Posted by Jim on October 22, 2018
Jingoism can’t disguise DUP’s reckless Brexit agenda
By Sinn Fein deputy leader Michelle O’Neill
There are many great ironies of the DUP’s current position on the Brexit
debacle.
Arlene Foster’s party claims they cannot resile from their ‘blood red’
lines of no extra checks on goods coming from Britain to these shores
because that would apparently undermine the constitutional integrity of
the union they cherish.
It’s a far cry from the days when, at the height of the BSE crisis, Ian
Paisley pragmatically declared that our cows are Irish.
But it also ignores the fact that the DUP’s view of the world,
particularly on social, moral and religious issues, simply would not be
tolerated elsewhere in that union.
Marriage equality, women’s healthcare rights, language rights and
inquest rights are all taken for granted everywhere else on these
islands.
Not so here in the north of Ireland where the DUP is still not prepared
to countenance 21st century rights for 21st century citizens.
Clearly, there is very little unity in the DUP’s union.
Despite this, the DUP leadership has made it clear that our economic
future is a secondary concern in comparison.
Arlene Foster is preparing to have a train crash Brexit in pursuit of a
narrow agenda with no regard for the majority who voted to remain or for
any of the people of the north.
The disunited union must be protected at all costs and to hell with the
economic consequences for the north and for future generations.
It is a gross act of political and economic vandalism, the price of
which will have to be paid by the ordinary people who live here.
They are refusing to accept the warnings of business leaders, experts
and the majority of citizens that the north cannot withstand exclusion
from the European Single Market and Customs Union.
They thumb their nose at the flexibility of the EU negotiators who have
offered a backstop solution that effectively provides the north with the
best of both worlds – unfettered access to both the European and British
markets.
Instead, they take their lead from hard Brexiteers like Boris Johnson
and Jacob Rees-Mogg who pine for the days of empire when the natives
would take what they were given and be grateful for it.
They regurgitate the myth that the rest of the world will be queuing up
to sign trade deals with post-Brexit Britain.
This ignores the cold hard economic reality that no nation is going to
give a better trade deal to a country of 70 million as opposed to an
economic bloc of 420 million.
But try as they might, the DUP can’t wish away economies of scale,
demand and supply or basic economics.
And no amount of flag-waving jingoism can disguise the reckless agenda
they are pursuing.
This disastrous approach will continue to play out like a slow-motion
train crash over the coming days and weeks as the Brexit negotiations
reach a critical point.
Time will tell if the DUP will pull back from the brink.
However, the fear is that, 21 months after the collapse of Stormont,
this is a party that has lost the run of itself. Intoxicated by
arrogance and the feteing by the right-wing of Tory Party, the DUP may
no longer even be capable of political pragmatism in the interests of
the people it claims to represent.
Thankfully for us all, they do not speak for the majority on Brexit.
And they do not have a veto on either the Irish Government or the EU27.
So whatever plays out in the coming days and weeks in the Tory civil
war, Dublin and Brussels must ensure the people of this island do not
become collateral damage in either.
Posted by Jim on
Concerns are growing that a failure to negotiate a solution to the
issue of the border after Brexit could spark a return of serious
violence in the north of Ireland.
The Dublin government clashed with the unionist DUP after they accused
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of scaremongering over the potential for
conflict.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney then accused the Tories and
DUP of ignoring or denying the risk for political reasons.
“There are some people who just don’t want to know because it doesn’t
suit the political narrative that the Northern Ireland border issue is
a really important issue for relationships on this island,” he said.
DUP Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson had condemned Varadkar’s decision to
show EU leaders in Brussels a newspaper story about a 1972 bomb attack
on a customs post in Armagh. He said it “scrapes the bottom of the very
deep barrel of threats, deception and rhetoric” and that it was
“despicable, low and rotten”.
Three IRA Volunteers, four customs officials and two lorry drivers died
in the attack at a British customs clearing station in the border town
of Newry.
Mr Varadkar said he used the story — just one of thousands of violent
incidents which have taken place at the border in recent decades — to
make sure that there was no sense that anyone in the Dublin government
was “in any way exaggerating” the “real risk” of a return to conflict.
The exchanges came after another week of fruitless efforts to convince
British negotiators to honour a promise of a ‘backstop’ that would
guarantee no return of border checks, first made in December last year.
Under pressure from the DUP and the far right within her party, British
prime minister Theresa May has suggested a future “expiration date” for
the backstop — a date when the border could once again be
remilitarised. That was quickly rejected by EU and Irish negotiators.
There have been statements and commentary by a number of unionist
hardliners on the potential of violence.
Earlier this month, the DUP were accused of making “dog whistle” calls
to loyalist paramilitaries after party leader Arlene Foster’s said she
had ‘blood red lines’ in the Brexit negotiations. A DUP official was
then reported as commenting that the party planned a “guerrilla war”
against any new regulations dividing Ireland and Britain. Loyalist
Jamie Bryson this week threatened a violent unionist reaction that
would “dwarf” the flag disturbances and Drumcree riots if their demands
for a hard border are not met.
A former British Army chief, General Richard Dannatt, has joined police
chiefs by warning of the possibility of a return to bloodshed in the
event of a hard border. Prominent Tory and TV celebrity Stanley
Johnson, father of senior Tory figure Boris Johnson, also made the
headlines when he blithely dismissed concerns over renewed conflict by
saying: “If the Irish want to shoot each other they will shoot each
other”.
Mr Coveney said his government was “trying to protect a very precious
peace and normality on the island of Ireland”. He said Mr Varadakar’s
comments were warranted and the Taoiseach was “dealing in facts”.
“If you speak to families living in the border area they will talk in
very emotive terms about their fears of the re-emergence of that border
infrastructure and it’s important to be honest about that.
“It doesn’t suit some people’s political narrative. It certainly
doesn’t suit people who advocate for Brexit because this is very
awkward and difficult to deal with but it’s the truth,” he added.
Mr Coveney said he believed a no-deal outcome was still very unlikely,
but in the event of a no-deal scenario, his government had no physical
contingency plans for border infrastructure as it would not be
accepted.
“I’m not going to create the impression that somehow by accident we’re
going to fall into a situation of being forced to reintroduce border
infrastructure” he said.
“I trust the British prime minister in terms of her [backstop]
commitments – it has been made in writing,” he added.
Although there has been an effective ceasefire, a number of republican
armed groups are understood to remain intact and to be in contact with
each other. A recent statement from Oglaigh na hEireann (ONH) indicated
it had held local discussions with the ‘new IRA’ and the INLA (Irish
National Liberation Army), as well as the previously unknown ‘North
Derry Republican Group’.
Sinn Fein leader May Lou McDonald said there could be no excuse “for a
return to conflict under any circumstances or provocation”. She added:
“It is reckless to risk progress, our agreements, and all that has been
achieved over the past decades. No leader or politician of integrity
would be prepared to play chicken or poker with our future and our
peace.”
Posted by Jim on
“This excellent article is a must-read for Members of Congress who wish to fully understand extreme British thinking on both Northern Ireland and Brexit. I have the honor of appearing along with the author, Fintan O’Toole, in the film “Bobby Sands:66 Days.” Mr. O’Toole has provided some of the very best analysis on the folly of Brexit—while at the same time brilliantly exposing how little, in fact, the extreme British leaders care for Northern Ireland, something which the extreme Unionsts in The North are unable to grasp.God help poor Ireland.” Fr. Sean McManus
A ‘precious union’? The Brexiters don’t care about Northern Ireland
Leavers ignore the issue of the hard border. They just use the supposedly sacred integrity of the UK as an excuse for no deal
Fintan O’Toole. The Guardian. London. Friday, October 1, 2018
To know what a thing is, you have to know where it begins and ends, and where its edges are. And the awkward fact is that the United Kingdom begins and ends in the blurry, meandering, impossibly ambiguous border that snakes its weary way around the six north-eastern counties of Ireland. This is a fact, not just of Irish history, but of British history.
If you listen to some of the more anguished Brexiters, you might get the impression that the Irish border is a devious plot against the people of the neighbouring island, a snare invented by the Irish to trap Britain in European vassalage. In reality, it was created at Westminster, through the Government of Ireland Act, which became law in May 1921. It is, first and foremost, a British problem and a British responsibility. At the heart of the current impasse over Brexit is a shocking refusal to accept that responsibility.
Brexit has always had a large dose of phoney populism – it is an elite project for extreme globalization wrapped up as a popular revolt against globalization. But it also has an equally large dose of phoney Unionism – it is an English national rebellion wrapped in the union flag. Among its many contradictions, perhaps the one in which the gap between rhetoric and reality yawns most widely is this one.
On the one hand, all the evidence is that neither those who voted for Brexit nor those who are seeking to drive it to the hardest possible conclusion, give a good ***damn for the Union, and in particular for Northern Ireland’s place within it. On the other, they are pretending to be willing to walk away from the Brexit negotiations at any cost if the bloody Irish and the scheming Europeans don’t stop making proposals for dealing with the Border question that would – horror of horrors – undermine what Theresa May calls “our precious union”.
Thus the need for a guarantee that there will be no Border infrastructure in Ireland is not a recognition of Britain’s duties to its own citizens. It is, in the words of the letter written to May this week by Boris Johnson, David Davis, Jacob Rees-Mogg and others, “a trap being set by the EU which it is vital we do not fall into”. In this self-pitying narrative, the basic facts of modern British history become a foreign conspiracy against “our status as a sovereign nation state”.
These people want a no-deal Brexit, and they are using the integrity of the Union as the excuse for it: the people of England, Scotland and Wales supposedly prefer to suffer a no-deal catastrophe than agree to checks on goods going between Stranraer and Larne. Such bureaucratic procedures – utterly invisible to the vast majority of the population – would allegedly amount to an act of sacrilege against the most sacred thing in the heart of every Briton: the integrity of the Union. They would suggest that Northern Ireland, contrary to a famous claim by Margaret Thatcher, is a little less British than her constituency of Finchley. And that can never be tolerated.
This has all the conviction of a brothel-keeper taking umbrage at the very mention of sex. At every stage of the Brexit process, we have seen complete indifference to the fate of Northern Ireland. The “precious union” stuff is a gaudy orange garment borrowed from the DUP to cover the most nakedly obvious attitude: this Irish border stuff concerns a faraway people of whom we know nothing and care less. It is not our concern but merely a distraction being used by the EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, to deny us the perfect Brexit we deserve and demand.
The evidence for this is threefold. First, in the 2016 referendum campaign, the leave side consistently refused to address the problems of Northern Ireland, the Good Friday agreement of 1998, or the Border. The best that could be got out of any of them was a double fantasy. The Border would not be a problem because the Republic of Ireland (never really recognised as an independent country) would just have to follow the UK out of the EU and return to the fold of what could again be called (political correctness be damned) the British Isles. And/or the EU would have to give post-Brexit Britain a fabulous trade deal – the easiest ever negotiated – that would ensure “frictionless” trade anyway, so again the border did not have to be considered.
Second, we know from the overwhelming survey evidence that English people who voted leave in 2016 or supported the Tories in 2017 felt little responsibility for Northern Ireland and did not care about the peace process. The most telling measure of commitment to a political union is whether or not you are content for taxes from the richest part to be used to subsidize services in the poorest. In the recently released Future of England study, just 25% of leave voters and 29% of people who voted Conservative in 2017 agreed with the proposition: “Revenue raised from taxpayers in England should also be distributed to Northern Ireland to help Northern Irish public services.” (Tellingly, the only people still willing to subsidize Northern Ireland are the remainers.)
And when asked whether “the unravelling of the peace process in Northern Ireland” is a “price worth paying” for Brexit that allows them to “take back control”, fully 83% of leave voters and 73% of Conservative voters agree that it is. This is not, surely, mere mindless cruelty – it expresses a deep belief that Northern Ireland is not “us”, that what happens “over there” is not our responsibility.
Third, since May triggered article 50, we have had, on the crucial border question, nothing but bluster and magical thinking. The prime minister has signed up twice, in December and in March, to the so-called backstop to ensure that Northern Ireland remains fully aligned with the Republic to avoid a hard Border. The rest of us are entitled to assume that she knew what she was doing. And yet here we still are, with May trying to wriggle away from these commitments. Why? Because they were predicated on the emergence of some as yet uninvented technology for invisible Border control – Johnson, while foreign secretary, seriously proposed that the 500km (310-mile) Irish border could be controlled like the congestion charge in London.
So spare us at least the hand-on-heart, tear-in-the-eye sentimentality – if this is what a precious Union amounts to, it is hard to imagine what a throwaway Union would look like. If the Brexiteers are really looking for a last ditch in which to fight for the purity of their cause, it should be somewhere they actually care about. They mentally ditched Northern Ireland a long time ago.
• Fintan O’Toole is a columist at the Irish Times and author of Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (published in November 2018)
Posted by Jim on
“The folly of Brexit has caused a series of lamentable reactions, but this outburst by Sammy Wison, DUP, must be one of the most appalling. (See below article from today’s Irish News of Belfast).
Taoiseach/Prime Minister Varadker is universally recognized as one of the good guys: a very smart, decent, fair-minded and capable man. He has shown great leadership over the entire Brexit mess, and he has spoken the truth about the danger of the return of a hard (British-imposed, lest we forget) Border.
Few people in Northern Ireland won’t find it ironic for Sammy Wilson to speak favorably of past ‘years of cross- Border political relationship-building,’ as if he were a great advocate for that!”—Fr. Sean McManus
Sammy Wilson slams Leo Varadkar over ‘despicable, low and rotten’ Brexit border terror claims
standing as a politician who should in any way be taken seriously”
Sammy Wilson said Leo Varadkar’s comments “diminished his
standing as a politician who should in any way be taken seriously”
Irish News. Belfast. Saturday, October 20, 2018
SAMMY Wilson has said Leo Varadkar’s behavior was “despicable, low and rotten” after the taoiseach used the story of an IRA bombing of a customs post to emphasise the importance of the Border issue to EU leaders.
The East Antrim MP said the taoiseach [Prime Minister] has taken a “sledgehammer” to years of cross- border political relationship-building.
Addressing fellow EU leaders in Brussels on Wednesday evening, Mr. Varadkar related the story of an IRA bomb attack at a customs post in Newry, Co Down in 1972.
Earlier today, Tánaiste [Deputy Prime Minister] Simon Coveney rejected any suggestion Mr. Varadkar was “scaremongering”.
However, the DUP’s Mr Wilson. claimed the taoiseach had “lost any sense of self control” in relation to Brexit, claiming his previous warnings about the impact of a no-deal had made him a “laughing stock”.
“His latest use of a victim of the IRA who was killed when the republican terrorists blew up a border post scrapes the bottom of the very deep barrel of threats, deception and rhetoric which he has dipped into in order to persuade ignorant heads of EU states that the EU must insist in detaching Northern Ireland from the UK in any Brexit deal,” said. Mr Wilson.
At dinner with EU leaders, Mr. Varadkar had circulated a newspaper article on the Newry bombing.
Mr. Varadkar brought in a copy of the Irish Times, which featured an interview with a relative of one of the nine killed in the blast.
Four customs officials, two lorry drivers and three IRA men died in the explosion at a customs clearing station.
The incident has sparked the latest fracture in the DUP’s deteriorating relationship with the Dublin government since the Brexit referendum.
The party believes the Republic’s unwavering stance in relation to the need for a border backstop to guarantee free movement on the island is a veiled tactic to create separation between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
DUP veteran Mr. Wilson expressed concerns that “republican madmen” could be influenced by the taoiseach “stirring up false fears” over violence.
Mr. Wilson insisted there was no chance border checkpoints would be erected when the UK leaves the EU.
“His behaviour is despicable, low and rotten,” he said of the taoiseach.
“He is not so stupid as to be unaware of the impact it can have especially given the record of republicans over the summer when they used impressionable young people to engage in sectarian attacks against the Protestant community in Londonderry.”
Mr. Wilson said much progress had been made in forging better cross-border political links prior to Mr. Varadkar becoming taoiseach.
He added: “Leo Varadkar has taken a sledgehammer to the work which was done but even more worrying is his total disregard to the impact of his irresponsible and reckless rhetoric on the peace of Northern Ireland.”
Earlier, Mr Coveney denied his government was scaremongering over claims violence could return if Brexit brings a hard Border.
The tánaiste said concerns about the potential to destabilise the island’s “very precious peace” were real, and reflected the fears of people living on the Border.
Mr. Coveney defended Mr Varadkar, insisting he dealt in facts.
“We are not trying to scaremonger here, what we are trying to do here is protect a very precious peace and normality on the island of Ireland,” he told BBC Radio Ulster.
He added: “If you speak to families living on the Border area they will talk in very emotive terms about their fears of the re-
emergence of that Border infrastructure and it’s important to be honest about that.
“It doesn’t suit some people’s political narrative, it certainly doesn’t suit people who advocate for Brexit because this is a very awkward and difficult issue for people to deal with, but it’s the truth.”
In response to Mr. Wilson’s remarks, a spokesman for the taoiseach said: “The priority of the taoiseach, the government and all parties involved in the Brexit negotiations is to protect the peace process and avoid the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland.
“The taoiseach wanted to ensure that fellow European leaders fully realise what is at stake and the importance of preserving the peace process throughout the Brexit process.”
Posted by Jim on October 20, 2018
Glucksman Ireland House Radio Hour
Dr. Miriam Nyhan’s guests: The filmmakers behind Mother and Baby a short film about the Tuam mother and baby home and filmmaker Williams Rossa Cole on his great-grandmother Mary Jane Irwin O’Donovan Rossa.
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Nancy Giambalvo:15 years later returns to Adrian’s show!
Nancy Giambalvo, was adopted through the black market (after her mother was told she had a stillbirth), grew up in Brooklyn, NY in a Jewish household but always felt she was different from the majority of her family and neighbors. After more than 20 years searching for her roots, Nancy finally discovered her birth family through a DNA test from Ancestry.com. And after many futile trips to Ireland through the years, this past June she and her husband Andy returned to Ireland and England to finally meet her mother’s family, the Gintys in Bonnieconlon, Ballina, Co. Mayo.
JP McMahon, creator of Food On The Edge An International Food Summit of Food and Food Culture takes place in Galway this weekend. JP is owner of the EatGalway restaurant group and is also the “Cook It Raw” Ambassador in Ireland, which has seen him attend and participate in international food events in USA, Mexico, Finland, Canada and many others.
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