Now where there is a will, there is a way is as true a maxim as you ll ever come across and, let s face it, the DUP s never wanted power sharing.

The alleged intelligence-gathering activities of Republicans, which came to light recently supplied the excuse for the exodus.

So it is back to square one unless the continued working of the Good Friday Agreement holds.

The Irish Times in its leader headed Way Forward In Northern Ireland (October 9th, 2002) states in its opening salvo:

The Belfast Agreement inched towards another period of grave instability when Northern Ireland s First Minister David Trimble, asked the British Government to table a motion at the Northern Assembly, seeking the exclusion of Sinn Féin from the power-sharing Executive.

Should that not happen, Mr. Trimble has indicated he and his ministers will resign. His initiative followed an announcement by Mr. Peter Robinson and Mr. Nigel Dodds of the Democratic Unionist Party that their membership of the Executive will end on Friday.

The First Minister is operating under intense pressure. Forces within the Ulster Unionist Party suspicious of Sinn Féin s intentions from the beginning, have lost confidence in the ability of the Belfast Agreement to deliver the kind of society envisaged more than four years ago.

The alleged intelligence-gathering activities of republicans, which came to light last week, merely confirmed their views.

Concluding the same leader states: At this stage, the various parties are focused on the coming elections and there is little chance they will display the kind of flexibility required to inject early vigour into the Agreement. In such circumstances, the two Governments must hold the line and ensure that the desire of the people on this island for peace, equality and power-sharing emphatically stated in separate referendums is not jeopardised."

The heads of the two Governments, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, have a hard task in hands.

Hopefully, they will rescue the situation and get peace to prevail at all costs.

Joan Littlewood brightened this passing parade

A LADY died last month who transformed a few beer-stained pages into a fine play.

Joan Littlewood did just that with Brendan Behan s play The Quare Fellow.

Behan was in Mountjoy jail for some misdemeanour. While he was in residence there, The Quare Fellow, was also inside.

He was a man named Kirwan who was accused of murdering his brother Bernard. The accused man was quite a character and Behan had a ready-made character for his play.

Kirwan was supposed to have fed some of his murdered brother s cooked body to his pigs. There was no sign of the body for ages until, one day, it was announced on the midday news that a torso had been found in a bog in Offaly.

I attended a lecture to the UCD Medical Society by State Pathologist, Dr. Hickey some time in the late forties or early fifties.

In the lecture, Dr. Hickey related that Kirwan was drinking a cup of tea in Portlaoise Jail when the news came through on the radio about a torso being found. On hearing the news the cup fell from Kirwan s hands.

Eventually he was convicted and hanged but not before he was captured for posterity in The Quare Fellow.

It was Alan Simpson who first produced this play in The Peacock Theatre in Dublin. I attended one of the early shows as did Joan Littlewood who sensed the play s potential.

She was given permission to do her own production and her version of the play, set in Mountjoy Jail on the eve of a hanging, proved to be an outstanding winner.

Joan Littlewood was born in London to an unmarried servant girl of 16. She was reared mainly by her grandparents.

There were no books in the house and, if her mother saw her with a book, she would throw it on the fire.

Joan got over this desperate drawback by slipping off to the library. She would read with a candle under the bedclothes. After surviving all that she deserved to make a breakthrough. She had the talent.

John Ezard in The Guardian described her as "a left-wing visionary with a passion for art, her life s work was inspired by a faith she had held since childhood".

"I really do believe in the community," she said. "I really do believe in the genius of every person. And I ve heard that greatness come out of them, that great thing which is in people. And that s not romanticism, d you see?"

Her passion for theatre, ignited by a school trip, was fed by independent visits to the Old Vic, where she saw John Gieldgud s Macbeth.

Judging it "too decorous", she put on her own production at her convent school. It was so gory that the Mother Superior fainted, twice. Her teachers, however, were impressed, and encouraged her to apply to Rada.

Next on the scene was Jimmy Miller, an acolyte of Bertolt Brecht with whom, in 1933, she set up Theatre of Action.

A touring company, its aim was to take plays expressing the struggle of working-class people to working-class districts.

Miller and Littlewood married but it didn t last. Then, in the 1940 s, the group was joined by Gerry Raffles, a handsome former public schoolboy who became the backstage lynchpin.

To Littlewood s delight and amazement, he fell madly in love with her a bond that was to last until his death 30 years later.

In 1953, Littlewood was offered a lease on the Theatre Royal, Stratford in East London. From there The Quare Fellow and many more plays blossomed forth and launched her to stardom.

She helped launch the careers of Richard Harris, Barbara Windsor and Michael Caine. Nine of her productions ended in the West End.

When Gerry Raffles died in 1975, Littlewood left England and settled in a French village near where he died. There she developed an unlikely friend-ship with Baron Philippo de Rothschild, who was also recently bereaved, and whom she called "Guv".

Joan Littlewood had certainly brightened this passing parade with her pioneering work in the Theatre when she passed away last month at the age of 87.

God rest her soul.

Death of a young boy was a sad and disturbing episode

THE kidnapping and murder of 11-years-old Jakob von Metzler in Frankfurt, Germany was the saddest and most disturbing tragedy I have come across since the murders of the school girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman a couple of months back.

Last week, Ian Huntley the caretaker of the school the girls attended was charged with their murder.

Jakob disappeared after getting off a bus near his home on Friday, September 27. He got off the bus outside a supermarket at 10.25am for the start of his two-week autumn holiday.

While his school friends went into the supermarket to buy sweets, Jacob just shouldered his rucksack and waved goodbye to his friends as he set off for the family home 100 yards away.

Jakob s family was among the richest in Germany. His father, Friedrich von Metzler, had inherited one of the country s great private banking fortunes. Michael Woodhead reporting in The Sunday Times (October 6) states that Friedrich and his wife Sylvia were determined Jacob would learn at first hand about life beyond the imposing wrought iron gates of their parkland villa, with its guard dogs and computer-monitored surveillance system.

The family s famous liberal spirit meant there was no expensive private education, no car to take him to school, and most surprising of all, given the number of high-profile kidnappings among Germany s rich elite, no watchful bodyguards.

Jakob never reached the gates of the family home. His body, trussed up and stuffed inside a rubbish bag was found three days later, 40 miles away beside a small lake popular for family picnics.

Less than two hours after Jakob s disappearance, a ransom demand for one million euros was found in the driveway to the family home. His parents paid the ransom but when the kidnappers failed to return their son, police launched a search involving 1,100 officers.

A 27-year-old law student, Magnus Gafgen, 6ft 4ins who had been employed to help Jakob with his studies, has been arrested after confessing to being involved in the abduction. Police say Jakob was probably killed the day he was abducted.

Gafgen does not fit the normal profile of a kidnap-per. He had no history of crime and knew his victim. His father, Guenther a building engineer said: "We put all our hopes into the children."

He said his son had visited his parents on the afternoon of the kidnapping, and on the Monday even called them again to ask if there were any left-overs from Sunday lunch.

"We never noticed anything different about him", said his mother.

Gafgen has refused to talk to the police and is isolated for his own safety in a cell in prison.

I hope to keep you informed as the story progresses.

 

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