Booooooooooooo!
Posted by Jim on October 16, 2019
‘De Souza’ Ruling A Lesson In Reality
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Sean Bresnahan shares his thoughts on the meaning of a recent court ruling.
The Good Friday Agreement is an elastic vehicle which Britain utilises to normalise her claim to sovereignty in Ireland, this through presenting as though her constitution has been penetrated when it hasn’t.
The ‘De Souza’ ruling today in Belfast — that it is merely Irish identity, and not Irish citizenship, which the British Government agreed to honour under the Good Friday Agreement — makes this crystal clear. For this reason I welcome it, for to be effective in Republican struggle we must deal in political realities, rather than ambiguous deceits.
It, today’s ruling, confirms — were there any doubt — that the current political arrangements here constitute an internal settlement, whose institutional ‘add-ons’ of an Irish hue in no way impact Britain’s political claims to Ireland.
It is surely now obvious, were it not so already, that we must speed up the business of clearing away that settlement, to stand in its stead the Irish Republic.
Under its writ, the Ulster Protestants can retain British identity (should they desire to do so) but they will no longer be citizens of the United Kingdom, or of whatever British dominion is stood on its territorial remnant post-the Union. That is the political logic of today’s ruling, though perhaps those who sought it are too ignorant to realise.
Though perverse it may seem, this again is to be welcomed. For let it be clear — come the Irish Republic every vestige of the British political connection must be consigned to the dustbin of history, where each and all of them belong.
We can share our country together going forward, cognisant and inclusive of our different identities and traditions, but it will be as free and equal citizens of the Republic — as it always ought to have been.
Any notion of a future political configuration that preserves Britain’s position into a supposed United Ireland, with a compromise to be entered into in the area of national sovereignty, should now be wholly resiled from — just as was the case by the British state today, in regards to our supposed Irish citizenship.
Official Communication from the UFA
Posted by Jim on October 15, 2019
53RD ANNIVERSARY OF 23RD STREET FIRE
On Thursday, October 17, 2019, at 1100 hours, the Department will commemorate the 53rd Anniversary of the 23rd Street Fire, at which twelve members of the Department made the Supreme Sacrifice on October 17, 1966. The ceremony will take place at the location of the fire, 4 East 23rd Street (corner of Broadway). All off-duty members and their families are invited to attend. Members are requested to attend in dress uniform.
MEMORIAL MASS
Squad 18 will be celebrating their Annual Mass in honor of all members of Engine 18/Squad 18 that have passed either Line of Duty or
E16/L7 ANNUAL 23RD STREET MEMORIAL MASS
The officers and firefighters of Engine 16/Tower Ladder 7 cordially invite all active and retired members and their families to their annual 23rd Street Memorial Mass on October 19, 2019, at 11:00 AM. Mass will be held at the Chapel of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, 325 East 33rd Street, NY, NY 10016. All members are requested to attend in Class A Uniform. For more information, call 212-570-4216.
PLAQUE DEDICATION
On Wednesday, October 23, 2019, at 1100 hours, a Plaque Dedication will be held honoring the memory of Firefighter Michael J. Reilly, E-79, who died on October 23, 2018. The dedication will take place in the quarters of E-79/L-37/B-27, 2928 Briggs Avenue, Bronx, NY. All off-duty members and their families are invited to attend. Members are requested to attend in dress uniform.
PLAQUE DEDICATION
On Thursday, October 24, 2019, at 1100 hours, a Plaque Dedication will be held honoring the memory of Captain Victor C. Valva, E-167, who died on February 19, 2018. The dedication will take place in the quarters of Engine 167 & Ladder 87, 345 Annadale Road, Staten Island, NY. All off-duty members and their families are invited to attend. Members are requested to attend in dress uniform.
Tories must grasp the profound stupidity of their approach to the North
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Brexit deal depends on Britain restoring disinterest towards Northern Ireland
Fintan O’Toole. Irish Times. Dublin. Tuesday, October 15, 2019
I try not to be a pedant but I do get annoyed when people use “disinterested” when they mean “uninterested”. To be disinterested is to be impartial, to deal honestly with other people without seeking to advance one’s own interests. To be uninterested is not to care about what happens to those people. One of the reasons Brexit has been such a mess is that the British government has seriously confused these two attitudes to Northern Ireland. It has managed, under both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, simultaneously to abandon its duty to be disinterested and to be fundamentally uninterested. If a Brexit deal is finally to emerge, it will be because the British have been forced to grasp the profound stupidity of this combination.
The Belfast Agreement is very clear on the idea of disinterested government. It requires that “whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, the power of the sovereign government with jurisdiction there shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions.” This requirement has been openly flouted since May’s ill-starred election of 2017 in which the Tories lost their majority in parliament. Impartiality has been abandoned in favor of a formal alliance with one party, the DUP, whose support lies almost entirely within one politico-religious tradition.
But this abandonment of the duty to be disinterested has gone hand-in-hand with a lack of interest. The Tories have been fundamentally indifferent to the desires of most people in Northern Ireland, to the realities of life for the Border communities, to the fragility of the peace process and to the consequences of the recreation of a hard Border. In this, they have been faithful to the instincts of their own voters and members: 75 per cent of Tory voters say the collapse of the peace process in Northern Ireland is a price worth paying for Brexit and 60 per cent of party members say Northern Ireland leaving the UK is an acceptable consequence of Brexit. The message the DUP has failed to get is: they’re just not that into you.
It is quite a feat to be both nakedly partial and essentially unconcerned and its consequence is, of course, utter incoherence. The abandonment of impartiality led to a rhetoric of the “precious, precious union”. But the lack of real interest in that peculiar part of the Union known as Northern Ireland has made British governments incapable of addressing the real problems of the peace process and the Border with any credibility or indeed honesty: we passionately love Northern Ireland but not enough to take its specific history and geography seriously. This, in essence, is why the Brexit tractor has been stuck in the muddy fields of Fermanagh and Tyrone, spinning its wheels ever more frantically but going nowhere.
Willful erasure
The most ludicrous effect of this contradiction has been the willful erasure of an obvious truth that both the British government and the DUP themselves accepted and articulated in the immediate period after the Brexit referendum: that Northern Ireland is different to Britain and that therefore Brexit would have to be different for Northern Ireland. It is hard to remember, after so much nonsense, that this was once a truth universally acknowledged in post-referendum discourse.
The British government’s first substantial Brexit plan, the white paper of February 2017, says: “The government recognizes that Northern Ireland’s particular circumstances present a range of particular challenges to be taken into account when preparing for our exit from the EU.” Even before that, Arlene Foster (yes that Arlene Foster) had put her name beside that of Martin McGuinness in a joint letter of August 2016 to May stressing that “this region (i.e. Northern Ireland) is unique” and actually demanding that the prime minister be aware of the “unique aspects of negotiations that arise from the Border”.
But the result of the 2017 election created a toxic collusion in which the DUP, drunk on the illusion of power, spun the fantasy that Brexit could be exactly the same for Northern Ireland as for Somerset or Warwickshire and May (against her better judgement) indulged it. Out went “particular” and “unique”; in came “exactly the same”. More than two years have been wasted on the pursuit of a proposition that both the British government and the DUP knew to be unreal. But in the manual of Brexit for slow learners, the last chapter of this volume was always going to be the same as the first: go back to the plain truth that Northern Ireland is unique and that, if it really has to endure Brexit, it must have a bespoke version. Its Brexit suit cannot be off the peg —it must be made to measure.
If a deal is now to be possible, Boris Johnson must restore some semblance of disinterestedness by acknowledging that Northern Ireland is not the DUP. And he must, however belatedly, try to seem interested in the realities of the place and its communities. It would be too much to expect either of these conversions to be sincere. But they are the key to the one thing that really interests Johnson: his own survival.
END