ALL HELL WILL BREAK LOOSE

by AUSTIN CURRIE

Sunday, October 10, 2004
Austin CurrieReviewed by Paul T Colgan
All Hell Will Break Loose, by Austin Currie, O'Brien, €24.95.

MEMOIRS OF TURBULANT YEARS

There is a certain timeliness to Austin Currie's autobiography. As a young Tyrone nationalist Currie worked to expose and undermine the bigotry at the heart of the Stormont regime.

His occupation of a council house in Caledon was one of the pivotal moments in the pre-Troubles period.

Currie exposed the institutionalised discrimination in the North by highlighting anti-Catholic bias in housing allocation.

The ensuing wave of protest and agitation that engulfed the six counties ultimately led to 30 years of armed insurrection and sectarian strife.

The title of Currie's memoirs refers to his parting shot as he was thrown out of the Stormont parliament after accusing Ulster Unionist John Taylor of lying.

According to various political observers and commentators Stormont is about to make a return, but not as we know it. With the DUP inching towards an accommodation with nationalists, a lost generation of politicians is likely once again to tread the corridors that Currie did as an independent nationalist in the 1960s.

Currie was on the SDLP negotiating team that helped to devise the ill-fated Sunningdale agreement in 1974.

"Sunningdale for slow learners'', as former SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon put it, may finally be on the cards.

Currie recounts his fairly orthodox nationalist upbringing, his early attempts at political agitation in Queens University, Belfast, and a political career that took him from Fermanagh and South Tyrone to Dublin West.

The 1965 to 1974 period of his career is the most significant. From winning his Stormont MP seat as a 24-yearold in 1965 he went on to become one of the prime movers in NICRA, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, and a founding member of the SDLP.

Currie's account of these turbulent years is not designed for the uninitiated, and he leaves much unsaid.

(Presumably he assumes that only students of Northern politics will take the time to sift through the minutiae of how NICRA came about.)

Currie has incurred the ire of both nationalists and unionists through the years.

Nationalists accused him of being a 'recruiting sergeant' for the Ulster Defence Regiment, of having sold out the rent and rates strike as a Stormont minister and of having abandoned them for a career with Fine Gael. Unionists saw him as an inflammatory subversive. His autobiography sets out to put the record straight.

Bernadette Devlin, Peoples' Democracy and Eamon McCann's Derry Trotskyites all come in for criticism.

Needless to say Currie reserves his strongest condemnation for the unionist one party state, and for the Provisional IRA, for its intimidation of SDLP members.

Lost in the tumult is any sense of Currie's home life.

While he lauds his wife, Annita, for standing by him when others would have walked away, the references to his personal life are sparing.

The Curries were frequently targeted by B-Specials and loyalists, yet he foregoes the temptation to rage against those who vied to make his life unbearable - even while recounting the vicious attack on Annita in their home in 1972.

Their close proximity to horrific incidents in the early 1970s is seemingly unending.

After a bomb attack that blows a chunk out of their home's gable wall the RUC were stationed in a fortified outpost at the edge of the garden.

Regular pot-shots by the IRA eventually led to the death of one RUC man, while another unfortunate officer died after his colleague accidentally shot him in the head.

A close colleague, Paddy Wilson was later stabbed to death by John White - who went on to become Johnny Adair's partner in crime.

Currie's later career as a Fine Gael TD is treated as an afterthought - squeezed into 50 pages. He ruminates so briefly on his decision to head south that the reader might almost miss it.

He recalls his struggle with partitionist attitudes during his run at the presidency, and how he rowed back from his belief that Sinn Féin should be pushed out of the political process when he supported the Hume-Adams dialogue.

Political autobiographies are essentially self-serving, and Currie's is no different.

It might not provide any major revelations about a crucial period in Irish history, but Currie's offering allows a pivotal figure to give his perspective on how hell indeed broke loose in the North.