All Hell

All Hell Will Break Loose” by Austin Currie (25^th October 2004)

This brilliant, detailed and lengthy autobiographical account of the author’s life might have been titled “All’s well that ends well”, for the Currie family were quite comfortably off in a political as well as financial sense as the story comes to a close.

It began well too. Austin was a Stormont MP for Tyrone, and he was the extremely able and popular civil rights agitator, who instituted the first civil rights actions at Caledon when he occupied a house destined for a single Protestant woman and who, inspired by the non-violent protests of Martin Luther King, helped organise the first civil rights march between Coalisland and Dungannon in 1968.

But one is left with a deep feeling that this politician, who was originally in an unwelcoming Nationalist Party only then to leave to form the SDLP in 1970, and his family were treated to an extremely nasty and almost pornographic, in a political sense, form of abuse from certain of their constituents.

Loyalist and republican paramilitaries never left this man or his family alone in the years that he represented his east Tyrone constituency as a senior SDLP figure. There were shootings, window smashing, assaults, as well as behaviour of the most vile sort experienced by this man and his family.

His autobiography plays down much of this abuse, but it demonstrates to those of us who already know most things about these people, that there is no line below which republican and loyalist paramilitaries will not go in order to demonstrate to us their cowardice. It demonstrates that if you stand up for the values of non-violence the devil’s henchmen will do everything to attempt to prove that you are a hypocrite because you “cannot live” like that.

They will attempt to provoke you and destroy you. Indeed on one visit to Austin’s isolated county Tyrone home these cowards repeatedly kicked his wife in the stomach, telling her that she would never have another child, and then carved the letters U.V.F. with a knife on her chest, all because he wasn’t there for them to shoot dead.

This book is an epic story of one man’s battle against the odds to bring a sense of decency to politics. It tells a story of a man with extremely high principles and an idealism to match who wanted to make things better for the people of the North of Ireland.

Austin is a genuinely warm-hearted, decent man who feels for people during his period in politics, especially for the poor and underprivileged that he came from in Coalisland, county Tyrone.

Like John Hume in our own city, Austin didn’t need to make the sacrifices he made in order to improve things in the North. Both he and John Hume were offered winnable seats in Dáil Éireann at early stages of their careers and could so easily have left to fulfil their callings in other parts of Ireland.

Like John Hume too, Austin is a truly brave man who stood for what was right and just in the context of a North that was and still is (to a lesser extent) wedded to bullying tactics and violence on a scale that would make the average man want to leave politics at the earliest juncture.

People should never forget that these men sacrificed more than just their time when they embarked on their course in politics. They sacrificed their family lives in many respects and lived under the constant possibility that they would be attacked.

Like Pat Ramsey MLA and his family in this city in more recent time, thugs and bullies are aware that when you have a weakness, like young children or a vulnerable family, they can take advantage of it.

Special tribute is paid in the book to Annita, Austin’s wife, who made many things possible for the senior SDLP and Fine Gael politician. Without her dedication and love, the extent of the contribution by Austin to politics would have been greatly limited. She reminded me much of my own mother, especially when my father was mayor, who also had a job, and children to look after as well as political duties.

This book is in reality an insider’s history of the civil rights movement, the SDLP, and even Fine Gael in more recent years. It is gloriously detailed, and it is a must for every student of the Troubles. It will demonstrate to even the most doubting reader the enormity of the contribution of the SDLP to the political process, to peace and to Christian values and the paucity of the contribution of other parties.

It made me extremely proud again that I worked and continue to work for the SDLP and in particular that I canvassed for Austin in 1986, when the unionists had resigned their seats in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

*John O’Connell isDerry-based author.

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