Bradley-Eames Consultative Group gets off to a bad start
The Consultative Group on the Past has commenced its meetings in inauspicious fashion, by suggesting that the British Government may be asked to accept that the IRA’s campaign of terror and that waged by other paramilitary groups constituted a war. There is more at stake than semantics because this definition is likely to facilitate a process whereby paramilitaries are granted amnesty in return for details about their activities.
Such a move would pander to republican revisionism which attempts to retrospectively legitimise their tawdry campaign of violence. The attempt to justify their activities by claiming that they were fighting for human rights has been discussed and dismissed below, but attempting to equate murders of civilians, police officers and off duty soldiers with acts of war by a bona fide army is another strand of the republican agenda.
To defer to this agenda is not necessary. The Alliance’s Stephen Farry is correct when he contends that there are other methods of inducing ex-paramilitary criminals to divulge their nefarious activities without inflicting the insult to victims that recognising these activities as acts of war entails.
Such a move would pander to republican revisionism which attempts to retrospectively legitimise their tawdry campaign of violence. The attempt to justify their activities by claiming that they were fighting for human rights has been discussed and dismissed below, but attempting to equate murders of civilians, police officers and off duty soldiers with acts of war by a bona fide army is another strand of the republican agenda.
To defer to this agenda is not necessary. The Alliance’s Stephen Farry is correct when he contends that there are other methods of inducing ex-paramilitary criminals to divulge their nefarious activities without inflicting the insult to victims that recognising these activities as acts of war entails.
Comments
Let's break it down.
Provos:
You were not fighting a war, but a violent campaign of terror.
Despite aformentioned campaign of terror, you did not actually achieve your stated aim of a United Ireland.
You had to steal virtually all of the SDLP's policies in order to achieve political success.
However, you still remain unelectable in the Republic.
Please stop having publically funded fantasy parties in the guise of consultation groups.
If you want to escape from reality, get a Nintendo Wii and stop wasting British taxpayer's money.
Lol. If we dissolved all these public bodies whose function is to mull over the past everyone in Northern Ireland could be given a Wii! Now there's a thought!
Far better for you then playing a publically funded version of Orange and Green Dungeons and Dragons.