Analysis: Time to go

Posted by Jim on March 10, 2019

There are many reasons you might think Karen Bradley should resign, but
the Derry Girls may not be the first one that comes to mind.

You may already know this, but Derry Girls is a comedy television series
set in the 1990s. It is in its second series, and it is not hard to see
why it works.  It is well written and manages to present a comedic view
of an awful time in Derry’s terrible history, from the view of some
innocent, and some not-so-innocent, schoolgirls.

It is black, gallows humour, but it is all in good fun, despite the
number of silly jokes that would have been considered inappropriately
sectarian in the past.

In the past. People have moved on. But not the Tories, not the NIO, and
and definitely not Karen Bradley, who spent this week trying to
indemnify the murders of Irish people by the British state.

The statement she made to MPs on Wednesday are of the kind made at
private luncheons and dinners by those that were regularly sent over to
Ireland to direct the killing. The words could as easily have come from
General Tuzo or Kitson or Jackson, or from Ted Heath or Margaret
Thatcher themselves. In the context of Britain’s Dirty War, and their
propaganda war, she delivered the kind of guarantee that would have been
intended to boost the mercenary killers as they set about the slaughter
of innocents.

The people of Ireland, North or South, Protestant or Catholic, have
every right to be in a blind, burning rage over her statement, because
it applies to all of us equally, regardless of creed or political
persuasion. They are colonial in nature. They put all Irish people on a
lower level of humanity to the British.

The British government has always viewed this island as a colony,
inhabited by the equivalent of Hutus and Tutsis, warring natives who can
be set against each other for England’s own advantage.

Despite this, what we have seen for the past 25 years is people in the
north of Ireland trying to make peace with each other. And what we see
very clearly this week is that they have been doing this in the absence
of any understanding or concern by the British government.

But we are still here, and we are still trying to move on. Just like the
Derry girls, we can laugh at the crazy misconceptions which Catholics
had for Protestants and vice versa, the half-baked ideas about each
others’ taste in music or our imagined customs.

The truth of the situation, as republicans have always said, is that we
are no different from each other than the people of Ballybofey are from
those in Stranorlar, or the folk of Norwich are from those in Ipswich.
Barely enough to inspire an energetic game of football.

And the fact that people can laugh about these imagined differences,
now, is testimony to the efforts of those pacifists who believed that
peace by itself could be the solution to the conflict here.

But into this just enterprise, we see once again a British government
which appears hell-bent on conflict. Not just with such statements,
which seek to justify the heinous massacres of their past, but also
future killings; and not just with their callous disregard of the peace
process; but now, more clearly than ever, their plan to reimpose their
border, which has always been the primary source of conflict in Ireland,
and retains the potential to reignite it.

It might be tempting to believe the Tories are just flailing towards
disaster because of some ineptitude or misunderstanding or
short-sightedness. Karen Bradley, in her own defence, has tried to
present herself as some sort of political Bridget Jones, a female Boris
Johnson whose incompetence is meant to be proof of her blue-blooded
sincerity.

But there was nothing accidental about her statement. Her message, and
the Brexit agenda which the Tories are implementing, are the direct
result of a singular need to stay in power through the support of the
DUP and the most xenophobic elements of their own party.

It is not right that the people of Ireland must pick up the pieces of a
conflict imposed on us, only to have them kicked away by the
short-termism of a bloodthirsty Tory regime which has zero mandate here.

Unless someone shouts stop, the victims of such a trajectory will be
Catholics and Protestants alike, and perhaps another generation of
British soldiers of the kind Bradley thought she was defending.

Set against the thousands of lives lost, regardless of how you calculate
the victims or the combatants, it is something that should not be
tolerated for a day by any of us, regardless of our politics.

And that is why Catholics and Protestants, Derry girls and Ballymena
boys, should unite in making sure Karen Bradley and her kind do not get
the chance to wreck our future once again.