- The Terry George backstory - by Seamás Mc Swiney
He first denounced the last twenty minutes of the Terry George film as being a total fiction and then accused the Irish Film Board of being the financier of nationalist propaganda. Bang, Bang. "Sacré Alexander!", as we say here in France. From anonymous film critic he has moved up a notch and has become spokesman for the Home Office damage limitation campaign -if he plays his cards right he'll become a household name in the Ireland of his birth. Still, all debate is welcome and Terry George has anticipated this one for a year, if not for twenty. He replied that on the contrary, all the major events and characters in his film correspond faithfully, in fact or in composite, with the real events. He has already prepared his documentation and invites Alexander Walker to do the same and meet again at a more appropriate venue and time. As your humble 'Film West' correspondent translates to the intrigued French (the official interpreter is late), Lelia Doolan strides across, plucks the microphone from my hand and, without so much as a "how'ya Séamas", irately defends Bord Scannan's participation in what she considers to be a fine and moving piece of film-making -in fact, only $1m of an $8m budget came from the IFB and section 35 money, the other seven coming from Castle Rock in Hollywood, so the Film Board's investment was hardly crucial in getting the film made.
Terry George actually wrote it before he wrote In the Name of the Father. Helen Mirren became interested six or seven years ago when Liam Neeson showed it to her. Later it was Castle Rock's desire to do a film with the actress, along with the reassurance of having Jim Sheridan as producer, that clinched the deal. But from the politics of cinema back to the Cinema of Politics: the debate on this film could be intelligent and useful if Alexander Walker & Co do their homework. With luck it will be both serious and stimulating with a minimum of ranting. As indeed it will be for 'Michael Collins' and as it already has been for In the Name of the Father, Nothing Personal and others. "...we need to fight out this battle of ideas and beliefs in the arts: in films, theatre, books, literature, debate and take it off the street." says Terry George. The French newspaper, 'Libération', spoke of the "impossible objectivity" of Terry George. It quoted him, concerning his membership of the IRSP:
"Since then my ideas have evolved a lot, they have matured, just like everybody else's. I have tried to represent the situation of that time in the most objective way possible: this film does not contain any significant episode which did not really take place. But it is impossible to be completely objective when treating such a subject." Arthur Lappin, as quoted in 'The Irish Times', puts it succinctly: "We're certainly not proselytising for the IRA but the film does try to redress a media imbalance regarding the hunger strikes".
Irish cinema has become a forum for political discussion with a capacity to broach old problems in new ways. Celluloid as a substitute for semtex. Arriflexes for armalites. I'd had the privilege of closely following the Cannes campaign of Some Mother's Son and I spoke with Terry George over breakfast on the bustling terrace of the Majestic Hotel, just before he slipped away with his wife, Rita, for some well-deserved peace and quiet after five days of trepidation, toil and media promotion. "Some Mother's Son" won't be seen by most people until its release in the autumn, so rather than going into too much detail about the film, I asked Terry George to talk to me about himself which would hopefully explain his point of view. I wanted him to recount his backstory, an incongruous trajectory from Hollywood Barracks to Hollywood Boulevard -the life, times and opinions of an expatriate ex-patriot as it were!
Tell me about the idea to use the two women to represent your point of view of the whole hunger strike drama?
It's not so much using them to represent my point of view. I think the main characters in all films represent to some degree the positive and negative points of view of the director. The women in the film are fair representations of a type of woman, a type of mother that I was familiar with in the nationalist community. They just represent two strands of women, mothers whose families are involved politically and support the various strands of the republican movement as opposed to women who, because of the negative aspect of politics in Northern Ireland, have no interest and have a deep aversion to politics and try to keep their family away from it - and that is, not so much my point of view, but two realities I was trying to get up there on the screen. Something new about this film is that maybe for the first time it's made by somebody who actually comes from Belfast and who was also actively involved in nationalist politics in Northern Ireland.
What were you doing at the time of the hunger strikes?
Well I'm not actively involved now. During the hunger strikes, I was in Belfast and a friend, Miriam Daly, a woman who encouraged me and helped me in the process of getting into Queens University as a mature student, was murdered because of her involvement in both the IRSP and the relatives action committee. This was in mid 1980 and there was a concerted campaign by a section of the UDA, or their military wing, the UFF, to hit at the growing political activism around the H-Block. Miriam Daly was assassinated, Bernadette McAliskey was shot and several other activists were killed. Rita my wife, and I attended the hunger strike protest marches and we knew a lot of the people involved. We were at the centre of the agitation at the time. At the time of the dirty protest at the beginning of the hunger strikes a crowd of us formed a student action committee, the Student's Campaign Against Repression (SCAR). I suppose it was somewhat reminiscent of Bernadette and Michael Farrell. We organised debates in the various universities around the country. Then Miriam was assassinated. I'd actually been driving past the house when I saw the commotion outside and I went over. The cops had just left and her brains and her blood were all over the.... And you saw all of that? I cleaned it up. Rita had worked for her as a kind of nanny-secretary......
I also heard that you'd been in prison in Northern Ireland.
Twice. I was interned in 1972 when I was nineteen.
And why?
I lived in the Protestant area of Castlereagh Road, but my friends and relatives who all came from the Short Strand area were peripherally involved in '72, the IRA and the Fianna and all. I wasn't involved at all but because of my association with them..... in the general round up my name came up in interrogations. They lifted me and I was interned for two months. What did that do to your attitude? It hardened it a lot, it confirmed all the suspicions and fears and I guess prejudices I had about Unionist and British policy in Northern Ireland at the time which was basically round up the Catholic population and lock them away.
Yet before the Troubles, having grown up in a Protestant neighbourhood, you had Protestant friends?
That's all I had. A few of them ended up in the UDA and one of the ones who was my, you know, best mate at eleven and stuff like that, he ended up in the RUC. It was a very staunch Protestant neighbourhood. My mother was from the Markets area and my father from Short Strand. My father ran a car business and aspired to get on in life so we moved to what would be considered a middle or lower middle class suburb and tried to move up the ladder. The tensions that were under the surface reared their head around the marching season, when suddenly I wouldn't be allowed to collect wood for the bonfire and stuff like that, so I was always aware of the division, the sectarian division, that we were a minority and second class to some degree because of our religion. I was a token taig. Some of my cousins would come visit and it was a bit like Indian territory for them. But this was pre-troubles, the O'Neill period, a period of moderation. So there was a bit of intermingling. Then all that stopped in '69 when the troubles broke out...I was surprised how the division in the community I lived in happened so quickly. Within the space of eighteen months or so, what had been a relatively integrated neighbourhood fell apart immediately and Catholics were intimidated to move out pretty rapidly... ...Later, my arrest and internment was based on coerced and false information. It was ridiculous, a general fish net. They were taking young guys, 17, 18, to Castlereagh and to Hollywood Barracks to be brutally interrogated, so they were naming just anybody they could, just to stop it. That was how I ended up on the Maidstone prison ship and the McGilligan prison camp. You arrive there and the head of the Provos and the head of the Official IRA come up and they ask "who are you with?" and you say "I don't know" and they say "well, pick somebody!" It wasn't "join up" or anything, it was just that either section controlled where you slept and that. I was never a big fan of the Provisional IRA's nationalist politics or their bombing campaign so I kind of moved in with the Officials and sat where they were eating.
I also heard that you went to seminary school.
Oh I did, when I was a kid.
Were you sent by your parents?
No, not at all, they were in complete opposition to it because they knew it was bullshit. I thought I was going to get away, you know it must be the equivalent of joining the British army in Britain, you listen to a pitch and you go off to Hampshire in England. They have a wonderful school. You can learn religion and serve God. I was only twelve and I stayed for three years.
Did you ever think of really becoming a priest?
Yeah, for about an hour and a half, basically during mass -religious moments. Which we had to attend every morning, but by the time you get to sixteen or whatever women appear and that's the end of that. Was the seminary school anything like prison. Yeah, boarding school, all institutions are.
To get back to a more serious kind, a few years after being interned you wound up being sent to prison for a longer stretch. What was that all about?
When I got out of internment, having met the Officials I ended up being involved with the IRSP and then, in the early days of the split by Seamus Costello and Bernadette Devlin. Then, I was arrested in a car where someone was carrying a gun and I got six years in Long Kesh in the political status compound. I got out in '78 after serving three.
Did it ever cross your mind, when you were working on the hunger strike script, that if you had been in prison then that you would have been involved in a direct way with the hunger strikes?
Well, I missed the demarcation line of political status as opposed to criminal status by some nine months. They were building the H-blocks when I was in there. We could hear the jackhammers and the sinking of the foundations.
What did the distinction mean at the time?
Well, in a day to day existence, it had a huge significance. We were in cages where we had basically free association with the other prisoners in there. You hung out with your friends and other people you knew and, like all these groups and community things, you got on with some and you didn't get on with others. While it was confinement it was confinement without regimentation, without the humiliation of prison regime. So the spectre of being locked up in a cell, to have to put on the uniform, to be regimented, was very real then. I knew what they were talking about alright.
Did you ever meet Bobby Sands personally?
I met him through the wire in the cages a couple of times. I mean I knew who he was. He was a figure in there because he was the O.C. in cage 11, a hard-core Provo cage in Long Kesh – Adams wrote a book about it. Then he got out and was quickly arrested again and ended up in the Block. I knew some of the major players pretty well. I met Adams, I knew Brendan Hughes quiet well, Bick McFarland, who basically ran the H-Block. After I got out of prison and I'd done the A-levels in there, I went to university and Rita and I got married. I'd met Rita in Dublin before I went to prison, and after I was arrested, she wrote to me in prison as well as visiting, so it was a bit of a jail romance until I got out again. What did you study in Queens? Politics and history... surprise, surprise. I always had the notion of journalism... writing something. So we tried to get back on track, build up some sort of lives together because Orla was born in mid 1980 and then, the hunger strikes and the aftermath... it wasn't a sudden brainstorm to leave, we'd been to the States on a vacation, and I went out there to "see what happens" and she came after. We kind of drifted into it. But our subconscious was speaking to us, that we'd had enough.
And you're still in New York now?
Well, we move back and forward between Ireland and New York. For a long time we were illegal aliens. Rita is now an American citizen and I have a work visa. I like the notion of being able to move between Ireland and America. It kind of liberates you from both cultures in some sort of way. I can understand that. If you're in the film industry, if you're an Irish film-maker and if you're not Neil Jordan or Jim Sheridan or I guess Pat O'Connor, you're struggling to get money and it becomes that sort of European mish-mash of fund-raising where the Irish Film Board gives a bit and then Eurimages and you're going around begging all over the place. It's maybe the way to make films. In America you try to get a story that's commercial and you go to a studio and you get a big whack of change and off you go.
Was that the way with 'Some Mother's Son', Castle Rock saw it as being a commercial story?
Well, I don't think anybody in America is going to see it as that, but funnily enough, the vibe out here now is that it could be commercial, because it's emotionally appealing in a universal level and I think they're always trying to put you in a market so now they smell a market for this... which is strange really.
So, compared to Irish based filmmakers, having to do the rounds, you were lucky in the sense that you got nearly all of your cash in one place?
Film-maker's aspirations are that they should start off in their country and make a little film, show it around, hope it's a success and maybe they'll get an American pick-up or at least some of them do. I kind of bypassed the first step and went straight to the source.
I saw in this morning's 'Variety' that you're talking about another project already.
The thing about Cannes is that you have this voracious shoal of journalists who swim around like mackerel or bluefish after the bait and the bait is every little bit of news. So I'm sitting and talking to the Variety guy and he was asking me about projects and I have this one in my head and I enunciate it and lo and behold it became a project and a story and maybe it's a pay day as well -who knows?
It's also a subject you're close to.
Well, I'm close to it because my wife was extremely close to the subject and still is in a way. I think it's an important subject and at the same time when you say important subject it sounds as though this is another serious film but I intend to make it more accessible or what's the dreaded word... commercial?
What's the story idea?
Well, it's a bit more than an idea. It's the story of a woman who runs a secret hideout for abused women, for women who are fleeing from their lovers and husbands and who has the need to hire bodyguards to protect these women to get them to court to protect their lives. The subtext of it is about the obsessiveness of men when their women decide they can't live with them anymore. That's what I want it to be about. I think that is an important topic because it seems to be that today in America, where random violence is a major problem, there are two categories of true maniacs. There's the spurned lover or husband who decides he wants his possession back. Every day there are women being murdered on their doorstep in front of their children because of these maniacs. There's that and then of course there's like the Oklahoma bomber and the mad post office worker who walks in and shoots everyone. My interest is in the first because clearly there's a lot of sociological causes that can be spoken to in a moving and entertaining way.
"Some Mother's Son" was a good break for you?
Well, "In the Name of the Father" was the break -"Some Mother's Son" still has a life of its own to go along.
And "In the Name of the Father" is due to your working relationship and friendship with Jim Sheridan?
Yeah, you meet some people and suddenly you click with them. I took Jim a play, actually a play about a tunnel escape from Long Kesh, and he directed it and ended up acting in it. It was in the Irish arts Center in '84/'85, winter and spring, and we got along great. Jim was always interested in film over theatre, I mean he's very good in theatre but he had that ambition -you know he's extremely ambitious, and he had a deep desire to go for film. So he wanted to do a film and Pearson came and he went off to do "My Left Foot". I stayed in New York and kept up my involvement in the Irish Arts Centre. I worked on a book about the Mafia. I'd got involved in it as a researcher and ended up co-writing it. I hung around in theatre and I produced some stuff and directed little bits and pieces. The best thing I did was producing Donal O'Kelly's "Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son ". Jim came back and by then he was a star. My Left Foot had won the Oscars and we talked about different ideas that we had in the past and he asked me to help him with a script about the North that Spielberg's company were looking to do. It was about an informer who was murdered by the IRA in Derry. We started to get involved in that but it was one of those things that never came to fruition. Meanwhile Gabriel Byrne had heard me read a short story I wrote and he asked me would I be interested in writing a script for "In the Name of the Father". So then I got into the Gerry Conlon story, sent the treatment I did of Conlon's book to Jim. From then on we were off and running.
I heard an interesting story how you, by chance ran into Gerry Conlon in Southampton, before the Guildford bombing.
I was always trying to get out of Northern Ireland. I'd take these forays over to England like everyone else, basically to escape and see if I could set up another life or whatever. On one of those occasions I went off to Southampton and I was working in construction. I'd tried to bluff my way onto the boats as we call it, the cruise ships, as a waiter or whatever, and then wound up working on the motor way construction. Southampton had a big Belfast community -this was in the early seventies and again it was split into Provos and Sticks and I was kind of with the Stickies crowd, just guys who were on the ships, drinking in bars, you know, hanging out. It was like supporting Manchester United or Manchester City and that was it. Anyway, I was in a night-club one night with a guy called Roxy McAteer, having a few drinks, and we could hear this loud abusive voice, a young Belfast guy who was being very drunk being very obnoxious to a lot of the locals. He was mouthing off about the English and what he'd do, so Roxy and I figured that if we didn't get him out of there we were liable to get kicked stupid as well. We took him by the arms and hauled him down the stairs. Roxy knew who he was. When we got outside he was going "I'm fucking Gerry Conlon and I'll get you fixed". Anyway, he shut up and went off. Then the work got scarce so I decided to head back to Belfast. I was reading the paper one morning about Guildford. I was glad to be out of England before all that because I could almost smell the climate of what was going to happen afterwards. The tension was enormous. I read in the paper about Gerry Conlon being charged with the Guildford bombing and I knew the minute I read it that he was innocent. He was such an asshole it was an impossibility. When you live in Belfast, you know the local Provos, not that they're saints or anything, but no way would they have Conlon associated with anything because he was too much of an eejit. So I read that there and I thought another poor fucker who's bit the dust, which is par for the course because I considered myself to be the same having gone through Hollywood Barracks and the Maidstone and so forth. Then I read about Giuseppe being arrested and charged and I thought Oh God! this is really tragic, but it joined the reams of tragedies in Northern Ireland. I watched the progress of the Guildford four thing and I remembered reading one episode where Conlon was on protest demanding rubber shoes because he had some disease and he couldn't wear the leather shoes they were given in the prison and it seemed both righteous and typical of the kind of scam that Gerry'd be up to. When the Guildford Four thing built up and it came to proving their innocence, I just watched in fascination and finally I met up with Gerry again. He was on a whirlwind tour of America after his release and he remembered that night in Southampton. He has an amazing memory, a stunning memory actually. "Some Mother's Son" had its premiere in Cannes just a few days ago and now you're on the point of leaving.
What's it been like?
Well, I kind of had a taste of this last year because we came here to seal the deal with Castle Rock. Filmmakers need a market, journalists need stories and they all come together in a sort of incestuous relationship here that's based on hype, star gazing and razzmatazz and yet once you put all these people together... in a strange way there is something Marxist about Cannes, in that this is where the dialectic really takes shape: polar opposites meet, discussions take place and they move on and films ensue.-It's quite fascinating to watch that take place -to be a part of it! I came here with some apprehension because I was worried about putting "Some Mother's Son" out to the world five months before we released it and having the Alexander Walkers of the world take a shot at it. But finally I said "Ah, to hell with it, let people see it", get the word of mouth going because I'm going to have to get out and sell this picture pretty ferociously. I think it paid off. We got mixed reviews, an excellent review from the British trade paper Screen International, a pretty terrible one from Variety and a kind of a ridiculous one from the Hollywood Reporter that denounced us in a weird, partisan way that in fact worked well for me because at the film company, Castle Rock, it reinforced everyone's determination to get it out there so I'm encouraged by it.
When is the next screening going to be?
I'm going to show it to a few people in America just to lay the groundwork for stuff I have to do. The next big screening is at the Galway Film Festival and I'm really looking forward to that because it will be the first time I get the vibe back from Irish people. It seems to me that the Irish contingent that were at the screenings were moved a lot by the film so I'm very interested to see what happens to an Irish audience about this film... You know, the hard thing about film-making and I suppose about any art is the trap of becoming self-delusional or being too swayed by varying opinions about your work. You lose all contact with it and all contact with the ground. Jim and I kind of pride ourselves in polling people and taking their opinions and then taking heed of what they say because I think the biggest sin in film-making is that level of self-delusion. I've seen film-makers out here who produce really bad work, partially because people around them wouldn't say "look, hold on a minute, this is shit -stop, and take a look at this" and that's how you end up with films like "Hudson Hawk" and "Cut Throat Island"; that level of insulating yourself from the real world and creating a cocoon of collective delusion.
Do you ever have the impression that this phenomenon exists among Irish filmmakers.
I do and I don't want to focus in on anybody. The European syndrome of film-making, which was well described one time as directors putting their personal anxieties and angst up on the screen, is a problem in Ireland. Rather than going to a therapist, directors put their foibles and interior problems up on the screen and I don't think that's entertainment by any definition of the word. But obviously people have to put the things that are strongest and most important to them on film.
Do you mean that they should sort of process it and....
I think it should be mixed in with story, humour, pathos, character development, ensemble acting so that it comes out as an entertainment. I know there is avant garde films and all but there must always be, for me, a very strong story. I'm very story and very fairy tale oriented in that I like moral tales that are deeply grounded in reality and people's experiences and by fairy tale, I mean that I think the classic story structures all come from fairy tales and are all moral tales. In some ways In the Name of the Father was Pinochio and I guess Some Mother's Son could be the Prodigal Son in some way or a variation of that. It has to be a strong story for me, that's the driving force and not some interior feeling you have about whatever your phobia of the day is. Now having said that, all the successful films out of Ireland over the last years have been strong stories and we seem to be heading into a period where there are very good scripts being made.
You're very interested in making films in Ireland in the future, even though the film you're talking about making takes place in America.
You don't want a be a one trick pony. I mean I've done a play and two films about the North, I think that's enough for now. I've lived as much of my adult life abroad as I have in Ireland, so I'll reflect on that and see what I come up with, I mean there's no question that I'll come back to things in Ireland for sure. I love Dublin and I've moved around a bit. All of the film work has been done in the Republic. The bond we made with the crew during In the Name of the Father is very strong. It's a great team and it's sort of hard to give that up.
Do you ever want to set a story in the context of society in the Republic, as a backdrop to a story?
Yeah, Jim and I have an idea about travelling people. It's not deep, heavy you know... -
...along the lines of 'Into the West'?
It's like that, it might be even more commercial, but I don't want to talk too much about it. It's a story that one of us will do soon. The thing about film is you say these things and then it takes you two, maybe three years. That's still a big chunk of your life you're giving up there. Jim has loads of stories. He has "I, Claudius" which he has the rights to, he has this boxing thing now, there's my gig, the bodyguard/the battered women thing, there's a couple of other things: he has an idea for a story in New York ("...a little girl who's brought from Ireland to America by her parents as an illegal alien. Her perspective is that she's the one looking after the family. It's about illegal aliens in America..."). We also have the play we did "The Tunnel" which actually would make a really good film somewhere down the line, so you're talking eighteen years work there. The best approach is one at a time and off you go.
Let's get back to 'Some Mother's Son' and your efforts to stick as close to the truth as possible.
I kind of got a notion of putting a written statement up before the film "While these characters are composites, all the major events are true and..."
A lot of the people who are not kindly disposed to the film start talking about a fictitious story.
There's very little fiction and I think when we start showing it in Northern Ireland, in the community it came from, they'll recognise that right away and most Irish people will recognise that. We lived through these events. People can judge how closely we get to it. Having gone through "In the Name of the Father" and all that bullshit about whether Gerry Conlon was in the same cell as Giuseppe, I was pretty careful about the major events. I now have a forty page document where I source every major scene in the film so that's why I'm interested and eager to get into debate with people because if they want to debate me on the minutiae of the reality of that hunger strike, they'd better have their facts because I have mine.
I don't know if you're going to like my saying this, but when I saw an earlier cut of the film on video, I had the impression of it being almost a documentary. You seemed to take pains to get elements and chronology in place in order to give a sense of it being the way things were.
Maybe, and that's a funny thing, because I think many people in Ireland might think that it's too like a documentary but the situation was so bizarre : this mass of women saying the rosary marching down the street, these are images I remember very vividly, ...there was the line protest where women stood with blankets around them in the middle of the road and held black flags, all of that there for us is recent memory and yet it's like there's something Kafkaesqe or Felliniesque about it for the outside world and I wanted to evoke that. There's also one missing image that crossed my mind watching the film, one that's probably unfilmable, and that is you never actually see someone who really looks like they're on the point of death after sixty days starvation, the most horrific image you could imagine. Though people say that the death bed scenes are particularly horrific. I didn't want a Daniel Day Lewis thing where John Lynch fasts for twenty days. He lost weight and he got down to what we could work with, close to reality. At the deathbed scene where he dies there's an image there that's pretty harrowing but I think that's pornography in a certain kind of way along with gratuitous violence. It's the same thing with the shit on the wall: it's there and you see it and that's it. Some have criticised it in saying we didn't go far enough in showing how they suffered but at the end of the day you're telling a story about women and not some horror picture about what went on in the Maze.
To a certain extent I feel you pulled some punches as well. Another thing that I missed in the film was the lack of images reflecting the effect that the hunger strikes had internationally with demonstrations and media coverage around the world. You kept it pretty close to Belfast and the war room in London. -...
I've this terrible reluctance to go to television to solve film problems and once you see a TV, and I use it once, I think the film-maker doesn't know how to come up with that scene, so you do the video tape camera thing. In fact, because of the cost, the film studio had thought that we were going to go to the video tape and the TV screen for the Bobby Sands' funeral but we managed to persuade them to recreate the whole thing.
How about the film's relevance to the present, now that Thatcher is gone?
That's a good point. The end of this film is both analogous to and almost a mirror image of what's happening at the moment which is where in the hunger strike too, both the IRA and the British government, (and at the moment the IRA, the British government and the loyalist community) are stalemated in intransigent positions and the peace and quiet of NI has come down to the interpretation of words just as it did at the time of the hunger strike where the attempts to resolve that broke down over the interpretation of certain words... ...A fundamental basic of the struggles in NI is a feeling of disempowerment and a lack of voice from the nationalist community and now there's a fear of disempowerment and lack of voice from the unionist community, that fear and that obsession with the past -it's all about lack of communication and voice. Now we're trying to take the single most tragic event in the recent history of the nationalist community and give it a voice and say "look, here's how we felt". If I could find a story from the loyalist community where I could do the same, I'd shoot it next except that I feel that I don't have enough interior knowledge about their community. But we need to fight out this battle of ideas and beliefs in the arts: in films, theatre, books, literature, debate and take it off the street and hopefully the peace talks will do that, but you can't go in there and say what's your definition of decommissioning... because you're going to get back to the hunger strike situation where everybody will say "I'd rather starve to death than this!" or "You can't have that!". Basically the hunger strike was about winning and losing. Thatcher had to win. That's clear, she made that clear and I'm sure she'd make it clear today. She was going to win that situation, it didn't matter. She established a reputation, I'm not going to be pejorative about that, she became the Iron Lady on the basis of this one battle. That was the decision that she made. But if people are going to take that position in the next few months in NI, we're lost.