Nationalists
Nationalists
are now nearly half of the population of Northern Ireland,
and it is about time a government which included them was set up.
The unionists, at last, are now ready to do this.
The Troubles are over, and we are ready to go on a new beginning.
The DUP have jumped.
Sinn Fein - IRA need to jump too.
They need to stop forever - as they should have stopped in 1994 -
community violence
and
organised crime.
SF-IRA have agreed to recognise
the police (and hence the courts and prison system).
They need to keep this promise and never go back.
They need to never kill again.
Will it work?
I doubt it, but I hope so.
The SF-IRA killing continues.
They killed in 2006
(Denis Donaldson)
and now they have killed in 2007
(Paul Quinn).
Will SF-IRA ever stop killing people?
In the long-term,
nationalists
- especially Sinn Fein -
may dream
of a (Gaelic, Celtic, socialist)
Catholic tribal state.
They better understand that the South
will fight them to stop it.
No one's going to impose a
Catholic tribal state
on us.
We had a Catholic tribal state, and it took a long fight
to get rid of it and establish the current diverse, secular state.
We're not going back.
I have no problem in theory with an armed campaign against a regime
recognised by the UN.
Many of the world's regimes have no right to exist,
and armed conflict against, say,
the 20 or 30 worst human-rights
abusing regimes in the world
seems justifiable, depending on the nature of the conflict.
Northern Ireland was a flawed state,
a majoritarian democracy
which needed to be reformed into a liberal democracy.
But it does not seem to me that it was ever flawed enough
to justify an armed campaign against it.
In the end in 1998, the state was reformed
and is now based on liberal democratic principles.
-
Maybe the violence brought this about,
and it would never have happened otherwise.
-
Maybe it would have happened anyway,
and the violence delayed it by decades.
I don't know.
But even if the violence did bring this reform about,
it still wasn't justified.
The war inflicted immense
suffering (on all sides)
way
out of proportion to the (many) flaws of the
Northern Ireland state.
This holds for the Old IRA too.
Their violence helped reform the state in 1922,
and implemented the democratic will of the people,
which had been expressed in elections for decades but ignored.
But
was it worth it?
Was it worth all that suffering?
Was it worth the destruction of the
Public Record Office?
I personally would trade our independence from Britain
just to get the
Public Record Office back.
It is not illogical to believe
that an armed campaign is unjustified
and at the same time the
fundamental issue is the reform of the
state.
There is a lesson
from Northern Ireland
for other internal conflicts
- that
we need to distinguish between these cases:
-
conflicts where one side should simply be destroyed,
e.g. Baader-Meinhof, Aum Shinrikyo, Al-Qa'ida
-
conflicts where a new political settlement is needed
as well as (or instead of) militarily opposing
the armed group,
e.g. Northern Ireland, Israel
(of course the Israelis themselves accept this)
In Northern Ireland's case, the state did need reform,
and that is what solved the conflict.
For years,
the policy on Northern Ireland
was to treat it as a security problem only.
Total isolation
of the IRA and their apologists.
Refusing to negotiate with terrorists.
Banning them from speaking on radio or TV.
Treating them as
insane, as criminals with no political motive.
There was a moral high ground to it,
but pragmatically it did not serve the purpose
of shortening the war.
The policy of trying to
establish
a liberal democracy was never tried.
- Discussion of
terrorism and internal conflicts
in general
-
These guys want to kill us anyway,
Mark Steyn,
March 15, 2004,
after Madrid,
on the difference between Islamist terrorism
and IRA or ETA terrorism.
He notes that (hopefully) the advent of
insane (kill all the infidels)
terrorism will finally be the death knell
of traditional cause-based, 1960s revolutionary terrorism:
"Despite Gerry Adams' attempts to
distinguish between "unacceptable" terrorism and the supposedly more beneficial
kind,
these days it's a club with only one level of membership.
That's why so
many formerly active terrorist groups have been so quiet the past couple of
years. In that sense, Bush is right: It is a "war on terror", and on many fronts it's
being won."
I link to republican sites
on this website,
and I believe they should be allowed to exist.
In Ireland,
Section 31 of the 1960 Broadcasting Act
prohibited the broadcasting of any material seen as promoting or inciting crime.
This was used to ban Sinn Fein and other violent groups
from the airwaves from 1972 to 1994.
Oddly, their literature was never banned.
- Of course, free speech works both ways.
If we have a right to know who bombed
Dublin and Monaghan,
or what happened on
Bloody Sunday,
then do we have a right to know
who bombed
Birmingham
or Omagh?
Can we have a
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
instead of these
absurd
selective inquiries?
-
Call for public inquiry into the killing of Pat Finucane.
I am opposed to this,
unless there is going to be
a public inquiry into
Bloody Friday, Jean McConville,
the Birmingham bombs,
the La Mon bombing,
Lord Mountbatten,
Joanna Mathers,
Hyde Park, Regents Park
and all IRA actions,
and all actions carried out by present day Sinn Fein members.
I presume the Finucane family would be in favour of that?
- In a sense, I'm not opposed to a Finucane public inquiry at all.
I'm just opposed to selective inquiries.
If the choice is public inquiry into none
or public inquiry into all,
I choose public inquiry into all.
I want to know who killed Pat Finucane.
And I want to know what present day Sinn Fein members did,
and who they killed.
I think we have a right to know the truth.
- IRA Army Council
- Timeline of IRA leadership
from The IRA: A Secret History by Ed Moloney
-
Alleged Chiefs of Staff of the IRA, 1969-present
-
See notes on linking to libel.
- Poll
(also here),
Feb 25, 2005,
of the Republic of Ireland:
- The majority believe
Sinn Fein and the IRA are the same organisation.
- The majority believe
SF-IRA carried out the
Northern Bank robbery.
- The majority who expressed an opinion believe
that the Sinn Fein leaders
Gerry Adams MP, Martin McGuinness MP and Martin Ferris TD
are on the IRA Army Council.
- The majority who expressed an opinion think
they should be arrested.
-
McGuinness, Adams and Ferris quit IRA council,
Irish Independent,
Sat, Jul 23, 2005.
- The Republic of Ireland is one of the
oldest and most stable democracies in the world.
It is also one of the
richest countries in the world.
The chances of it all being destroyed
by the violent marxist revolutionaries
of Sinn Fein/IRA are limited, but there is a constant threat.
- Sinn Fein/IRA won
5 seats out of 166 in the
2002 Irish general election.
However, they may be approaching a limit.
Violent hate-filled Northerners with their foreign ways,
hardmen in Dublin ghettos,
organised gangland crime,
and Marxist revolution
- all have limited appeal to the quiet southern voter.
- Without the violence, Sinn Fein are just another
extreme-left party.
Going on the past,
such a party is unlikely ever to win
more than 10 percent of the vote in the Republic.
-
2006 Dublin Republican riots
- The sectarian Catholic thugs of
Sinn Fein,
Republican Sinn Fein,
the
32-CSC
and the
IRSP
bring their foreign Northern violence
to the streets of our beautiful capital Dublin in 2006,
in the worst riots since the
1981 hunger strike riots.
- Members of all four groups have been linked to the riots
in the press reports I've read.
-
In case anyone had forgotten, violence is what republicans do,
by Brendan O'Connor, sums up the Dublin riots of 2006:
"It is republicanism, the violent tradition of republicanism,
and indeed republicanism's reverence for violence,
that allowed what happened yesterday to happen.
They tore apart our town, they tried to kill our cops, they ripped our fire engines to bits.
They attacked the heart of this country and the very people we trust to protect that heart
and it is Irish republicanism's twisted morality that made this acceptable."
- Bringing Northern violence to Dublin may appeal
to some of the south's criminals,
looters and general street scum,
but it has limited appeal to the quiet southern voter.
- As
realitycheckdotie says:
"Today's riots just show how out of touch so-called Irish nationalists are with the rest of us."
-
The attack on Asians on Westland Row
shows how close NI sectarianism is to
old-fashioned racism.
They can't stand our ancient Protestant community
- and
now they can't stand newer immigrants either.
Three Asian shop assistants were dragged from the Centra store
and beaten up in the street by the Catholic bigots.
Like all street protesters,
"direct action" vandals,
rioters, looters and terrorists,
SF-IRA use protest and violence because they are unable to win using logic and reason.
-
The majority of voters reject their arguments,
and have demonstrated this rejection again and again
in elections.
Instead of accepting their election loss, though, SF-IRA want to override it.
As Amir Taheri
says:
"Those who can never win elections, always take to the streets."
-
A Sinn Fein / IRA poster I see regularly says the following:
WHO'S OCCUPIED
7000 Brit troops in IRAQ
14000 in IRELAND
GET THEM OUT
|
- The answer is very simple.
Neither country is "occupied".
- In both countries,
the majority want the troops to stay
(see opinion polls for
Ireland and
Iraq).
In both countries,
the people can freely vote
for parties that demand immediate withdrawal of the troops.
The people have chosen not to vote
for such parties
(see elections for
Ireland
and Iraq).
At any time they are free to change their mind, vote for withdrawal, and then the troops will
withdraw.
Until then, it would be absurd for the troops to withdraw just because some minority wants it.
-
If Sinn Fein can point to a single
opinion poll
in either country
where the majority demand immediate withdrawal,
then they can truthfully call these countries "occupied".
If you know of any,
tell me here.
-
In the absence of any such evidence, Sinn Fein should shut up.
These countries are not "occupied".
They are responding in the normal way to the democratically expressed wishes of the people.
- FAIR
(Families Acting for Innocent Relatives)
- IRA atrocities
-
Sectarian killings by republicans
- Malcolm Sutton calculates this as
8 percent of all killings by republicans.
- List of major events
-
Bloody Friday, 1972
(and here)
-
Claudy, 1972
-
The Birmingham bombing, 1974
-
The Bayardo Bar, 1975
-
The Kingsmills massacre, 1976
-
The "La Mon" hotel massacre, 1978
-
Droppin Well bombing, 1982
-
The Darkley Gospel Hall massacre, 1983
-
The Harrods bombing, 1983
-
The Enniskillen bombing, 1987
-
Warrington Bomb Attacks, 1993
-
The Omagh bombing, 1998
- IRA murder victims
- Every Garda but one to die over the last fifty years
has died at the hands of Republican paramilitaries.
- The IRA tended not to directly attack civilians
like the loyalists and Palestinians do.
However, they did bomb civilian areas, with "warnings",
which is not acceptable according to the rules of war.
If America deliberately bombed civilian areas of Iraq
from the air, after a 30 minute warning,
people would rightly regard it as a crime,
not least because many civilians would die,
as they did in IRA bombings.
- Malcolm Sutton
shows the high cost of such "collateral damage":
- The 3 main categories of killings in the Troubles are as follows:
- Republican killings of British forces - 1064
- Loyalist sectarian killings of civilians - 713
- Republican killings of civilians as collateral damage - 406
- The 4 main categories of killings by republicans are as follows:
- Republican killings of British forces - 1064
(55 percent of all killings by republicans)
- Republican killings of civilians as collateral damage - 406
(21 percent)
- Republican killings of "others" - 158
(8 percent)
- Republican sectarian killings of civilians - 151
(8 percent)
- The security forces
-
This graph
notes the restraint of the security forces.
The security forces were killed themselves far more
than they killed others.
With the paramilitaries, the situation is the opposite.
The republican and loyalist paramilitaries killed others far more
than they were killed themselves.
- SF-IRA
go on and on
about Bloody Sunday,
when British forces killed 14 civilians.
Yet clearly Bloody Sunday was an error
- otherwise there would have been a Bloody Sunday every month during the Troubles.
SF-IRA itself killed 400 civilians in errors,
which it wants us to shut up about
while it moans about Bloody Sunday.
- There is endless SF-IRA hypocrisy about the war.
SF-IRA complain about
shoot-to-kill.
Yet they practised shoot-to-kill themselves.
They complain about the shooting of
unarmed IRA members.
Yet they shot their enemies when unarmed.
Why, in SF-IRA's moral universe, should a higher moral standard apply to their enemies
than to them?
- Loyalist crimes
The problem with setting up a
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
is that the violence is not over.
Sinn Fein / IRA is still killing people,
and does not want us to know who did it.
And Sinn Fein / IRA wants to reserve the right to kill more people in the future.
The loss of cultural destruction
is felt
long after the politics that drove the conflict are forgotten:
- In 1993 the IRA bombed the Linenhall Library
in Belfast,
archive of
(among many other things)
irreplaceable republican and nationalist documents.
(It also of course contains an
archive of
irreplaceable unionist documents.)
- The IRA bombed the National Gallery in 1991.
- Nationalism caused the destruction of the
Public Record Office in 1922,
making Ireland, already a country with little surviving old architecture,
a country with little surviving written history as well.
As I have said,
I would trade our independence
from Britain to get the Public Record Office back.
- The IRA in 1919-23 burnt a number of the old Anglo-Irish houses,
destroying forever ancient libraries
and irreplaceable family papers and portraits.
- In 1986
"The General" stole and vandalised priceless old masters
from Russborough House.
This vandalism is treated as comic
in the many obnoxious films celebrating him.
- The burning of libraries
Everyone was worried that the Republican dissidents would carry on large-scale
violence after the ceasefire.
In reality, with the appalling exception of Omagh,
there has been little difference
in the level of
Republican dissident violence and SF-IRA violence since the ceasefire.
If we exclude Omagh, SF-IRA has certainly killed more people since the ceasefire
than the Republican dissidents.
- republicans
(and here)
- CIRA
- INLA
-
I believe in freedom of speech for the Republican dissidents,
which is why I link to them here.
I have no confidence that
in a society run by these people,
there would be any
freedom of speech,
or any meaningful civil liberties.
- RIRA
Equality
If nationalists are going to compromise, and stay in the UK for the forseeable future,
then maybe it's about time the UK welcomed them as
first-class citizens
(as it should have welcomed all the Irish in the past, but never did).
These trivial, symbolic changes would be so easy to make, and only good could flow out of them:
- Repeal the offensive Act of Settlement of 1701.
Scrap the Oath of Allegiance.
Make it absolutely clear that every office in the state (including the prime minister and the monarch)
can be occupied by a Catholic (or indeed an atheist).
- Disestablish the church.
Remove the
Protestant bishops
from the House of Lords.
Roman Catholicism is, in any case, the largest religion in England
(by numbers attending church).
- In Northern Ireland, fly both flags, or a
new neutral Ulster flag.
- Play both anthems, or play
Danny Boy
instead.
- Give Irish at least semi official language status.
Certainly signs for the many placenames
of Irish origin (e.g. Belfast, Derry)
should give their Irish versions
(as is done in the south).
- Guarantee to pipe RTE
to all homes that wanted it.
After all, we all get BBC in the south.
Return to Northern Ireland page.