Opinion

Deaglán de Bréadún: What can happen when we 'Give Peace a Chance'

The Rolling Stones in 1964: Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, who died last week aged 80, Brian Jones and Mick Jagger. PA photos.
The Rolling Stones in 1964: Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, who died last week aged 80, Brian Jones and Mick Jagger. PA photos. The Rolling Stones in 1964: Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, who died last week aged 80, Brian Jones and Mick Jagger. PA photos.

THE recent passing of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts didn’t mark the end of an era, since several other members of the band are happily still alive.

But Charlie’s survival to the ripe old age of 80 years was somewhat unusual in rock music circles.

There’s a film with Dudley Moore called ‘Thirty Is A Dangerous Age, Cynthia’ but, for rock stars, the time of peril is when you hit 27. Those who died at that age included Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison of The Doors, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and of course Charlie’s fellow band member Brian Jones.

I saw Charlie Watts and Brian Jones on stage at a concert the Stones gave in Dublin in the 1960s. It hardly needs saying that Mick Jagger dominated the proceedings with his high-powered vocal performance and famous gyrations. By contrast, Jones just stood there looking into the middle distance and playing his guitar. Watts meanwhile was drumming away in the background to great effect.

A furore erupted just before the concert proper began when showband singer, the late Brendan Bowyer, made a surprise appearance with a troupe of dancers to perform his pop number ‘The Hucklebuck’. Bowyer had an excellent voice but the Dublin audience did not appreciate the Waterford native’s intervention and there was an outbreak of heckling and jeering with offensive terms like “culchie” being used. There was considerable media coverage afterwards and it inspired this cheeky schoolboy to write a letter under the nom de plume ‘I Was There’ to the now defunct ‘Evening Press’, setting out my perspective on the incident: my first piece of writing in a national newspaper.

In general terms, the Stones have been rather less political than the Beatles although they did warn Donald Trump last year of possible legal action if he continued using their material at campaign rallies, where the song ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ had featured prominently.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney took a particular interest in the Irish situation, indeed both of them had significant Irish roots. The day after the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in January 1972, Paul and his late wife Linda wrote ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, which was recorded by their group Wings. It was banned by the BBC but made it to Number One on the Irish chart and also (thanks to Basque separatists) in Spain.

A photograph of Lennon with Yoko Ono at an August 1971 protest march in London shows him holding the front page of the far-left ‘Red Mole’ magazine with the slogan “For the IRA, against British imperialism” and he has been quoted as saying: "If it's a choice between the IRA and the British Army, I'm with the IRA. But if it's a choice between violence and non-violence, I'm with non-violence. So it's a very delicate line."

Delicate is right, John, or in the words of the old Dublin saying: “You could sing that if you had an air to it.” The wave of international sympathy for northern nationalists after Bloody Sunday, for example, was damaged by three terrible events that took place shortly afterwards: the Official IRA bombing on February 22 at Aldershot Barracks in England which killed six ancillary workers and a Catholic chaplain; the Abercorn Restaurant bomb in Belfast on March 4, attributed to the Provisionals, which killed two civilians and wounded 130; the Donegall Street PIRA car bomb in Belfast city centre on March 20, killing four civilians and three members of the security forces and wounding 148 persons.

Bullets are bad enough but it was particularly unfortunate that bombs became such an integral part of what militant republicans call the “freedom struggle”. Matters were made even more horrific by the appalling recklessness displayed in the three events mentioned above.

But that was then, this is now. Since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 we’ve had a largely peaceful situation and republicans have made advances that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. The latest polls indicate that Sinn Féin will hold the first minister post after the next Stormont assembly elections and might indeed be the main party of government in Dublin in a relatively short while.

Meanwhile the timing of a border referendum and its potentially game-changing outcome are matters of constant public discussion. It just goes to show what can happen when, in John Lennon’s words, you ‘Give Peace a Chance’.

Email: Ddebre1@aol.com; Twitter: @DdeBreadun