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I have to add some comments on the play I was talking about, things that are simply “so Belfast”.
The play was held in Culturlann, a lovely venue in the very heart of Republican West Belfast. You can buy books down stairs on the history of the IRA. John is a actor born on the Protestant side of town with certain preferences common to actors. He wrote a play about a British born actor who settled in Ireland and was closely related to the various figures of the Irish revolution.
If you don’t understand how this all fits together, I am not surprised. You have to live and take part in Belfast for many, many years before you can hope to understand it. This is why I am usually smirking into my beer along with my native born friends when Americans come over and explain us to us.
Belfast is comprehensible. You just have to keep your mouth shut and listen for awhile… something that all too many people find impossible to do.
There may be better libertarian think-tanks around in Europe than the Irish Open Republic but if so I haven’t come across them yet. I don’t know if the editor, Paul McDonnell wrote the piece appearing below but, regardless of the authorship, it cuts through all the cant and recrimination to remind us who the real enemies are.
“Post ‘peace process’ Northern Ireland is like SimCity – a computer simulation game where you get to build and run a city – played by Social Democrats. During the peace process and its aftermath political life in the Province was immersed in a warm, enervating, bath of ‘reconciliation’, ‘mutual recognition’, ‘sharing of feelings’ and general ‘feeling’ of ‘pain’ all around. The politicians, think-tanks, civil servants, peace volunteers, community action groups, women’s groups, freed murderers of the innocent and, yes, even the White House all hunkered down in a general peace and love fest where a direct question was about as welcome as a swastika flag at Woodstock.
Of course before the whole thing got going no one thought to set conditions that Sinn Fein and their tattooed counterparts on the ‘Protestant’ side must both respect and actively support the enforcement of the rule of law. Any 12 year old playing SimCity realises that the police need to be able to uphold the rule of law or anarchy reigns and then it’s game over.
Not in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland today is what happens when Social Democrats do what they are best at. And what they are best at is Showing Concern Whilst Selling Out To Tyranny. Think of David Owen, Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Office and the Bosnian Serbs. ‘Bombing the Serbs will make things worse’ etc. etc… Meanwhile thousands of innocents die. Likewise Northern Ireland is a product of the Social Democrat school of thought. Another name for it is fudge. Social Democrats are too influenced by the ideology that only groups, and not individuals, have real rights.Hence the ‘appeals’ to the gang who murdered the young postal worker – as if the murder of the young man was a genuine corporate act and not a conspiracy to, and commission of, murder. The ‘community leaders’ don’t want to insult anyone. If you are a murdering gang then you must be granted ‘parity of esteem’ with other groups.
Northern Ireland has been moulded into the Social Democrat narrative whose defining characteristics are mob rule and capitulation to mob rule – aka ‘achieving gender balance’, ‘equality’ and ‘parity of esteem’. The Social Democrat plan is to expand the public sector and use it as a vehicle to provide jobs for their friends and, as is the case in Northern Ireland, those whom they are afraid to confront. They pretend that they are ensuring ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’. This they do by making sure that if it employs thousands of people it doesn’t need at tax payers’ expense then at least the public sector must hire the right quotas of unneeded Catholics, Protestants, women and murderers.
The Social Democrats who sold the pass in Northern Ireland are the Irish political parties, the SDLP, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, the British Government and former US President, Bill Clinton. The OUP cannot really be blamed. They were outgunned (literally) and they knew it. So when a postal worker is murdered, trades unionists take to the streets, political leaders ‘call for the violence to stop’. Sinn Fein blames the Protestants but nobody seems interested in catching and punishing the criminals.”
I have spent the last 13 years of my life in the West Belfast, Andytown orbit. I suspect I know a little bit more about it than some. I certainly don’t class as an outsider or a disinterested outside observer on these matters. I am also not going to be drawn into a long discussion that will just rehash verbal territory I have been over many times before.
Comparing any of the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland of either side to the Al Qaeda is ludicrous. Ours are a local problem, not a global one. In any other period of history what happened in Northern Ireland would have been called a civil war. In the early days of ‘The Troubles’ in the 70’s there was actual open small unit warfare between elements of the British Army and highly trained IRA units. This was not reported in the newspapers but I have talked to people who were there.
The British Army purportedly arrived to protect the Catholics from the Protestants, but the people who lived through that time say that the results were otherwise. It was as if the National Guard who went to Selma shot the blacks they had come to protect.
It would not surprise me to find that the USSR was feeding money and agents provacateurs to both sides in the late 60’s and early 70’s in the run up to the hostilities. Whatever the causes, the problems between the two communities escalated into open warfare. There were real problems here for outsiders to exploit, not imagined ones. In those days the Protestant community ran Northern Ireland the way the Klu Klux Klan ran Mississippi. Catholics were niggers here, and that made a fertile and inflammatory ground for what was to come.
This was not a pleasant place in those days. One friend was held in his bedroom with an Armalite stuck into his mouth – he was perhaps 15 – while his mother was held downstairs and the British soldiers searched for the hundredth time. 30 years ago, but I think if he ran into that officer today only one would survive the meeting. I could give you a hundred stories like that, all from the people it happened to, all from people I know very well.
Almost all of it happened right here in one small province, about the size of West Virginia. True, the IRA did things in England; but it seems to me that is supposed to be part of the same country. Some of the Protestant paramilitaries acted in Ireland, but I would also have to call that part of the same ‘country’ because there was a rather serious intersection of interests in Northern Ireland.
Did the IRA and UFF commit terrorist acts? Yes. Are they just like the Al Qaeda? Not even close. Al Qaeda killed over 3000 people and injured many more (remember my flame about us never being given an old fashioned casualty figure, dead plus injured?) in one hour. The attack on the World Trade Center was not a military objective; it was planned to maximize deaths of civilians of a nation nearly a half a planet away from where the attackers lived. The same organization killed perhaps another thousand people in the last decade, many of whom were Americans. This is no little local civil war. They aren’t killing their neighbors over which flag should be flown over City Hall.
In the global leagues, the IRA and UFF and the rest of the Northern Ireland alphabet soup are pikers. And pretty much out of business pikers at that. I’m sure Natalija can tell us about living somewhere where the terrorists really knew how to go about their job. I think we should all be thankful for the fact that as bad as these people may have behaved, they were not in those leagues. They called and politely told people to evacuate before blowing up places, rather than timing for maximum carnage. They never tried to acquire ‘the bomb’. They didn’t blow up civilian airliners.
And yes, I do agree that the ‘Real IRA’ people responsible for killing so many people of both sides in Omagh should be just quietly shot dead if found. I doubt anyone here would shed a tear over their despicable carcasses.
The Peace Process here is working. I have lived through it. I do not want to go back to the way it was. I want the Republican and Unionist leaders jawing and jockeying instead of shooting. I want them to keep it up for another decade. By then they will be out of touch with the reality of day to day life. Belfast is a lovely place with these lads talking instead of fighting. I’d like to keep it that way.
Some day there may be a vote here on which country we are to be a part of. I suspect by the time it happens the vote will be based on pure economics rather than which flag was printed on your nappies.
The shooting of the postal worker mentioned by Perry in an earlier article occurred only a few blocks from where I live. Of course all I knew of it was some sirens (common) and the sound of Brit choppers hovering in the area (likewise).
The postal workers threatened to stop all mail delivery if the neighborhoods in question did not guarantee safety of all postal workers, regardless of religion. I have heard the public outrage from across the entire spectrum shocked the paras to the point that they are talking disbandment, although I have not read confirmation of such. It’s probably in the local papers if so. People may be getting shot just up the street, but I still have to get projects out the door (cablemodem?) or I don’t eat. It’s funny how you can know what’s going on all over the world and hardly notice the world news happening around the corner.
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