Anthony McIntyre ✒ This week’s Ombudsman report into a number of Northern conflict deaths has again placed the RUC firmly at the centre of a collusion narrative. 

With each passing report, inquest or inquiry the noose tightens around the neck of the RUC's monochrome remembrance of itself and its security services allies that the RUC and political unionism has assiduously tried to cultivate.

The RUC mythology that imagines a force committed to the rule of law has been steadily eroded and is being displaced by a narrative that judges its role to have been one of the rule of law enforcement – a law unto itself, often determined by the force within a force that was RUC Special Branch.

The aspect of the Ombudsman report report that interested me most was that concerning the 1992 massacre at Grahams’ Bookmakers on the Lower Ormeau Road. I had grown up in the area, joined the IRA there and was imprisoned twice as a result of being with the organisation.  Friends from it visited me throughout my imprisonment and would pick me up from, and drop me back at, the gates each time I was on parole.

I retained a strong emotional attachment to that half mile cluster of streets throughout my time in prison. On the morning of the attack a friend who lived no more than a hundred yards from the bookies had visited me. On hearing the news, my immediate thoughts were about him, worried that he might have been caught up in it. I got the prison welfare to ring his home. Fortunately, he was safe.

Another person who had previously visited me had not been so lucky. Peter Magee’s life ended that day. He was eighteen, uninvolved and unarmed: slain for no reason other the “yabba, dabba doo, any Taig will do” moronic mindset espoused by Johnny Adair, whose prevailing political objective was to be a British drug dealer rather than an Irish one. Peter came up to see me unannounced when he was 15, solely out of curiosity along with his uncle who was my friend and the primary visitor that day.

A day or two after the attack I penned a lengthy piece for An Phoblacht which sought to explain life for a community under siege. 

Former RUC members are seething that they are now figuratively in the dock rather than putting others in it. A posse of them set off in pursuit of Ombudsman, Marie Anderson and one of her predecessors, Nuala O’Loan who in the eyes of the former police enforcers, had the temerity to support Anderson. The PSNI, eager to maintain fidelity to the beast that bore it, has also been complaining that the RUC actions and methodology were being repeatedly overlooked in a succession of damning PONI reports.

And damning they are, because they lend credence to the perspective that the RUC functioned quite comfortably as an institution of British state terrorism. For all the criticism that may be thrown at the IRA’s armed struggle, it is becoming increasingly clear to even those who had no inkling, that one of the fronts the IRA fought on saw it pitched against British state terrorism. In the zero-sum game that is legitimacy, the legitimacy that is hemorrhaging from the RUC is being transfused into the IRA. Attempts to portray the Northern conflict as a law and order problem occasioned by an aggravated crime wave are hollowed out by their own implausibility.

In all of this, one of the responses simply has to make its way onto the Dawson Baillie Library, which is located in the province of Retardia. There the inhabitants beat drums, kick the pope and speak some indecipherable patois. Some plods have taken to telling the News Letter that almost all of the ‘collusive behaviour’ claims relate to standard police practice where human intelligence sources are involved. As my wife observed, on the first count of collusion, the RUC pleads guilty as charged. 

 ⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Collusion ✑ Guilty M'Lud

Anthony McIntyre ✒ This week’s Ombudsman report into a number of Northern conflict deaths has again placed the RUC firmly at the centre of a collusion narrative. 

With each passing report, inquest or inquiry the noose tightens around the neck of the RUC's monochrome remembrance of itself and its security services allies that the RUC and political unionism has assiduously tried to cultivate.

The RUC mythology that imagines a force committed to the rule of law has been steadily eroded and is being displaced by a narrative that judges its role to have been one of the rule of law enforcement – a law unto itself, often determined by the force within a force that was RUC Special Branch.

The aspect of the Ombudsman report report that interested me most was that concerning the 1992 massacre at Grahams’ Bookmakers on the Lower Ormeau Road. I had grown up in the area, joined the IRA there and was imprisoned twice as a result of being with the organisation.  Friends from it visited me throughout my imprisonment and would pick me up from, and drop me back at, the gates each time I was on parole.

I retained a strong emotional attachment to that half mile cluster of streets throughout my time in prison. On the morning of the attack a friend who lived no more than a hundred yards from the bookies had visited me. On hearing the news, my immediate thoughts were about him, worried that he might have been caught up in it. I got the prison welfare to ring his home. Fortunately, he was safe.

Another person who had previously visited me had not been so lucky. Peter Magee’s life ended that day. He was eighteen, uninvolved and unarmed: slain for no reason other the “yabba, dabba doo, any Taig will do” moronic mindset espoused by Johnny Adair, whose prevailing political objective was to be a British drug dealer rather than an Irish one. Peter came up to see me unannounced when he was 15, solely out of curiosity along with his uncle who was my friend and the primary visitor that day.

A day or two after the attack I penned a lengthy piece for An Phoblacht which sought to explain life for a community under siege. 

Former RUC members are seething that they are now figuratively in the dock rather than putting others in it. A posse of them set off in pursuit of Ombudsman, Marie Anderson and one of her predecessors, Nuala O’Loan who in the eyes of the former police enforcers, had the temerity to support Anderson. The PSNI, eager to maintain fidelity to the beast that bore it, has also been complaining that the RUC actions and methodology were being repeatedly overlooked in a succession of damning PONI reports.

And damning they are, because they lend credence to the perspective that the RUC functioned quite comfortably as an institution of British state terrorism. For all the criticism that may be thrown at the IRA’s armed struggle, it is becoming increasingly clear to even those who had no inkling, that one of the fronts the IRA fought on saw it pitched against British state terrorism. In the zero-sum game that is legitimacy, the legitimacy that is hemorrhaging from the RUC is being transfused into the IRA. Attempts to portray the Northern conflict as a law and order problem occasioned by an aggravated crime wave are hollowed out by their own implausibility.

In all of this, one of the responses simply has to make its way onto the Dawson Baillie Library, which is located in the province of Retardia. There the inhabitants beat drums, kick the pope and speak some indecipherable patois. Some plods have taken to telling the News Letter that almost all of the ‘collusive behaviour’ claims relate to standard police practice where human intelligence sources are involved. As my wife observed, on the first count of collusion, the RUC pleads guilty as charged. 

 ⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

18 comments:

  1. The only people who couldn't see collusion between the RUC, the occupying army and unionist terror gangs were the RUC, the occupying army and unionist terror.
    It was plain as day to those of us who had feet on the ground during the war.
    I attended an INLA volunteers funeral in Strabane. A British soldier assaulted me in the car park and an RUC peeler put his hand on the Brits shoulder and said "Bob, too many cameras."
    The West Brit had no concern for my well being or rights only that it would be captured on film.

    https://declassifieduk.org/explainer-british-collusion-in-northern-irelands-dirty-war/

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    1. What did you expect? The cops to sit back and be killed and do absolutely nothing about it?

      I'm sure you said/did nothing to warrant a belting too.

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    2. Colonist's mindset Steve ... them wogs are getting above their station!

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    3. HJ,

      Would you have sat back and took it?

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    4. Steve, the deep-seated supremacist orientations of both Unionism and the Orange state were at the heart of what would lead to the deaths of so many, coppers included.

      Nationalist (with the support of a handful of their more enlightened Protestant neighbours) originally responded with the 'Civil Rights' movement.
      The supremacist nature of Unionism revealed itself almost immediately >January 4th 1969 an orange mob supported by B-special RUC men attacked and trounced young students at Burntollet Bridge >By March 1969 the UVF were planting the first bombs of the troubles in false flag operations in order to bring further wrath down on Nationalists and to undermine Terence O'Neill's leadership>
      The first copper wouldn't die until much later that year when Victor Arbuckle was gunned down by raging UVF men on the night of Oct. 11th 1969.

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    5. The RUC were getting hammered by republicans from 1920- around 90 RUC murdered in 2 years. Cherry picking the troubles misses this. Do you honestly believe the cops would somehow have forgotten their fallen comrades since before NI even existed? Blaming a supremacy mindset is too narrow a viewpoint. I've no particular love for the cops but come on, nobody would sit back and get taken out and not do anything about it, cops, republicans or otherwise.

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    6. Steve, our collective history is as old as time. Coloniser and colonised.

      Our past is not unique.
      Top-dog and under-dog dynamics play out, and have played out universally since time immemorial. However, political systems evolve to regulate and curb the excesses of these base drives.

      Deviations from the ideal persist though; in immature systems top-dog (supremacist) tendencies hold firm. Such is Unionism at its essence. It was, is and can only remain a deeply flawed polity.

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    7. HJ,

      That's too simplistic an overview but everyone has their own opinion.

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    8. First principles stuff Steve, just cause & effect rather than a simplistic overview.

      We may politely agree to differ on this ... and yet I think we both know which of our opinions will likely stand the test of time.

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    9. Fair enough HJ, I just don't think that by the time the 3rd or 4th generation of planters were born they thought of themselves as anything but native.

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    10. It doesn't look that way to me Steve.
      Though there may always have been challenges in interactions between invaders and indigenous peoples across time and locations few have been as contentious nor as enduring as those between the Elizabethan planters and the native Irish.
      The Norman invasion of Ireland worked out markedly different than that of the Tudors. The Normans inter-married with the native Irish and embraced their language and culture. The Elizabethans did not. In fact the Elizabethans outlawed such practices. Such is the difference between invaders and colonisers. Implicit in colonisation is total domination of native culture. Alas, Unionism at its core and at its worst is still stuck in that mindset. Even at its best it still remains deeply conflicted.

      More growing pains ahead!

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    11. " The Normans inter-married with the native Irish and embraced their language and culture."

      That's me alright then, I have a fair whack of Swedish/Dane DNA in me along with 20% Irish and 70% Scot!

      My point was that by the third generation of people born on a land they consider themselves native, regardless of their background. I have a Scots Gaelic surname with roots in Scandinavia, doesn't make me feel any less Irish or Belfastish!

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    12. Of course the grandkids, never mind the great-grandchildren of original immigrants will consider themselves natives ... and rightly so. That though is far removed from the point I'm making, or attempting to make.

      At an individual level I don't have any great disagreement with another person who calls himself a Unionist or a Loyalist, whether s/he identifies as Ulster-Scot, British or Irish. What I do find repugnant though is that our island home and all its inhabitants remains hostage to a collective polity which at its heart is nothing more than a self-sabotaging anachronistic outworking of an imperialist colonial, essentially unjust and now defunct model.

      Political Unionism in its immature stance is wilfully failing the people it claims to, and ought to represent. Through that process it holds the rest of the people of the island to ransom and I deeply resent it for all that.

      (see my last reply to AM too)

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  2. Somewhat of a 'dog bites man story'.

    The supremacist Orange state was much more than a 'cold house for nationalists'.
    Despite much of the politically correct polite revisionism of recent times and an increased deferential acquiescence to it, none nor any of it can wish nor wash away the Orange state's (and all it's organs) sordid past.

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  3. I would not dispute Henry Joy's depiction of a unionist supremacism but I think given the Catholic Church sway within nationalism there must have been a large swathe of Catholic supremacism there too. There is very much a strain of it within the republican physical force tradition which feels it has a supreme right to kill you.

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    Replies
    1. See my latest response to Steve.

      The intensity of the under-dogs response will generally be proportionate to the top-dogs aggression.
      Then of course the Tudor's were evangelising for their new religion (which the Normans were not).

      In your attempt to be balanced AM you sometimes become unbalanced ... land grabs & forced dislocations, the Penal Laws ever heard about any of them!!!!

      (and that's not a rant, just factual recall)

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    2. it is not even an attempt to be balanced - I don't disagree with your take on supremacism. There is noting unbalanced about raising the issue of a Catholic Supremacism which raised its head in the Free State once the shoe had switched feet. Supremacism is not something confined to unionism. Or do we dismiss as fanciful any notion of Catholic supremacism?

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    3. I don't dismiss Catholic supremacism. Yes it existed, yet it is best understood as part of a several hundred year continuum.
      The response of Church/State in the 26 counties was similar to what happens when a stuck pendulum is released ... its tendency will be to swing too high on the other side.

      That pendulum, though still not yet completely at rest, has settled greatly. Supremacist moves in the 26, carry little or if any weight. Proponents of such thinking no longer even garner a mild rebuke so limited is their influence.

      The Neanderthals of the DUP up North however, they're horses of a different colour ... and the other Unionists who who refuse to find a maturity within themselves and loosen their ties with the 'Mothership' ... and instead formulate policies for a decent transition which realistically face up to the inevitable changes that are coming are, to my mind anyways, little or if any better.

      Its still it seems, dogs in mangers and other cupid stunts all the way down!

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