'The war for equality was victorious'
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" - Milan Kundera 


Two decades on from that warm closing day of the August 1994 calendar when the Provisional IRA ceasefire was announced, it is hard to make any plausible claim that republicanism is twenty years on. It might even be argued that in the heady atmosphere back then there were signs in some republican quarters, albeit misplaced, of a greater optimism that a united Ireland might not just be too far off. Not much evidence of that type of sentiment today. Those either brave or foolhardy enough to vent it sound strained, as if they were predicting the resumption of the Latin mass, their ‘best before’ date expired.

Partition, which the Provisional IRA’s armed struggle was meant to eradicate, has survived the big cessation by twenty years and there is nothing on the horizon to suggest it will not continue to survive for the next fifty. In the zero sum battle between the Provisional IRA’s armed struggle and partition, there was one clear winner - partition. 

That the armed struggle failed to even secure a draw in the form of joint sovereignty underscores the distance short of republican objectives the campaign pulled up. The post hoc rationalisation that seeks to depict the armed struggle as being successful has the unedifying quality of sounding like soccer players claiming they did not lose a match because they managed to score a few points over the bar. 

Having forecast in writing, to much derision, the ceasefire some years earlier while still in prison I could hardly feign surprise or shock at its announcement. Nor was I in any doubt that the armed campaign was being wound up far short of its stated goals but considerably close to the professed objectives of its opponents in the British state. Nowhere was this more evident than in the politics of the consent principle. Having ideologically justified its armed campaign on the wholesale illegitimacy of the consent principle, the Provisional IRA was now being compelled to embrace the terms it warred against. The British state’s enduring alternative to republicanism, its long sought strategic objective, was finally colonising republican minds, and would ultimately produce mimic men as capable of criminalising physical force republicanism with the same shrillness as any Tory, Unionist or Fine Gael club member. 

On the day of the announcement twenty years ago, I was much less concerned about the armed cessation than the pattern of politics that was moulding the emerging unarmed strategy. What has been termed “republican theology” was not shaping my view. I was a Provisional republican rather than a traditional one. Innately suspicious of the doctrinaire, I was not enamoured to the concept of purist positions, sensing that the quest to perfect rather than improve is often as dangerous as the blemish perfection portends to correct. While not a subscriber to the perpetual war camp, I retained an ability to discern in the ceasefire the erosion of the ideological raison d’etre underpinning the armed campaign that was now being ended. 

From the perspective of advancing republicanism the ceasefire was an ethical rather than a strategic necessity, even if initiated for party political reasons rather than out of any moral consideration. The politics driving it were strikingly devoid of any strategic potential for developing republican struggle but were replete with indications, deliberately not spelt out, for discontinuing rather than continuing with the republican project, not just its armed dimension. 

In my mind the buzz term of the period ‘new phase of struggle’ was a euphemism for strategic failure. Whatever the necessity for a ceasefire I was psychologically equipped to accept military defeat but not to celebrate the wider republican implosion it constituted. So, mindful of the December 1980 victory march at the end of the collapsed hunger strike I declined to make the short journey from Ballymurphy over to Connolly House, tersely commenting to a friend in the local Sinn Fein cumann that everybody can celebrate Christmas but not the turkeys.

Instead, in the company of Tommy Gorman I sauntered up to a resource centre at the top of the Whiterock Road, where he rang Bernadette McAliskey to congratulate her on her statement ‘the war is over and the good guys lost.’ Tommy was later “chastised” for his thought crime by the very man who the late Tony Catney alleged had castigated him as being treasonous for also being in possession of ideas not cleared by Thought Traffic Control.   

Casting our minds back to 1994 it is not that difficult to imagine the outcry on the ground had it been revealed that after a long war among the dubious list of achievements would figure: Martin McGuinness serving as Peter Robinson’s deputy in Stormont, between them running the North administratively as part of the wider British state apparatus; that the same McGuinness would no longer be standing shoulder to shoulder with the people he previously ordered to conduct armed actions but would be screaming “traitors” at them for carrying out the killings he had not approved rather than those he had; that equality would mean middle class Catholics having the same right as middle class Protestants to prosecute republicans for their role in the Provisional IRA’s campaign and have them tried in no-jury Diplock Courts. 

If that is a victory why did we ever fight a war in pursuit of a victory we always had?

This is the type of outcome that back in 1994 could only have been viewed as unmitigated defeat. We would have described the current arrangement as a little partitionist Bantustan subcontracted out to us so that we might, as loyal subjects to Her Majesty the Queen, help in its administration. That it can now be explained away as something else is not a measure of republican success but rather of how erstwhile republican activists have intellectually acquiesced in the logic of partition, learning to love what they once hated.

Given what we know today it is hardly going out on an intellectual limb in making the assertion that no volunteer who fought in the ranks of the Provisional IRA prior to the ceasefire of twenty years ago will live to see a united Ireland. But many more would undoubtedly have survived to have seen more than they ever did had their lives not been cut short by a war that produced nothing substantially different from the Sunningdale Agreement.

There is a sense that Martin McGuinness implicitly acknowledges some of this. Hence in public he pretends to have left the IRA in 1974, presumably unable to carry personal responsibility for his direction of an armed campaign for a further two decades that achieved so little beyond that date.

Occasionally we hear it said as some sort of rationale for the continuation of the war post-1974 that there was not one line about equality in the Sunningdale Agreement although lines aplenty in the Good Friday Agreement. Yet if we parse IRA and Sinn Fein statements explaining why the Sunningdale Agreement was the antithesis of republicanism there is no mention of equality being absent. Republicans did not oppose Sunningdale because it failed to stress equality for nationalists within the partitioned North. They rejected it because it failed to tackle the existence of the partitioned North; just as the GFA failed also to tackle partition, instead guaranteeing it for as long as a majority in the North want it to remain.

Of course none of this should be said. Under the regime of organised lying the President of Forgetting has outlawed the act of remembering. Memory too is seditious, a crime against the peace process.





Remembering Why War Was Waged

'The war for equality was victorious'
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" - Milan Kundera 


Two decades on from that warm closing day of the August 1994 calendar when the Provisional IRA ceasefire was announced, it is hard to make any plausible claim that republicanism is twenty years on. It might even be argued that in the heady atmosphere back then there were signs in some republican quarters, albeit misplaced, of a greater optimism that a united Ireland might not just be too far off. Not much evidence of that type of sentiment today. Those either brave or foolhardy enough to vent it sound strained, as if they were predicting the resumption of the Latin mass, their ‘best before’ date expired.

Partition, which the Provisional IRA’s armed struggle was meant to eradicate, has survived the big cessation by twenty years and there is nothing on the horizon to suggest it will not continue to survive for the next fifty. In the zero sum battle between the Provisional IRA’s armed struggle and partition, there was one clear winner - partition. 

That the armed struggle failed to even secure a draw in the form of joint sovereignty underscores the distance short of republican objectives the campaign pulled up. The post hoc rationalisation that seeks to depict the armed struggle as being successful has the unedifying quality of sounding like soccer players claiming they did not lose a match because they managed to score a few points over the bar. 

Having forecast in writing, to much derision, the ceasefire some years earlier while still in prison I could hardly feign surprise or shock at its announcement. Nor was I in any doubt that the armed campaign was being wound up far short of its stated goals but considerably close to the professed objectives of its opponents in the British state. Nowhere was this more evident than in the politics of the consent principle. Having ideologically justified its armed campaign on the wholesale illegitimacy of the consent principle, the Provisional IRA was now being compelled to embrace the terms it warred against. The British state’s enduring alternative to republicanism, its long sought strategic objective, was finally colonising republican minds, and would ultimately produce mimic men as capable of criminalising physical force republicanism with the same shrillness as any Tory, Unionist or Fine Gael club member. 

On the day of the announcement twenty years ago, I was much less concerned about the armed cessation than the pattern of politics that was moulding the emerging unarmed strategy. What has been termed “republican theology” was not shaping my view. I was a Provisional republican rather than a traditional one. Innately suspicious of the doctrinaire, I was not enamoured to the concept of purist positions, sensing that the quest to perfect rather than improve is often as dangerous as the blemish perfection portends to correct. While not a subscriber to the perpetual war camp, I retained an ability to discern in the ceasefire the erosion of the ideological raison d’etre underpinning the armed campaign that was now being ended. 

From the perspective of advancing republicanism the ceasefire was an ethical rather than a strategic necessity, even if initiated for party political reasons rather than out of any moral consideration. The politics driving it were strikingly devoid of any strategic potential for developing republican struggle but were replete with indications, deliberately not spelt out, for discontinuing rather than continuing with the republican project, not just its armed dimension. 

In my mind the buzz term of the period ‘new phase of struggle’ was a euphemism for strategic failure. Whatever the necessity for a ceasefire I was psychologically equipped to accept military defeat but not to celebrate the wider republican implosion it constituted. So, mindful of the December 1980 victory march at the end of the collapsed hunger strike I declined to make the short journey from Ballymurphy over to Connolly House, tersely commenting to a friend in the local Sinn Fein cumann that everybody can celebrate Christmas but not the turkeys.

Instead, in the company of Tommy Gorman I sauntered up to a resource centre at the top of the Whiterock Road, where he rang Bernadette McAliskey to congratulate her on her statement ‘the war is over and the good guys lost.’ Tommy was later “chastised” for his thought crime by the very man who the late Tony Catney alleged had castigated him as being treasonous for also being in possession of ideas not cleared by Thought Traffic Control.   

Casting our minds back to 1994 it is not that difficult to imagine the outcry on the ground had it been revealed that after a long war among the dubious list of achievements would figure: Martin McGuinness serving as Peter Robinson’s deputy in Stormont, between them running the North administratively as part of the wider British state apparatus; that the same McGuinness would no longer be standing shoulder to shoulder with the people he previously ordered to conduct armed actions but would be screaming “traitors” at them for carrying out the killings he had not approved rather than those he had; that equality would mean middle class Catholics having the same right as middle class Protestants to prosecute republicans for their role in the Provisional IRA’s campaign and have them tried in no-jury Diplock Courts. 

If that is a victory why did we ever fight a war in pursuit of a victory we always had?

This is the type of outcome that back in 1994 could only have been viewed as unmitigated defeat. We would have described the current arrangement as a little partitionist Bantustan subcontracted out to us so that we might, as loyal subjects to Her Majesty the Queen, help in its administration. That it can now be explained away as something else is not a measure of republican success but rather of how erstwhile republican activists have intellectually acquiesced in the logic of partition, learning to love what they once hated.

Given what we know today it is hardly going out on an intellectual limb in making the assertion that no volunteer who fought in the ranks of the Provisional IRA prior to the ceasefire of twenty years ago will live to see a united Ireland. But many more would undoubtedly have survived to have seen more than they ever did had their lives not been cut short by a war that produced nothing substantially different from the Sunningdale Agreement.

There is a sense that Martin McGuinness implicitly acknowledges some of this. Hence in public he pretends to have left the IRA in 1974, presumably unable to carry personal responsibility for his direction of an armed campaign for a further two decades that achieved so little beyond that date.

Occasionally we hear it said as some sort of rationale for the continuation of the war post-1974 that there was not one line about equality in the Sunningdale Agreement although lines aplenty in the Good Friday Agreement. Yet if we parse IRA and Sinn Fein statements explaining why the Sunningdale Agreement was the antithesis of republicanism there is no mention of equality being absent. Republicans did not oppose Sunningdale because it failed to stress equality for nationalists within the partitioned North. They rejected it because it failed to tackle the existence of the partitioned North; just as the GFA failed also to tackle partition, instead guaranteeing it for as long as a majority in the North want it to remain.

Of course none of this should be said. Under the regime of organised lying the President of Forgetting has outlawed the act of remembering. Memory too is seditious, a crime against the peace process.





38 comments:

  1. Anthony,

    When I clicked on the link Tony Catney alleged had castigated him as being treasonous for also being in possession of ideas not cleared by Thought Traffic Control.

    I can't access it or read... I keep getting 'pinged' back to this notice. Both from a laptop and an android device..

    Votre compte actuel ne dispose pas de l'autorisation d'accès nécessaire pour afficher cette page.

    Cliquez sur ici pour vous déconnecter et changer de compte.


    Basically means my blogger account doesn't have permission to access the link. And to log out and log in with another account (I only have the one account)...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Frankie,

    it might have been a glitch at this end. Try it now and let me know.

    ReplyDelete
  3. (link works...cheers)..

    Here is a pice from Spiked June 2012.. The last paragraph reads like this...

    The meeting between the queen and McGuinness is an obvious symbol that the Irish War is long over. Given that she returns there as reigning sovereign of Northern Ireland, and that the Union Flag still waves over Stormont Castle, it also seems clear that the republican movement was the biggest loser. But this is a war that nobody has won – least of all the peoples of Northern Ireland

    Half way into the piece there is a link to an Alex Kane piece in the Belfast Newsletter where he shows how un-republican PSF have become (or at least the leadership)

    It [PSF] has accepted an internal settlement and the border separating the UK from the rest of Ireland. It co-governs with the DUP. It has stood down the IRA and the Army Council. It has decommissioned the arsenals. It has accepted a local police force. It has accepted the criminal justice system…. [O]ther than moving into Buckingham Palace and curling up like an old green corgi at the foot of the Queen’s bed, I’m not sure how much more Sinn Fein could do to indicate that their war has been lost and the surrender terms penned by the British.’

    One of the comments in the Newsletter piece..

    Ulsterwoman I have been reading various articles on Martin McGuinness,. Martin Igram the MI 5 agent revealed that McGuinness was a spy working for the British. Certain Sunday newspapers have stated this as well. If this is the case, Martin is still working for the British big time. I think I know why he gets on so well with Unionists. Martin McGuinness a Unionist hero who did what his paymasters asked, to demilitarise the PIRA?

    Seems Brian Mor was a bit of an Oracle...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Frankie,

    It was a glitch here then. Thanks.

    I have never bought into the notion that he was working for them as an agent. Others at senior level almost certainly were; functioning as agents of influence. I think they were put in place much like sweepers in ice curling - to smooth the way for the strategy people like McGuinness and Adams were delivering.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anyone who can't access BBC NI and wants to watch the Peter Taylor documentary tonight called Ceasefire..

    I know BBC NI can be found online at Filmon. Go to UK Live and click on it and scroll to BBC NI...(you may get a 30seconds advert)

    Anthony,

    What I've never understood is the Provisional's knew in 1972 & again in 1974/75 that the British were not going sign up to anything that signed away British control over the six counties.. Why did the leadership in 1994-1998 think it would be any different?

    ReplyDelete
  6. “God's Final Message to His Creation:
    'We apologize for the inconvenience.”
    ― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish


    The President for Life's Final Message to His Sheep and Turkeys:
    "We won't apologise for the inconveniences."

    - Gerry Adams, Dark Fellow, Dark Shadow

    ReplyDelete
  7. Frankie,

    they knew it would be no different. But to keep their political careers on track they felt they had to pretend to the grassroots that nothing had really changed in terms of what their objectives were.

    One reason I suppose why they hid Hume/Adams from the grassroots. I debated this in public with Pat McGeown at the Felons Club during the Feile 0f 94 just ahead of the ceasefire and made the point that Hume/Adams was no different from the Downing Street Declaration which the leadership had pretended to reject at Letterkenny.

    Pat, normally quite adept, clearly was all over the place during the debate which got quite heated as I recall, even though we were firm friends.

    They were making it very clear to the British that they were signing up to partition but telling the grassroots something else.

    The peace process was an exercise in deception.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Danny Morrison and Billy Hutchinson discuss IRA ceasefire 20 years on

    Don't blame me if you click the link and scream dogs abuse.. I'm just the messenger.

    ReplyDelete
  9. AM, maybe I'm too stupid to follow your logic, but you see the ending of the Provisional campaign as the ethical thing to have done? If that's the case then lies told allay self destructive pride are quite forgettable in the scheme of things. And In the face of all evidence people still prefer to believe these lies.This turns McGuinness into a martyr like figure too.If it was the ethical thing to do.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Frankie,

    the interview was poor all round.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Daithi,

    I don't really understand the point you are making.

    I hope the point I was making is straightforward enough. A war that cannot be won should be discontinued.

    The stopping of the war was the ethical thing to do.

    That the SF leaders who ran the IRA stopped the war did not do so for ethical reasons but party political ones.

    ReplyDelete
  12. My point is compared to the horror of an unethical war, any external benefits Sinn Fein may experience for ending it are irrelevant. I think if they were as honest as you , and called it for the defeat it was a the time,they couldn't of carried the bulk of the movement with them without more Joe O' Connor type murders.

    ReplyDelete
  13. The benefits advance SF and the political careers of its leaders. So it is relevant n that sense. That doesn't make it worth it.

    You need only listen to Morrison this morn on that piss poor debate admitting that he now supports the British judiciary which tries in Diplock courts republicans for their role in the IRA campaign. And when he claims it is not a defeat it was himself who defined decommissioning as surrender. Fortunately, we don't have to square that circle.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Anthony,

    In the Morrison interview, I thought 'Paddy' called it right. At least I understood where he was coming from..

    I'm trying to edit 'Good Morning Ulster and Richard English & Seanna Walsh'..

    ReplyDelete
  15. I listened to the interview, at least he let his mouth and brain synchronise this time, and their was no pauses where his mouth ran out of words like when talking about you ! (Though as usual MMG sounds like he has a very watery mouth)

    ReplyDelete
  16. we are running the RTE interview with him tonight. He tries to lie his way through the hunger strike issue in it but to no avail.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Frankie,

    the funny thing is that both Paddy and the other caller from the Shankill made a more robust case than either of the two people actually being interviewed.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Mackers.... "I have never bought into the notion that he (J118) was working for them as an agent."

    Do you not think it strange that, in the North, he only ever served 1 month on remand on an IRA membership charge and was released with the Crown Prosecutor saying "I have been instructed not to proceed with the prosecution due to insufficient evidence, therefore I have been instructed not to proceed."

    Who instructed a Crown Prosecutor in those days when Republicans were being rail-roaded into jail? And the BBC had all the evidence he needed; two 1972 interviews in which McGuinness spoke for the IRA (OIRA Ceasefire) or as the commander of the IRA in Derry. (Tom Mangold Interview)

    Then there was Raymond Gilmour who put away most of the IRA in Derry yet he didn't put Marty away. Even Garret Fitzgerald wondered this aloud to Jim Prior who said, yes you guessed it, they had no evidence.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Dixie,

    while he has been suspected by senior figures at different times I have come across too many of his internal critics (to the point of despising him) who take a view that it was not possible for them to be alive were he an agent.

    Counter insurgency relies at times on moulding leaderships and clearing the way for leaderships that they do mould. It doesn't mean they have actually recruited the individual leader.

    It is my view that the Brits saw in these people a way out of the armed struggle and into a partitionist arrangement. They didn't need to turn them and ensured that agents of influence were on hand to push the ideas that the Brits needed pushed.

    I can't speak definitively on the matter. The Brits might have turned them. If it ever comes out that they were turned I would express no shock. I just haven't heard the case made persuasively yet.

    ReplyDelete
  20. It's interesting to read so many articles concerning the ceasefire that concentrate on Belfast and Londonderry.....it would seem that outside of those areas of revolutionary fervor nothing much else happened. The rest of us must have been just fuck'n around for 30 years!!!
    All said and done we should have built more leisure centres and sought funding for more 'community workers' who mostly are unqualified illiterate fuckwits which both Belfast and Londonderry have more than their fair share off for some unexplained reason....that would have resolved just about as much as the Belfast/Londonderry leadership has done and did for 30 years.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Regarding the interview, it seems to me that Danny was bragging about selling out, while Billy seemed too interested in non issues to realise his side actually won out the g.f.a. Any time Danny gets asked about the betrayal of republican principles, he reminds everybody he served time, don't see how that is relevant.
    Niall, all people can do is speak about their experiences, if the are from Belfast or Derry, then obviously they are going to speak about Belfast or Derry so I don't see your point.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Anthony, I appreciate your honesty and your logical reasoning - but I believe your first premise on Partition is mistaken, therefore your well-reasoned conclusion is too.

    The reason we are in a relatively peaceful and democratic society today is that the IRA attempt at ending partition failed.

    Partition need not be abusive. Under threat it was, but without threat both communities can increasingly accommodate each other and blend into a happy nation. Of course if either side still are unwilling to have a shared future, partition will again be under threat and abusive.

    The alternative to partition was an anti-British Catholic (or Marxist)Gaelic State. Unionists were never going to go quietly into that.

    I've just watched a BBC Parliament program from the Irish Embassy in London on the Home Rule crisis. Thoughtful contributions from historians and John Bruton:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/house-of-commons-28194335

    From that program I was struck with an alternative form of partition that may well have had a happier outcome: Home rule for the South, but continued Direct Rule for the North. That would have ensured fair treatment of the Catholic minority in the North. while letting the Southern Irish explore their freedom and expand it as they saw fit.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Wolfesbane,
    Republicans and unionists are never going to agree on partition, we see it as our birth right to have a unified Ireland, you see the six counties as British as Glasgow, Cardiff etc and on and on it goes. Both of us try to claim the moral high ground and score points, however if the truth be told the British government couldn't give a fuck about your community and the free state has made it perfectly clear that it wants nothing to do with my community so we are stuck together on this little part of the world caught in an endless cycle of mistrust and violence.
    I'll never stop agitating for a united Ireland, having said that maybe in the short term we should concentrate on breaking down barriers. There was a big deal made about the fact that it's twenty years since the first ceasefire, but in those twenty years have the two communities become any closer? we might have stopped shooting each other, but with contentious issue after contentious issue how long will that last? It is such a distrustful place that if one community expresses their heritage the other automatically assumes it is under attack. That is the true test of peace, for a second forget about partition, Irish, British etc for if the two communities don't interact then serious violence is inevitable.
    Out of curiousity if, for arguments sake, if the 26 and 6 counties voted for a u.i what do you think would be the reaction of the unionist community, you spoke before about never going into a anti-British socialist state, what's your opinion on the current 26 county government? I must admit it seems to me that the unionist community speak only of democracy when it suits them am i wrong?

    ReplyDelete
  24. Wolfsbane,

    we won't agree on this.

    Partition was the outworking of a unionist strategy of threat. It was a violent arrangement sustained by violence and in turn conjured up violent opposition. As was said recently about Ferguson, state violence leads to street violence.

    ReplyDelete
  25. DH says: "I'll never stop agitating for a united Ireland, having said that maybe in the short term we should concentrate on breaking down barriers."

    Seems to me as if you recognise a bind in all that David.

    Perhaps one way out of that bind is to concentrate on prioritising an aspiration for a unity of peoples that inhabit the island rather than a geographical unity of land mass. Also, it's possible to aspire to geographical unification without necessarily aggressively agitating for it. We can respectfully aspire without having to act it out with aggressive and threatening agitation.
    We can, if we choose to, concentrate on respecting the aspirations of the other.
    If we do all of that the barriers will fall away ... there won't be any need for 'breaking' them down.

    "we might have stopped shooting each other, but with contentious issue after contentious issue how long will that last?"

    I like you David experience such frustrations occasionally too. Though most people would say you know that stopping the shooting is a great start. And given the depths of hostility previously reached, what we have is truly a great start. Only fools would minimise that.
    Wouldn't it be a shame to blow that great start regardless of ongoing contentious issues rather than finding strategies to navigate our way round them?

    Collectively and individually we're at a choice point (in truth we always are).

    We have a choices (in truth we always have), we can pro-actively choose to be the change we want in the world rather than churlishly demanding it of the world.

    If as republicans we really do aspire to liberty, fraternity and equality we need to practice what we preach.
    Like most change processes this really is an inside job! Like an egg, if it's chipped away at from the inside it's the beginning of new life. If on the other hand it's chipped at or cracked from the outside the potential is lost ... what must follow is death and decay.

    As Gandhi said David 'I’m a lover of my own liberty, (and so) I would do nothing to restrict yours'.
    In that vein I aspire to affording the same freedoms to Unionists as I would claim for myself including free speech and freedom to peaceful protest.
    I commit myself to remaining mindful of the consequences of my words and actions, to do the best I can to live responsibly, respectfully and peaceably with all my neighbours.

    ReplyDelete
  26. David Higgins said:
    'Wolfesbane,
    Republicans and unionists are never going to agree on partition, we see it as our birth right to have a unified Ireland, you see the six counties as British as Glasgow, Cardiff etc and on and on it goes.'

    Hmm. No, many of us Unionists see N.I. as different from Cardiff, etc. in that two nations are represented in our people. We are both British and Irish. Yes, the old position of 'Ulster is British (only)' did have the support of the unthinking masses, but our Troubles have caused some of us to think more deeply.

    'Both of us try to claim the moral high ground and score points, however if the truth be told the British government couldn't give a fuck about your community and the free state has made it perfectly clear that it wants nothing to do with my community so we are stuck together on this little part of the world caught in an endless cycle of mistrust and violence.'

    True. That's why it's important we think more clearly than ever before, if we are to escape the mutually exclusive dogmas of the past.


    'I'll never stop agitating for a united Ireland,'

    I've no problem with that - but hopefully it won't be the sort of U.I. that was offered in the past. How about a truly new Ireland embracing both the British and Gaelic peoples? NOT one in which the Gaels gradually assimilate the Brits and end up with a Gaelic Ireland. NOT one in which the Roman Catholic Church calls the shots and Catholicism is an essential part of being Irish. Not one in which the people are delivered into a Marxist 'Democratic Republic'. Real democracy, with civil and religious liberty.

    'having said that maybe in the short term we should concentrate on breaking down barriers.'

    Agreed.

    'There was a big deal made about the fact that it's twenty years since the first ceasefire, but in those twenty years have the two communities become any closer? we might have stopped shooting each other, but with contentious issue after contentious issue how long will that last?'

    Yes, things have greatly improved in that many lives have been spared - but you are right that the contention is as bad as ever. Some brave efforts have been made towards reconciliation - but a equally strong effort has been made to marginalise the Unionist community. That campaign has done much to undermine the ordinary Unionist's trust in the peace process.

    It was quite a deliberate decision by SF to continue the war by other means. SF are a smart bunch of activists, and they knew the unionists - and especially the Orange Order - are mostly political ignoramuses. When SF called off its war, they activated a plan to antagonise the Unionist people by way of challenging big time the existing contentious parades and introducing contention on any others they could find.

    When they announced their policy of ramping-up the contention, I recognised the harm this would do to the newly born peace process and I met with a high profile Republican I knew to plead for them to take it easy. They continued with their plan. They very nearly succeeded in plunging N.I. into a massive orgy of death and destruction with the Drumcree face-off between the police/army and the Orange Order/loyalists. I believe it was only God's mercy that kept the thickos of Unionism from falling into the trap SF set for them.

    SF have succeeded in delaying deep reconciliation for at least a decade.

    But their bankruptcy of policy is becoming ever more evident - they are not fit to run a modern democracy. I pray they wise up and throw off their baggage and play a real part in an agreed future.

    ReplyDelete
  27. David said:
    'It is such a distrustful place that if one community expresses their heritage the other automatically assumes it is under attack.'

    Yes, that can happen. But it is to be expected, for many times it IS an attack on the other's heritage.

    'That is the true test of peace, for a second forget about partition, Irish, British etc for if the two communities don't interact then serious violence is inevitable.'

    Agreed.

    'Out of curiousity if, for arguments sake, if the 26 and 6 counties voted for a u.i what do you think would be the reaction of the unionist community,'

    If the Unionists became a minority in N.I., then I think they would reluctantly accept they were defeated and act accordingly. Those who could sell their homes would leave for the U.K or elsewhere; those who couldn't would stay until they could. Others would wait in hope to see how things went. I doubt any would take up the gun to get self-determination for their nation - it would be pointless. Unionists would have the right to self-determination, but not the realistic possibility that is needed to justify a war of liberation.

    'you spoke before about never going into a anti-British socialist state, what's your opinion on the current 26 county government?'

    Seems to me they are generally as democratic as any other Western government. But solidly Gaelic, not British and Gaelic.

    'I must admit it seems to me that the unionist community speak only of democracy when it suits them am i wrong?'

    You are mostly mistaken. Many unionists are fussy in their political thinking, so one can't look to them for a clear definition of democracy. But the Unionist case is clear in itself - nations are not determined by majorities. The right of the Ulster British people to be separate from a U.I. is the same right the Irish people had to be separate from the U.K. The Irish had that right whether or not the U.K. as a whole agreed.

    But a successful N.I. has two nations and both of them must agree on their future together. Only then can they gradually merge into one Northern Irish nation. That's my prayer for our peoples. But God knows best, so I'm open to whatever comes our way.

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  28. Wolfesbane,
    Thanks for taking the time to reply it,s appreciated. While i will always campaign for a united Ireland. I honestly think that ship has sailed, so what are we left with? We still have to live here so, regardless of who is calling the shots, i worry about what we do in the mean time. The reason i asked about unionist attitudes is the cycle has to end we can't keep picking up arms every time we feel marginalised, where has it got us so far? Whatever happens in the future it will all be for nothing if we can't co-exist.

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  29. Niall
    It's interesting to read so many articles concerning the ceasefire that concentrate on Belfast and Londonderry.....it would seem that outside of those areas of revolutionary fervor nothing much else happened. The rest of us must have been just fuck'n around for 30 years!!!

    I get what you mean Niall. But as David said all people can speak about is their own experiences during the conflict. Most of mine was confined to Ardoyne.

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  30. I don't know if Kevin Kearney was or wasn't an Mi5/SB agent. The last time I seen Kevin was in St Gabriel's secondary..

    The piece reads..

    'One house in Etna Drive in the Ardoyne of north Belfast was regularly used by senior IRA and Sinn Fein figures for meetings with priests from Clonard Monastery in west Belfast.

    A security source told Belfast Daily: “What they didn’t know was the house was bugged.

    “Kevin was a police agent and a specialist MI5 unit went in and planted a number of listening devices in the house.

    “The meetings were held in the house in the 1990s in the run up to the ceasefires.

    “The talks were to convince leading hardline IRA members to accept the 1994 ceasefire.

    “These meetings went on for months. It gave us a good insight into what was going on within the IRA in Ardoyne.

    “They needed to be convinced of the benefits of the ceasefire.”

    What I'm asking myself is after the Joe Fenton & Sandy Lynch affairs why weren't the Provisionals more security conscience? Maybe it's as simple as the spooks had acess to better technology at the time and could circumvent the scans the Provisonals had..

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  31. David said:
    ' Whatever happens in the future it will all be for nothing if we can't co-exist.'

    Amen to that!

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  32. Anthony said:
    'Partition was the outworking of a unionist strategy of threat. It was a violent arrangement sustained by violence and in turn conjured up violent opposition. As was said recently about Ferguson, state violence leads to street violence.'

    I agree. The problem did not begin there, however. The threat of violence from Unionism in 1912 was in response to the threat from both the British and Irish to use violence to force us into a Nationalist Ireland.

    The crux of the issue however was not the threats and counter threats. It was the National Question - the right of the Irish to self-determination, and the same right of self-determination for the other nation in Ireland.

    Failure to accommodate both rights has been the cause of all the grief. Thankfully, new light has shined in on both sides and more are opening their eyes to think again on the issue. I did not realise this had begun some time before the Belfast Agreement, until I heard John Bruton speak at the event at the Irish Embassy in London to mark the centenary of the passage of the 1914 Home Rule Act.

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  33. Who won the war
    DURATION: 1 HOUR
    Peter Taylor has been covering the conflict in Northern Ireland for more than 40 years. On the 20th anniversary of the 1994 ceasefire, he makes a personal assessment of who really 'won the war'.

    Monday 29th September 9pm BBC 1 NI

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  34. Thanks for flagging this one AM & Frankie.
    Looking forward to seeing it.

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  35. Henry,

    I've been waiting to see this for a good 6/7 weeks. I know who didn't win the war. It wasn't republicans or the working class of the six counties.

    All I know about the show is Peter Taylor say's who he thinks who won at the very end...

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  36. Does violence pay

    A thirty minute podcast on the up coming Peter Taylor documentary "Who won the war"... It includes a 'chat' with Danny Morrison and Malachi O'Doherty. Along with several phone in's from the public...


    @Henry, if you want quick insight to the program, 'Google' The Nolan Show' and listen to the last 30mins of todays 26/09) program....

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  37. I'm sure you'll agree with me on this Frankie; that evaluating in absolute adversarial terms of winning and loosing is a simplistic and less than fruitful way of looking at outcomes.

    Most people would say you know Frankie that black/white, win/loose and good/bad type evaluations are inherently limited, certainly so when addressing complex narratives.

    What's now become clear to the majority of thinking people, is that common sense, common decency eventually prevailed.
    Once the necessary conditions were put in place to entice enough people in from the margins the centre gained mass and stability.
    And of course the descent into a blood-lust culture out at the extreme margins helped motivate a move to the centre too.
    Sure it's possible (though not probable) that this somewhat unstable centre may fragment again; regrettably there's always unplanned for and unexpected unknowns.

    The fact is Frankie we have a peace of sorts , imperfect as that is I'd hope rockabillies, like all lovers of life, will champion it too.
    And I'd hope you'll agree with me Frankie, that rather than knocking it, we owe it to ourselves, and the coming generations, to consolidate and build on this imperfect peace. No sentient being could want to be led down a road into the dark pit of violence once again.

    Of course that does not require sycophantic reverence for the politicians who put the deal together and nor does it preclude opposition and protest.
    And hopefully those that take on leadership in such oppositional movements will remember (that) they, as do agencies of the state, have a responsibility and perhaps a duty to respect and indeed nurture the fragile peace.

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  38. Henry,

    What there isn't is the whole scale murder. That's it. Everything else is still in place. The security apparatus is there, the oxymornons still in place, the division, sectarianism... total lack of trust and no integration.

    In fact in someways it has come full circle.. And if you listen to Journalist Peter Taylor looks back at his career covering the Troubles you'll understand why...

    Most people would say you know Frankie that black/white, win/loose and good/bad type evaluations are inherently limited, certainly so when addressing complex narratives.

    Dunno Henry... I reckon if you look at it (the conflict) in black & white terms from a republican point of view this is fairly close to the truth..

    Gerard Hodgins said: “Awh, the British. We lost. We just didn’t get our united Ireland. And now we’re pretending that it wasn’t about freedom, that it was really about equality.”

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