We look at the stories that were making the headlines this week in the Andersonstown News in 1980
SAS in Twinbrook
THE large number of SAS personnel involved in last Sunday’s abortive raid in Twinbrook, may quite well herald a new phase in the British government’s policy of oppression against the Nationalist community.
The raid was, to our knowledge, the first time that the force have been used in such great numbers, although they have been deployed here since the early seventies (despite British Government denials).
They usually act in small undercover groups and are known to have great difficulty co-ordinating when acting in large numbers. In the Belfast area they have been mainly used for assassinations and as agent provocateurs with no more than four men being used in any one assignment.
The large number of men used in the Twinbrook raid would suggest that their ‘success’ in ending the Iranian Embassy siege in London has prompted the British Government to use them here on a large scale.
Most informed commentators suggest that this highlights the British Government’s utter frustration with their continual failure to solve the problem here, and also a definite abandoning of their policy to have the RUC accepted as a credible force in the Catholic community. The RUC admitted that some of their personnel were involved in the abortive raid, and the fact that SAS men in the past have often been called Army Liaison Officers with the RUC suggests that the Catholic community will have to steel itself for another period of harsh treatment from the forces of ‘law and order’.
The degree of alarm expressed by the Catholic community as a whole, ranging from the Bishop of Down and Connor William Philbin, to Provisional Sinn Féin, could quite well make this new British policy unworkable.
Support for H-Block hunger strikers
THE statement from the men ‘on the blanket’ on Friday 10th October, although simple in its content, was chilling in its implications. The statement said the men would be commencing a phased hunger strike from Monday 27th October.
In view of the fact that these men have endured the horrors and degradation of the H-Blocks for the last four years, their determination to carry their proposed hunger strike through to the bitter end cannot be doubted.
Equally the British Government will allow them to die, but only if public opinion fails to react. The power of public opinion and its effects on the British government was one of the factors, indeed the principal factor, which resulted in the British recognising the hunger strikers of 1972 as political prisoners.
Today’s prisoners are no different from those of ’72, they are members of the same organisation, imbued of the same ideals. Indeed, when you consider the methods employed to secure evidence, the severity of the sentences and the conditions under which they are confined, there can be no doubt that the men ‘on the blanket’ are truly special prisoners
If tragedy is to be averted, not only inside the H-Blocks but outside as well, then it behoves all of us to support all and every peaceful means to bring pressure to bear on the British to restore political status to the prisoners. Apart from massive street demonstrations, I would urge those who are planning to support the campaign to give serious consideration to an economic campaign however limited.
Finally, and as always in our hour of need, let us not overlook the power of prayer. Even those who do not agree with the blanket men will at least pray for them and we who support them, must redouble our efforts, A lighted candle in the window to symbolise the light of hope would not be out of place. L Wilson Belfast 11
Editorial
THE assault on H-Block campaigners and the destruction of property in Twinbrook last Sunday, show us exactly what law and order, British-style, means.
And, following as it does the murder of two other H-Block campaigners last week, it must make people realise just who the real terrorists are and how swiftly, and with what impunity, they can strike at law-abiding citizens.
“They remind me, and others, of the Black and Tans,” said Dungannon man Jack Hassard, interviewed on Downtown Radio; and Nationalists, event those too young to remember, will know that these were the methods, and the type of people, used, two generations ago, by the British to stifle any form of protest, however, peaceful, and to terrorise people into submission.
Local politicians and public people have condemned the gangsterism; but it’s easy to have a go at the SAS, a gang of hooded thugs, regarded by many as not being an ‘official’ part of the ‘security forces’. But the SAS is as official as is the UDR, the RUC, the Green Howards, or any other section of the British military machine. And it has been admitted, officially, that Sunday’s action was a joint RUC/British Army action.
Paddy Devlin was among those who condemned what happened; but just a short time ago he was advising local people to give their full support to the RUC. How can people support a group who are part of the criminal conspiracy that sanctioned and carried out last Sunday’s lawlessness? Remember: ‘the primacy of the police’ has been British policy for some time now; and it was just this type of joint RUC/SAS action that resulted in the death of an innocent 16-year-old, John Boyle, in Dunloy last year.
The SAS is above and beyond the law – even some Alliance people admit it. But, so also are the British Army and the RUC above and beyond the law. An investigation published in book form today by Penguin, and previewed elsewhere in this newspaper, shows, in great detail, how the ‘highest in the land’ conspired to place RUC lawbreakers outside the law they were supposed to uphold.
Everyone should support law and order; and everyone would like to. But what are we to do when we see that the law-makers and enforcers themselves don’t believe in the rule of law?
No one in the community is safe from these people.
In just 44 days, this talentless PM has crushed the living standards of tens of millions of people – yet still wallowed in self-pity
Backed by the DUP, Liz Truss was a truly dreadful Prime Minister who has done incalculable damage to the Union
October 20 2022 04:57 PM
Liz Truss departed Downing Street as she had inhabited it: Weakly, woodenly, arrogantly, haplessly, incoherently, unrepentantly, reeking of incompetence and without an ounce of personal insight.
This disgraceful chapter in British political history will serve some purpose if it demonstrates to future generations the peril of pig-headed political zealotry – whether from left or right. But even if that is so, it will have come at a terrible price for tens of millions of people.
In a pathetically deluded 90-second statement outside Number 10, Truss’s stated reason for quitting wasn’t that she had belatedly realised what she was trying to do was daft, but that she realised she would no longer be permitted by Tory MPs to deliver that reckless agenda.
It is to the credit of the many Tories who saw how thoroughly unsuited Ms Truss was for the job of Prime Minister and distanced themselves from her as she became increasingly wild, just as it is to the shame of those Conservatives who, unable to see past their partisan blinkers, kept lauding her as she destroyed Britain’s reputation and saddled tens of millions of people with financial hardship.
These calamitous few weeks will mean years of higher taxes, cuts to public services and massively higher debt repayments – both for individuals, and for the UK.
Truss’s resignation statement managed to blame Vladimir Putin, the economic problems she inherited and structural difficulties in the UK economy – but avoided any remorse for her own inescapable and inexcusable failures.
Liz Truss making a speech outside 10 Downing Street, London (PA)
Instead, trying to fashion some coherent positive narrative from the rubble in which she stood, she boasted: “We delivered on cutting energy bills and on national insurance” – the first, a policy which every western democracy has delivered and the second a pitiful consolation for the people whose outgoings will now soar by vastly more than the small cut in one form of taxation due to her inability to manage the public finances.
Preposterously, she talked about “maintaining our country’s economic stability”, and lamented how “our country has been held back for too long by low economic growth”, without any acknowledgment that her contribution to this was to take gradual decline and spectacularly accelerate it.
Politics is not a game; putting oneself forward to lead a nation is not to be done lightly because it involves people’s lives and people’s wellbeing. Truss’s talents were too limited to realise that she was unsuited to such a task. Her party was too willing to look past her obvious failings, but has also simply exhausted itself after too long in power – she won in large part because her rival was an untested relatively new MP whose eye-watering wealth would hardly have been well received by voters struggling to heat their homes.
Truss also demonstrates the short-sightedness of those who worship at the altar of quotas in politics, believing there should be percentages reserved for woman or other groups insufficiently represented in Parliament. Some Tories trumpeted her modest background and the fact that she was the third female Tory leader. But while there is a need for more women in politics and more people from humble backgrounds, just because she ticked both of those boxes did not mean she was good.
Many people disliked Margaret Thatcher or were appalled at her policies. But she was demonstrably up to the job intellectually and had a coherent vision of where she wanted to take the UK.
Thatcher, who Truss haplessly sought to emulate, once said that “being powerful is like being a lady; if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t”. Just 44 days after entering Downing Street, and after burning much of what was within her reach, the Downing Street arsonist’s only real power was over the timing of her self-immolation.
There is a final lesson from this tragedy. The DUP has now backed three successive Prime Ministers. In each case, it has seen the candidate it wanted triumph and in each case that individual has been disastrous. Indeed, each of those individuals has been more shockingly incapable of delivering either good government, or the DUP’s own narrower priorities, than their predecessor.
Sammy Wilson praised Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous budget as something which would “increase living standards, boost employment and raise revenue for public services”. It did none of those things, and instead saw a currency crisis, increased inflation, and increased poverty.
In backing Truss, just as the DUP had lauded Theresa May and Boris Johnson, they have not only made it harder to remove the Irish Sea border, but have weakened the Union itself – literally in a financial sense, and figuratively in the eyes of those undecided voters in Northern Ireland on whose votes the future of the Union will someday depend.
Just as Sinn Féin is the worst possible advocate for Irish unity among those undecided on the issue, so the DUP has been actively driving people away from unionism for years – and in more recent times has been enabling wanton damage of the Union itself.
The UK has survived civil war, a mad monarch, the rise and fall of empire, Hitler’s onslaught, financial crises, separatist movements and terrorism. But seldom have those who cherish the Union unthinkingly brought down such destruction on that which they love.
Image caption,It’s not just the UK’s media that has been following the political chaos
The UK’s economic and political turmoil over the past few weeks – culminating in nearly all of Liz Truss’s original finance plans now being axed – has been watched around the world.
It is rare for close allies to comment on each other’s key policies at home – and if they do, it’s unlikely to be an outright criticism.
But at the weekend US President Joe Biden weighed in, saying Ms Truss’s original plan was a “mistake” and it was “predictable” that she would have to backtrack.
“I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,” Mr Biden said. “I disagree with the policy, but that’s up to Great Britain.”
The EU’s economy chief, meanwhile, said there were “lessons to learn” from what is happening in the UK.
“What happened shows how volatile is the situation and so how prudent we should be also with our fiscal and monetary mix,” said Paolo Gentiloni on Friday after Ms Truss fired ex-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.
The world’s media has been far more brutal.
“Liz Truss, who’s been the British PM for barely six weeks, has managed to drag her party and her country into a debacle the depth of which the country has never before sunk to. And less so at such speed,” says an editorial in Colombian daily El Colombiano.
Its headline suggests what the PM might be known for: “Liz Truss the Brief?”
“Clinging to her ideology, far removed from the reality facing the country, Truss exemplifies to perfection what it means to go against common sense when steering the politics of a country.”
Meanwhile, the UK is becoming a “cautionary tale” about the effect of “bad politics”, said an editorial in Indian daily newspaper The Hindu on Monday.
The newspaper – a widely-read English-language paper and generally critical of right-leaning political parties – said Ms Truss was “once seen as a new hope for breathing life back” into the UK Conservative Party.
But now she may have added the “label of ‘incompetence’ to the Tory governance image”, it adds.
Russia’s media speculates over Ms Truss’s future, reporting that she might be out of her post soon.
“Embarrassment for Liz”, said the state-owned daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Monday.
“Yet another political crisis is looming over Britain: the newly minted prime minister, Liz Truss, may be forced out of her Downing Street residence already in the coming days and weeks,” it says.
“The Tory leader’s unpopularity in party circles and in British society has long been known, but now the [prime] minister has come close to the end of her scandalous career.”
China’s state media also heaped on further criticism. “The outside world does not seem optimistic about the turnaround of the Truss government,” said state-run news agency China News Service on Friday.
The Global Times said Truss’s position remained unstable because of “continued negative reviews”.
But some online media, including Shenniao Zhixun, a blog run in south-west China, noted that the new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, nicknamed “son-in-law of China”, had a Chinese wife and “a good attitude towards China”.
But “once we start writing about a prime minister ‘buying some time’, or ‘seeing off the immediate danger’, they are nearing the end of their time,” the opinion piece on Sunday adds.
The recent census figures for the North attracted significant attention and analysis. It is remarkable that a century after partition, and the creation of the sectarian gerrymandered northern state that the population demographics have shifted so dramatically.
While many people today are reluctant to equate religion with political affiliation and national identity it is nonetheless a fact that the northern state was constructed on that basis. Two thirds of the population was Protestant and unionist. One third was Catholic and nationalist. In the years following partition the Unionist regime at Stormont set about entrenching its domination by creating an apartheid state in which Catholics/nationalists were discriminated against in employment and housing and tens of thousands were denied the vote in local government elections.
When the census figures where published ten years ago in December 2012 the unravelling of the sectarian headcount that was the basis for the northern state was already visible. When the question of identity was asked 40% of citizens registered as Britishonly. Another 8% identified as British and northern Irish. That meant that 48% of citizens in the North had some form of British identity. A far cry from the 66% of 1920.
Those who acknowledged in 2011 that they were Irish-only stood at 25% and the figure for those self-identifying as northern Irishonly was 21%. That was 46% of citizens identifying as Irish and not British. Ten years later and the percentage identifying as British-only has dropped significantly to 32% while those who registered as British and northern Irish is unchanged at 8%. That means that approximately 40% of citizens now identify as British.
The comparison for those identifying as Irish-only shows a jump of 4% to 29%. Those who registered as northern Irish-only has remained unchanged at approximately 20%. In addition another 2% identified as Irish and northern Irish only. That brings the total identifying as Irish to 50.67%.
In addition, in the last six elections in the North political unionism has failed to secure an electoral majority. In every electoral contest since 2017 the combined unionist vote was less than a majority of votes cast. Put simply, the unionist electoral majority is gone.
In the Assembly election Sinn Féin secured the largest number of first preference votes and the largest number of seats – a first for a non unionist party. Michelle O’Neill is now the First Minister Designate. Partition was supposed to make this impossible. Partition sucks. On all counts.
None of this means that winning the unity referendum provided for in the Good Friday Agreement is a dead cert or that Irish Unity is inevitable. What it does mean is that there are more and more citizens who want constitutional change. But it must be planned. For united Irelanders this presents an enormous opportunity and a huge challenge.
The Ireland’s Future event in Dublin at the beginning of this month and the Belfast People’s Assembly on 12th October, along with an Ireland’s Future event in Belfast on 23rd November and a Donegal People’s Assembly on the 24th November are all evidence of the growing determination of people to develop a strategy and encourage the necessary conversation around planning for future constitutional change.
Brexit and right-wing policies bring renewed calls for Irish unity
Probably the biggest factor in the slow-burning cause of Irish unity is the current unpopularity of the Tory government, among both unionists and nationalists.
October 10 2022 11:00 AM
All my life, which has been longer than I ever imagined, I’ve been hearing about the prospects for a united or new Ireland, but suddenly it has become relevant. Maybe it’s because of recent election results, showing how nationalists have almost solidified — in the way that unionists used to do — around one party, in Stormont and Westminster.
Or maybe it’s the 2021 census, confirming what we have long suspected, that there would eventually be more Catholics prepared to declare that was their birthright than Protestants, in a statelet designed for a Protestant majority.
The infamous arithmetical solution, based on Catholic nationalists eventually outnumbering the Protestant unionists at the ballot box, is slowly coming about, even if it is far too simplistic to say all those in both communities will vote accordingly. I recall putting the crude numbers solution to John Hume in the early 1990s and hearing him imply that it was the worst thing he could think of. He was in politics to make sure a united Ireland did not happen that way.
Another possible reason for the rise in nationalist hopes — and unionist fears — is the interest being shown by the parties in the Republic, responding to the campaign led by influential community leaders in Northern Ireland.
In the past, southern politicians have run a mile to avoid any commitment to the national goal, but the success of Sinn Fein in polls and votes has forced them to give serious consideration to the options. This time, learning the lesson of Brexit, they are determined to have a viable plan well ahead of any vote.
Of course, nothing can happen until the Good Friday Agreement commitment, letting the Westminster-appointed secretary of state decide on a border poll, is put into action. And the likelihood of that, under the present embattled government, is minimal, even though the Tories are obviously running out of patience with their customary DUP allies over the Stormont veto.
Underlying all this uncertainty is the divide not only between nationalists and unionists but between pro and anti-Brexiteers, notably over the NI Protocol.
Nationalists appreciate the preservation of the link with Dublin and the European Union in the necessity for checks on trade between NI and GB, while unionists see them as a wedge that threatens their existence as an integral part of the UK. The fact that the DUP backed Brexit heavily and have been consistently let down by successive prime ministers adds to the sense of crisis, as it awaits decisions on a Stormont election and a border poll.
But probably the biggest factor in the slow-burning cause of Irish unity is the current unpopularity of the Tory government, among both unionists and nationalists.
Since the Brexit vote, brought about by false promises, the government has been veering to the hard right, breaking away from its nearest and most profitable trading partner and trying to find a buccaneering, regulation-free role for itself on the world stage.
Boris Johnson was soon proved to be a false friend to the DUP, by signing up to a withdrawal treaty that put a border in the Irish Sea, and there is little confidence that Liz Truss, under pressure, will persist with her protocol-busting bill and initiate a trade war with the EU.
It is certainly arguable that the United Kingdom is a very different country, under increasingly right-wing government policies, than it was even a decade ago. How much support is there here for sending asylum seekers to Rwanda? Or for restricting people’s right to protest or strike?
Therein lies the dilemma for the expanding middle-of-the-road voters here, as they contemplate the next series of elections and a possible border poll. If Britain drifts further from Europe towards deals with the Far East and USA, will Irish unity, incorporating EU membership, become more attractive? Unionism, using its veto on Stormont, has made little attempt to widen its appeal, split three ways.
Keir Starmer’s Labour could change all that, if the opinion polls are to be trusted, but can it really upset a 71-seat Tory majority within two years? He needs a revival in Scotland, still concentrated on its own nationalist referendum, as well as a rejection of the populist values, eagerly promoted by the right-wing media and bought in Red Wall constituencies in 2019.
He, too, is stuck by his acceptance of the Brexit result, despite all the evidence. He says he will make it work, presumably by dampening hopes that the UK can go it alone and restoring relations with the EU. Whether he can also create the growth that the Tories aspire to is another matter, but if he could recoup some of the ground being lost he could be a long term premier.
Essentially, therefore, the fate of Northern Ireland, constitutionally and economically, may be in the hands of the British public. It will decide which direction the UK goes, towards greater isolation and economic decline — making NI more of a millstone — or settling for another Labour-led attempt to resolve age-old problems of identity within a new kind of Irish unity.
What is clear is that if we must have to share the island under totally new circumstances we need to know a whole lot more about each other — what makes us tick, what government would be like, what basic things cost and what painful parts of history have kept us apart.
The politicians here in Ireland and Britain would have the last, or near last, word after lengthy negotiations that would follow a positive unity vote.
Frankly my main interest would be in retaining the free health service, as well as the BBC, but if I could be convinced that instead of two divided entities — Northern Ireland and the UK of Britain and NI — both could find a peaceful, progressive future in a new configuration, I would think it worth supporting. What we have demonstrably isn’t working.
