LIVING IN DENIAL…
By ATWadmin On August 31st, 2010I note that the Roman Catholic Church has been accused of being selective in its acceptance of inquiries into Northern Ireland’s troubled past.
DUP MP Gregory Campbell spoke out after a retired bishop questioned last week’s police ombudsman’s report into the Claudy bombings which named Father James Chesney as the chief suspect for the 1972 atrocity.
Writing in a daily newspaper yesterday, former Bishop of Derry, Edward Daly, said he was “not at all convinced” the priest was involved in the bombings which ripped through the Co Londonderry village, killing nine innocent people.
Campbell has a point, of course and Daly seems wilfully deluded. However, what can we make of the DUP who willingly sit in power with the political delegates of the same terror group that bombed Claudy, Enniskillen, Teebane, La Mon….? The DUP know the pedigree of those who they share power with and yet they still do it. I think the words grotesque hypocrite sums up Campbell and his clan.
The priest was only a "suspect"
And the IRA have always denied being involved in LaMon and Claudy
Yes Sean, must have been those damn nasty chappies from the Animal Liberation Front then?? Of course we all know how experienced they were in their bombmaking techniques – they must have trained the IRA then because the forensic report showed that the same methods and explosives were used in other IRA atrocities.
Here we go, the apologists have started. Want to deny that Enniskillen happened as well? Or the Shankill Road? Or any of the hundreds of other murders that IRA scum carried out??
I share DV's view – the DUP are no longer the firebrands of the past, merely a damp squib, and have lost their grip on reality by sitting down with SFIRA. Hypocritical isn't a strong enough word for their actions.
I suppose you can make of the DUP what the voters make of them, a party willing to accept that by doing what they are doing they've ended the cycle of violence that produced the atrocities you've listed.
Yes Mahons – appeasement has that result. Problem is, no one's told the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, and all the other spin offs that see that violence pays.
Mahons -
What "cycle of violence" did DV list? I see outright butchery committed by psychopaths against innocents.
You may as well tell your compatriots to convert to islam, so as to "stop the cycle of violence" against America.
David – The spin offs are dying on the vine and rightly so.
Pete – David listed atrocities which were part of the cycle of violence, I'll respect you enough to note you could recognize the atrocities performed by the other side.
The same charge could be levelled against those that consistantly do their utmost to try and rubbish claims of colusion or continue to imply that the Bloody Sunday dead were not innocents.
Mahons -
You make it sound as if someone pressed a button on some mythical cycle of violence generator. Really, they were, instead, deliberate acts of butchery and mass murder against innocents. Some of those psychopaths are now in government, and that's why NI is a gangster state run, in part, by psychopathic mass murderers and there is no peace process. All that's happened is that the shop has been handed over to the mafia.
I didn't ask you to go quite as far. All I suggested is that you and your compatriots convert to islam to break this "cycle of violence" the US has found itself imbroiled in. If I went as far as you in relation to NI I'd be exhorting you to put a bunch of Taliban in the White House.
"The spin offs are dying on the vine and rightly so"
-But are they, Mahons? My impression is that terrorist activities (carried out by these so-called "dissident" groups) are gradually increasing in frequency. At least, that's my overall impression over the last 5 years, I may be wrong. And it seems that the parties involved in the NI Assembly always make verbal condemnations, but neither they nor the PSNI seem able (or is it 'willing'?) to actually do much about it. You do begin to wonder….
"What "cycle of violence" did DV list? I see outright butchery committed by psychopaths against innocents"
Indeed Pete, hence the Catholic Church are not the only ones who stand accused of being selective.
Mahons
It's the victims of the spin-ffs that are dying on the vine. Tragically so. Ask the widow of Constable Carroll. Tell it to the next of kin of Cengiz Azimkar and Mark Quinsey. Irish Republicans still kill. Their support is not withering as events in nearby Lurgan prove.
Tom – I don't think the statistics support an increase if you are suggesting an increase in violence since the GFA, although there could very well be an increase in incidents from time to time. As for the impression that there is a lack of official action, I think that applies across the board in crime in NI, where I am often shocked at the deliqunet investigation, inept prosecution and minimal sentencing.
Pete – The Taliban suggestion is sophmoric. There is a historical component of the violence in NI as you know. I'd agree that some of people who've made their way into the government are appalling, but having them there is less appalling than what had happened in the past.
David – Are there more people killed since the GFA than there were before?
Tom Tyler -
Indeed.
Reporting on "a few dissidents" has moved this summer to "a few dissident groups".
I don't think we were supposed to notice.
If you didn't notice (would a better word be admit?) the decline in fatal attacks, what would you be expected to notice?
Mahons
How many deaths at the hands of terrorists are tolerable/
Mahons, no, I am not suggesting an increase in violence since before the GFA. Obviously, the violence has decreased dramatically since that point in time, and that's a good thing. What I mean is that, starting from that huge drop, the level of terror incidents seems to be gradually increasing once again. Not to the level it once was (pre-GFA), but still, an increase from what it was just after the GFA.
There's no need for you to ask David "Are there more people killed since the GFA than there were before", that's not the point I'm making. (The answer to that question is, of course, "no, there are far fewer people killed now than there were then"). But that's not what I was saying. I was suggesting that, although the overall level of deaths is indeed much less than it was pre-GFA, the rate of terrorist activity (since the GFA, ie, starting from that point) seems to be increasing.
David – I don't think any are "tolerable". But significantly less deaths are better than significantly more deaths, especially if there is a historic opportunity to overcome the climate of tit for tat violence.
Tom – I think the question has to be asked because it is so often brushed over in the analysis here. And you may be right that there is a spike in occurences of terrorist activity (if less fatal results) though I don't know. I would attribute that to the desperation of the dissidents who despise the peace process and seek to undermine it by their outrages.
Mahons
It is the price paid for "significantly" less deaths that concerns me.
In its strange, strange way, this strange, strange case illustrates the long and very friendly partnership beween the Catholic Church and the British State in Ireland. There were numerous Catholic pulpit denunciations of Fenianism, which is unlike any of the three principal British political traditions in being a product of the French Revolution. Hence its tricolour flag. And hence its strong anticlerical streak, always identifying Catholicism as one of Ireland’s two biggest problems.
In reality, those two biggest problems are the abiding legacies of the two main streams feeding into Irish separatism. The Orange Lodges opposed the Act of Union of 1800, the best thing that ever happened to Ireland, which incorporated one of the most backward countries in Europe into what became in the nineteenth century the most advanced country in the world. The consequent improvements in Ireland’s agriculture, industry, education, infrastructure, welfare provision, honest and responsible administration, and so on, were almost incalculable, and enjoyed the strongest possible support of the Catholic Church, without which many, most or even all of them could not have happened, especially at local level.
But to the Orangemen, the Union meant Catholic Emancipation, and indeed the necessary Unionist majority in the former Irish Parliament was secured on that very basis, by Protestant Emancipationists who secured the votes of the Catholic commercial class by promising to deliver the Union that would deliver to those voters the right to sit in Parliament. Those voters delivered that majority, that majority delivered the Union, and the Union delivered Catholic Emancipation, which the old Irish Parliament would simply never have countenanced.
Protestant pioneers are sometimes produced by Republicans as a sort of trump card. But those believed their own Protestant, “Saxon” nation to be the only nation, as such and with all national rights accordingly, on the Irish island. They had no more interest in or regard for Gaels and Catholics than their contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, had either for the “Indians not taxed” or for his own slaves. They viewed those other inhabitants of Ireland as anti-monarchist opinion has regarded the Australian Aborigines from the Victorian Period to the present day, as Hendrik Verwoerd regarded the non-white peoples of South Africa, as Ian Smith regarded the Mashona and the Matabele, and as Golda Meir regarded the Palestinians when she denied that they existed at all, a view still widely and deeply held.
Such notions have been ridiculous when viewed from east of the Irish Sea at least since Dr Johnson asked “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” But when the Stormont Parliament and its supporters opposed integration because integration meant Civil Rights, then they were in no way out of keeping with the anti-Unionist thinking of their ancestors. In the meantime, separatist leaders as late as the Gladstone years had seized on the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, with all its implications for the system of tithes, as a nullifying breach of the Act of Union.
The other main stream feeding into Irish separatism arose out of the urban Catholic bourgeoisie that the Union had so greatly expanded and entrenched. But it was largely directed from outside Ireland, and very often from thousands of miles away. It was, and is, the wannabe leprechaun pretensions of those who, if they had ever seen what they saw as the pure Gaelic folk-culture at all, had only ever done so from their carriage windows, so that they had no understanding whatever of people whose circumstances compelled them to live like that, people who warmly welcomed the drastic elevation of their condition by the alliance of Throne and Altar, however many tears that may have brought to the eyes of those whose wholly detached world had by then passed from Jacobinism to Romanticism, and who for the most part did not live in Ireland.
When those fantasists seized their moment during the international distractions of 1916, almost no one in Ireland had ever even heard of them, and barely any more people took them remotely seriously. By the time that the Home Rule legislation, with its built in delay until after the War, actually came into effect, then even the “official” reasons given for it by its proponents no longer applied.
That red saltire on the Union Flag was, and is, no word of lie. The Irish were vigorous participants in British imperialism, and especially in its military aspects. It was under that Flag, and by those means, that they propagated the Faith to the ends of the earth.
David – I accept that argument as having some merit. But the price of not reaching a compromise was significantly more deaths and no quotations are needed.
Mahons
The price of reaching a compromise with terrorists was to betray those they terrorised and whose graves I stood at. No need for quotations.
"Daly seems wilfully deluded"
Based on what David? What evidence has been presented to suggest that Father Chesney was involved? RUC Intelligence? Let me remind you that RUC intelligence as the principle intelligence involved in Internment, less than one year before Claudy. The result was that the majority of people interned weren't actually memebers of the IRA. RUC intelligence, at that time at least, was wrong over half the time. Why are we taking RUC intelligence as verbatim fact against a man who has no opportunity to defend himself?
Father James Chesney's memory has very quickly (mostly due to anti Catholic bigotry of a large amount of people in the North) become the 10th victim of the Cluady bombing.
People can say what they like about Chesney as you can't libel the dead. I'm inclined to believe he was involved largely because of the trouble the British went to to get him out of the way. But that is just an opinion. The reality is that no evidence was ever produced and Chesney himself was never even questioned.
And it is an important point because the case is no being used as a political football by unionist rejectionists to attack the agreement and the DFM. all that nonsense must be rejected and the presumption of innocence must apply to Chesney.
David – all due respect, others stood at graves as well and decided a different course of action was necessary.
Mahons
Others put people in the graves. All due respect.
David – I am unaware of anyone arguing that there weren't victims. The consensus of the electorate was to avoid unending violence by a peace agreement, which has worked.
Mahons
The consensus of the electorate supported seeking an end to the threat of violence by supporting the peace agreement.
Munich Agreement, 1938.