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Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Twenty Six

 

Pastords @ 66

 

A Morning Thought @ 3297

Michael Glackin ✍ I’m not surprised to hear the rumour that there were petrol bombs being kept on standby in car boots near Garvaghy Road, whether true or not.

The fact that nothing happened, the opportunity never arose and they were kept in their box is a credit to the residents, nationalist leaders, the PSNI and – in fairness – the Orange Order & loyalism.

It also speaks to the fact that they have no support within nationalism and republicanism. They are a tiny cabal of opportunistic anti-GFA puritan fanatics who lurk in the shadows while sending wee lads out to do the dirty work and the sentence that follows.

As a collective they may be the single worst element of our society.

Loyalism is more or less reduced to gangland criminality and factional infighting that are found in every city in the world, just under the guise of paramilitaries as a cloak of legitimacy within those communities.

The far-right anti-immigrant bigots are largely ugly, angry morons who lack the intellectual capability to separate reality from social media propaganda.

The Orange Order are fundamentally flawed, with the original sin of being an explicitly sectarian organisation, but they’re an old boys’ club now that has long lost its power, if not its usefulness to bad actors. Let them bate away where they’re welcome and mind their manners where they’re not.

Republican dissidents have a groupthink psychopathy that allows them to believe they are entitled – via their incredibly narrow interpretation of Irish history and bagful of clichés and quotations – to murder other members of our society. Imagine being so utterly convinced of your righteousness that you believe killing strangers is honourable in this age where Catholics have equality and a democratic path to constitutional change.

Now, as Newton Emerson’s piece in the Irish News today points out, mainstream republicanism – and Martin McGuinness in particular – looked this problem in the eye and put it in its place years ago. Unionism has never done this convincingly and now is being led down a shitty path by the extreme voices on that side.

Allister, Bryson, et al may not have gotten their march down the road and won’t be throwing any petrol bombs, but they’re having a cracking few weeks of creating their culture war, sowing division and throwing a grenade into our society, which was always the big prize in this episode. The dissident threat just underlines how things could quickly escalate.

Mainstream unionism, civic and political, needs to get that mentality under control and put it in its place instead of whataboutry and constantly pointing the finger at SF, SDLP and Alliance. Otherwise they risk letting this grow, fester and drag us back despite the vast, vast majority wanting to get on with our neighbours and make life here better for everyone.

⏩Michael Glackin  is an observer of events in North.

Petrol Bombs And Puritans

Geordie Morrow 🖌 with a painting from his collection of art work.


 Oil on canvas board 24”x20”, painted June 1977

⏩Geordie Morrow is a Belfast artist.

Milk Delivery

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

Green Party Inclusive Terminology Guidance Bars Women from Brighton

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

On Friday, as the largest conference in the Green Party’s history opened in Brighton, two of its members gave an interview from outside the building. Zoe Hatch and Jude English, directors of the Green Women’s Declaration, had been refused entry. Hatch said they had all been suspended or expelled, and that what they believed amounted to agreeing with the Supreme Court about single-sex provision for women, which she thought most of the British public did too. Saying it inside the Green Party, she said, is no longer allowed.

Shahrar Ali, the party’s former deputy leader, was outside as well, telling GB News he had been barred from attending and intended to go back to court. Inside, the party was holding what its own spokesperson had called, a fortnight earlier, the most democratic conference of any political party in Britain.

Continue @ Heartlands Tribune.

You Cannot Protect What You Cannot Define 🪶The Green Party’s Language Ban

Frankie McKillen ✍Billy “ Blue” Kelly and Brendan “ The Dark” Hughes came from the same republican generation. 

Both were deeply involved in the Provisional IRA. Both went to prison. Both lived long enough to see the armed campaign end and Sinn Féin enter the political institutions it had once rejected. And both looked at where republicanism had arrived and asked, in different words, essentially the same question: Was this what we fought for? 

There is another connection between them. We heard some of the most important things they had to say only after they were dead. Brendan Hughes gave his extensive recorded testimony to Anthony McIntyre for the Boston College Belfast Project. His interviews were conducted on the understanding that they would remain confidential until his death. They subsequently became the centrepiece of Ed Moloney’s Voices From The Grave. Billy Kelly created his own, rather less formal, voice from the grave. 

Six months before his death, he contacted Sunday World journalist Hugh Jordan and offered him an interview. Kelly imposed one condition: it was not to be published until he was dead. His explanation was extraordinary. “ If you put this out now I’ll be in big trouble. You’ll need to hold on to it until after I’m gone.” Kelly said he had wanted to speak for a long time but believed that, had he done so, he would have been “castigated and pressurised into retracting it”. So Kelly spoke while alive but chose to be heard from the grave. And when the grave finally released his words, they sounded remarkably familiar. 

Big Houses 

 One passage in Kelly’s interview immediately brought Brendan Hughes to mind. Kelly said: “A number of republicans have ended up with big houses and cars and a load of money and property.” He then contrasted their circumstances with his own: “But people like me and others – who fought the war and went to jail – ended up with nothing.” 

Almost a quarter of a century earlier, Hughes was making a strikingly similar complaint. Interviewed by Anthony McIntyre in Fourthwrite , (issue 1--interview starts at page 6) , Hughes talked about former IRA volunteers struggling economically while others prospered. When McIntyre pointed out that some people believed the struggle had been worthwhile, Hughes replied that among them were people with “big houses and guaranteed incomes”. Hughes’s criticism was not merely jealousy over who owned what. His argument was political and social. He believed a movement rooted in working-class republican communities had changed character. In his view, some people had moved into comfortable political and economic positions while former volunteers and the communities from which they came remained behind. 

Kelly, speaking decades later from his New Lodge flat, sounded remarkably similar. Different man. Different interview. Different time. The same uncomfortable image: big houses on one side, former volunteers wondering what it had all been for on the other. 

“The Brits Won” 

 Kelly went considerably further. His assessment of the IRA campaign was brutally concise: “The Brits won. There’s no other way of saying it.” Kelly said that he and others had joined the IRA believing they were fighting for a united Ireland and to end British rule. Looking at Northern Ireland at the end of his life, he concluded that they had failed. “We fought to get the Brits out of Ireland, but we failed,” was his assessment. He pointed to the continuing British constitutional position and the provisions governing a border poll. He even ridiculed the black-taxi cavalcade which accompanied the IRA ceasefire, saying it created the impression that republicans had won something when, in his opinion, they had secured nothing. 

Again, Brendan Hughes had travelled much of this road before him. Hughes became deeply disillusioned with the direction taken by the republican leadership. He complained that the thirty-two-county democratic socialist republic for which he believed he had struggled was no longer even being discussed. He regarded the political direction taken under Gerry Adams’s leadership as a fundamental departure from what he believed the IRA campaign had been about. 

There is an important distinction here. These were the assessments of Hughes and Kelly. Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams presented the peace strategy very differently, arguing that it created a peaceful and democratic route towards republican objectives. Adams also publicly rejected some of Hughes’s allegations and described Hughes and other critics as opponents of Sinn Féin’s strategy. But whatever view one takes of that argument, Kelly’s words demonstrate that Hughes’s disillusionment was not unique. 

What was it all for? 

Perhaps Kelly’s most powerful words were not “The Brits won”. They were these: “What was the point of the IRA campaign in the first place? What was it all for?” That question could almost have come from Hughes. Hughes had spent his later years wrestling with much the same issue. Men had died. Men had spent decades in prison. Hughes himself endured the blanket protest and hunger strike. Families and communities had lived through enormous suffering. What, Hughes wanted to know, had justified it? Kelly’s conclusion was even harsher. He said the IRA campaign had not been worth the loss of a single life and described the Troubles as a waste of human life, explicitly including violence beyond that committed by the IRA. Whatever anyone thinks of that conclusion, it is difficult to dismiss the significance of who was saying it. 

Kelly was not an academic analysing the IRA from a university office. He had been an IRA gunman and prisoner. He admitted killing British soldiers. He travelled to Libya as part of the delegation which sought weapons from Colonel Gaddafi. This was a man who had helped acquire the means to continue the war eventually asking: What was the war for? 

Adams And The Destination Of The Struggle 

Hughes’s criticism became deeply personal because of his former closeness to Gerry Adams. The two had been comrades and friends. Hughes subsequently came to believe that the political strategy associated with Adams had taken republicanism somewhere fundamentally different from the destination for which volunteers such as himself believed they had fought. 

Kelly’s final interview approached the issue from his own direction. “Sinn Féin led the people up the garden path,” he said. He contrasted republican rhetoric with the political reality he saw around him and complained that some republicans had prospered while people like himself had not. 

It would be too simple to say that Hughes and Kelly held identical views on every question. There is no evidence for that. But on several fundamental points their criticisms converge. They believed the IRA had fought to end British rule. They did not believe that objective had been achieved. They questioned what decades of armed struggle had accomplished. They believed some people associated with the republican movement had prospered while former volunteers and working-class republican communities had been left behind. And both expressed deep dissatisfaction with the political direction taken by Sinn Féin under Adams’s leadership. 

The difference Was When They Spoke 

There is one fascinating difference. Hughes became publicly outspoken while he was still alive. As early as 2000 he was telling Fourthwrite that he felt “no satisfaction whatsoever” with how things had turned out and urging republicans who disagreed with the leadership to speak out. But his most extensive historical testimony was preserved under the Boston College arrangement for release after his death. 

Kelly went further in protecting himself. He specifically instructed Hugh Jordan not to publish until he was gone. And he told us why. He feared being “in big trouble”. He feared being castigated. He feared being pressured into retracting his words. That ought to interest anyone concerned with republican oral history. 

How Many More? 

 Kelly said something else in his final interview which deserves attention. He felt qualified to speak not only for former prisoners but also for dead comrades who could no longer speak for themselves. There is a strange irony in that. Kelly wanted to speak for the dead, yet apparently believed he needed to become one of them before he could speak freely himself. Brendan Hughes became a Voice from the Grave through Boston College. Billy Kelly became one through Hugh Jordan and the Sunday World. Which raises the question: How many more Blue Kellys are there? 

How many former IRA volunteers have already recorded interviews with journalists or historians on the condition that they remain unpublished until death? How many have left tapes with their families? How many have written accounts sitting unopened in drawers? And how many hold views similar to those expressed by Hughes and Kelly but have decided that saying them publicly while alive simply isn’t worth the consequences? We don’t know. 

Nor should we assume that any future testimony will agree with Hughes or Kelly. Other veterans may leave behind accounts defending Sinn Féin’s strategy and reaching completely different conclusions. That is the point of oral history. You record the voices first and argue about what they mean afterwards.

Voices From The Grave 

There is something almost eerie about reading Kelly’s final interview alongside Hughes’s words from a quarter of a century earlier. Hughes talked about republicans with “big houses and guaranteed incomes.” Kelly talked about republicans with “big houses and cars and a load of money and property.” Hughes wondered what had become of the republican objectives for which his generation had fought. Kelly asked: “What was it all for?” Hughes believed the political direction of republicanism represented a departure from what he had fought for. Kelly’s final verdict was: “We lost and the Brits won.” 

Two veteran IRA men. Two different lives. Two different recordings. Two voices from the grave. And, separated by more than two decades, two remarkably similar questions about where Irish republicanism ended up and who benefited from the journey. Perhaps the most important question now is not whether Hughes and Kelly were right or wrong. It is how many more voices are still waiting for the grave before telling us what they really think.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

Voices From The Grave 2.0

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Twenty Five

 

A Morning Thought @ 3296

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 20-October-2026.

Photo of Jessica Krug

The issue of trans-racials, people who identify as being from a race or ethnicity they are not born into has raised its head again in the person of Hannah Gann a white Jewish woman of considerable wealth and privilege who self-identified as a Palestinian with mixed black (Tunisian) heritage.[1] She is not the first person to make such extravagant claims.

In 2015 Rachel Dolezal came to prominence in the US and internationally having been outed as white. Now, normally being white is not something you are outed as, but Dolezal has quite the chequered history. She was born to white parents, sued a black university for racial discrimination on the grounds she was white, altered her appearance and even became the head of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in Spokane. She, a white woman, had managed to pass herself off as black, not to other whites but to black leaders. It caused a moment of crisis for identitarians and was unintentionally great material for comics, though most stayed away from it. This was when Woke was goosestepping its way through cultural institutions, banishing all who would question it to the intellectual and cultural dungeons or side lines, particularly those who were Leftists. So she was best left alone and denounced. The uncomfortable questions she raised were not to be dealt with and unsurprisingly others tried their hand at it.

One of those who did was another white woman who passed herself off as Latina. Ostensibly easier to do. Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan was the first “Latina” president of the National Lawyers Guild who passed herself off as Colombian and sometimes as Puerto Rican. She did well out of it apparently and has been criticised by actual Latinas who haven’t had quite the same success as this brazen grifter.[2] There are others such as the white academic Jessica Krug, who apparently insisted on pronouncing her surname like the Spanish Cruz. She claimed, depending almost literally on the time of day, to being Afro-Latina, Algerian, Black, Puerto Rican etc. but was in fact a white Jew. Her book, published by the prestigious academic press Duke University Press was nominated for the Douglass Prize and also the Harriet Tubman Prize. The Douglass Prize is open to all, including whites, the Tubman Prize is not. Duke University ended up denouncing her and having to donate all their profits from her book to a fund for Latino and Black academics.[3]

This happened not just in the US but around the world. The influencer Oli London said he identified as Korean, then decided that wasn’t good enough and said he was a non-binary, gender fluid Korean and even underwent various surgeries to make himself look more “Korean” and renamed himself as Park Jimin Huening Kai Taeyong Imnida[4] before finally finding his home as a conservative Catholic and detransitioning.[5] It is a very appropriate ending for him. He started off believing there was some soul that was uniquely Korean and he had it and ended up believing in some universal Christian soul that we all apparently have. And he finally accepted he had been born in the right body, well what other body could he have been born in? The only trans he now accepts is the ridiculous notion of transubstantiation, which is the belief that Catholics literally eat the body of Christ at mass. I am not sure which is the more insane claim.

Rachel Dolezal has survived the whole thing, is now known as Nkechi Diallo and no longer says she is black but rather Trans-Racial. She got past her welfare fraud conviction as well and even managed to write a book with the unintentionally hilarious title of In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. Some of the others are still going strong as well.

However, there are consequences to these charades. Gann in fairness to her seems to acknowledge it:

I still believe in every cause I ever supported, in the ongoing fight for justice and in the righteousness of liberation for all oppressed peoples… I still believe that theirs is the real story and mine is just a sick, deluded distraction.[6] 

Almost everyone accepts that these charades undermine the causes the deluded participate in. All of the women mentioned here could have participated as women in struggles against women’s oppression. Two were Jewish and they could have participated as anti-Zionist Jews. But that doesn’t get them enough points in the Oppression Olympics that are so favoured in social movements. The more boxes you can tick, the more a right to be heard you have and the easier it is to shut down an opponent with “That’s because you are not…”. Class doesn’t matter and identity politics rule the roost. 

I lived in London for a short period in the 1980s and even then you could see the reactionary anti-working class seeds of what became Woke politics. The joke at the time was that if you were a black, Irish, lesbian in London with a disability nobody could criticise you. That is no longer a joke, that is the rule amongst most social movements, liberal and Left organisations. If you don’t have a disability pick one, preferably one that is not easy to challenge. In the 1980s, workers looking for an extra sick day would claim bad back. Couldn’t be disproved, or at least that is what one of the local doctors in my neighbourhood in Dublin used to say. He gave them out like confetti. Now you pick a complicated one, that only a medical professional after lots of study could claim wasn’t true. Left organisations and social movements have the highest rates of just about everything going, from autism to ADHD. It gains them brownie points and undermines those who actually suffer from these conditions.

At the time of the Rachel Dolezal scandal, Trevor Noah the South African comedian, based in the US, was also in the ascendent and a woke warrior. He was scathing of Delozal and the likes and said you can’t pick and choose the good parts. You haven’t lived as a black person, and all the oppression that entails, so you can’t just claim to be one. To be clear, race and ethnicity are socially defined concepts and whiteness as a concept has only existed for a few hundred years. The genetic differences between blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians etc, are miniscule and limited to secondary features like skin colour etc. Whether you can identify as black or Asian crosses no significant biological frontier, just a social and historical one. So far most liberals and Leftists reading this piece may have been nodding along in quiet agreement. Here is the sting in the tail.

If you can’t be trans-racial, then you can’t be transgender either. The biological differences between men and women are huge and sex is a biological category and women exist as a biological category. All of those who shriek in horror at the nonsense of Dolezal, Gann and others but think Eddie Izzard is a woman need to reconsider their politics and perhaps their mental health. The Trans-Racials only positive contribution is that they helped shine a light on this nonsense in quarters that were not open to discussion on the question of transgender. Some have the ridiculous idea that a man can identify as a woman, but draw the line at a white man identifying as a black woman. Stupidity reigns supreme.

References

[1] NBC News (23/09/2026) ‘Temu Rachel Dolezal’: Philly activist confesses to years of identity fraud faking Black and Palestinian Heritage. Doha Madani. 

[2] Prism Reports (07/01/2021) The National Lawyers Guild’s former first ‘Latina’ president is a white woman. Tiina Vásquez. 

[3] The Guardian (14/09/2020) Publisher denounces Jessica Krug for pretending to be black. Alison Flood. 

[4] Newsweek (28/06/2021) Oli London Before Surgery Pictures as Instagram Star Identifies as Korean. Ryan Smith. 

[5] EWTN News (04/11/2022) De-transitioner Oli London shares conversion to Christianity. Edie Heipel. 

[6] NBC News (23/09/2026) op. cit.

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Trans-Racials Ride Again! From Palestine To Latin America

Caitlin's Newsletter ★ Written by Caitlin Johnstone.

“Antisemitism” watchdog groups are flipping the fuck out about hip hop artist Macklemore saying “Free Palestine” while opening for Ed Sheeran, and the western press are of course helping to spin this ridiculous nonsense as a massive scandal.

During a New Jersey concert over the weekend, Macklemore said the following:

One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.
I said, Free Palestine.
I want those words to be loud and clear, so the people from Gaza, all the way to the occupied West Bank, know that we have not forgotten them.
And this next song was inspired by the bravery of Columbia University students who led an encampment movement that mobilized the entire world; open up hearts, myself included, so thank you to those students that risked their diplomas, that risked their tuition, that risked their scholarships, that stood up and said, no. CUAD students, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voices for Peace. Thank you, guys.

Oh My God Shut The Fuck Up About "Antisemitism"

Christopher Owens 🔖 has just completed reading a potboiler. 


A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device – a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

I know. Who farted, right?

Universally hailed on its release earlier this year (even winning the Orwell Prize for Fiction), this 145-page book has been sitting on my shelf for most of the year. It’s cover ever so slightly reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the combination of mounting praise and HAL trying to hypnotise me into reading the book finally broke my resistance.

And you know what, it’s ok.

Split into three parts (an interview between the narrator and his old mentor, Thomas; an argument with a curator after the narrator reveals he didn’t record the interview; and a conversation with Thomas’s son Max) the book skips along at a steady pace but with little weight (at least not until the end) nor with any particularly engaging characters. The end result is a collection of vaguely interesting ideas that never quite come together in a meaningful sense but you recognise the author’s intent and still go along with it.

Take this excerpt for example:

The man in the old-fashioned hat came by to check the tickets. I enlarged the little QR code and he scanned it. Then I put my earbuds in and began to listen to a talk, recorded in Paris in 1973, that Thomas gave about translation. I took a photo of the win-try, postindustrial landscape through my masked reflection as the train picked up speed, and then I checked and deleted the photo and shut my eyes and faced the past. My mentor paused, fifty-one years ago, and poured water into a glass. Someone in the audience coughed twice.
I was in Paris. (I don’t know how else the recording influenced the dream.) I was getting Eva from what must have been her school. I stood outside a tall and ornate wrought-iron fence, waiting for the gates to open. There were other parents and caregivers around, whispering to each other or into their phones. I don’t speak French, but it was clear that people were anxious. The wind was picking up. I heard sirens in the distance. I looked at my phone, but there were no alerts.

As you can probably guess, technology and our ambivalent relationship to it are a driving theme. While you can appreciate the ambition and the very skilled prose that does a lot of the heavy lifting, it ultimately feels like it has nothing to say while suggesting otherwise.

Such contradictions could be fascinating but in this case it’s akin to a potboiler.

Ben Lerner, 2026, Transcription, Granta Press. ISBN-13: 978-1803513805

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

Transcription

Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.


Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Twenty Four

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