Family Requests Donations to Lil’ Bravest

Posted by Jim on January 25, 2019

Bombing Derry

Posted by Jim on

Anthony McIntyre shares his thoughts on the weekend bomb attack in Derry. 

The online commentary from Derry citizens exudes a collective sigh of relief that their young people had the good fortune to escape being killed in a bomb attack on a public place by one of the armed republican militias in the city. That relief is fused with a palpable anger that the bombers targeted Derry streets in the first place. A flavour for the feeling is captured in the raw Twitter comment from Derry:

They represent no one, they are not patriots they are criminals. When your fight for freedom restricts the lives of the people you claim to fight for, its futile … Fuck every last one of you and your ’cause’.

Strong stuff, seemingly reflecting a much wider band of sentiment as well. There is no room for doubt that the people of Derry want to bury the republican physical force tradition, not their children.

The New IRA as it is colloquially known has been blamed although to date no republican body has been willing to come out and stand over the indefensible and reprehensible. Apart from some contextual mumblings and stale rhetoric from fraternal groups or individuals, there has been no admission of responsibility. The public of Derry, seemingly, is not permitted to know who is bombing it or why it is being bombed. The rule of Closed Material Proceedings appears to apply.

The PSNI have encouraged the perception of New IRA culpability through its arrest of several Saoradh activists. There is a common perception that both groups drink from the same well, with more than a few observers of the republican scene willing to see the relationship between Saoradh and the New IRA much like that which existed between Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA. Arrest Saoradh activists and by extension the New IRA is in the frame plus a legal political party is smeared in the process. A cop version of buy one get one free. It is sleight of hand. As the PSNI is so at ease with public lying, there is no particular reason to attach any weight to its justification for the arrests that “everything we do has to be lawful, proportional and necessary” when in fact much of what the force does is laughable, disproportionate and gratuitous. A more persuasive case has been made by solicitors acting on behalf of one of the arrested men:

There was never any question of charges in this case. This arrest was particularly cynical. Not a shred of incriminatory evidence was put to him in two days of interviews.

The independent political activist Emmet Doyle has reinforced scepticism towards the PSNI statement by saying:

despite all the whoha, four of the five people arrested by police are home, without charge. No doubt the fifth will follow so the question is why kick doors in and drag people to Musgrave for nothing?”

While the PSNI are simply unworthy of belief, they did not plant the bomb but took risks with their own lives shepherding the people of Derry to safety from a lethal device placed in Bishop Street by people who thus far have lacked both the moral and political conviction to stand over their actions.

21 years after the unmitigated and unpardonable atrocity inflicted by republicans on the civilian population of Omagh, it seems unfathomable that there remain republicans so divorced from the concept of rights other than their own, that they would still consider detonating a car bomb in a population centre. Whatever the purpose – we do not know because nobody from the militarist camp has told us – the discernible military effect was noise. Republicanism advanced not one solitary step either strategically or politically. The opposite in fact. Republicans of the armed sort have once again allowed themselves to be depicted as troglodytes who now and then emerge from tenebrous caverns to hurl spears at wider society. This, after having consulted some strange hieroglyphic drawings on the walls of their caves which they interpret as bestowing upon them the right to risk killing and maiming citizens. There is need for neither consultation nor approval, just the endorsement of the wall. Like some conceit-saturated British aristocrat from the film Braveheart claiming jus primae noctis.

It takes no leap of the imagination to conjure up the horrendous vista that the civilians of Derry were exposed to. The result of Saturday night’s attack could easily have been a homicidal catastrophe of Omagh scale proportion. Yet somebody still thought making a lot of noise was worth the risk. The video footage of a crowd of Derry youth being permitted by the bombers to walk past a primed bomb with absolutely no awareness of the danger they were placed in was nothing short of villainous negligence. When juxtaposed to the footage of one of the bombers running away from the scene to ensure his own safety, the image may yet become damningly defining for armed republicanism. The old pejorative of IRan Away that so stung and helped fuel the emergence and rise of the Provisional IRA, has acquired an added inflexion and will possibly endure.

Such injurious intonations add to the serious credibility problem that republican militias face. In the South, even if the persistent accusation against them is untrue – that they licence the criminal drug trade via taxation – and they have not therefore criminalised the physical force tradition by such arrantly criminal funding mechanisms, their warring with drugs cartels has caused people to regard them as something straight out of a Love/Hate set. The public see no 1916 type rebellion against the British, just street executions related to the drugs trade.

In Drogheda here, those who have commented about it discuss the Derry bombing as if it was an extension of the local bomb incidents that have plagued the town recently. Those occurrences are the result of an ongoing inter gang feud, and events in Derry are viewed in much the same light, just something that happens further up the road. When people invoke Nidge and Fran from Love/Hate in conversation to articulate their view of modern armed republicans, futility induced fatigue prevents me even attempting to disabuse them of their perception.

In the North, the current military prowess of armed republicanism has long been a standing joke amongst former Provisional IRA activists, for the most part seen as resembling the Provisionals’ civil administration teams, up to the task of beating the local hood, but little else. Many who took part in a serious guerrilla war are wary of dignifying the current posturing as a “war”, seeing the “revolutionary acts” as the make believe of pretenders performing a militaristic rain dance, put on for the purpose of headline grabbing. An oft quoted term to describe the leaders of the various grouplets is “egos”.

Even if such perceptions are false or exaggerated, their pervasive existence should alert any serious thinkers within armed republicanism to the impossibilist nature of the task they have undertaken and the incalculable damage being done to republicanism and its history. Since the Omagh bomb at least, the reputation of physical force republicanism has been in tatters.

Given that republicanism most certainly did not benefit in the slightest from the bombing of Derry, there is one very clear answer to the eternal political question of cui bono? British security services, eager to expand their security empire by exaggerating the threat posed by armed militias. Being beneficiaries is a far cry from the security services having any involvement. Still, various republican militias are legendary for their ineptitude and underachievement compared to the Provisional IRA. And as the latter’s competence in the field of internal security was nothing to write home about, it is easily conceivable that today’s militias, being even less competent are even more penetrated. We know from Omagh that the British security services are not easily absolved from blame or black operations.

The IRSP has taken to admonishing one of their members for stating publicly what others are speculating privately. Yet, if the hidden hand of the British was not involved in the bomb attack on Derry – there is no evidence thus far to show that it was – then we are left to conclude that some republican activists all on their own and without any nudging from the British are so rotten to the core that they would wilfully endanger the lives of Derry youth. A most sobering and shuddering thought.

As the author of an upcoming book on “dissident republicans”, Marisa McGlinchey, makes clear, there are many from that dissenting school of thought who simply would not countenance the Derry attack. That wider body of republican opinion needs to purge itself of this revolutionary arrogance which holds that the community of Derry has no right not to be bombed and that some masked militia has the right to bomb it. If republicans are insistent on freedom, then the right of a community to be free from republican violence must figure top of the agenda. Violence if ever resorted to has to be the last resort, never the first. It must also be strategically not traditionally driven. Republicans have no more right to bomb population centres in defence of republican doctrine than priests would have to burn people at the stake in defence of Catholic doctrine. In our current political climate where Ireland has rebelled against antiquated institutions and cultures which insist that their laws trump societal law, the republican physical force tradition now appears quasi fascist. Canon Law of the clerics or physical force law of the militarists can have no application to wider society.

Of course, this will be heresy to the heretic hunters. Evolution of ideas is invariably anathema to fundamentalists. As keepers of the flame with which they seek to burn others, without the flame they have nothing to keep, their raison d’etre extinguished with its final flicker. Nevertheless, their ahistorical view of a precept possessing a timeless immutable quality, unable to adapt to climate or circumstance, is ultimately pushed aside by the power of evolution.

The republican physical force tradition is not immune to that trend. Once an adjunct of republicanism, it is now an aberration. The popular working class nationalist mood has unquestionably shifted from one of Brits Out To Bombers Out. Republicanism, if it is not to belie itself, is ultimately a foil to absolutism of any hue, whether monarchical, political, military, clerical inter alia. As a creature of the Enlightenment it is bound by progress not regress, by the latitude of innovation rather than the deadweight of tradition. A gaggle of the self-appointed and the self-anointed is an apostolic succession better shunned by republicanism than deferred to. There is no intellectual or ethical basis for republican coexistence with absolutism. Dictatorships of army councils, like psalters of bishops, who seek to inflict their archaic and destructive doctrines on society should be told where to go.

Official Communication from the UFA

Posted by Jim on January 23, 2019

Theresa May intends to jettison the Good Friday Agreement

Posted by Jim on

Be warned, Theresa May intends to jettison the Good Friday Agreement  
Theresa May doesn’t have a reputation for flexibility and collaboration.Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast . Wednesday, January 23, 2019 

History has proved Charles de Gaulle right on all counts about British governments.

In his memoirs he wrote … “For England, (he preferred to call them the English) there is no alliance that would hold, no treaty respected, no truth which matters.” That was his conclusion after being tricked and traduced by the British throughout the last war, long before he became president of France.

He was right to veto the UK’s entry to the EEC as it was in 1963 and again in 1967. In 1963 he said, ‘England isn’t a big deal any more.’ De Gaulle correctly believed that Britain still clung to imperial delusions and preferred its ties to former colonies. He said, ‘The England of Kipling is dead.’ Leading figures in the Conservative party didn’t think so and, as De Gaulle predicted, sucked up to America as a way to masquerade as a world power. The UK wasn’t reconciled to being a medium-sized European power and in the intervening decades we see quite clearly still hasn’t become reconciled to that role.

When the British were finally admitted to the EEC in 1973 they joined with many reservations, political and psychological. Many British politicians continued to refer to ‘Europe’ because they never felt European or part of any European community. The British continually asked for special treatment as De Gaulle foresaw they would. They repeatedly asked for opt-outs which they received. Last March the prime minister of Luxembourg Xavier Bettel summed it up perfectly when he said: ‘They were in with a load of opt-outs. Now they are out, and want a load of opt-ins.’

Back to De Gaulle’s original description. There was no EEC or EU treaty that Britain fully accepted. The same is true today. Four times Theresa May accepted the “ backstop”, starting in December 2017. Yet since then she has repeatedly whined and whinged to have what she agreed undone. She actually wrote a letter to Donald Tusk on March 19 2018 committing to ‘a legally operative backstop solution’ in the Withdrawal Agreement. She then proceeded to send her ministers traipsing around the EU, or ‘Europe’ as she would call it, trying to get the “backstop”changed.

Eventually, in the summer May managed to get the “backstop” expanded – to appease the DUP – from being Northern Ireland specific, to embrace the whole UK. Remember, that was her idea to which Michel Barnier and the EU Commission reluctantly acceded. Then she signed up to it in the final Withdrawal Agreement last November, but immediately ratted on it in true, traditional British fashion just as David Davis ratted on the Joint Report of December 2017 within forty-eight hours.

In essence what all the thrashing about for the last week has been for is trying to find a way out of everything the British government has agreed in the past two years. It’s the same mindset that has dominated the UK’s relations with the EEC and EU for forty-five years. They want the EU to disregard its own rules and legal order to make a special case for the UK. The British government will only agree to a deal they have dictated and even then reserve the right to walk away from it if, some years later, they find they don’t like it. As Professor Brendan O’Leary told a conference on Brexit last summer, Britain is a fundamentally unreliable partner because ‘any parliament can unwind any treaty; it’s not binding in constitutional law.’

Thus for the last few years Britain has been unwinding the Good Friday Agreement because of the government’s reliance on the DUP. John Bruton, of all people, accused the British of ‘tearing up’ the GFA even though the Irish government changed its constitution by referendum to fulfil the requirements of the GFA. The British are wilfully allowing the institutions of the GFA, including the British-Irish Inter-Governmental Conference, and the all-Ireland bodies, to atrophy.

Every time Theresa May says no deal is better than a bad deal it means she intends to jettison the Good Friday Agreement. Of course you need to remember that only a British referendum matters.

“….stupid EU referendum….”

Posted by Jim on January 22, 2019

Tory party was David Cameron’s `only reason for dangerous, stupid EU referendum’
Bimpe Archer. Irish News. Belfast. Tuesday, January 22, 2019

FORMER British prime minister’s “only reason was his own party” for a “dangerous, stupid” EU referendum, a new BBC documentary hears.

During an interview for `Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil’, European Council president Donald Tusk said Mr Cameron admitted he only promised the 2016 vote because he expected to be in another coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who would veto it.

The series, which starts on Monday January 28, features interviews with political figures from all sides of Brexit, including former chancellor George Osborne, ex-foreign secretary William Hague, president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker and former French presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande.

However, the producers said yesterday, Mr. Cameron, who resigned in 2016 after leading the failed `Remain’ campaign, declined to take part because he has signed an exclusive deal for his memoirs.

Instead former Polish prime minister Mr. Tusk recounts a discussion with him before the referendum, when the then Tory leader was attempting to win concessions from other EU leaders on migrant benefits.

“I told him bluntly, come on David, get real. I know that all prime ministers are promising to help you, but believe me the truth is that no one has an appetite for revolution in Europe only because of your stupid referendum,” Mr. Tusk said.

“If you try to force us, to hurry us, you will lose everything. And for the first time I saw something close to fear in his eyes. He finally realized what a challenge he was facing.”

The former Polish prime minister recalls asking: “Why did you decide on this referendum … it’s so dangerous, so even stupid, you know, and he told me – and I was really amazed and even shocked – that the only reason was his own party”

He said Cameron “felt really safe, because he thought … that there’s no risk of a referendum, because his coalition partner, the Liberals, would block this idea of a referendum.

“But then, surprisingly, he won [the election] and there was no coalition partner. So paradoxically, David Cameron became the real victim of his own victory.”

The further two episodes will look at the Greek financial meltdown and the Syrian migrant crisis.