At the Baile na nGael

Kings County Board meeting, on the agenda for this meeting will be discussion and voting on marching in the NYC SAINT Patrick’s Day Parade.  Other topics will include upcoming charitable events we are hosting and a Communion Brunch.

Saturday, January 28th, 2017 11:00 am

NY Metropolitan meeting at Rory Dolan’s in the Bronx.  Parade and other matters being discussed.

Wednesday, January 18th, 2017 7:30 pm

Kings County Officers are invited to attend the Queens County Board meeting at the “Hibernian”, home of Division 21 at 4 Roxbury Blvd.  They are discussing their options with respect to NYC parade participation. We are guest, and have no say in their voting.

Tuesday, February 28th, 2017 7:30 pm

Div 19, regular meeting.  At this meeting will be a Draping of the Division Charter honoring members that passed.

Please pass this to fellow Hibernian members, Thank You.

On a lighter note, Eddie Velinskie and myself will be bartending at the Good Shepherd Catholic Club this Friday night January 20th, 2017, all are invited.  $20 POP.  New members welcomed and encouraged

Patrick Murphy. Irish News. Belfast.  Saturday, January 14, 2017
Sectarianism does not work – in war or politics. That is the lesson from Stormont’s latest incestuous crisis when, after 30 years of sectarian war and 20 years of institutionalised sectarian politics, we are left to reflect on 50 wasted years.

We are little further on from January 29 1967, when the Civil Rights Association (CRA) was formed to demand fairness in an unfair society. Not fairness on a sectarian basis (one person one vote was denied to Protestants as much as Catholics) but fairness for all. Today’s Stormont is no more fair or enlightened than the one of half a century ago.

So how and why did we squander 50 years and can we guarantee our children that we will not waste another fifty?

Stormont has failed because mandatory coalition on a sectarian basis produced two competing half-governments, each cynically pre-occupied with grooming its own electorate.

The evidence, for example, lies in special political advisers running the civil service, giving £2 million for the UDA-linked Charter NI and allocating £60m for an apparently over-scaled Casement Park, while schools are bankrupt.

There was no-one in government to cater for, or even identify, the common good. Instead, mutual sectarian inter-dependence diverted from failing public services.

(Against popular opinion, this column argued last week that cutting the Líofa grant was a DUP tactic, to be later reversed for inter-party negotiations. Guess what happened this week? Now, that’s cynicism.)

Stormont’s flawed system emerged from the SDLP’s flawed analysis in the early 1970s that the problem here was one of two conflicting identities, later hardened under the Belfast agreement into two separate nations. It was derived from the British claim that they were here to keep two warring factions apart. It failed to recognise Britain’s role in fomenting sectarianism (making the SDLP analysis more Catholic than nationalist) and it lacked any socio-economic content or context. The problem was flags, so the solution must be shared flags.

(If you think Britain was an honest broker, look at how British intelligence ran loyalist paramilitaries for the war’s first 20 years. It then significantly controlled both loyalist and republican groups for the final 10 years.)

Following the Hume-Adams talks, Sinn Féin accepted the SDLP’s analysis in a major departure from the teachings of Tone, Pearse and Connolly. SF sought to represent only Catholics. Protestants and Dissenters were placed in Unionism’s foster care. (Yes, you might find a pun in that.)

Much of the party’s policy both in and towards Stormont was heavily influenced by Martin McGuinness. Had he been healthy, Stormont would not have collapsed.

Sinn Féin’s new approach represents an unusually confused and disorganised transfer of power over northern affairs from McGuinness to Adams.

The party has several objectives in collapsing Stormont – it allows time to find a replacement (possibly Mr Adams himself) for Martin McGuinness; it absolves SF for failing social and public services, especially for southern consumption; it places Brexit at the heart of post-election negotiations and heads off growing grassroots rebellion against DUP appeasement and Stormont’s overall failure.

Mr Adams’s Belfast speech last Saturday was to re-establish authority. (“Let me through, I am your leader.”)

Meanwhile, Stormont’s opposition, the SDLP and the UUP, believes we should have a more polite form of sectarianism. In the event of direct rule, the SDLP even wants the Irish government involved in running The North, presumably on the basis that Irish austerity is so much better than British austerity.

Warming to their theme, Dublin foreign minister, Charles Flanagan, wants us to protect Stormont. (If he lived here, he would realize that we need protection from Stormont, not for it).

So, half a century after we founded the Civil Rights movement, sectarian self-interest has brought us back to where we started. Sadly, in view of the civil rights gains, we could have got here without firing a shot; without a single death; without accepting the legitimacy of partition and without polarizing an already fractured society.

We have made little progress since British army violence drove the CRA [Civil Rights Association] off the streets. Along with Britain, the main opponents of the Civil Rights movement were Ian Paisley and later, the Provisional IRA, which argued that the state should be destroyed, not reformed. The thoughts and deeds of both led to sectarian war and today their political descendants have failed the people of The North with their sectarian politics.

So, we do not need changes to our system of government. We need a new system, one which revisits Britain’s sectarian “solution” to the Irish problem, as enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement. Anything less will waste another 50 years.

WHILE the rest of the world celebrates New Year with parties and fireworks, the British also use the occasion to claim they still have an empire.

Yes, it is time for the New Year’s honours list when, in recognition for their services to the crown, Her Majesty appoints Commanders, Officers and Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

News of the Empire’s disappearance does not appear to have reached Britain. It once covered one quarter of the globe and contained a fifth of its people.

Today, it consists of 14 overseas territories, including the Pitcairn Islands (population: 48) and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (population: 99, none of them permanent).

In addition to CBEs, OBEs and MBEs, the Queen also appoints Knights and Dames (well, it is the pantomime season) of various types, including some within the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.

It began in the pre-Reformation Church, as symbolic purification by bathing and going to confessions. (I think they have now dropped those conditions.)

Good luck to anyone who has received an honour and who genuinely believes that the honours system has merit in the modern world. However, even they would probably accept that the system is less than perfect.

For example, David Cameron’s wife’s hairdresser received an OBE, following the prime minister’s resignation after the Brexit referendum.

This was only fair, since Mr Cameron’s barber had received an MBE in 2014, “for services to hairdressing.” (On that basis you deserve an award “for services to newspaper reading”.)

One of Mr Cameron’s former advisers, Steve Hilton (who did not receive an award) says the honours system is “a serious type of very British corruption”.

But even without the cronyism, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that at best the honours system is a bit silly and at worst divisive, pretentious and even downright obnoxious.

The appointments process is secret and highly hierarchical. So while only 25 hand-picked people receive the Order of the Garter (don’t even ask) senior civil servants, for example, might receive the odd knighthood or a CBE.

Lower civil service ranks and other public servants, usually receive OBEs. (Why honour those who have been paid for doing their job?)

School crossing patrol ladies, however, tend to receive mere Membership of the British Empire (which presumably puts them on a par with the Pitcairn Islands).

It is difficult to understand Britain’s glorification of an empire which killed countless millions across the world, including in this country.

Anti-racism campaigner and former Liverpool footballer, Howard Gale, recently refused an MBE because, he said, it would have betrayed all the Africans who suffered under the British Empire.

That has not stopped the Stormont executive from planning to send children from all our schools to visit and glorify the Somme, where thousands died so that the British Empire could continue to inflict murder, starvation and famine on those who dared to oppose it. (Stormont calls it education.)

If the British must have an honours system, they might like to honour (in a non-imperial way) the relatives of those killed at Kingsmills and Ballymurphy, for example, for their dignity in the face of government evasion, intransigence and secrecy.

Probably the only honour these people really want is the truth about what happened their loved ones.

Others who deserve honours include people engaged in voluntary and charity work, such as organising food banks for those among us who would go hungry without them.

The most appropriate honour for them would be a society in which there is no hunger.

Such honours would make a welcome change from, for example, Tony Blair’s knighthood for Philip Green, “for services to the retail industry” in 2006.

A report by MPs says that Sir Philip should be stripped of his knighthood, because he “systematically extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from BHS”, leaving a £570 million hole in its pension fund.

A charity once chaired by Charles Dickens says it has been overwhelmed with requests for help from struggling shop workers in the months since BHS collapsed.

Perhaps Mr Green should keep his knighthood, since it symbolizes the Empire which the honours system reflects.

You see, that’s the real insult of New Year’s honours. Granting an MBE to a school-crossing patrol lady suggests that somehow everyone is equal in the eyes of an unelected monarch.

But the truth is that the false grandeur of Britain’s honours system is merely another distraction from the growing inequality within our society – which means that, like poverty, it is likely to be with us for some time to come.