JOHN CONSTABLE
Dec. 89, Irishtown, Letterkenny
(You cannot tell what people think by spying through their curtains].
I read a leaflet about the extradition of Jim Clarke from Portlaoise, so I go and see his brother. On the wall of his house in Letterkenny is the most English of paintings, Constable's Salisbury Cathedral. Neil Clarke seems a little distrustful when I ask (as diplomatically as possible) what it might be doing there, but he goes away and came back with another picture. He takes down the Constable leaving a rectangular dust shadow. The new work fits precisely into the shadow. The image is of an IRA firing party engraved in glass with a portrait of a young man; it is a memorial to Kieran Fleming who drowned crossing the border after the Great Escape from Long Kesh, Neil tells me that he only puts this picture up at night when he's alone and has drawn the curtains.

BAKED BEANS
May 88, Killarney
The Great Southem Hotel; I'm at a bosses conference. Tony 0'Reilly thinks Ireland is a brand that's not selling too well. He says, "working with such excellent raw materials we have failed miserably and consistently to create awareness," like Gucci for Italy, Dior for France, or the Royal Family for the UK"... !

THE BREEZE BLOCK
Dec. 22, 88
I am travelling the whole length of Ireland and it is dismal. My child, James, has left for home because we slept in a house in Belfast with no roof and it snowed; people live there all the time. I started a week ago at Malin Head, but today my journey was cut short in Co. Monaghan when I fell off a four-inch breeze block at a Garda border post. The cops laughed. I broke my ankle.

THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH
Aug. 12, 89, Belfast
I am taking photographs at a place called the Busy Bee. Six landrovers, playing soldiers come crashing up on the pavement -- Brits running everywhere screaming and shouting. They grab a young woman with a very small child in a pram. There's pretty major resistance as everyone fights back - stones begin to fly, and the girl is pulled from the Brits.

Afterwards RUC men are pushing people into the road while others are pushing people onto the pavement. One of them nudges me in the chest with his rifle -- trying to knock the camera out of my hand, "fucking move,. fucking move... don't you understand the Queen's English?" I don't even understand the question.

MOST DAYS I CHANGE MY MIND
Sept. 27.94
It's a dirty night in Manhattan, cold and wet. I'm walking down Broadway. Haiti and O.J. flash on the Times Square screen a hundred feet above. Stepping through the traffic a newspaper flaps across the street and wraps itself around my leg. "GER'S GREEN APPLE," it proclaims. Amongst all the signs, perhaps it's a sign. I take it back to my hotel and make a little altar with some of my holy bits and pieces. It quotes someone on the Falls Road: "we support Gerry Adams and hope the fuck he knows what he's doing". It's a bit dismal and hardly an analysis of the situation back home, but I take it up as my slogan. It's going to be the name of my exhibition. I look out of my window at the Empire State Building -- and I do believe it's lit up in green.

WET LEVIS
Sept. 29, 94
Heavy rain in New York. Sirens blaring Gerry's motorcade slips across a wet Times Square. I wave [but with the tinted glass, rather hopefully] and my new Levis are drenched by his limo's stately progress. High above in lights a giant woman hitches a lift; beneath her is emblazoned: "Banana Republic." I got a bad feeling and rush back to work. I make a minor self-criticism-- reacting as a shopper is wrong, when the state of nations is being decided.

I'VE BECOME A BIT LIBERTARIAN OVER THE YEARS BUT I'M AGAINST THE FREEDOM TO SHOP.
Oct. 94
Back in London I read: "An Indian summer has descended on Ulster and it warmed the faces of the shoppers in Belfast city centre yesterday. The "Indians" and the "cowboys" have all put away their guns. The shoppers, Ulster's cavalry, have arrived. I can't believe it. Deep depression sets in. I decide to call the exhibition, White Goods. There are pockets in Ireland yet to see a Shopping City or a Toys Are Us, where the hunt for white goods has not become the cultures pinnacle. This is thanks in part to the much misunderstood Irish Republican Army.

ECOLOGY
Oct. 94
O'Reilly says we have a niche and it is that we are seen as green and unspoilt and more than a thousand miles away from Chernobyl... then he laughs.

A PERSISTENTLY PERVERSE ELEMENT
Dec. 94
I know little or nothing about Mexico, I did see an Italian western once called in English "A Fistful of Dynamite." James Coburn played an IRA bomber helping the revolution in Mexico. I liked it. Did the film have anything to do with either place, Mexico or Ireland? But as this exhibition is supposed to be a collaboration with Mexican, Chicano and Irish artists, here is a contribution to the debate. Sometimes we're proud of the things they say against us:

It would be difficult to deny the existence of a constitutionally criminal class, a persistently perverse element, which is the born foe of all law and order, at war with every form of social and political organisation and whose permanent attitude of mind is that of the Irishman, who on landing in New York, inquired, "Have ye a government here? " and on receiving an affirmative answer, replied, "then I'm agin'it."

This was written by a man called Evans in 1906.

London - January, 1995