RIC Commemoration

[Purple]

I'm sorry, but these narratives are simply cherry-picking whatever bits taste nice, depending on what day of week it is, but completely avoiding the bits that are hard to swallow

We are going around in circled here so i'll leave it at this but I find the above quote deeply ironic.

 

[WolfeTone]

We are going around in circled here so i'll leave it at this but I find the above quote deeply ironic.

Really? Its not me that holds the dual position of condemning secret private armies that kill innocent civilians and children while supporting the same.
I have no with truck with the IRA. The IRA, and paramilitarism in general, has been a cancer on this island since its very inception.
There is no more irony in my position that the same cannot be attributed to broader political spectrum. Each perspective concocting its own narrative of legitimacy over the other, when in fact all paramilitaries engaged in warfare against the State and its civilians, without any moral authority or sanction from the majority of people.
Condemn one, condemn them all. Or don't condemn any.
In the absence of the multitudes willing to swallow their pride and admit to the shame that festers underneath their own glorifications then perhaps the only option, the real option, is to draw a line in the sand.
That is what I have chosen to do.

 

[Purple]

In the absence of the multitudes willing to swallow their pride and admit to the shame that festers underneath their own glorifications then perhaps the only option, the real option, is to draw a line in the sand.
That is what I have chosen to do.

Yes, that's the irony I was referring to. I find the SF position on this issue, as articulated very well by you, sickening.
To each their own opinion and all that. I am simply giving mine.

 

[Firefly]

I told you, I do not know how our PS pay compares to OECD average.

This also has the whiff of tecate..

 

[WolfeTone]

This also has the whiff of tecate..

What is that supposed to mean? If you are inferring that @tecate is me under a different guise, then you are wrong (again).
Im not really interested in another one of your rabbit-hole identity parades. Im not @tecate. Anyone taking a cursory look at our comments in Bitcoin threads will see that s/he is more than capable of arguing the technical elements of bitcoin, alot of which go over my head. I think I have a good grasp on the conceptual side.

So if you don't mind, you have implied that there may be some undue financial burden with the cost of PS pay in a UI? Correct me if I am wrong. I have neither agreed nor refuted this, so perhaps you could provide some detail as to how much it would cost, if anything.

 

[Purple]

This also has the whiff of tecate..

The beer or the place?

 

[WolfeTone]

@WolfeTone So the British Government strung out the 25 years of Provo sectarian terrorism. This is firmly tecate land.

You've sadly joined the Firefly identity parade whataboutery.
It is a matter of record that British government policy included imprisonment without trial, criminalisation of republican ideology, collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, shoot-to-kill and the suppression of criminal investigation into violent crimes. (Finucane, Ballymurphy, Derry, Dublin/Monaghan, Loughinisland, Miami Showband, etc)

A policy to engage in direct negotiation, as Llyod George did, did not emerge until the 1990's.
Once the concept of negotiation did take hold, the impetus for an end to the violence took hold. This is all a matter of public record and fact.

But some more detail on the facts of the tragedy of the era. According to CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet) a total of 3,532 deaths are attributable to the Troubles period of 1969-1994 and up to 2001.
60% of those deaths were attributable to Republican paramilitaries (I estimate 52% of all killings attributable to PIRA). 40% are attributable to British Security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries.

Of those killed by republicans - 35% of their victims were innocent civilians, or 742
Of those killed by BritSec & LoyPara - 73% of their victims were innocent civilians, or 1,031

These are not my figures, they are obtainable here

Conflict Archive on the Internet

The notion that the conflict was a predominately one sided PIRA affair is bogus. People are entitled to take what narrative they want, but I will stick to the facts as presented.
The British State, wary of the political fallout from atrocities such as Derry and Ballymurphy, engaged with loyalist paramilitaries over a sustained period, in covert operations, to attack Catholic communities in an attempt to drive out the IRA, as leading loyalist Billy Hutchinson testifies.

 

[Duke of Marmalade]

@WolfeTone You display a tecate like stubbornness, I didn't say you were tecate.
I note that you combine British Army/Loyalist Paramilitaries as a single participant. That is your narrative - the PIRA Catholic defenders versus the British and Loyalist oppressors. I actually don't go along with the SF apparently conciliatory stance that there should be room for different narratives - there is no room for a narrative that portrays the 25 year senseless sectarian campaign of PIRA in the way that you have portrayed it.

 

[WolfeTone]

You display a tecate like stubbornness, I didn't say you were tecate.

With respect Duke, the stubborness is all yours.

You flippantly dismiss the recorded factual evidence of collusion between British Security forces and Loyalist paramilitaires. Of course, on the face of it they are separate entities. But if one entity is providing intelligence, weaponary, refuge (by way of escape and non-investigation of serious crimes like murder) then they are collaborators and one and the same organisation.

Sinn Fein and IRA, or SF/IRA?

there is no room for a narrative that portrays the 25 year senseless sectarian campaign of PIRA in the way that you have portrayed it.

I beg your pardon, what way have I portrayed it?

Scratch that, I think its fair to say there is little to be gained anymore in the detail. I am recorded here as calling the IRA a cancer, I don't think I can be more forthright than that. Here is a select few comments to back up my views

Nobody had a mandate to murder anybody.

Surely anyone, or any organisation, that is involved in killing children are child killers?

The truth is that child victims of British Army, and their proxies in UVF, are as every bit a tragedy of this conflict as the child victims of the IRA.

I'm not suggesting that the Provos were not aggressors in their own right and that opportunities for peace were missed on their side.

Planting bombs and indiscriminately killing children in 1881 was as morally repugnant then as it is today

In the context of this discussion I do not purport to claim that Provos did not commit some awful criminal atrocities, I am quite adamant that they did, and shameful atrocities they were.

I have never tried to, nor am I trying to, justify the PIRA campaign

 

[Duke of Marmalade]

Of course, on the face of it they are separate entities. But if one entity is providing intelligence, weaponary, refuge (by way of escape and non-investigation of serious crimes like murder) then they are collaborators and one and the same organisation.

That is the narrative I was talking about. That the Catholic population faced a murderous oppression from combined Loyalist and British State forces and the PIRA campaign should be seen in that light (BTW what is your view of OIRA ceasing to resist this oppression in 1972?).
Then tecate like you give a list of prior quotations which are not relevant to the narrative at hand.

 

[WolfeTone]

That the Catholic population faced an intolerable oppression from Loyalist and British State forces and the PIRA campaign should be seen in that light

Duke, no disrespect, but the Stormont regime was, and remains a totally discredited parliament. Do we have to go down the road of the discriminatory practices against Catholics in Housing, eduction, employment, public service appointments?
That a civil rights movement to rectify these wrongs would be subjected to police brutality only went further to disgracing that political establishment.

That violence then erupted is not unsurprising....I think we are agreed on that?
What we are not agreed on, is the sustenance of that violence for such a long period of time. I recognise as you do, the futility of that violence. I recognise the fultility on all sides, do you?
But here is the critical point, it is easy (easier) from the view of hindsight and being of distance to point out the violent actions of the IRA and say they should have stopped long-time before.
But the cycle of violence had commenced, once that commences it can be hard to stop - we are all familiar with the tit-for-tat concept?

So how do you get it to stop?
Internment? Criminalisation? Collusion with loyalist paramilitaries in murder? Suppression of police investigations into murder? Shoot-to-kill?
Or face to face negotiations for a political settlement?

(BTW what is your view of OIRA ceasing to resist this oppression in 1972).

My understanding of this is that the OIRA leadership in Dublin were caught napping as to the true extent of events erupting in the North. The OIRA ceasefire was more a strategy to suit those who, like Cathal Goulding, who was nearing his fifties simply not prepared to engage. The OIRA was irreparably damaged by the split of the Provos, it was further damaged again with more splits and in-house fueds (I think the INLA emerged at this point).
Their cease fire was not a measure to engage with the British and Unionists to resolve issues and forment a peaceful path. It was a ceasefire of convenience for those who had lost control and simply wanted out.
Thats just my opinion.

 

[Duke of Marmalade]

But the cycle of violence had commenced, once that commences it can be hard to stop - we are all familiar with the tit-for-tat concept?

As I have said before, we can now see that the "tat" was almost entirely from PIRA. When they ceased everyone ceased.
You're probably right on OIRA.

 

[WolfeTone]

When they ceased everyone ceased.

Just like 1921 and 1916 before that.

 

[Purple]

This thread is now entering Wonderland...

 

[WolfeTone]

We are long gone past that.

Im still trying to figure how someone born in NI is both a foreigner and as Irish as we are at the very same time? Depends on which narrative you are trying to sell at the time I suppose?

The record of Dáil Éireann in January 1921 that failed to back a motion declaring a state of war against Britain is all I need to know about what support GOIRA, and its miniscule membership relative to the Irish Volunteers, had from the public at large. It reveals a lot about the political class of today who try to subvert the events of that period to fit a narrative that is expedient to their political bias.

I'm more interested in looking to the future.

I'm wondering what the impact of average Public Sector pay levels in a UI would be relative to the average OECD level.

 

[cremeegg]

I don't know why people hold the views that they hold. Therefore the only answer I can give is that I don't know.
In my opinion post independence we had to construct a version of Irishness that never really existed as we were culturally dominated by England and then Britain for 800 years. So we created a Celtic Ireland in which a kind of Celtic Catholicism and Nationalism were intertwined and ethnically cleansed most of our Protestant population.
We constructed a narrative in which "The Irish" were oppressed by "The British" and ignored the fact that the Nation State as we know it and fought for in 1916 and during the Civil War didn't exist, even as a concept, when Strongbow rocked up in Bannow Bay in 1169. The reality of history didn't suit us and didn't allow us to assert our identity, a constructed identity based on what those in power thought it would have been had we been free all of that time.
In that context the glorification of our independence struggle was inevitable. We are not alone in that; the Americans remember a War in which the French fought the British, with a third of the local population siding with each and a third not getting involved at all, as their War of Independence. They remember it as a war in which the entire population of what is now the United States fought the British, with some help from the French.

That's my view but, as I said before, I don't know why others hold the views they do.

I know that you hold very different opinions to me on these matters, the Troubles etc. and I would respect your opinions without accepting them. Those of us old enough to have lived through (although in my own case at a safe distance I am glad to say) them have our own ideas built over decades and nothing said on here is likely to shift that.

However I would like to address the points you have made above

In my opinion post independence we had to construct a version of Irishness that never really existed as we were culturally dominated by England and then Britain for 800 years.

Ireland was not culturally dominated by England for 800 years. Englands cultural influence on Ireland was negligible before 1600. The Norman Lords who ruled approx half the country were Irish speakers, 'more Irish than the Irish themselves' It began to make some inroads after that, but had little sway over the majority of the population until the early 1800s.

O Connell's efforts to modernise the country supported the introduction of the English language and the introduction of the National Schools in the 1830s spread education through English. The Famine decimated those Irish speaking parts of the country particularly.

The idea that a version of Irishness was constructed is touted by those who are unsympathetic. It is a distortion built on a misunderstanding. It began in the late 1800s not after the foundation of the state. It was a work of rescue, not construction. Douglas Hyde collected the poetry of Raftery, because it was still very much alive more than half a century after his death. The culture that produced his work and many others like him was brought into the modern world, particularly the world of print for the first time. It was not 'constructed'.

 

[WolfeTone]

@Duke of Marmalade I see one of your definitive sources of the period of the Troubles, Eoghan Harris, is peddling his distortions of events once again today. This time with regard to killings of two children in Co Cavan by loyalists.

Harris, while initially lauding the documentary A Bomb that Time Forgot, that accounts the events in Belturbert, his primary aim is to use the same documentary to advance his own distortions and distractions.

Harris initially lauds the documentary "It was good, therefore, to have a whole programme devoted to the deaths of Geraldine O'Reilly (15) and Patrick Stanley (16)...", but the real intent of his article is to then distract and undevote from the subject of the documentary and reel in the reader to the overall events occuring at the time and the general widespread violence in the province, with chief perpetrators being the IRA supported by a number count.

Having set up the distraction, Harris can deliver the soft-soap version of British State collusion. According to him, a British Army officer who had knowledge of a loyalist bomb attack to blow up a border crossing bridge, prior to the Belturbert attack, is of no real significance.

"....one British army officer - just one - had turned a blind eye to the loyalist attack on Aghalane Bridge"
"It would be regrettable if a documentary that highlighted one atrocity gave oxygen to Sinn Féin's collusion campaign"

What Harris conveniently omits is that the officer in question had the authority to direct British troop movements in the area. Having duly informed RUC Special Branch that there were to be no troops in the vicinity at a during set time and period, loyalists just happened to carry out their attack on the border crossing during that set time and period.

By linking campaigns for justice for the victims of British State collusion to a "SF collusion campaign", Harris is effectively urinating on the memory of those victims, not least Geraldine O'Reilly and Patrick Stanley.
For the most part, the victims of collusion have no part or association with SF. If SF are the most vocal for their cause it is only an indictment of the existing political establishment who abandoned these victims a long time ago. The campaign for Dublin/Monaghan, along with this documentary, also carries the "forgotten" tag.

Harris, continues the distortions. Quoting "Irelands Violent Frontier", an excellent account of the history of the border, he identifies a quote from visiting Protestant churchmen in the mid-80's who claim that 75 people have been killed by republican paramilitaries with only one person convicted since 1971. Harris ties all these deaths to an "openly sectarian campaign".
The good churchmen are correct insofar that 75 people have been killed between 1971 and 1986 in Fermanagh, and their intent is genuine to highlight the pervasive fear that Protestant community lives under with threats from the IRA.
But to be accurate and offer some context about those that were killed, out of 75 deaths in the period in Fermanagh , the IRA were responsible for 64 deaths - 17 BA, 17 UDR, 16 RUC and 14 civilians. Of the 14 civilians there is substantive evidence that in 7 incidents the intended targets were nearby mobile military patrols. Clearly, in the main, IRA targets were British security force personnel and not ordinary Protestants.

But it would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that the IRA did carry out a sectarian campaign of intimidation, forced evictions and expulsions, business firebombing, house burning, in Fermanagh against the ordinary Protestant population. That indeed they did. At least 4 of the ciilian deaths were between '71 and' 86 were a result of sectarian attacks

But Harris is no fool. He knows that he didn't have to extract an inaccurate account from, albeit well-intended English clergymen. He could have picked any amount of chapter and verse from Irelands Violent Frontier to demonstrate the true nature of Protestant life along the border.
But then if he had chosen the following excerpt it might interfere with the distorted narrative.

"As the IRA’s campaign developed in 1919–21, it took on a sectarian dimension in these border counties. The border counties experienced the most intense sectarian violence outside Belfast. Protestant churches, Orange Halls and Masonic Halls were destroyed. Their assumed loyalty to the Crown and the British state made Protestants an object of suspicion to republicans – in Monaghan they were forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the Republic. Frequent raids for arms were carried out on Unionist homes.
The IRA picketed Protestant businesses and harassed Catholics who used them.
Monaghan was a Sinn Féin stronghold. When, in February 1921, a Protestant trader and B Special in Rosslea was fired on, local Specials retaliated by rampaging through the Catholic part of the village, firing into houses. Although no one was killed or injured, Eoin O’Duffy, the IRA commander in Monaghan, authorised the killing of four Specials and the burning of ten Protestant houses in retaliation. Fourteen houses were torched and three Protestants shot dead. Two were Specials but the other was not. Joseph Douglas was dragged from his mother’s house and executed by the roadside. Rosslea and the surrounding towns and villages would be centres of IRA activity, much of it organised and launched from across the border, in both the 1956–62 campaign and that of the Provisionals. From Pettigo and Belleek in the west of Fermanagh along the Fermanagh and south Tyrone borders into south Armagh, IRA activity would be intense during all its twentieth-century campaigns.
In February 1922 Eoin O’Duffy organised a series of raids across the border into Fermanagh and Tyrone with the objective of kidnapping 100 prominent Orangemen, who were to be used as hostages for the release of three IRA men who had been sentenced to death. In fact, 40 hostages were taken across the border into Monaghan. Despite the truce between the IRA and the British, which had been in force since the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Michael Collins was willing clandestinely to support this activity as a means of bringing pressure on the northern government."

GOIRA / PIRA what was the difference?

But yet the Harris narrative, shared by many across the political spectrum, believe that there was a difference.
And they use this distorted narrative to divert attention away from the other foul-stenching narrative of the recent period, namely that collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and British security forces in the murder of innocent civilians and the subsequent cover-up of investigation was only a few bad apples.

 

[Duke of Marmalade]

@WolfeTone I don't really like EH, I distrust people who go through Damascean conversions. I hadn't read his article until your post alerted me. If you are correct about the 75 killed in Fermanagh (I didn't check) then indeed his article is a gross distortion.
You have two main themes. First is that the Provos are just as bad (or maybe just as good) as the GOIRA. Possibly in the eyes of St Peter you are right. I sense in mainstream nationalism a bit of an ambivalence over the WoI. They do not really celebrate it. Far more comfortable celebrating the martyrdom and victimhood of the Easter Rising. I was aware of the Easter Rising since I was about knee high - flags out in my neighbourhood every Easter. It wasn't until I was adult that I became aware that the Rising was in fact a failure, that it was the WoI which won our sort of independence.

Your other theme is that collusion between State forces and Loyalist murder gangs was at a much more serious level than "bad apples" (ala Gardai, for example) and was so rampant as to both justify the extended but pointless Provo campaign but also to portray the extended Troubles as an equal struggle between Provos on the one hand and British/Loyalist elements on the other. I profoundly disagree with this narrative for the reasons set out in the preceding 12 pages.
Another question for you which may seem silly at this stage. Do you support Sinn Fein? I presume yes and it seems to me that your earnest pursuit of the two themes described above is mainly motivated by a desire to normalise SF. And that is of course a main SF objective, hence their abhorrence at Stanley breaking ranks.

 

[WolfeTone]

I sense in mainstream nationalism a bit of an ambivalence over the WoI. They do not really celebrate it.

Yes it is surely an oddity that on the eve of coming into existence of this State 100yrs ago, that brought us our 'freedom' there is no apparent cause for celebration.

so rampant as to both justify the extended but pointless Provo campaign but also to portray the extended Troubles as an equal struggle between Provos on the one hand and British/Loyalist elements on the other.

No, I have never tried to justify the Provo campaign. My perspective is one of a collapse of trust in the institutions of policing, courts, govt administration.
This was clearly the case in many nationalist communities and in the absence of such trust the vacuum for those who saw no other way, other than a violent way (as in 1916), is opened.
So I don't justify the Provos, but I dont jump on the political expedient wagon of condemnation. Particularly, on the bandwagon of those political actors whose All-Ireland politics stops at the border.
If ever they participate in elections up north as SF, Greens and PBP do, then the constituents of nationalist communities become their constituents, and the convenience of standing at the border and judging what happens up north will be less convenient.

Do you support Sinn Fein?

Im not a shinner if that's what you mean. I have been very supportive of Adams/McGuinness in bringing at end to the IRA without it descending into a chaotic bloody fued.
They are not without criticism of course, and there are many aspects to pick fault with. But in the round, you can trace the push for political strategy over the military strategy back to the hunger strikes. It was Adams that led the way on this.
But I was also supportive of Ahern, Blair, Reynolds, Major, Clinton, Trimble, Hume and even Paisley when he crossed his own rubicon.
Thatcher is the one I cannot abide.

As for their politics, in terms of the general social and economic discourse I don't they will be much different in power than the rest. Certainly not radically different.
They say the right things in opposition, but in government it will invariably be different - see MM bank bailout comment last week. Apparently, in opposition he referenced it 57 times. Once in government, there was no bailout.

On constitutional matters pertaining to a UI, I do think if they get into government it may provide the impetus for the rest of the political class to actually confront the issue in a meaningful way.

 

[WolfeTone]

I don't really like EH, I distrust people who go through Damascean conversions. I hadn't read his article until your post alerted me. If you are correct about the 75 killed in Fermanagh (I didn't check) then indeed his article is a gross distortion.

That is my misunderstanding so. I retract the inference.