Data Breach?

Of course Gerry Kelly is on the Northern Ireland Policing Board. Consider the funeral of Bobby Storey, followed by the decision of the Police that no Covid-19 regulation had been breached. Storey's coffin was borne to its rest by Gerry Adams, Martin Ferris, Sean Hughes, Kelly, Martin "Duckster" Lynch, and Sean "Spike" Murray. At any given time, there are seven members of the Provisional Army Council. Of the deceased and his six pallbearers, only Ferris was from the 26 Counties.

There, however, Sinn Féin might have entered government if it had fielded enough candidates at the last General Election to the Dáil. It will certainly field enough next time. Handpicked for Leadership by an Army Council that was based almost entirely in what it never called "Northern Ireland", Michelle O'Neill as First Minister would be a detail, since that Council has effectively been in charge there for 25 years, regardless of how many votes its partisans, who had sometimes included its members, had obtained. But handpicked for Leadership by an Army Council that was based almost entirely in what it never called "Northern Ireland", Mary Lou McDonald as Taoiseach of what that Council did not regard as the real Republic of Ireland would be a seismic event, effectively extending the exercise of the IRA's claim to sovereignty across the entire territory claimed, and to the means of a sovereign state's participation in international affairs.

Sinn Féin still formally believes the Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland as the legitimate successor of the Second Dáil, although that Parliament's only surviving member in 1986, Tom Maguire, conferred legitimacy on the Continuity Army Council, so that it was the Continuity IRA that provided a firing squad at his funeral in, almost unbelievably, 1993, and so that it has been Republican Sinn Féin that has held commemorations at his graveside. Anyway, that is what Sinn Féin believes. That the Army Council is the sovereign body throughout Ireland as the legitimate successor of the Second Dáil. For all practical purposes, it has functioned as such since 1998 in the Six Counties, whence hail most its members.

And what of the dissidents, who are said to have been emboldened by the PSNI data breach? In March, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell. In May, there were a further 11 arrests, including of eight Protestants. One shies away from this kind of thing, but there has always, always, always been a school of thought that the New IRA was a false flag operation. The United Kingdom is going to be the worst-performing economy in the G7 this year, so a lid needs to be kept on any popular dissent. It is time for a security emergency, thanks to one or both of the Loyalist paramilitaries and the dissident Republicans. If those did not exist, then our rulers would have to invent them. And at different times, those did not used to exist.

Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime in general, and in drug-dealing in particular, leading to generations of professional and social interaction of the kind that also takes place routinely among, for example, rival Mafia families, when they are not letting each others' blood without mercy. There has never been any secret that the Loyalist organisations were off-the-books arms of the British State, while the old IRA was also riddled from top to bottom with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on, as was the Real IRA, and as at least has been the much older Continuity IRA, which, as mentioned, goes back to the split over abstentionism in 1986. The recent documentaries about David Rupert, and about "Robert" by the superlative Peter Taylor, undeniably broke ground, and were a reminder of how good the BBC could be, but they could not have surprised anyone.

There has never been any doubt as to the true nature of the likes of the UDA, the UVF, and Ulster Resistance, which provided the then Queen's Government with confidence and supply from 2017 to 2019. Across that ostensible divide, it is all heating up over there just as it is all threatening to heat up, by our standards, over here. That is all unconnected to any sincere pursuit of a United Ireland. Sinn Féin is so shot through, so to speak, with British Establishment payroll voters that they have first swung it in favour of the EU and now, if only in all but name for the time being, they have swung it behind NATO, of which whether Ireland was in fact a member has always been the non-Yes-No question that British membership of the EU has also become. In either case, if you think that the answer is a straight "No", or even "No" at all, then you are not in the club. Sinn Féin has lately received the President of the United States before attending the King's Coronation, so it is in the club.

With O'Neill as First Minister, or even with only the present state of affairs in Northern Ireland, and with McDonald as Taoiseach, then who would need a border poll? Why would the IRA want one? No referendum would ever endorse rule by the Army Council. Once that were established across the whole of Ireland, then the beneficiaries would never wish to give it up, and everyone else would find it practically impossible to make them. That day is now well within sight. But there will always be dissidents of one sort or another. They are too useful for there ever to be allowed not to be.

Still, when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.