Kevin Myers rips into The Guardian

Early this year the Guardian provided blanket coverage of Sinn Fein’s ‘Irish Unity’ conference in London.  A questionable editorial choice, given that the talking shop was considered irrelevant by just about every other British newspaper.

Usually its pages are light on comment from Northern Ireland, but the paper’s one regular contributor of Ulster opinion is a certain Gerry Adams.  Whatever patronising, tacked together, imbecilic garbage occurs to the Sinn Féin president, can’t be rushed to the Guardian’s presses quickly enough.

His latest sortie draws ridiculous parallels between Afghanistan and the Northern Irish Troubles.  And I only wish that Kevin Myers response had also been carried by a national British paper.  It appeared in the Irish Independent and you can also read the full article in today’s Belfast Telegraph.  Here I reproduce my edited highlights.

I'll take criticisms of NATO/US/British policies in Afghanistan from anyone -- Amnesty International, the Quakers, the Greens, even The Kingstown Presbyterian Sewing Circle -- but by God I won't take it from that lying Pharisee, Mr Gerard Adams, MP, who now swears he was never in the IRA. There's a lawful war in Afghanistan, authorised by the UN, in which soldiers from 40 countries -- including Ireland -- are serving. So what in the name of all the gods of journalism is 'The Guardian' doing, employing a defeated terrorist warlord as a moral arbiter over the British Army that had effectively beaten  

NOW, I'm not really too surprised that the wretched little Jolyon or Tarquin of 'The Guardian' -- who commissioned Gerry Adams to write a moralising sermon about Afghanistan -- apparently knows nothing about events in Northern Ireland. After all, few English people usually seem capable of remembering anything at all about Ireland, but English liberals, out of an apparent mixture of masochistic insipidity and pathological self-loathing, seem positively to rejoice in regular recitals of British atrocities. So naturally, Jolyon or Tarquin are probably totally unaware of the IRA's murderous deeds: Birmingham (21 dead), White Cross (10 dead) and La Mon (12 dead, including three married couples), never mind Gerry Adams's many little japes.

But have 'The Guardian' features editors already forgotten the allegations of only a few months ago, that for two decades, Gerry Adams had done nothing substantial about a republican who decades before had been accused of child-rape? The alleged victim finally told Gerry Adams about this accusation 22 years ago -- and the result was not the usual IRA response: a bag over the head, and a hole in both. No indeed: the Sinn Fein activist in question moved from Belfast to Sinn Fein circles in Dundalk, and later to the US and Donegal.

So, as a matter of interest, would 'The Guardian' ever commission an article denouncing British policy in Afghanistan from an Irish Catholic bishop, against whom were resting allegations of passivity over child-abuse such as those being made against Gerry Adams MP?