On Mar 29, 5:29 pm, Whack all imperialists <***@gmail.com> wrote:
I rated this post as total shit. Unfortunately, the "total shit"
option is not supplied by Google, but by our resident mental nutcase.
Suck on this one Seumas!
Staring into Northern Ireland's moral abyss
By Kevin Myers
Last Updated: 2:23am BST 30/03/2008
As if almost to acknowledge the victory of nationalist Ireland in the
moral abyss that has been the Northern Ireland peace process, the
Queen visited Belfast on Good Friday, the nationalist anniversary of
the Agreement of 10 years ago.
For as with almost everything in the province, that accord has two
identities. Unionists call it the Belfast Agreement and commemorate it
on the date it occurred, April 10.
Catholic nationalists link it with the Holy Day with which it happened
to coincide, the moveable feast of Good Friday. And that, of course,
was the day the Government chose for the Queen's visit.
Moral abyss? How could it be a moral abyss? Did it not bring peace to
Northern Ireland? Well, no, not really. The IRA had been all but
defeated by 1994. Its ranks, including its army council, were riddled
with informers.
The South Armagh salient alone held out, inviolate, intact and
unbroken; but this was only possible because respective Dublin
governments refused to seal the border around the salient, or to
unleash their special forces, the Rangers, on the IRA: and the
Rangers, moreover, would have relished the job.
Instead, Sinn Fein-IRA was brought, bought and feted into the peace
process, its leaders welcomed by Tony Blair at Chequers, while their
rivals in the Catholic population, the constitutional SDLP, were all
but frozen out by both governments.
No tea and biscuits for peaceful nationalists; only those who had
blown the heart out of London, who had tortured people to death, who
had been responsible for starting and continuing a savage war, got the
hospitality, and in due course, a place in the power-sharing
Executive.
This is Machiavellian real-politik, is it not? Indeed it is: and the
electors of Northern Ireland soon recognised it for just that. They
are not fools: if extremes were being rewarded for being extreme, then
clearly, the extremes should be the people to vote for.
Moreover, even though the IRA continued to murder people after the
Agreement of 1998, and mounted intelligence operations against other
members of the Executive, even though its agents were tracking the
movements of former ministers for justice in Dublin, even though it
mounted the biggest bank robbery in UK history, it was never punished
by exclusion from power.
For the peace process was solely about ensuring the IRA never bombed
London again; and as far as MI5 - the prime movers of the peace
process - was concerned, the corruption of Northern Irish political
life was a small price to pay.
The Agreement has turned religion from being just a denominational and
theological matter into a permanent political identity. Meanwhile, the
compromises made to keep Sinn Fein-IRA in countenance, regardless of
all else, have effectively destroyed the centrist parties, the Ulster
Unionist Party and the SDLP.
Left standing are the two groups that have been the authors of so much
misery, bigotry and suffering down the decades: Ian Paisley's
Democratic Unionist Party, and of course, the political arm of the
IRA, Sinn Fein.
These are the thugs, killers and bigots who have dominated much of my
entire career as a journalist. I lived and worked in Belfast from 1971
to 1978, a period covered in my book, Watching the Door.
I arrived there as the divisions, long since established in what we
may only loosely call a society, were beginning to sink deep to its
very heart.
On the one hand, we had the Protestant fundamentalists, opposed to any
conciliation with the Catholic minority, led and inspired by the
Reverend - and by God, what a ludicrous title that is - Ian Paisley,
and on the other, we had the Provisional IRA, led in Derry by Martin
McGuinness. Thus the vice: between its teeth, a society about to be
crushed close to gibbering lunacy.
More than 3,700 people lost their lives in the ensuing madness. Those
of us who passed through the early, terrible days of the Troubles
carry with us memories that will never depart.
In my case, I see, every single day of my life, the face of Cpl Robert
Bankier, of the Royal Green Jackets. One night, I was eavesdropping on
the Army radio net when I heard a report of a relatively innocent
stoning incident in Cromac Square in Belfast: but to my riot-
accustomed ears it sounded more like the prelude to an IRA ambush. It
was: I heard the gunshots as I arrived, and discovered poor Cpl
Bankier dying beside his Land-Rover.
Over the coming months in 1971, under the weight of terrorist attack
and burdened by an idiotic Unionist government to which Westminster
had lent the British Army, Northern Ireland fell apart.
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If there was a terrorist barbarity in the moral repertoire, short of
suicide-bombing (though this would come later), the IRA tried it. If
there was an utterly counter-productive imbecility in the locker of
state folly, the Stormont government, with a dullard's witless fist,
reached for it - and usually with the backing of a government in
London whose ignorance of Ireland was as great as it was of
Azerbaijan.
It is important to remember that the IRA leaders did not want reform.
They were moral absolutists who sought just one thing: the British
out, by force of arms only, and the creation of an all-Ireland state,
with a Gaelic, Catholic ethos. No quarter could be given to such a
demand.
Furthermore, it was clear the Northern Ireland government - which was
not even the intellectual match of Basingstoke borough council - was
incapable of coping with the security crisis: yet London failed to
take charge. The icing on the cake was supplied by the British Army,
fresh from its native-bashing experiences in Aden, the lessons of
which it applied in generous measure upon Northern Ireland's skulls.
I have thought about this long and hard. You can go back in a time-
machine and suspend the Northern Ireland government before it
committed its worst blunders; you can teach the British Army manners;
you can reform the RUC. This is all possible.
But you can do nothing about the historical determination of the IRA
to have a war. And nor can you diminish the wide-spread Protestant
dislike of Catholics. These are irreducible truths which cannot be
removed from the equation by the fiat of mere will. Too many people in
Northern Ireland wanted a war for them to be denied it; and a war was
what they duly got.
And it has to be said, war was what the Republic of Ireland tolerated.
Even after the British Conservative Party had abandoned its strategic
and historic alliance with the Ulster Unionist Party, and insisted
that constitutional nationalists must be brought into government in
Northern Ireland, the Irish government continued to allow the IRA to
use its territory as an operational base.
No IRA atrocity - La Mon, in which a dozen Protestants were
incinerated alive by home-made napalm, or the murder of the British
ambassador and his secretary in Dublin, or the extermination of the
Mountbatten boat party of children and octogenarians, or the
Remembrance Sunday massacre at Enniskillen, or other bestialities too
numerous too list - was enough to make the Republic of Ireland destroy
the evil in its midst. It is a shocking thing to say about one's own
country: but it is the abominable truth.
And so we had a 25-year war, concluding with "informers" being drowned
during IRA interrogation in baths of cold water, and suicide bombers
blowing up soldiers (the difference from Iraq being their ignorance of
their fate). The war then came to a negotiated settlement between the
various forces which had foisted conflict on the Province.
Political power in Northern Ireland now effectively belongs to a
republican Tonton Macoute, and a semi-religious political sect. But it
is only power in the most etiolated sense, for these ugly, conjoined
sisters cannot actually govern.
They have no consensus or programme. They spend, but they cannot rule:
and meanwhile, so-called "peace-lines", 12ft walls, have spread
through Belfast like fissures in a cracked plate. Ten years ago there
were 18 of them: now there are 40, in all, 13 miles long, keeping
Catholic and Protestant not merely physically apart, but blissfully
invisible to one another.
Moreover, most people have forgotten, or will not state, this central
truth. One way or another, and sooner or later, peace was a certainty.
The IRA capacity to strike had been diminished by a systematic
penetration of the terrorist structure by British agents.
Indeed, the obsequies upon the IRA's campaign could have been
pronounced at least a decade earlier, if the Irish Republic had shown
the necessary political courage to crush the IRA.
So the real achievement of the Belfast Agreement was to give a
political lifeline to a militarily doomed Sinn Fein-IRA. Its
leadership now has the power to decide whether to allow policing to
devolve to the Northern Ireland Executive (though this opera-bouffe
confection can agree on almost nothing).
Indeed, President McAleese told the Queen - in public, no less -that
Her Majesty would not be invited to Dublin until control of policing
had returned to Northern Ireland hands.
Apart from this being an astounding departure from both basic good
manners and presidential protocol - the Irish head of state no more
makes such public pronouncements on policy, while standing on what is
legally foreign soil, than does the British monarch - this has one
astonishing implication. It is that any possible invitation for the
Queen to visit Dublin is now entirely dependent upon the whim of the
Army council of the IRA.
In other words, relations between the two Anglophone states of the EU
are to be presided over by a group of failed terrorists. Like the
multiplying peace-lines across the city, that is just one of the many
grotesque legacies of what was agreed in Belfast, on A Long Good
Friday, April 10, 1998.
* Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast by Kevin Myers is
out now (Atlantic Books; £14.99).
So there you go Seumas. The only voice left speaking for the Republic
is that impudent bitch McAleese who tried to tell our Queen on her own
legal territory, what to do. Time to get our troops back home and sort
out Ireland once and for all.