The troops to put down Loyalist rioting will be ordered in, not from Dublin, but from London, exactly as happened in 1969. It is almost comically naïve to suggest that permanent direct rule would not have been "one community lording it over the other", never mind that it would have been unacceptable to both of them for different reasons. But Peter Hitchens is on much firmer ground when he asks:
Can anyone explain to me why the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is still in the high-security prison at Belmarsh? Is this strict-regime incarceration justified by any real risk?
A British judge has rightly refused his extradition to the USA. The US government is appealing, but if he were freed on bail it is hard to see how he could flee the country when it is almost impossible for normal people to get out of Britain, let alone famous men on bail.
Keeping him in Belmarsh, unconvicted of any crime, looks like spite. While the US government appeals – and who knows how long that will take in our clogged courts – couldn’t Mr Assange at least be sent to a less severe prison?
Permanent direct rule would have meant us instead of the Protestants being in charge, while New Labour's Good Friday Agreement (as we all now see) means the IRA and Sinn Fein being in charge-is that better?
ReplyDeleteHitchens writes: ""We are told again and again that nothing (especially blatant outrages by Republican killers) must be allowed to get in the way of the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland. This actually means that our surrender to the IRA and to the ‘loyalist’ murder gangs 23 years ago, under mighty pressure from the White House, must never be questioned or reversed. Most people on the mainland, glad to put a painful problem behind them, have simply not noticed that during those 23 years there has not in fact been peace at all. Low-level violence, intimidation and the driving of people out of their homes have all continued. The IRA Army Council still exists and its political puppet, Sinn Fein, has grown in power and wealth in both parts of Ireland.
Now it dawns on loyalists that Dublin rule of the whole island (which was written into the 1998 capitulation, though ignored by most at the time) is within sight, and very possibly Sinn Fein rule at that.""
Every word is harrowingly true.
Permanent direct rule would have meant us instead of the Protestants being in charge
DeleteComically naïve. Anyone who can write that sentence knows literally nothing about the subject. Not the first thing. In any case, albeit for other reasons, direct rule was and is equally unacceptable to the Unionist parties and to the Loyalist paramilitary organisations, which have never been as far apart as they have both usually liked to pretend.
For all his gifts, Hitchens is out of his depth on Northern Ireland. He does not begin to understand the nature of the relationship between Sinn Féin and the IRA, for example. Or what the other side means when it describes itself as British, a meaning that is wholly incompatible with direct rule. He just writes what he wants to be true. But it isn't.
“ In any case, albeit for other reasons, direct rule was and is equally unacceptable to the Unionist parties and to the Loyalist paramilitary organisations, which have never been as far apart as they have both usually liked to pretend.”
ReplyDeleteThat’s the whole point-direct rule was unacceptable to many loyalists, as much as Nationalists, for the precise reason I and Mr Hitchens state. Because it would have taken away their power. You never answered the point that instead we now have the IRA able to “lord it over” everyone and kill (and breach COVID regulations to attend mass funeral for their leaders) with complete impunity. Is that better?
English golf club bore stuff, in the unlikely event that Northern Ireland might ever come up in an English golf club. Only the seat most like that there, North Down, has ever elected integrationist MPs who were actually standing as such, even they were not members of mainland parties, the one of those that stands in Northern Ireland gets practically no votes, and even North Down now elects the Alliance Party with the DUP in a close second place, super-devolutionists both.
DeleteEvery word of what Hitchens wrote above is undeniably true which is why you haven’t answered it. How was direct rule less preferable to today’s situation of direct rule by IRA paramilitaries who drive people out of their homes, gun down the likes of Barry McGuigan and breach every law (including COVID regulations) with impunity, and get “comfort letters” while British soldiers are prosecuted for historic offences?
ReplyDeleteHitchens is right. It was a surrender and if you think it brought “peace” it is you who know nothing-not the first thing-about Northern Ireland.
English golf club bore stuff, in the unlikely event that Northern Ireland might ever come up in an English golf club. Only the seat most like that there, North Down, has ever elected integrationist MPs who were actually standing as such, even they were not members of mainland parties, the one of those that stands in Northern Ireland gets practically no votes, and even North Down now elects the Alliance Party with the DUP in a close second place, super-devolutionists both.
DeleteEnglish golf pub bore stuff
ReplyDeleteHardly-as the last month’s mass loyalist rioting (and the continued controversy over prosecutions of British soldiers and unpunished IRA murders) shows, the truth about the “Good Friday Agreement” is dawning on everyone.
Hitchens can claim to have been the first.
English golf club bore stuff, in the unlikely event that Northern Ireland might ever come up in an English golf club.
DeleteIntegrationism was an eccentricity introduced by Enoch Powell, who was another one who treated things as true merely because he wanted them to be, and who never really knew very much at all about Northern Ireland.
Even when he was an MP for it, then the UUP still treated him as a fringe oddity. Consider the career of Jeffrey Donaldson: Powell office boy, UUP MP, DUP MP for the same seat without a break, DUP Leader in the House of Commons. That is quite the trajectory.
How many votes do the proponents of the Fleet Street fantasy version of Ulster Unionism think that they would get if they stood for election there? Hitchens, or Charles Moore, or some such should try it. He would do less well even than dissident Republicans.
The opposition to the DUP within Unionism comes from Traditional Unionist Voice, which is the DUP only even more so, and thus if anything even further removed from the Hitchens position. The DUP is losing support in one direction to that, and in the other to the Alliance Party.