Since this poem was first written, the Guildford Four have been released, the collusion between the British Army, the RUC, the UDR and the Loyalist paramilitaries has been exposed and a new inquiry is under way to specify the extent and depth of that collusion. No one who has seen what Inquiries of this kind produce - those of Sir Arthur Young, Stalker and Widgery are notable examples - would expect even a considerable fraction of the truth to be revealed. What is at issue is not really the collusions and conspiracies that have produced so many atrocities. In a way, the identity of the SAS men who have, under one guise or another, murdered so many people in the North does not matter. It is deployment of them and the support given to them by the legal system that is at the heart of the matter. Everyone who lives in or has any interest in the North knows that the rancid legal system and the ferocious behaviour of the police and army are indisputable facts of life. But they are concealed in the language of law and order, of justice and morality, of stability and security. They provide none of these things, except for propaganda purposes. It is part of the process of demonisation by which all IRA killings are abominations and all official killings are in defence of what is noble and desirable. This is symptomatic of a society that is under such strain that it is reproducing in its terminal defence the very violence that initiated it.
Still, one must not say so. Or, more accurately, very few say so. Thomas Kinsella's Butcher's Dozen was a satiric and angry comment on the scandal of the Widgery Tribunal that could find no evidence of murderous intent on the part of the Paratroop regiment that killed fourteen unarmed civilians and wounded sixteen others in January, 1972. But few poems or essays or articles have been written on this topic, a miniscule number compared to those written on IRA atrocities. There was a time when the broadsheet poem or ballad, written in relation to an immediate or neighbouring event, flourished. The social conditions for that have largely disappeared, but it is also the case that the process of fumigating verse of any trace of political commitment has reached an advanced stage. To have a conviction, to assume a moral stance is perfectly possible, just so long as that stance is not sharply in conflict with the presiding order of things.
Three people were murdered in Gibraltar; then the murder was redescribed as justified killing. Lies were told, reputations besmirched, contradictions ignored in the rush to affirm that the victims were deserving of their fate and their murderers heroic defenders of the realm. In such an atmosphere, all vestige of justice, of law and of humanity disappears. Jack Mitchell's poem is an angry attack on the hypocrisies of a system that kills without compunction in its own defence and then assumes before the world the mantle of morality. Truth is the first casualty in war, as we know. But among the later casualties that flow from the first one is the disappearance of the possibility of ever re-establishing the truth. The British legal system, in the last twenty years, has become little other than a system of punishment and disinformation. Poetry prides itself on having some special or privileged access to language; it seems fitting, then, that a poem should try, by the most traditional of methods, to restore to language some of the vigour and some of the truth-telling capacity which have been drained from it.
Satire always has an element of nostalgia about it, because it is always concerned with something that has been lost. It is also, inevitably, a mode of anger and rebuke; but the note of lamentation is never far removed. The viciousness of the Thatcherite regime in Britain is, in itself, abnormal; but it has established itself as the norm. Killings in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Gibraltar may be the last wave of bloodletting of the Empire that was retreating from Africa, Malaya, Aden and Cyprus only two decades ago. But the distortions that this long retreat from imperial possessions creates are so severe that it is by now almost impossible to assert the primacy of some essential sense of human value or of justice. The contamination has come to rest at the heart of the British legal and political system. It is a subject worthy both of satire and lament. What this poem does is to remind us that the lament should primarily be for the victims.
Rhymed verse has a particular power because rhyme is an organized mode of pointing up similarity in dissimilarities. Words that sound the same have different meanings. When combined with rhythm, this paradoxical feature of rhyme is regularized to such an extent that the reader or listener can hear the noise of the stable meanings breaking down, the more loudly because of the degree of organisation the poem achieves. Couplets, rhymed en-stopped or even run-on, have this wicked quality. They march along in serried ranks, but their orderliness is in inverse proportion to the sense of disorder that they create. In this poem, that sense of disorder is so pronounced that we come away from it with a renewed sense of the manner in which, at the political level, the law and order represented by courts and governments can generate more powerfully than any other force the savagery that marked that day in Gibraltar and the hypocrisy that tried thereafter to conceal it. The poem keeps its gaze on the murderous actions and, in doing so, makes us gaze at the real face that hides behind the curtain both in the courtroom and in the centres of power.
Séamus Deane,
Dublin.