All Ireland poetry champion: Seamus Fox

BACK in the day, Seamus Fox was the only fella I knew in Craigavon with a Public Enemy record - I had the tape but he had the vinyl.
In fact he was the only person I knew anywhere with any rap music - Craigavon, a town 26 miles from Belfast and at the centre of an area once known as the Murder Triangle in the 1970s, didn't really embrace hip hop. The Bronx, Bed-Stuy or Sugar Hill it was not.
But Seamie was a good lad, same year as me at Lismore and been in the cubs together - so I knew him well enough to try get a gander at this hallowed item.
So I got an invite round to his house in Edenbeg - he won't mind me saying this - he wasn't a great one for tidying. He was 16 and living alone at the time, I think one of his parents had died, can't be sure, but there amid the physical and emotional mess was a pristine copy of It Takes a Nation of Millions...
And not just that, there was Eric B and Rakim and EPMD and Stetsasonic, these were the coolest things I had ever seen. Maybe in the intervening years the incident has become heightened in my memory, maybe he'll tell me it was a one Redhead Kingpin 12".
But the point is that he was always into rap and performance, a bright and intelligent bloke who had no outlet for his massive creative energies. Maybe he felt he shouldn't display his sensitive side and to be fair, there weren't too many performance poets in the lounge of the Drumgor Tavern at the time - you could have measured with a microscope the shortness of the shrift you would have been given in the boozer if you had said: 'houl on there lad, I'm gonna bust a wee haiku here."
But there is a poet in the lounge bar now  because Craigavon's finest bard is the Irish performance poetry champion. He's got his demons but he meets them head-on with a wit and a forthright nature he learned from all those hours listening to 'Cold Lampin' by Flava Flav.
My favourites are Ulster Fry, Trying to Get My Head Straight and the brilliant, brilliant Colonial Ceremony but there are also a number of sensitive love poems he perhaps doesn't get enough credit for. You can hear them here at Malachi O'Doherty's brilliant podcast site.
You should also check out the brilliant montages he does to accompany his poems.
This is what Chuck D would have been rapping about if he'd had a bottle of wine under the curly wurly bridge, bai.


 

Craigavon: The real story

Tonight's media has showed just how limited 24 hour news is in telling a story.
Some myths to be exploded:
1) According to the BBC reporter she was standing at the crime scene with a sprawling estate to her right. Ardowen (where we lived in 661 until 1979) is not sprawling, it's fairly average sized council (Housing Executive) estate.
2) Craigavon has been a hotbed of paramilitary/ drug violence. It is not and never was a hotbed of violence. Historically starved of cash (for feck's sake it was never finished) and like many new towns that have been ignored by the authorities, it has experienced problems with drugs and gangs recently. But it has never been a hotbed of anything other than perhaps Buckfast consumption.
Before the Peace Process there were relatively few incidents during the Troubles in Craigavon.
3)The British media has ignored Northern Ireland as a story for too long, its bipolar nature has ignored the problems that allow dissident Republicanism to exist. Nationals have been laying off NI stringers and not paid attention to areas like Craigavon, areas which have not drank at the well of the Peace Dividend to any great extent.
God help us, but Ken Maginnis is the voice of reason so far. Maybe that is a measure of how far we have moved.

Craigavon, my home

Maybe my blog, in its short history, hasn't been the place for overt politics, but it is tonight.
A policeman was shot dead in my home town of Craigavon tonight and I can't tell you how sad I am for him, his family and the area.
He was shot dead, doing his job, a mile from my parents' house in a housing development in fields around my school, Lismore, where I ran cross country and close to the pitches where I kicked points with our Martin and our cousins Eoin and Kieran the last time I was home.
He was assassinated near the school I'm going back to on Thursday, 18 years after I left, to give a seminar on journalism to 16-18 year old pupils.
This shooting has devastated the name of the wonderful place I grew up in and a wonderful place to go to school.
When I was growing up, Lismore was (and remains) a shining beacon of educational equality where you could achieve academically without going to many of the grammar schools that satellite Craigavon.
I would say that. My ma teaches at the school and I worked there at every level of staff from substitute teacher up to cleaning staff. My ma and da serve St Anthony's chapel as does my uncle Fergus and Auntie Pauline.
I still feel proud to represent Lismore and Craigavon every day of my life. It made me what I am. I feel ashamed to have run away from it and make a life elsewhere.
But much more than this, and contrary to news reports tonight, the Craigavon I grew up in was not a ghettoised place full of dissident Republicans.
In Drumgor Tavern, a mile from Lismore Manor, Prods and Taigs, Catholics and Protestants drank side-by-side. All the soccer teams I played for were mixed, the lads and women I served in the Goodyear Sports and Social Club were of mixed religious backgrounds.
Ultimately, this blog about Curtis Mayfield's bongo player or a Lloyd Cole lyric or a Bill Hicks punchline seems a trivial self indulgence full of complacency and hubris.
God bless him, whoever he was.