integrated, economic, social and environmental practices. It is what his office has supported all over the world through their investments and has been fiscally and ethically successful. This is the context of his strong support to bring direct investment to the North and to influence companies to look at the potential for investment on the island of Ireland. Irish America is calling for support for investment opportunities and there will be an international investment conference in the coming year in the North to turn some of the good will in America and elsewhere in the world into practical and tangible investments by companies

In asserting once again that prosperity and fairness must be intertwined in the impact and allocation of such investment. Once again the ball is in Irish America’s court to again assert and require that hope and opportunity must be within the grasp of all. That this is the time for long overdue change in the daily realities of exclusion and that this is good for business and good for peace.