Diver eschews republican intolerance

When troops were welcomed home on the streets of Belfast, republicans maintained that their problem was with the ‘coat-trailing’ military parade, rather than the civic reception or church service. Strange then that Sinn Féin and its fellow travellers have spent the start of this week eviscerating Derry City Council’s SDLP mayor, Gerard Diver, for hosting an informal reception, mainly for the Territorial Army, at Guildhall in the city.

To clarify then, republicans object to the mayor hosting an informal reception, with no military trappings or uniforms, behind closed doors, to welcome home mainly TA soldiers from the city who happen to have been serving in dangerous places throughout the world. A stunning degree of intolerance. Sinn Féin is not interested in inclusion or reaching an accommodation with unionists as is becoming increasingly clear. Instead, it intends to combat every vestige of British identity on the island of Ireland.

Well done to Mr Diver for showing that there some nationalists appreciate what concepts like ‘sharing’ and ‘respect’ actually entail and are prepared to put them into action, rather than merely talking about them.

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