Why the GAA support the Terrordome?

The Maze Stadium debate continues to rumble on in various quarters, not least amongst the DUP, where the ideological fissures become increasingly apparent.

Perhaps the most interesting slant offered over the weekend came from Jarlath Burns on the BBC’s Politics Show. Burns outlined the lack of any tangible desire for a stadium near Lisburn amongst Ulster GAA circles, but voiced the belief that a political understanding had been struck between the organisation and Sinn Féin. Burns believes that to secure SF acquiescence in the removal of some of the GAA’s unpalatable political rules, support for a Maze Stadium including the so called “Conflict Transformation Centre” was a pre-requisite.

Certainly Burns is an authoritative source on the machinations of the GAA and this sheds more light on the unpleasant political manoeuvrings that have resulted in this project being foisted on sports fans as the only show in town.

A SF backed museum will quite simply become a shrine to republican terror and it is simply astounding that Paisley and Poots are prepared to ignore this aspect of the project for their own myopic reasons.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more