What a Brassneck
Congratulations to my fellow blogger Mick Fealty (pictured), founder of , who posted the inaugural article on , the Daily Telegraph's new political blog, at 11.18 this morning.
On breaks from writing today, I watched some of the proceedings of the Labour Conference on the ±«Óãtv Parliament Channel. MP, the former minister for Europe, chaired a session dealing with the future of communities in the UK, which provided a few bloggable moments. The mics were left on during the live broadcast, which enabled viewers to hear some of the conversation between Vaz and the panel event he chaired, featuring cabinet ministers and other politicians. Thus, we could hear the deputy leader whispering clues about who a particular local councillor (asking a question) was. We could also hear Vaz telling the panel not to begin answering questions until he called their name (since, he explained, the microphone in the hall would not be turned on until tthat cue). "Don't speak until I call your name," says Vaz, " -- think of it just like the old cabinet." At which point, one of the cabinet ministers (I couldn't identify which it was) jokes, "Don't speak at all, then!"
Later on, I watched as Dennis Skinner laughed in apparent disbelief as , the most recent Conservative defector to Labour, made a barnstorming speech (for which he earned a standing ovation) calling on his erstwhile colleagues to take the plunge and join Labour. Davies's attack on the Tories from Thatcher to Cameron was so comprehensive that some will wonder why he didn't himself take the plunge much, much earlier (he's been in Parliament for 20 years). Brassneck?
Davies undoubtedly gave the best speech of the morning -- rhetorically speaking. The second best speech was probably the Northern Ireland Secretary, (another defector from the Conservatives). He began with an extract from Heaney's The Cure at Troy:
History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
He then celebrated the progress made in Northern Ireland, focusing on images of transformation -- such as the participation of Martin McGuinness and Jeffrey Donaldson in
Now back to my other writing: I'm trying to join up some thoughts to be delivered as a talk tomorrow at Stranmillis University College, in a service marking the beginning of the new academic year. I was planning to make use of a different Heaney poem, but The Cure at Troy may get another outing.
I'm off tonight to film with the Blueprint team. The producer, Natalie Maynes, has taken over her mother's back garden and the crew will be setting up a green screen shoot to tie in with our earlier Mountsandel sequence. We plan to recreate the mud cabins at Mountsandel (Ireland's earliest settlement) using computer graphics, then have me walk into one of the cabins and sit down beside an open fire.
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