Ex-RUC officerreflects on howthings fell apart

The RUC George Cross Foundation Trustee made the comments after quoting a passage from the late great Igbo writer Chinua Achebe’s, ‘Things Fall Apart,’ a novel that examined what happened when coloniser and colonised clashed and intersected in what is now south eastern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th Century.

‘Things Fall Apart,’ appropriately enough, takes its title and epigraph from a work written by an Irish poet, WB Yeats, who once, when speaking of Irish Protestants in Seanad Éireann in 1925, proclaimed proudly: “We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.”

Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ and its ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ inspired Achebe to address conflict in his own sphere but it could easily have been applied to the outbreak of the Troubles and the collapse of the old Stormont in the later 1960s and early 1970s.

On Thursday, the circle closed in the Verbal Arts Centre, when it was Achebe’s wisdom inspiring truth-telling and peace-building in Londonderry.

Closing his keynote address to what was billed as a ‘Crows on the Wire: Narratives of the Unheard’ symposium, Mr McCallum, said: “I’d like to quote from the Nigerian Booker Prize winner, Chinua Achebe.

“He is referring to his home village in the Biafran area of Nigeria.

“’A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon.

“Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.’”

Mr McCallum repeated: “We meet together because it is good for kinsmen to do so,” before closing by stating: “We are all, I believe, kinsmen. We may have had our differences in many things and continue to have differences in many things but the fact that we are gathered here together at this ‘Crows on the Wire: Narratives of the Unheard’ symposium shows that we are travelling in the same direction to ensure that, as we’ve already heard from the Victims and Survivors Commission that it must never happen again.

“And so I believe that we are meeting together this morning because it is good to do so.”

Mr McCallum, who served for 27 years in both the RUC and the PSNI retiring as a Superintendant in 2002, spoke for 15 minutes at the convention, which was hosted by the veteran Belfast journalist, Henry McDonald.

The event followed on from the hugely successful ‘Crows on the Wire’ theatrical production – dealing with the human story behind the changeover from the RUC to PSNI – that toured across Northern Ireland last year.

Following his retirement from the PSNI Mr McCallum continued his interest in wider criminal justice issues and has contributed to the sector in the UK, Europe and Asia, Pakistan and most recently in Nigeria.

The North Coast native has also served as a Governor at a local integrated primary school and is an independent member of his local Policing and Community Safety Partnership (PCSP).

He is also a member of the ‘Healing Through Remembering’ organisation and a member of the ‘Crows on the Wire’ Steering Group.

In a powerful address to an audience that included local school pupils, some of whom have been studying journalism at the Verbal Arts Centre, Mr McCallum said: “We need to change how we do things in this part of the world if we are to break our cycle of physical, mental and indeed political violence, and I believe that it’s through projects such as ‘Crows on the Wire,’ and the process of purposeful storytelling and cultural conversations, amongst other complementary media....we can help to make that change.

“For clearly our society cannot continue as it has for so many years. As Albert Einstein famously said: ‘One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different result.’ Folks, it ain’t gonna happen.”

He also bemoaned the dispiriting experience of listening to, watching or reading about the views of local politicians, interest groups or individuals, as carried by local media, and how this sometimes feels as though very little progress has been made, in terms of healing divisions wrought by the Troubles.

“Sometimes, you know, when you listen to the Stephen Nolan show, you know, or Talkback, or the evening programme with Seamus McKee, it seems to be Groundhog Day and I’m not sure we’re any further ahead today, in many respects, than we were maybe ten or fifteen years ago,” he said. “So, we need to change and we need to work out how we can best change.”

Mr McCallum said most victims and survivors, regardless of their background, tended to agree on one thing.

“’It,’ and by ‘it’ I mean the conflict or the Troubles, or the war, or the nightmare, or whatever it was that people want to say happened. ‘It’ must never be allowed to happen again. ‘It’ must never be allowed to happen again,” he told the assembled audience.

He also said that the Jonathan Burgess penned ‘Crows on the Wire’ play, along with its attendant by-products, such as discussions, social media and software applications, had an important role to play in spreading understanding of what it was like for former RUC officers faced with Chris Patten’s report in the late 1990s.

“There is a much quoted Nigerian proverb: ‘Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse.’ Curiosity drives me to try to understand why certain people, including myself, do certain things at a certain time, in a certain context and in a certain way, to try to walk in the other person’s shoes, to seek to understand, to do empathy...and I believe that ‘Crows on the Wire’ provides that important mechanism,” he told the audience.

He said that it had been a pleasant surprise to learn how audiences and communities that would have largely been at loggerheads and often in violent opposition to the organisations with which he had served for 27 years, had seen the RUC in a different light as a result of ‘Crows on the Wire.’

“I thought it was very interesting,” he commented, “that 71 per cent of folk from the Catholic, republican, nationalist background had a slightly different perception of what it was like to be a police officer through all those difficult years, and I think also, that 97 per cent of people thought that it was a good medium to address legacy issues and address debate in this particular area.”

The ‘Crows on the Wire’ project - centred on the drama - explores the transition of the RUC to the PSNI, from the perspective of some of those most directly impacted, namely the rank-and-file officers.

Set in a police locker room, it’s an intense dramatisation of the actual transition of the RUC to the PSNI on a night in November 2001.