Official Communication from the UFA

Posted by Jim on March 26, 2018

March 25th

Official Communication from the UFA

Posted by Jim on March 24, 2018

Join the stand against new gerrymander

Posted by Jim on

The DUP are behind the redrafting of constituency boundaries to hold
onto as much power in the North as possible, writes Sinn Fein MP Elisha
McCallion.

Fifty years ago the people of Derry took a a stand against
gerrymandering and the denial of equal voting rights to nationalist
citizens.

It is appalling that half a century on from the birth of the Civil
Rights movement, people are again taking to the streets to demand
democratic equality.

But that is precisely what happened yesterday when the people of
Dungiven protested against the new electoral boundaries being proposed
by the Boundary Commission.

If given the go ahead, these plans will carve the town of Dungiven into
three separate constituencies. This is farcical, unnecessary, and
completely unacceptable.

But it isn’t just Dungiven that will be affected. The new boundaries, if
implemented by the Tory Government, will disfigure and distort the
electoral map right across the North. Representation will be denied to
thousands of nationalist voters and leave several constituencies without
any nationalist representative whatsoever at an Assembly and Westminster
level.

That is a democratic affront so it is worth reminding ourselves how this
situation came about.

In 2016, the Boundary Commission was established with a remit to reduce
the number of constituencies from 18 to 17 and to distribute the
electorate in a fair and equitable way across the new constituencies.

The commission initially produced a plan that by and large achieved
these key objectives, but they were heavily criticised by the DUP
because that party stood to lose out electorally.

The DUP’s Ian Paisley Jr announced that his party “[would] see about
that” and submitted their own version of how they would like the new
boundary map to look. This DUP proposal sought to maximise the number of
DUP elected representatives and minimise the number of nationalists by
manipulating electoral boundaries.

In the subsequent period, the DUP entered a self-serving pact to keep
Theresa May’s Government in power. And just six months after that deal
was signed, the Boundary Commission produced new proposals.

And it is these radically revised plans – which are virtually
indistinguishable from the DUP’s – which have hemmed thousands of
nationalist voters into constituency’s that no nationalist
representative has a hope of ever winning.

The Boundary Commission deny there has been a deliberate gerrymander at
the behest of the DUP and stress their independence from political
interference.

Nevertheless, they do admit to radically altering their plan, as well as
applying the controversial rule seven – known as the ‘gerrymander rule’.

This rule is only available in the north of Ireland and gives the
Commission scope to go beyond the usual electorate quotas in any given
constituency. Despite ruling out the need to evoke it in their original
proposals, the Boundary Commission changed this approach after the DUP
argued for it to be implemented.

Indeed, the Commission’s revised report overturned every key decision
that underpinned their original proposals, without offering any
reasonable explanation as to why.

It is Sinn Fein’s firm view that these changes are unjustifiable and
must be overturned.

Votes should be equal. Political representation should reflect the
population in any given constituency. These proposals achieve neither of
these aims and, instead, effectively deny representation to thousands of
nationalist voters.

When the northern state was created, it was deliberately gerrymandered
in order to try to guarantee a perpetual unionist majority.

The last Assembly election finally ended that democratic injustice when
unionism lost its majority status for the first time since 1921.

Demographic changes are also indicating a nationalist voting majority by
2022, coincidentally the same year when these boundary changes are due
to take effect.

But rather than respond to these changing political and demographic
trends by reaching an accommodation with their neighbours on this
island, it seems the DUP would prefer to re-gerrymander constituencies
in order to try to artificially hold onto as much unionist control as
they can for as long as possible.

But this isn’t 1968.

We cannot allow them to turn back the clock.

Sinn Fein has submitted our proposals to the Commission which set out a
fair and equitable way forward in line with accepted good practice and
the Commission’s own remit.

And we are urging members of the public to also make submissions before
the consultation closes on March 26.

You can do so by emailing Review@boundarycommission.org.uk or go online
at www.bcni2018.uk

If enough of us object, our voices cannot be ignored.

So stand up for fairness in the electoral process and demand that all
votes are equal.

This was once the Ireland’s capital city of injustice. We need to send a
strong message that there will be absolutely no return to the
gerrymandering of the past.

Official Communication from the UFA

Posted by Jim on March 21, 2018

March 21^st 

Famine Lie

Posted by Jim on

20 Mar 2018 01:19 PM PDT

Chris Fogarty on the ‘Famine’ lie.

The competition between the truth of 1845-1851 Ireland and the “famine” lie might be ended. If the arbiters are the Irish Times and its publication (16/3/2018) of Dr. Fernihough’s interactive map based upon the 1841 and 1851 censuses of Census Commissioner William Wilde, the “famine” lie has won.

The competition started on or about 3 Nov 1845 when a group of twenty-two Irishmen urgently visited British Lord Heytesbury in his Vice-Regal Lodge, Phoenix Park, Dublin. They begged him to cease the food removal; that people were starving to death; and to halt all distilling and brewing to leave more grain available for human nourishment. The Lord ignored their pleas and, before showing them the door, he read to them from a paper about potatoes and blight.

Thus, each November 3rd there are world-wide commemorations of Ireland’s Holocaust (An t-Ár Mór) and of Heytesbury’s lie of potato famine/Gorta Mor/Great Hunger.

The Irish did not go down easily. The at-gunpoint removal from Ireland’s producers of their abundant meats, livestock, grains, oatmeal, flour, dairy and poultry products, etc., required more military (in addition to landlords’ militias and carbine-toting constabulary) than had conquered the Indian Subcontinent. It took more than half (sixty-seven of Britain’s 130-regiment army) to perpetrate that Holocaust. Approaching “mission accomplished” in 1849 Queen Victoria awarded an Order of the Bath to the perpetrating regiments’ Commander-In-Chief, General Sir Edward Blakeney.

Nearly a decade later Victoria also knighted William Wilde for his 1841 and 1851 census work. Wilde, husband of “Speranza” and father of Oscar, officially “established” the starvation death toll to be 21,770. To “explicate” the actual mass death, Wilde’s 1852 census cited celestial eclipses of a millennium earlier and unheard-of, imaginatively-named “pandemics.”

Victoria thus knighted Wilde for concealing what she had awarded Blakeney for perpetrating.

Dr. Fernihough might have innocently used Wilde’s ludicrous fabrications and minimizations, but Irish Times editors owe their readers an apology for publishing them. Concealing this genocide invites more of them. Why do it?

Chris Fogarty is the author of Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it “Perfect.”