Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

For some years now, Sinn Fein’s representatives have been spouting platitudes about accommodating unionists in an “agreed Ireland”.  The party’s latest bout of navel-gazing is prompted (it claims) by the aftermath of of the EU referendum. Brexit, Sinn Fein says, “changes everything”, including the assumption that unionists will necessarily oppose “Irish unity”. In its new document, Towards a United Ireland , the party proposes a series of ideas to recognise the “unique identity of Northern unionists and the British cultural identity”.   Alex Kane does a good job of debunking the view that unionism , or Northern Ireland as an entity, can survive Irish unity.  I agree with him.  Unfortunately, though, the notion that the political divide in Northern Ireland centres on identity rather than sovereignty is deeply ingrained, and not just among nationalists. Over the past few decades, Sinn Fein has changed the way it talks about unionists, either because its id...

The story of Northern Ireland’s violent past continues to be redrawn, as the republican movement seeks to cast the British state as an aggressor and campaigns to incriminate soldiers and policemen, while obscuring the deadly role played by the IRA and other terrorists.  It’s a process achieved by describing counter-terrorism and intelligence operations as ‘collusion’ and focussing on the proportionally small number of incidents during the Troubles perpetrated, or allegedly perpetrated, by members of the security forces. In November, the DUP and Sinn Fein agreed the Fresh Start document at Stormont, following ten weeks of negotiations.  It became easy to forget, after all the ensuing self-congratulations, that the crisis which prompted those talks was created by the IRA’s suspected involvement in a murder and Sinn Fein’s links to its Army Council. Some passages of the Fresh Start agreement addressed paramilitarism in Northern Ireland, committing resources to fight...

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 retaine...

Sinn Fein reps are quite the culture vultures this week, with the notable exception of culture minister Caral Ni Chuilin.    Máirtín Ó Muilleoir is curating an exhibition of ‘political art’ hosted at the Golden Thread Gallery.   It includes an offering by Conrad Atkinson (above), which apparently caused controversy back in the 70s, when Protestant museum workers refused to hang the painting at the Ulster Museum.   As it happens, they may have acted on aesthetic rather than sectarian motivations, because, aside from its questionable 'political message', the artwork looks rather like it was painted by a disturbed four year old child.      However all art exhibitions are certainly not equal in Shinner land.  According to the Irish News our so called culture minister has declined an invitation to attend the Royal Ulster Academy’s 130 th Annual Exhibition , which gets underway at the Ulster Museum today.  One of its exh...

"Wellity, wellity, wellity" as Homer Simpson once observed.  We've finally seen it all.  Not quite Lord Gerry of Andersonstown,  but certainly Baron of the Manor of Northstead.  In reply to a question from Nigel Dodds, the prime minister confirmed: "I'm not sure that Gerry Adams will be delighted to be Baron of the Manor of Northstead. But nonetheless I'm pleased that tradition has been maintained." Let's hope the interviewers in southern Ireland are appraised of the Sinn Féin president's new title.  He ought to be addressed properly during the election campaign.

In yesterday's Belfast Telegraph I argued that, if Northern Ireland remained "quite civilised" during the Troubles, it was no thanks to Pat Sheehan or other IRA members. Is it a shock that Pat Sheehan, convicted IRA bomber-turned-West Belfast MLA, has a warped view of the Troubles? As the latest back-street revolutionary to turn Armani-clad seer and represent Sinn Fein at Stormont, it would be more surprising if he saw republican violence for the futile nihilism it was, rather than as a "probably quite civilised" campaign. That won't relieve the hurt and revulsion felt by victims of 30 years of IRA 'civility' when they read his comments - made in an interview with David McKittrick. The Assemblyman, recently co-opted to replace Gerry Adams, lauds the organisation for its restraint: "The IRA, if it had wanted to kill Protestants, could have left a 1,000lb car-bomb on the Shankill," he reasons. Of course, the IRA did actually leave a bomb o...

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 Inter...

In a column in yesterday's Irish News  (as ever paywall and facsimile in situ) I considered the recent violence in Belfast. Our traditional summer riots this year acquired added menace due to the close involvement of dissident republicans.  Using the Orange marching season as their pretext, paramilitary groups orchestrated violence in several areas, marshalling an army of young foot soldiers, distinguished by their loathing for the police, and dismissed by Sinn Féin as ’anti-social elements’.  Despite this direction by shadowy forces, and the obvious parallels with trouble from another era, recent events have a distinct modern edge.   Between cameramen - who jostle with the rioters - helicopters and mobile phones, the latest disorder in North Belfast was captured for posterity from every conceivable angle.   These are the ‘Youtube riots’ of a new generation and a proliferation of amateur video merely focuses yet another spotlight on the Police Service of N...

Predictably, there’s been an enormous quantity of analysis and reportage, following the publication of the Saville Report on Tuesday.  If posting has been light over the past couple of days, it’s because I’ve been making an effort to digest the best of it. There is a lot to commend the thrust of Turgon’s post on Slugger O’Toole, which examines unionist reaction to Saville.  He identifies two ’predictable’ responses which he believes are emblematic. One, as typified by Gregory Campbell, casts doubt on the report’s interpretation.  The other, as articulated by Sir Reg Empey and others, points to a disproportionate concentration of resources on the victims of Bloody Sunday, as opposed to victims of Republican violence. I accept that these arguments have been raised and that they are, as Turgon contends, ’understandable’.  I also agree with his broader point that, should we deny moral equivalence between terror groups and the British army, we should also expect st...

In today's Belfast Telegraph I use Gerry Adams' latest US Tour as a jumping off point to examine Sinn Féin's lack of focus on the people who will actually decide the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. The annual St Patrick's Day exodus to the United States is not what it used to be. During the 1990s, Northern Ireland would gratefully empty its entire cohort of politicians, clutching suitcases full of green clover and emerald ties, unto a fleet of Boeing 747s bound for Washington. Stormont's most ardent pedlar of Irish kitsch then is still, all these years later, its greatest enthusiast for a transatlantic jolly. Gerry Adams arrived in Boston on Saturday, scheduled for a full week of paddywhackery, focussed on promoting the goal of ‘Irish unity' among the island's diaspora. He really needn't bother. The Sinn Fein president is already treated like a superstar by the section of Irish America he prefers to court. Adams’s breakfast date on Sunday mor...

Now I don't know whether much of the Northern Bank millions remains unspent by Sinn Féin and the IRA, but if there is a spare $500,000 still lying around republican coffers it could serve as an opening bid for this rather flimsy looking item. The Bloomsbury auction house in New York is charged with selling "the only full-sized tricolour of the 1916 rising extant" . Apparently it was retrieved by British forces from the GPO in Dublin. It might be, as the blurb points out, a flag "of enormous historic importance", but I would suggest, whoever buys this piece of Irish linen has too much money. It's estimated to raise between $500,000 - $700,000 USD!

Sinn Fein’s ‘Irish Unity’ world tour has reached our nation’s capital: London. A venue which has more relevance to Northern Ireland politics than the United States of America, though hardly replete with the people who must be persuaded of the merits of a united Ireland, if it is to ever to become a reality. Although the conference is as irrelevant as ever, it does offer a neat guide to Republicans’ fellow travellers in the United Kingdom. Despite fitful interest in politics in Northern Ireland, the Guardian has decided to offer blanket coverage. Is the newspaper an unofficial sponsor of this event? I see that regular contributor, husband of the paper’s deputy editor and former republican prisoner, Ronan Bennett, is taking part. Certainly it’s unusual to find so much comment about Northern Ireland appearing at CIF all at once. Martin McGuinness rolls out his stock platitudes , Margaret Ward, a regular Sinn Féin mouthpiece, does her bit and Paul Bew’s dissenting opinion is adorn...

Is anyone else profoundly, stultifyingly, mind-numbingly bored by the saga unfolding at Hillsborough? From its outset I’ve been cynical about the process. Talks conducted between the DUP and Sinn Féin, Siamese twins bound together by common dependence on dysfunctional carve-up at Stormont, were never likely to deliver a genuine fresh start for power-sharing. But over the course of the past week cynicism had been replaced by tedium. We have had news of countless ’breakthroughs’, several impending and significant arrivals by prime ministers and even a US foreign secretary, a welter of leaking and spinning which has amounted to nothing. Meanwhile, at Stormont, Assembly business has effectively ground to a halt. The UUP and SDLP have participated, waiting to be included in the process at Hillsborough, but the DUP and Sinn Féin have been working with skeleton teams. Indeed Jeffrey Donaldson, Nigel Dodds and other figures have been consigned to the business of every day politics, seemin...

Eoghan Harris is a commentator accustomed to transgressing republican shibboleths. In his latest Sunday Independent piece he ponders Gerry Adams’ response to a family history disfigured by involvement in campaigns of terrorist violence, as well as paedophilia. Although Harris takes a circuitous, and rather more interesting route, he reaches a conclusion which echoes my own reflections on the Sinn Féin president’s skewed sense of morality. It is ‘time (Adams) took the final step and admitted that the armed struggle “besmirched” the tricolour as much as the abuse’. Gerry Adams might command sympathy by describing shame at the abusive actions of his father. He might, Harris hints, even seek to exploit a national mood of sympathy, as the Republic of Ireland as a society grapples with its own issues around clerical and institutional abuse. But if we are generous, and allow that Adams’ motivations may not be exclusively tactical and manipulative, still, we can hardly applaud his cando...

Gerry Adams’ influence within Republicanism might be on the wane, but he has lost none of his capacity to astound and revolt. First we had Adams’ interview on Christ and forgiveness. Now another clear example of the Sinn Féin president’s warped morality has emerged. Speaking about ‘Republican honours’ accorded to his father, who had repeatedly abused children within his own family, Adams’ observed, “I didn’t want him buried with the tricolour, I think he besmirched it.” It is impossible to read this statement without reflecting on a succession of IRA funerals which Adams was happy to attend. Thomas Begley, who killed himself in the process of murdering nine Saturday afternoon shoppers on the Shankill Road, clearly did not ‘besmirch’ the tricolour, in Adams’ estimation. He was happy to act as Begley’s pall bearer. Gerry feels that emotional, physical and sexual abuse of children brings shame on the Republic of Ireland flag whilst murder, maiming, torture and all manner of other c...

Gerry Adams, or 'this blog' as he now prefers to call himself, would no doubt be keen to assure voters that they are not witnessing the fag end of his political career. After all, he recently assured the media that he will remain Sinn Féin's president as long as he damn well pleases (or words to that effect). Democracy, eh? Still, there's no harm in having more than one string to your bow. Gerry is already a confirmed man of letters (albeit one who attracts widespread academic derision) and 'a blog'. Now he's turning his attention to the tourist industry , offering guided tours of South Armagh. I'm sure 'Cú Chulainn Tours', staffed by ex republican terrorists, offers a highly impartial account of the area's history!

I don’t suppose that I was the only one reminded of Stuart Neville’s novel ‘The Twelve’ , when I read newspaper reports detailing SOCA’s seizure of a South Armagh republican’s assets, which took place yesterday. Newsline featured pictures of Sean Gerard Hughes’ farm, and I almost expected to hear the whine of an injured bull terrier. Sinn Féin’s response has, thus far, only exacerbated the sense of déjà vu. Neville’s book was a work of fiction, but the Republican movement which provided its backdrop hardly required a painstaking imaginative effort. For the uninitiated, or those outside Northern Ireland, the Serious Organised Crime Agency was granted a court order to seize assets belonging to Hughes, on the grounds that they are suspected to come from laundering the proceeds of mortgage fraud, evading tax and fiddling the benefit system. He has previously been convicted of fraudulently claiming income support. Sinn Féin’s MP for the area, Conor Murphy, who is also Regional Develop...

From teargas , sorry ‘léargas’, the virtual tree from which the wise old owl of Sinn Féin dispenses pellets of ‘insight’, “This blog travels to Wales on Tuesday – to Swansea – to speak to the British Irish Parliamentary Assembly. I will tell that forum that while Irish republicans want our rights, we do not seek to deny the rights of anyone else. We want justice for all and privilege for none.” A paragraph which teaches us, not only that the Provos’ president is scheduled to address BIPA’s latest plenary session this morning, but that Gerry Adams has taken to describing himself, in the third person, as a ‘blog’. ‘The blog’ has, in recent months, been on a veritable world tour promoting ‘Irish unity’. Slugger O’Toole has a preview of what he (it?) will say on the latest leg, other than, presumably, “HELLO SWANSEA!”. Two passages in particular jump out from amongst the leaden, Orwellian Shinnerspeak which ‘the blog’ intends to deliver. In deference to the ‘east-west’ sensibili...

It is hardly every day that one feels compelled to defend Peter Mandelson. However, when he is accused of ignorance and obnoxiousness by a purveyor of sentimental Irish American drivel its hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for Labour’s ‘dark lord’. Niall O’Dowd criticises Mandelson’s conduct as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, endorsing Bertie Ahern’s contention that he hampered the peace process. If acknowledging the existence of a view which contradicted Republicans’ nationalist orthodoxies and recognising that Sinn Féin / IRA did not comprise a trustworthy group, comprised a road block to progress, then Mandelson erected that obstacle. Actually the former Secretary of State helped build trust between unionists and the Labour administration. But no doubt the Irish American view is that he was guilty of encouraging ‘false consciousness’ by listening to two sides, rather than one.

In a recent article , Simon Jenkins wrote about the ‘raucous child’ which inevitably accompanies history, ‘lessons to be learned’. Over the past few days I have been immersed in two separate accounts which attempt to portray this difficult infant, chaperoned by partial histories of terror campaigns. Richard English’s ‘Terrorism: How to Respond’ purports to take an essentialist approach to its topic, but it is a puzzling book, that stresses the importance of the unique context in which each terrorist group operates, yet attempts to apply principles which it derives from Northern Ireland’s experience rather widely. In contrast, ‘Talking to Terrorists’ by Bew, Frampton and Gurruchaga, consciously rejects the notion that a particular template can be exported internationally. Importantly, it contends that the Ulster peace process has in any case been misinterpreted, even as its purported lessons have been cited as a model that can help resolve conflicts elsewhere. English’s short book...