tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34368432649279511652024-03-13T08:20:37.162+00:00Brian John Spencer“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labour, so writing is the only recourse left for me."
- Hunter S ThompsonBrian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.comBlogger1020125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-15984073353863858252020-07-19T15:05:00.000+01:002020-07-19T15:05:09.362+01:00The IRA killed border protestants to keep the SDLP and UUP apart<div class="tr_bq">
Henry Patterson <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/182497925863/gerry-adams-was-particularly-concerned-to-ensure">wrote</a>:</div>
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"Gerry Adams was particularly concerned to ensure that no deal was developed between the Ulster Unionists and the moderate Nationalists of John June’s Social Democrats and Labour Party (SDLP) which would have marginalised republicans. <b>As one Tyrone republicans explained to the journalist Ed Maloney, the killing of UDR men “stops the unionists doing a deal with the SDLP”. </b>It was also the case that “Ulsterisation”, by cutting down on the number of British soldiers available as targets, meant the Provisionals had an added incentive to target the RUC and UDR. The establishment of Adam’s henegmony in the republican movement by the end of the 1970s coincided with an intensification of attacks on the UDR in border areas. South Fermanagh was particularly affected."</blockquote>
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<a name='more'></a>Professor Henry Patterson published 'Ireland’s Violent Border' in 2013 about the sectarian murder campaign carried out by the Provisional IRA in the border areas of Northern Ireland. Patterson <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/nelson-mccausland/ira-campaign-along-border-was-driven-by-murderous-policy-of-ethnic-cleansing-34784399.html">explained</a> his reasons for writing the book:<br />
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"I wanted to write about the border, the problems of north-south security co-operation and the terrible price which border Protestant communities paid for it, because it’s a crucial, but largely ignored, story. </blockquote>
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It’s very common in literature on Northern Ireland and the Troubles to see it largely in terms of a dominant Protestant majority and a Catholic minority, but in the border areas it was the Protestants who were in the minority and who suffered for it. </blockquote>
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It has been ignored in large part because it does not fit into the oppressive Protestants/oppressed Catholics dichotomy."</blockquote>
He further <a href="https://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/jim-cusack-ira-engaged-in-ethnic-cleansing-of-protestants-along-border-29150363.html">said</a>:<br />
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"The British were convinced that the IRA's ability to exploit the Border and use the Republic as a safe haven was the key to the Provos' ability to wage the long war but with the exception of the Fine Gael/Labour coalition of 1973-77 the Irish default position was that most of the violence in NI had its origins there and the Republic's contribution to the the violence was minimal. The British sent regular security analyses of the Provos' exploitation of the Border and Irish territory to Dublin and pleaded for more co-operation but, particularly when Fianna Fail was in power, it got a cool reception. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Both Lynch and Haughey made it clear that the price of improved co-operation from Dublin would be high – a major constitutional initiative by London in tandem with Dublin and over the heads of unionists. The result was outlined by a former RUC Special Branch officer referring to the Provos' infrastructure in the Republic in 1980s: 'My conclusion: while successive Irish governments proclaimed their abhorrence of Provisional violence, their refusal, with the partial exception of the Fine-Gael coalition of 1973-77, to take the issue of Provisional exploitation of their territory seriously, objectively facilitated the organisations' ability to carry on its long war into the 1990s.'"</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-25033596888731097022020-03-10T10:00:00.003+00:002020-03-10T20:44:44.487+00:00Countering the republican refrain "you took our land"The common refrain from republicans is, "you took our land".<br />
<br />
Yet Belfast as a town and later city was only founded in the early 1600s.<br />
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It was built in a basin, situated at the foot of a rim of hills and at the the mouth of a river. It became a trading hub and the merchant community and the population grew rapidly from the 1650s onwards.<br />
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A mid-century figure of around 1,000 quickly rose to 2,000 by 1660. Hitting 3,200 by 1670, then reaching 5,000 in 1706.<br />
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The population grew to about 8,500 by 1760, grew to 13,500 in 1782, then got to 19,500 in 1791.<br />
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By 1912, the population of Belfast was nearly 400,000 compared with 174,000 in 1871. Edward Carson <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2018/12/look-to-belfast-and-be-repealer-if-you.html">said</a> in 1911:<br />
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<b>"The men who made Belfast, which was a town of 12,000 when the Act of Union [1801] was passed, and now has something like 400,000 people, do you think they will accept notice to quit?"</b></blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-48089224155416407982020-03-04T12:38:00.001+00:002020-03-04T12:38:32.165+00:00Before Ne Temere, 30% of presbyterian ministers supported Home Rule, afterwards only 4%<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Before Ne Temere was enacted in Ireland, 30% of Presbyterian ministers in Ireland favoured Home Rule. After the implementation of the Ne Temere decree 4% did. (See <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/99393706123/before-ne-temere-30-of-presbyterian-ministers-in" style="color: #3778cd; text-decoration-line: none;">here</a>).<a name='more'></a></div>
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The Ne Temere Decree came into force on Easter Sunday 1908. The Canon Law meant that the Catholic Church would not recognise a marriage between a Protestant and a Catholic unless it took place in a Catholic church. It also decreed children from any marriage must be brought up Catholic.</div>
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<br />The marriage rate between Catholics and Protestants was <a href="http://t.co/gaYvquVx5k" style="color: #3778cd; text-decoration-line: none;">under 1% in 1911</a>.<br /></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;">Famous Irish protestant and polemicist Hubert Butler <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139477510303/before-the-application-of-ne-temere-to-ireland" style="color: #3778cd; text-decoration-line: none;">wrote</a> in 1954 about the effects of the Ne Temere decree in <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139477510303/before-the-application-of-ne-temere-to-ireland" style="color: #3778cd; text-decoration-line: none;">'Portrait of a Minority'</a></i>:</span></div>
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"Before the application of Ne Temere to Ireland hostages were exchanged pari passu and the two communities shared in each other’s lives on equal terms. Now there is no reciprocity and in those who have given all and received nothing, <b>there is often a feeling of slow strangulation which they are forced to dissemble in case they do injury to those they love. A whole community can die without drama as though it had been struck by one of those instrument of “re-education”, which leaves no external bruises."</b></blockquote>
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In 1912 Edward Carson <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/138980892263/edward-carson-on-the-ne-temere-and-the-motu" style="color: #3778cd; text-decoration-line: none;">wrote</a> against the Ne Temere and <b>Motu Proprio decrees</b>:</div>
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"But the differences which still sever the two great parties in Ireland are not only economic but religious. The general slackening of theological dispute which followed the weary years of religious warfare after the Reformation, has never brought peace to Ireland. In England the very completeness of the defeat of Roman Catholicism has rendered the people oblivious to the dangers of its aggression. The Irish Unionists are not monsters of inhuman frame; they are men of like passions with Englishmen. Though they hold their religious views with vigour and determination, there is nothing that they would like more than to be able to forget their points of difference from those who are their fellow Christians. <b>It is perhaps necessary to point out once again that the Roman Catholic Church is a political, as well as a religious, institution, and to remind Englishmen that it is by the first law of its being an intolerant and aggressive organisation. </b>All Protestants in Ireland feel deep respect for much of the work which is carried on by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. They gladly acknowledge the influence of its priesthood in maintaining and upholding the traditional morality and purity of the Irish race. They venerate the memories of those brave Irish priests who defied persecution in order to bring succour to their flocks in time of need. But they are bound to deal with the present political situation as they find it. <b>They are determined that no Church, however admirable, and no creed, however lofty, should be forced upon them against their wills. </b>There is a dark side to the picture, on which it is unnecessary to dwell. We have only to ask the <b>Nonconformists of England</b> what would be their feelings were a Roman Catholic majority returned to the British House of Commons. In most of the articles in this book which deal with the religious question; special stress is laid upon <b>recent Papal legislation</b>. </blockquote>
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<b>The Ne Temere and the Motu Proprio decrees have constituted an invasion of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the minority in Ireland</b>, and they are even more significant as an illustration of <b>the policy of the Roman curia</b>. Those who have watched the steady increase of Roman aggression in every Roman Catholic country, followed as it has been by passionate protest and determined action by the civil Governments, must realise the danger which Home Rule would bring to the faith and liberty of the people of Ireland. <b>It is not inconsistent to urge, as many of us have urged, that Home Rule would mean alike a danger to the Protestant faith and a menace to Catholic power. </b>The immediate result of successful <b>Papal interference with civil liberties</b> in every land has been a sweeping movement among the people which has been, not Protestant, but anti-Christian in its nature. If we fear the tyranny which the Roman Catholic Church has established under British rule in Malta and in Quebec, may we not fear also the reaction from such tyranny which has already taken place in France and Portugal. But we are told that there are to be in the new Home Rule Bill safeguards which will protect the minority from any interference with their civil and religious liberties. It is not necessary for me to go over again in detail the ground which is so admirably covered by Mr. George Cave and Mr. James Campbell. <b>They show clearly that the existence of restrictions and limitations upon the activities of a Dublin Parliament, whether they are primarily intended to safeguard the British connection or to protect the liberties of minorities, cannot be worth the paper on which they are printed.</b> Let us take, for instance, an attempt to prevent the marriages of Irish Protestants from being invalidated by an Irish Parliament. We may point out that <b>an amendment to the 1893 Home Rule Bill, designed to safeguard such marriages, was rejected by the vote of the Irish Nationalist party</b>. But even were legislation affecting the marriage laws of the minority to be placed outside the control of a Dublin Parliament, the effect would not be to reassure the Protestant community. Mr. James Campbell mentions a case which has profoundly stirred the Puritan feelings of Irish Protestantism. A man charged with bigamy has been released without punishment because the first marriage, although in conformity with the law of the land, was not recognised by the Roman Catholic Church. However justifiable that course may have been in the exceptional circumstances of that particular case, the precedent obviously prepares the way for a practical reversal of the law by executive or judicial action. <b>We must remember that, since the Ne Temere decree has come into force, the marriages of Protestants and Roman Catholics are held by the Roman Catholic Church to be absolutely null and void unless they are celebrated in a Roman Catholic Church.</b> We have also to bear in mind that these marriages will not be permitted by the priesthood except under conditions which many <b>Irish Protestants consider humiliating and impossible.</b> No more deadly attack upon the faith of the Protestant minority in the three provinces in Ireland can be imagined than to make a denial of their faith the essential condition to the enjoyment of the highest happiness for which they may look upon this earth. </blockquote>
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<b>The second decree prohibits, under pain of excommunication, any Roman Catholic from bringing an ecclesiastical officer before a Court of Justice</b>. Even under the Union Government this decree is a danger to the liberty of the subject. Under an independent Irish Government, <b>nothing except that vast anti-clerical revolution which some people foresee could possibly reassure the people as to the attitude of the Executive Government in dealing with a large and privileged class."</b></blockquote>
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Jesse Buck <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139724096773/the-role-of-ne-temere-in-the-decline-of-a-custom" style="color: #3778cd; text-decoration-line: none;">wrote</a> an academic paper on the role of the Ne Temere decree:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The 20th century started with a custom in Ireland for raising children in mixed marriages; the sons would be raised in their fathers’ religion and the daughters in their mothers’. Certainly there were tensions. Mixed marriages were often suppressed by both the churches and the British state but they did exist. This was all about to change with the promulgation of Ne Temere and the political campaign launched by Protestants against it. <b>Ne Temere represented a new and robust approach by the Catholic Church towards mixed marriages and the raising of children within them. On the 19 April 1908 Pope Pius X promulgated the Papal Decree of Ne Temere. It effectively undermined the possibilities of marriage between a Catholic and non- Catholic.</b> Ne Temere was a hardening of the Catholic Church’s previously ambiguous stance on mixed marriages that cancelled the compromise position of the “Dutch precedent”, which had allowed for mixed marriages in some areas. <b>The Ne Temere Decree stated that the only valid marriage was one before a Catholic priest and the couple could only be married on the understanding that the following conditions would be met.</b> There would be no interference in the religion of the Catholic partner and the Catholic partner would do everything they could to convert the non-Catholic partner both before and after the ceremony. They would not present themselves to the minister of another religion and most onerously for the custom all children must be raised Catholic. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The most contentious issue was the religion of the children. Ne Temere led to the ‘promise’, a requirement before marriage that the non-Catholic partner agree to the children being raised Catholic.</b> This undermined the custom of raising sons in their fathers’ religion and daughters in the religion of their mothers. Ne Temere posed an existential threat to the Protestant community. There is a debate about whether this requirement was created with Ne Temere or pre-dates it. Lee suggests that it “dates from the 18th Century" although the promise to raise the children as Catholic was not sought in Ireland until Ne Temere. As the Catholic Bishop Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin at the Select Committee of 1825 illustrates, in the case of mixed marriages he only advises that the children be brought up Catholic. It was with the introduction of Ne Temere that the promise was always sought. Edwards himself a product of a mixed marriage saw Ne Temere as a formula to prevent mixed marriages “a proclamation of religious apartheid”. Prior to Ne Temere and the ensuing Protestant reaction mixed marriages could be performed with some difficulty in both partners’ churches and the couple could devise their own strategy for their children’s religious affiliation. With the advent of Ne Temere a couple had to choose only one church, which often resulted in the excommunication of one partner from their church and the loss of their community and family support network. In a place where the majority were Catholic and in a time before individual career structures that would have enabled a mixed marriage family to survive without the need for community support, the effect of Ne Temere was to force mixed marriages into the Catholic fold. The long term survival of the Protestant community relied on the perpetuation of its religion and traditions through the generations. </blockquote>
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Ne Temere did not end the custom on its own, it was part of a composite effect. The decree needs to be placed in the context of early 20th century Ireland and Britain. The start of the century was a tumultuous time, Britain was in the throes of a working class uprising and the movement for Irish Home Rule, which sought to repeal Act of Union 1800, had gained momentum. Ne Temere became a battle cry for Protestants fearful of Home Rule and their future in Catholic-dominated Ireland. It was this reaction that solidified opposition to Home Rule amongst Protestants and led to a scare campaign against mixed marriages leading to the end of the custom. </blockquote>
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The first two years following the promulgation of Ne Temere saw its criticism by the Church of Ireland Synod of Bishops, but apart from a few condemnations it generally went unnoticed. It was the McCann case that brought Ne Temere notoriety in Ireland. Over the course of 1910 and 1911 a domestic dispute in a mixed marriage family went from the home to public meetings and all the way to Parliament. There are two accounts of what transpired one Catholic and the other Protestant. Beyond dispute is that there was a Catholic husband Alexander McCann and his Presbyterian wife Agnes, who had married before Ne Temere. Whether they followed the custom of raising sons in their fathers’ religion and daughters in their mothers’ is not indicated. According to the Protestant side the couple had agreed that husband and wife would attend their respective churches. The major protagonist was the chief advisor and spokesman for Mrs McCann, the minister in her Townsend Street Presbyterian Church, William Corkey. It is at this point the two accounts diverge. According to William Corkey in October 1910 a priest visited the McCann home and informed them that they were not properly married and living in sin. He said that in order to rectify the situation a Catholic priest should marry them and she should make the promise to raise the children as Catholic. She refused and three days later Mr McCann took the children, the furniture and left. Lost and adrift she went to her church where her Pastor William Corkey took up her case. The Catholic account tells a different story of a troubled family life, where Agnes degraded her husband’s religion and told of their many short term separations. Tellingly the Catholic side asked Corkey to produce the name of the priest who declared the couple to be living in sin which he could not do. Corkey produces a number of letters purporting to be between the couple attesting to the happiness of their marriage. Although I have only dealt briefly with the Catholic side it is not my intent to engage in the debate over which account is closer to the truth. For the purpose of this article it is the effect of the Protestant reaction that is most relevant. It was the Protestant leaders who used Ne Temere to dissuade their youth from mixed marriages as it was they who felt the proselytising and existential threat of Ne Temere. </blockquote>
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Corkey spoke at meetings and protests in Belfast, Edinburgh and Dublin using the language of sectarianism, tapping into the critical junctures in British anti-Papery. He calls the priest who supposedly visited the McCann’s “the spokesman for Rome”, he quotes Rev Dr Irwin “The claim of that Church always has been to control the individual, the home, the school, the nation”, Rev Dr. Murphy of Cork said they have been “robbed of their peace and happiness by a foreign and self-constituted despotism”. Corkey says Mrs. McCann “inherited from her ancestors in Scotland... an incurably stiff back that absolutely refused to bend before the power of Rome”."</blockquote>
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Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-70856003065468777412020-02-15T17:18:00.000+00:002020-02-15T17:18:30.483+00:00Advanced republicans desire to expel or resettle Ulster's unionistsIn 1987, four years into his 34-year tenure as president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/183001466603/anyone-unwilling-to-accept-a-united-ireland-and">said</a>:<br />
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"Anyone unwilling to accept a united Ireland and wishing to leave should be offered <b>resettlement grants</b> to permit them to move to Britain, or assist them to move to a country of their choice."</blockquote>
J Bowman <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/190828287298/on-the-second-day-of-the-convention-de-valera">wrote</a> in his essay, <i>‘De Valera: did he entrench the partition of Ireland?’</i>:<br />
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"On the second day of the convention de Valera returned to the theme of northern policy and put forward a suggestion which he was also to voice privately to diplomats and to a group of Irish historians in the 1960s. Perhaps in the speech he is revealing an important aspect of his attitude to the Ulster unionists. He suggested that a transfer of populations between Irish emigrants in Britain and those in Northern Irland who described themselves as British might provide a solution to Partition. De Valera’s ambivalence and inconsistency is manifest on this, as on so many other topics. Along with stating in parliament in 1951 that ‘no matter how the world goes, these people and ourselves are going to live on one island here’, he also hankered after what had been his earliest prescription, <b>the expulsion of the Ulster Unionist from the island of Ireland. </b></blockquote>
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He had first advocated this in 1917-1818. In 1943, he confided to the American minister in Dublin David Gray that a statesmanlike settlement was available 'especially since the precedent for the exchange of populations has been established’. <b>Gray was not impressed: the idea was 'about as practicable as expelling the New Englanders from Massachusetts’.</b> After the war, de Valera spoke in a similar sense both in Ireland and on his American tour in 1948. He was also questioned specifically on this point by a group of historians in 1964. </blockquote>
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De Valera told them that a comparison with Cyprus - as it then was - would be instructive. The minority citizen be he Turk or Ulster Unionist <b>'must decide his priority: land or allegiance. If the former was more important, then he must accept subjection to the political will of the majority of the island; if being Turkish or British was the more important, then he sould return forthwith to the favoured country, Turkey or Britain’. </b></blockquote>
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That the proposal to expel the Ulster unionists with compensation should recur in <b>de Valera’s thinking between 1917 and 1964 </b>may help in answering the question raised in this article. Is this not an indication that essentially de Valera hankered after an <b>Irish-Ireland State based on so narrow a concept of Irishness that the Ulster Unionists should be either expelled, absorbed or merely tolerated as an un-Irish minority?</b> In fairness to de Valera we should emphasise that he was working in an Anglophobic political culture and in a period when political or religious ecumenism were not only not espoused but were not even discussed. </blockquote>
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Yet, that said, there remains a considerable contrast with today’s broad consensus in the south on the need for a self-critical approach to the south’s policy on unity, epitomised - despite many interparty differences - in the Report of the New Ireland Forum. Although appropriate genuflections are made in his direction, de Valera’s successors as leader of Fianna Fail have all rejected his concept of a narrow Irish-Ireland State."</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-32766499368735273572020-02-04T10:44:00.000+00:002020-02-04T10:44:20.204+00:00Young politicians in Sinn Fein no different from the past<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
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Just to be clear. This is what the Sinn Féin cllr said was 'misinterpreted'. <a href="https://t.co/mdA74xqr1L">pic.twitter.com/mdA74xqr1L</a></div>
— Úna-Minh (is my first name) Caomhánach (@unakavanagh) <a href="https://twitter.com/unakavanagh/status/1217868594165489664?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 16, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Sinn Fein councillor Paddy Holohan <a href="https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/paddy-holohans-comments-mountain-to-climb">said</a> on the No Shame Podcast:<br />
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"It bugs me to death to understand that he leads this country and that he's so separated not even from society now but he's so separated from the history of this country. <b>Leo Varadkar’s blood obviously runs to India so his great grandfather is not part of the history of this country</b> ... Now Leo, obviously he’s an Irish citizen, but his passion doesn’t go back to the times when our passion goes back to. So we’re in a situation where we have a leader that’s not only separated from the history of the country but separated from the classes in the country now."</blockquote>
Dean Van Nguyen, an Irish-Vietnamese writer, <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/deanvannguyen/status/1217939252971016192?ref_url=https%3a%2f%2fd-35279948652326457103.ampproject.net%2f2001251659540%2fframe.html">responded</a>:<br />
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"Putting <b>value in antique blood links is a cornerstone of racism."</b></blockquote>
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<a name='more'></a>The young Sinn Fein councillor Patrice Hardy <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/190640373718/what-i-still-cant-get-my-head-around-is-why-an">tweeted</a> with indignation in response to the news that an Irishman was captaining the England cricket team to World Cup victory:<br />
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<b>"What I still can’t get my head around is why an Irishman would ever want to captain an England team."</b></blockquote>
Eoin Morgan from Rush in Ireland has an English mother and has always had a British passport, and he <a href="https://punditarena.com/features/mcorry/corrys-corner-eoin-morgan/">told</a> the Sunday Times in 2010: "From the age of 13, I wanted to play cricket for England. I’ve never felt any shame in saying this is what I wanted to do."<br />
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Martin Corry <a href="https://punditarena.com/features/mcorry/corrys-corner-eoin-morgan/">wrote</a> a column in response to the wider furore:<br />
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"However, when Pundit Arena moved to congratulate the Dubliner on his success, to our surprise, <b>some of the backlash we received regarding Morgan was quite frankly appalling.</b> </blockquote>
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Through our social channels, <b>Morgan was branded a snake and a traitor among various other obscenities not worth including in this column</b>. All this abuse thrown at an athlete whose only crime was maximising his potential. </blockquote>
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For a country as inclusive as Ireland, that carries a world-renowned reputation for travel, immigration and integration, it’s worrisome to see such hatred thrown at someone born and bred in our capital city just because they chose to play for England. </blockquote>
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Because that’s the real issue here isn’t it? England! If he defected to France or Australia sure we’d probably embrace it, no?"</blockquote>
Another young Sinn Fein councillor from Mid Ulster Niamh Doris caused controversy when she <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/unionists-disrespected-by-sinn-fein-northern-ireland-tweet-says-councillor-38112035.html">tweeted</a>: <b>"The term 'Northern Ireland' is like nails on a chalk board to me."</b><br />
<br />
In <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/unionists-disrespected-by-sinn-fein-northern-ireland-tweet-says-councillor-38112035.html">response</a> a Sinn Fein spokesman said: "No one should be surprised that we, as Irish republicans, want to see a new and united Ireland for all."<br />
<br />
Another young Sinn Fein councillor Catherine Nelson <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/190640698333/brokenshire-villiers-bradley-smith-all">tweeted</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Brokenshire, Villiers, Bradley, Smith - all symbols of British occupation. None will ever serve the interests of the people of this island. Their focus is & will remain maintaining what little is left of their crumbling empire. Only way to send them home ➡️ #IrishUnity #Think32."</blockquote>
Niall O'Donnghaile <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/190640897183">tweeted </a>in response to Ireland’s call said in 2015:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I enjoy watching Ireland in rugby & appreciate moves to be embracing but that song doesn't embrace many of us, so is it therefore exclusive?"</blockquote>
He furthered <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/190640897183">commented</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Giving a little by taking away I'm not sure is the right solution/approach."</blockquote>
He later <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/190640897183">tweeted</a> in 2019:<br />
<br />
"”Norn Iron” is always going 2 be an antithesis to those of us with an Irish identity; inherently how could it represent us?"Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-6955977601281694202020-01-16T09:17:00.002+00:002020-01-16T09:17:41.570+00:00What about the Good Friday Agreement?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6T3kXVv5jqFsTkFeuJVzpXmQ7vKKAseYd_hpFVcOWiAB3bYpmkifeM-1SO2eExlgQkiXwZCOx4vB7WQyvmP9qFPmOb4iicav2F801HPPJ4otdW7wwtSowx2rGq8mqhRTNAiX_S6YehhE/s1600/Ian+Knox%252C+Good+Friday+Agreement.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="560" data-original-width="885" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6T3kXVv5jqFsTkFeuJVzpXmQ7vKKAseYd_hpFVcOWiAB3bYpmkifeM-1SO2eExlgQkiXwZCOx4vB7WQyvmP9qFPmOb4iicav2F801HPPJ4otdW7wwtSowx2rGq8mqhRTNAiX_S6YehhE/s320/Ian+Knox%252C+Good+Friday+Agreement.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Alex Kane <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/182557303883/i-could-go-on-but-my-primary-point-is-this-the">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The GFA which was endorsed by 71% in 1998 exists almost in name only today."</blockquote>
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Jon Tonge said:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"No. It's a model that I'm not convinced will ever fully work. I don't see Northern Ireland ever being truly stable. Since the Good Friday Agreement power-sharing hasn't been running 40% of the time. Stormont has never operated as a fully functioning joined-up government. The two big parties' constitutional aspirations are just too different."</blockquote>
Gerry Adams said in 1999:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Agreement is not a peace settlement , nor does it purport to be one ... During the talks we set ourselves to the task of weakening the British link while defending the right of the Irish people to national self-determination. It is in this context that we constantly measure the gains and losses contained in the Good Friday Agreement. The Agreement ... marks the beginning of a transitional period towards Irish unification."</blockquote>
Ed Moloney <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/182575845258/it-has-taken-how-long-several-months-at-least-but">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It has taken how long? Several months at least but finally a journalist covering the Brexit story, in this case John Campbell of the BBC, has gone to the trouble to actually read the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) to check whether Leo Varadkar is correct in stating that a hard Border would offend the GFA. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And his conclusion, as readers of thebrokenelbow.com will know full well, is that GFA says nothing – nada – about the nature of the Border, ‘hard’, ‘soft’ or middling and all those politicians, from Varadkar to Mary Lou have either been pulling the wool over our eyes or have themselves failed to complete the simplest of due diligence. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As for the hacks, it takes about 30 minutes to read the GFA so one can readily understand why so many journalists have failed to read the document at the heart of this controversy. I mean, that’s half an hour that could be better spent fiddling one’s expenses."</blockquote>
<br />
<br />Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-82368422634668268802020-01-07T20:26:00.000+00:002020-01-07T20:26:05.514+00:00The catholic church's colonialism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfImjPEviPJip5PtKFtterUz8Z7HUuaTMjIsDSfiyT7vAPu30esInHhVDXbgRryLCATfMNnu_vn_e8tw5BuarXTttFsbweNt5bw3KSmH-2k4Exj2IzpHrOtUIRUS2zjlpwGwmSSshBPLE/s1600/Sinn+Fein%252C+new+year+honours.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1008" data-original-width="828" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfImjPEviPJip5PtKFtterUz8Z7HUuaTMjIsDSfiyT7vAPu30esInHhVDXbgRryLCATfMNnu_vn_e8tw5BuarXTttFsbweNt5bw3KSmH-2k4Exj2IzpHrOtUIRUS2zjlpwGwmSSshBPLE/s320/Sinn+Fein%252C+new+year+honours.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
As recent social media activity has shown, Irish republicans see it as crazy that a catholic priest would accept an honour from the British (becoming 'Members of the British Empire'). As exampled above, Andree and Patricia don't see how Catholic priests could associate themselves with the British Empire and imperialism.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Ever since Brexit it’s become routine for Irish media and commentators to express with exasperation incredulity how little the British know about Ireland.<br />
<br />
But the comments above from Andree Murphy and Patricia MacBride also shows the glaring ignorance of Irish republicans.<br />
<br />
These Irish republicans seem to be very familiar with British imperialism and colonialism, but seem to be totally unaware that the Catholic Church played a central and driving role in the inception of and the whole history of European colonialism.<br />
<br />
It would appear that Irish republicans like Andree and Patricia have no concept that the Catholic Church was one and entwined with imperialism. That they are so vehemently against British imperialism, but have no concept of Catholic imperialism is truly remarkable.<br />
<br />
The Catholic Church backed and underwrote with a Papal Bull the conquest and plantation of South America, including the extermination of the great majority of the indigenous peoples, see <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2016/01/being-planter-ctd.html">here</a>. All you have to do to familiarize yourself with the reality of Catholic church and colonialism is to read the work of Julian Brave Noisecat, as an example he <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-vaticans-colonialism-and-imperialism.html">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal bulls from the 15th century that justified European colonization of newly “discovered” lands. One particular papal bull, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1455, authorized Christian nations “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all ... enemies of Christ,” take their land and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery." The doctrine played a central role in centuries of colonization the world over and resulted in immense loss of land and life by indigenous peoples across the Americas."</blockquote>
An interesting observation here, Rev Jules Gomes <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2018/01/ethics-and-empire-reappraising.html">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"But Middle Easterners or Muslims feel no post-colonial guilt for the Ottoman or Mughal empires. Only Western liberals derive perverse pleasure from the sport of post-colonial masochism. Western liberals are blind to Islamic imperialism (or Soviet or Communist imperialism). I think I know why they are incurably infected with this fake post-colonial guilt. Because they are the real racists!"</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-18063733664491225552019-11-07T10:28:00.000+00:002019-11-08T18:01:44.443+00:00The stereotype of the Irish Protestant<div style="text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The banker from the film Calvary who personifies vulgar excess and the lingering ascendency in Ireland</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
For the the outsider, <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/130209361993/orange-and-green-were-all-paddies-to-outsiders">every one from Ireland is Irish</a>, Green and Orange and every shade in between. (Except perhaps in the United States, as noted <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/95082918113/george-best-had-to-come-to-terms-with-a-world-in">here </a>and <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/83710171555/for-a-northern-irish-prod-this-is-how-it-goes-in">here</a>.) The natives suffer from and indulge in <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/northern-irelands-vanity-of-small.html">the vanity and narcissism of small differences</a>. Irish people all have a notion of "the other". The person who is "the other" is the confessional and constitutional counterpart, the person in the house next door or in the adjoining community. I wrote <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/unconscious-bias-against-irelands.html">here</a> about the bias and prejudgement that the protestants of Ireland experience.<br />
<a name='more'></a>For "the other" we have certain preconceptions and stereotypes. Almost always myths and untrue.<br />
<div>
<br />
Nick Liard <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/83710171555/for-a-northern-irish-prod-this-is-how-it-goes-in">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"For a Northern Irish prod, this is how it goes: in England you’re Irish, but not really Irish. In Ireland you’re British, but not really British. In America, where I live at the minute, you’re Irish, but when you qualify that you’re from Northern Ireland, you get the little glimmer of (mis)understanding. Then they say, pleased with themselves: “So are you Protestant or Catholic?” Cathestant or Protholic?… I hate this question, as the interlocutor thinks the answer will explain everything about you, about whether you’re the oppressed or the oppressor."</blockquote>
Alan Bairner <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/95083979573/whilst-the-ulster-protestant-can-be-dismissed-in">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Whilst the ulster Protestant can be dismissed in England as just another Irish person or, more generally, as a Celt, in Northern Ireland itself, his or her perceived identity is unlikely to be either Celtic or Irish. Indeed, even those Ulster Protestants who do want to celebrate their irish news recognise the problems associated with their attempts at self-identification."</blockquote>
Dr Deirdre Nuttall who is running the '<i><a href="https://www.ucd.ie/irishfolklore/en/Irish%20Protestant%20Folk%20Memory%20Project_INFORMATION%20SHEET.pdf">The Irish Protestant Folk Memory Project</a></i>' <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/158707058658/a-lot-of-older-people-believe-in-the-idea-of-the">said</a>;<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"A lot of older people believe in the idea of the Protestant work ethic. There are stereotypes [about Protestants in southern ireland]: Protestants are good at growing daffodils and can make a meal out of barely any food."</blockquote>
She also <a href="https://jkapalo.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/keeping-their-heads-down-shame-and-pride-in-the-stories-of-protestants-in-the-irish-republic-pdf1.pdf">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Many Protestants arrived in Ireland at the time of or in the wake of the Cromwellian wars in the mid-1600s (when Ireland was conquered by the forces of the English parliament). It‘s reasonable to assume that many, if not most, old Protestant families have at least some ancestors among them. However, even in families that can proudly trace their ancestry through the centuries, many are reluctant to countenance this possibility and quite a few vehemently deny any ancestral link to the plantations, even when they haven‘t been asked about it. Many appear to feel that contemporary Irish Protestants are invited to assume a collective sense of shame for the terrible things that happened a long ago, such as the massacre carried out by Oliver Cromwell in Drogheda in 1649, or the subsequent clearance of Catholics to be replaced with ―planters‖, and to apologize for or express this shame. <b>Some have even been explicitly told, at school or in conversation with their friends and neighbours, that they should be ashamed, because they are descended from the villains of Irish history.</b> One of the first things that many Protestants in the Republic of Ireland say when they start telling the story of their family is ―We have nothing to do with the planters."</blockquote>
Elodie Aviotte <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/151007487778/during-the-week-of-the-white-house-visit-ken">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"During the week of the White House visit, Ken Maginnis agreed to appear on the Larry King Live show on CNN along with Gerry Adams, as long as there would not be any direct debate (O’Clery, 1996, p.176). This point has often been seen as a media victory for the Sinn Fein leader who appeared very relaxed and full of confidence facing a rather nervous, aggressive adversary. Thus, Adams was seen as a peacemaker, and Maginnis, because of his refusal to directly speak to Adams and to shake hands, reinforced the US prejudice toward Unionists."</blockquote>
Henry McDonald <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/148730356818/henry-mcdonald-those-from-nationalist-and">wrote </a>in his essay, <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/148730356818/henry-mcdonald-those-from-nationalist-and">'Investigating the Protestant ‘Kaleidoscope’, in The Contested Identities of Ulster Protestants'</a></i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"South of the border the overwhelming image of the Ulster Prod is one of bewilderment. The unionists of the north east of Ireland are in the main as unknown an entity as the Bosnian Serbs or the Algerian Berbers. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Outside of the caravan of north-south community relations groups and the political classes, “Middle Ireland”, while not overtly hostile to the unionist population, has little understanding of/or social interaction with them. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Herein, then, lies a paradox, because “Middle Ireland’s” indifference to matters north of the border has played an important part in the social shift within the Republic away from reclaim-the-Fourth-Green-Field nationalism to support for a political settlement, which in the short to medium term accepts partition. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There is a minority (dwindling?) in the south who maintain an historic hostility to those they regard, at its most benign, as “misguided Irishmen and women”. Yet most people in the Republic take the attitude that, as long as it is peaceful, settled and stable, the north and its people can continue taking the high road while the south takes the low road. Partition in mind as well as geopolitical reality. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The media uses televisual shorthand to explain a complex story in an increasingly short period of time. Images of young men in hoodies using flagpoles with Union flags on them, bashing police Land-Rovers amid pentecostal-like flames from smashed Molotov cocktails, make for great TV pictures. Sour-faced, angry men, some of them in bowler hats, scowling into the camera and the microphone, make for great sectarian soundbites. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This selective cast-list, this guaranteed “picture-rich” backcloth, reminds you of the way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often played out for Western viewers. The cast-list here are normally dispossessed Palestinians and wild-eyed bearded Jewish settlers, more often than not with Brooklyn accents. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We rarely see the clubbers and the surfers of Tel Aviv, just as we hardly ever see the aspects of normal life that also go on across the Green Line in Palestine. Complexity is the enemy of all fundamentalist thinking, whether that be Islamism, the ultra-nationalism of the Jewish settler groups, the Taigs-Burn-in-Hell evangelicalism of the far-Right loyalist fringe, or the nihilistic addiction to republican armed struggle. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Perhaps that is why a small but bewildered minority just didn’t “get” a gesticulating, marionette of anarchy and energy from east Belfast who had come down to Co Clare with tales of drug-taking, all-night drinking, financial chaos, daydream record business projects as well as a decent, utopian ideal. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Here was someone who confounded all the usual stereotypes held even within sections of moderate, conservative Middle Ireland about northern Protestants - yet who was still “lost in translation” south of the border. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One of the most important novels to come out of Northern Ireland in this decade gives a more rounded, kaleidoscopic vision of the Protestant community. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
David Park’s The Light of Amsterdam involves three sets of characters from loyalist east Belfast: a single mother struggling financially who reluctantly joins her daughter’s hen party to the Dutch city; a middle-aged, well-off couple taking a break in Holland from their garden centre business; and a divorced, lonely father accompanying his teenage son there for a weekend holiday he hopes will reconnect a bond between them. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The centre-piece event that starts the novel off is the funeral of George Best and the main character’s melancholic sense of loss, the university art teacher sensing in the soccer star’s death his own ultimate decline. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There are sparse references to the Troubles and sectarian division. Park’s book instead deals with the aftermath of divorce, isolation, frustration, the desire to break free, all existential, universal themes. Yet Park succeeds in bringing to life a section of the Northern Irish population rarely seen in novels, films, plays or documentaries. The main cast are essentially decent, but flawed human beings who are not driven by a 24/7 sectarian raison d'etre, or an impending sense of political doom. They have more important things to worry about. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Perhaps it is no accident that Parks created Marion and Richard, who are relatively well-heeled living in the leafier suburban end of east Belfast and own a garden centre business. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Back in 1998, when a progressive section of unionism was trying to persuade a sceptical unionist electorate to back the Good Friday Agreement, Paul Bew, Professor of Politics at Queen’s University and renowned Irish historian, coined the phrase, “the Prod in the garden centre”. Professor Bew noted the indifference an important section of the Protestant middle class - moderate and relatively liberal - had towards the feral politics of Ulster. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Those interested in establishing real reconciliation in the Republic and a proper understanding of those “alien beings” that sometimes fall to southern earth should be arguing for a shift in southern perceptions. The place to start this is in southern schools and colleges. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The works that need to be studied ought to include the likes of The Light of Amsterdam; to allow authors, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians and even anarchist-hippy-punk dreamers like Hooley to shine light themselves into <b>a community where for too long (especially for those of us who grew up in nationalist and republican backgrounds) there were only the shadows of stereotype and gross generalisations."</b></blockquote>
Eamonn McCann <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/149362409783/if-orangemen-marching-along-the-garvaghy-road-is">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"If Orangemen marching along the Garvaghy Road is an expression of the culture of the Protestant people, what was Van Morrison at the Botanic Gardens? If the essence of the Protestant people is expressed through marching in a bowler hat behind a band past people who find the spectacle unpleasant, what is expressed in the plays of Sam Thompson and Gary Mitchell, the poetry of John Hewitt and Louis MacNeice, the accomplishments of George Best and Margaret Johnston, the music of Ash and Derek Bell?"</blockquote>
Donald Clarke <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/188535651098/it-should-be-otherwise-its-not-as-if-the">wrote </a>in the Irish Times, <i>'No offence to George Best, but loyalists could be doing with a few more heroes</i>', October 2019:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It should be otherwise. It’s not as if the Northern Irish Prod is short of distinguished role models. Let’s rule out Van Morrison just to make him even more annoyed than he usually seems. Edward Carson and Ian Paisley don’t really appeal outside niche audiences. But Field Marshal Alan Brooke, a Fermanagh man, was one of Churchill’s ablest generals. Ruby Murray, the hugely popular singer and rhyming slang for “curry”, was raised in Belfast. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
On my inclusive, fantasy gable I am, however, going to set aside space for a scientist. The brilliant John Stewart Bell, who devised the mind-expanding theorem that bears his name, is one nearly irresistible candidate. But the winner, after a photo finish, is declared to be the great astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She is a groundbreaker. Still very much with us, she can come and enjoy her lovely mural. No, it’ll never happen. But maybe we could name the other airport after her."</blockquote>
One abiding untruth is of the northern protestant community as "dour", laconic and downcast. Conor Cruise O'Brien <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/130263019258/conor-cruise-obrien-southern-catholics">articules</a> this perception below, where he notes that Southern Catholics generally view Northern Protestants as a dour, humourless people. Conor Caffrey <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/115844412353/if-it-were-not-for-the-small-family-size-you">said</a> below that Protestants were dark and colourless with no sense of humour. Conor Caffrey <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/115844412353/if-it-were-not-for-the-small-family-size-you">wrote</a>:</div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"What is a Protestant daddy? A poem I remember by Mr Durkan. It summed up my early fears of those so called “left footers” in Greystones town. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Greystones has always had a considerable density of Protestants since Oliver Cromwell rampaged his way through here. In my childhood, rumours abounded that the now genial Reverend Ian Paisley retreated here. Was that him that played the bagpipes at Smugglers Cove? I often wondered upon hearing the sounds of that alienated and most political of celtic instruments drifting out to sea. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Protestants weren’t exactly monsters, but they had crooked angular features not unlike a painting by Graham Knuttel, but without the colour and much darker. </b>They were tall, thin and wandered silently about town in black clothes, stooped, and lurched in shadows in the early evening or so I thought. They wore sunglasses which made we wonder if they had eyes at all. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And St Patrick’s, on Church Road, was haunted with devilish ghosts. At least it appeared that way with uplighting and a full moon and my overactive imagination. I would run by quickly between the lampposts on the opposite side of the road. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My early education was mediated through what I know realise to be the intransigent diatribe of the Holy Christian brothers and they had one view of those hellbound others and that was they were heading downwards and to burn. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It didn’t help there were so many of them about town. They seemed to have all the money and live in the Burnaby. They spoke with Anglo accents, which I have to say as a teenager I later admired and thought sophisticated and even cool. Their shades looked cool now and no longer menacing. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now I am back and my kid is going to a Protestant school, albeit she is sent out with an agenda to proselytise and convert the heathens. And perhaps make one or two of her classmates jealous of her communion dress – the girls of course! </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And dare I say it. Just like our friend Mr Paisley north of the border I laugh and joke with the old enemy. Some of my best friends are Protestants. And two are even <b>those dreaded Ulster Scots from the staunchest of Antrim and Down and shockingly they have a sense of humour that I enjoy</b>. If it were not for the small family size, you would never know it. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I have realised that besides their crooked features and impending doom at judgement time some of them Protestants are a likeable lot. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
According to the recent census we have the highest percentage of Church of Ireland attendees in Ireland. Not just Protestants but a baffling multitude of nonbelievers from Presbyterians to Pentecostal to Evangelical. I plead ignorance on the difference but they all have their churches and halls. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And I realise that most of the settlers were of Protestant working class. Now there is a good reason for cultivating my Upper Redford Park accent."</blockquote>
<div>
<div>
Conor Cruise O'Brien <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/130263019258/conor-cruise-obrien-southern-catholics">wrote</a> in his autobiography, <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/130263019258/conor-cruise-obrien-southern-catholics">‘Memoir: My Life and Themes’</a></i> (pp. 428-430):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I didn’t in fact think that the unionists in Northern Ireland were any more bigoted than nationalists. But because for historical reasons unionists’ bigotry tended to be uninhibitedly expressed, while nationalist bigotry tended to be covered over with layers of pseudo-ecumenical rhetoric, outsiders - British, American and other - tended to find nationalists nicer and more "reasonable” than unionists, a perception which has been greatly to the advantage of the former."</blockquote>
He <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/130263019258/conor-cruise-obrien-southern-catholics">continued</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"In the summer of 1995, a more formidable non-sectarian unionist, with no Thatcherite baggage, Bob McCartney, asked for my help and got it… I found canvassing with Bob McCartney in North Down a most interesting and illuminating experience an also a heartening experience. Bob is probably the most successful QC in Northern Ireland, but his own family roots are in the working-class area of the Shankill Road, Belfast. He is at ease with people of all classes in Northern Ireland, as very few other politicians are. In the working-class areas people recognise him and come up and chat with him. To my initial surprise, they were usually laughing and joking together. I was surprised because <b>southern Catholics - the community of which I was an aberrant member - generally think of Northern Protestants as a dour, humourless people. </b>Yet here they were joking and laughing like mad. How come? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When I thought about that for a while, the answer was not hard to find. Most southern Catholics, when they talk with Ulster Protestants, try to induce the Protestants to move in a direction in which they have not wanted to go (that of a united Ireland). If you do that with any group of people you are likely to find that your interlocutors seem glum and uncommunicative. In short: if you try to push people around you will find that they will bristle. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Canvassing with Bob McCartney, I was seeing Protestants as they are when they are at ease with themselves. Few people from a southern Catholic background can ever have seen Ulster Protestants under those conditions and I felt quite privileged and happy to have this experience."</blockquote>
</div>
<div>
Eighteen year old Irish protestant and Trinity College Dublin student Heather Jones <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/134322671588/the-stereotype-of-the-irish-protestant-ctd">said</a> in 1996 in an interview with the New York Times:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"When you meet Roman Catholics they tend to judge you in the context of Northern politics… You don’t speak Irish (said citing the stereotypes)… You must be very Anglo-Irish, close to Britain, and financially well-off."</blockquote>
Tim Keatinge, an official at the COI College of Education, <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/134322671588/the-stereotype-of-the-irish-protestant-ctd">said</a> to the New York Times in a 1996 interview:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Twenty or thirty years ago, well, I wouldn’t say we were ashamed, but we were in the closet. But I never felt threatened. Roman Catholics would find out your religion and put you on a higher pedestal for some things, like honesty. They thought you could be trusted."</blockquote>
</div>
<div>
Conor Cruise O'Brien, <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/116097979408/bertie-rodgers-was-an-ulster-presbyterian-who">described</a> the Ulster protestant W.R. Rogers in <i>‘Introduction to Irish Literary Portraits’</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Bertie Rodgers was an Ulster Presbyterian who sought and enjoyed the company of Southern Catholics. The case is not unique: it remains unusual… He was, among so much else, a good Dubliner and Dublin loved him."</blockquote>
Patrick Mayhew, British politician whose ancestors were Anglo-Irish in County Cork, <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/155527786903/living-in-the-south-anglo-irish-families-tended">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Living in the south, Anglo-Irish families tended to think of northern Protestants as denizens of the wild woods."</blockquote>
Frank McGuinness <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-stereotype-of-northern-ireland.html">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It was an eye-opener for a Catholic republican, as I am, to have to examine the complexity, diversity, disturbance and integrity of the other side, the Protestant people."</blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-82432784567808195662019-06-24T09:29:00.000+01:002019-06-24T09:29:08.819+01:00Two ways to view the republican movement...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqQ7Ps2M3WYe5QiIDR33uzgDRy4LI1NaHNVfXAWJcY5ruOGDSY4cBbkYErORR6BH7h4w_d01Eq0Obdq-15W_LjaflPq1pwRaoGV-jr3Ke5v6a1ArZ_KHThUz1A1ZNfYOgp8K3EqHtlLWs/s1600/Eamonn+Mallie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="335" data-original-width="828" height="128" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqQ7Ps2M3WYe5QiIDR33uzgDRy4LI1NaHNVfXAWJcY5ruOGDSY4cBbkYErORR6BH7h4w_d01Eq0Obdq-15W_LjaflPq1pwRaoGV-jr3Ke5v6a1ArZ_KHThUz1A1ZNfYOgp8K3EqHtlLWs/s320/Eamonn+Mallie.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
And in contrast a News Letter editorial <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/184690540263/the-news-letter-editorial-of-april-30-2019-said">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald said yesterday that the UK and Irish governments must “intervene” if the Northern Ireland talks to restore Stormont fail. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“The current stalemate cannot continue, the current position is simply not sustainable,” she said. <a name='more'></a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Her party would, she added, enter the talks in good faith. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Time has, she added, run out on equality. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Any deal, she said, must be based on equality and respect. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But there has been no equality, not since 1998, nor has there been respect. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Sinn Fein has always been given special dispensation. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Republicans were tardy in decommissioning, despite the goodwill of early prisoner releases, they spied at Stormont, broke into Castlereagh, robbed the Northern Bank, murdered people including Robert McCartney. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Never did they face sanction. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When Stormont finally resumed in 2007, there were subsequent crises over devolution of policing and justice, over the paramilitary report in 2015 after further killings and over the secret On The Run schemes. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Then, in 2017, they pulled down Stormont. They have been allowed to do this without so much as a hint of reproach from a supposedly Conservative and Unionist government, and never any sanction, in much the same way that Sinn Fein alone has been allowed to boycott Westminster and get expenses. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Will London ever realise that if there is no sanction ever under any circumstances, this sort of conduct will recur and recur, with Dublin all the while putting pressure on the UK, and never on republicans? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Indeed, Sinn Fein is indulged in the notion of whether it will ‘accept’ less than the near deal of last year."</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-71827828063233005132019-03-30T15:24:00.001+00:002019-03-30T15:24:45.320+00:00Ireland's "up the 'RA" problem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzArmo0DBiS0u4zBOJIMerEpuS9xJ0Sg_SYwC3MhMY69vzVP9aAMNtQHjI0YZolfYftrxiPo2eMecf0wILG9nmrmbK2Fjqs8Bl7ecN5f8uT_AZXTmbe3ENaLmA4D0Cy3Bra7nk-7Pu6Kw/s1600/_106055664_marylou_england.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="660" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzArmo0DBiS0u4zBOJIMerEpuS9xJ0Sg_SYwC3MhMY69vzVP9aAMNtQHjI0YZolfYftrxiPo2eMecf0wILG9nmrmbK2Fjqs8Bl7ecN5f8uT_AZXTmbe3ENaLmA4D0Cy3Bra7nk-7Pu6Kw/s320/_106055664_marylou_england.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Recently Declan Rice caused huge controversy after it emerged that in 2015 he <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/soccer/international/declan-rice-apologises-over-2015-up-the-ra-instagram-post-1.3834526">wrote</a> "up the ‘RA" on Instagram. Only a few days earlier Michael Conlon entered the ring in New York to <a href="https://twitter.com/StephenNolan/status/1108003226245312512?s=20">chants</a> of "ooh ah up the RA".<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Then of course the President of Sinn Fein Mary Lou McDonald caused great controversy when Sinn Fein proudly shared a photo of their leader walking in New York with a banner stating, 'England Get Out of Ireland.'<br />
<br />
Thirty years ago the President of Sinn Fein Gerry Adams <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/183001466603/anyone-unwilling-to-accept-a-united-ireland-and">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Anyone unwilling to accept a united Ireland and wishing to leave should be offered resettlement grants to permit them to move to Britain, or assist them to move to a country of their choice."</blockquote>
Then around the same time Sinéad Ryan of NewsTalk <a href="https://twitter.com/sinead_ryan/status/1110277733333037056?s=20">tweeted</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I am Irish. We started 800 years ago and they're still not fully gone!"</blockquote>
Journalist Paul Doyle <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/yw84vw/how-militant-irish-republican-slogans-went-viral?utm_campaign=sharebutton">reported</a>, "In China, a class of children are sitting down for an English lesson. Their teacher, an Irishman, has devised a helpful chant to acquaint them with the language: 'Ooh, aah, up the RA! Ooh, aah, up the RA!'"<br />
<br />
In 2013 the Republic of Ireland player Shane Duffy who was born in Northern Ireland <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/republic-star-shane-duffy-faces-storm-over-proira-tweet-sent-from-phone-29138559.html">tweeted </a>“up the ra” but said someone had stolen his phone.<br />
<br />
In April 2018 Cliftonville’s Rory Donnelly shared on Instagram a photo with the comment "up the RA"<br />
<br />
Coleraine player Jamie McGonigle sang anti-British songs in the summer of 2018, chanting "fuck the queen".<br />
<br />
Cliftonville’s Ryan Catney <a href="https://unionistvoice.com/sport/exclusive-cliftonvilles-ryan-catney-likes-social-media-posts-praising-inla-terror-gang/">liked </a>social media posts praising the INLA.<br />
<br />
<br />
A Belfast rap group called Kneecap led chants of <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/watch-belfast-rappers-chant-brits-out-at-empire-following-royal-visit-37871955.html">"Get the Brits out now"</a> at the Empire Music Hal, the same pub Prince William and Kate Middleton graced 24 hours earlier.<br />
<br />
FAI Chief Executive John Delaney had to apologise after singing the Wolfe Tones' republican ballad Joe McDonnell in a Dublin pub in 2014. It happened in the Bath pub following the Republic of Ireland's 4-1 win over USA at the Aviva Stadium. John Delaney <a href="https://www.rte.ie/sport/soccer/2014/1125/662305-delaney-apologises-for-offence-caused-by-song/">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I'll give you an example. Sean South from Garryowen has been sung on the Irish team bus for years, from the Jack Charlton era, right up to the current era."</blockquote>
At the end of the West Belfast Festival Feile an Phobail 2018 a concert was held in Falls Park at which The Wolfe Tones sang Go On Home British Soldiers, Go On Home. The crowd chanted “Ooh, ah... up the ’RA”, other chant included "We will fight you for 800 more" and "you’ll never defeat the IRA" and "So f*ck your Union Jack". And there were Irish tricolours decorated with the letters IRA. Other groups to play that night included Shebeen, The Rising of the Moon and Gary Og, all “rebel music”.<br />
<br />
Shouts of "up the Ra" were <a href="https://twitter.com/KevDoyle_Indo/status/1017038833551060992?s=20">heard</a> from across the Liffey as Harry and Meghan arrived at the Famine Memorial in Dublin city centre. While crowds in the background on this side gave them a big cheers.<br />
<br />
Wolfe Tone wrote after the failed 1798 rebellion:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"For a fair and open war I was prepared. That it has disintegrated into mayhem and assassination and bloodshed I am extremely sorry, this is not what I had wanted."</blockquote>
Joe, <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/181249217908/im-saying-this-as-someone-who-stands-up-for-them">speaking</a> in a bar in Belcoo on the border, a farmer who owned land on both sides of the Border <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/181249217908/im-saying-this-as-someone-who-stands-up-for-them">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I’m saying this as someone who stands up for them, but they shouldn’t be here, if you really want to go into it like that. They are planters. They were planted in here, and what happened over the years was scandalous."</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-20263039830692793822019-02-19T10:41:00.000+00:002019-02-19T10:41:02.531+00:00Ray Davey on the Civil Rights campaign in Northern Ireland<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIH1LZ4H7O2Dezo5vhfccs9oj5yAXcrgSV0XUi4Egm3OmBQI8GVZXJwgprtgxXRvyMtlyP6HNM-VupXmNcg_uJhd24r9H_2YKDU1dvzmAYENFlb7FviyG5PxTXL2xOuDXN0uk-8lc5Jpc/s1600/Davey01b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="505" data-original-width="599" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIH1LZ4H7O2Dezo5vhfccs9oj5yAXcrgSV0XUi4Egm3OmBQI8GVZXJwgprtgxXRvyMtlyP6HNM-VupXmNcg_uJhd24r9H_2YKDU1dvzmAYENFlb7FviyG5PxTXL2xOuDXN0uk-8lc5Jpc/s320/Davey01b.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br />Ray Davey wrote in his book ‘<i>Take Away This Hate</i>’ (pp. 90-92):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It was, as far as I could see, a time of creativity and optimism among the students that I knew best. The result was that when in the Autumn term of 1968 the whole situation suddenly changed and the academic calm was rudely shattered by protest marches and confrontation, the vast majority of students were deeply shocked and completely taken by surprise. <a name='more'></a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This was initially sparked off by unrest among students in other parts of the world. It was known as the period of student revolt. This was happening in various ways: protest against the way the universities were run, demands for more student participation in the organisation and running of the institution, as well as even more radical requests. It was part of a general reaction against structures and institutions and a demand for much more democracy instead of oligarchic and at times authoritarian control. In many centres there was violence and frequently security forces were involved. Earlier there had been the Civil Rights Campaigns in the United States. All these events and the radical and revolutionary ideas, proclaimed by a writer like Marcuse, created a whole new ethos and attitude in many campuses. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was very obvious that this new thinking and approach would find fertile soil in Northern Ireland among the new generation of students who were the first generation of their tradition to have higher education as the result of the 1947 Education Act. These young people were able to articulate their feelings and asserted that they were no longer willing to be treated as second-class citizens. They were well aware of all the grievances they and their elders had to endure, such as discrimination in housing, employment and in local government. They were also very conscious of the Special Powers Legislation and had little confidence in the status quo at Stormont. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I learnt much of how they felt, when with several of my fellow chaplains I attended the early meetings of the new radical group, the People’s Democracy. This was mainly made up of students from a Nationalist background and also members of the Youth Socialist Group which included many who were not students. Events soon escalated. There were several civil rights marches in Belfast very widely supported by students and staff. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Soon came the much publicised civil rights march in Derry when the Minister of Home Affairs over-reacted and many of participants were batoned by the police. The march from Belfast to Derry, started by a small group of People’s Democracy, again drew a violent reaction, and the events of Burntollet bridge became part of history. Here the marchers were ambushed by Loyalists who claimed that Republican flags were being displayed, and that IRA supporters were in the procession. So polarisation increased, as did the danger of much greater violence, with the Loyalists becoming more articulate and organised. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The gives something of the atmosphere of these traumatic weeks. I can remember the various responses of the student population, because Queen’s now found itself very much in the limelight, as most of the activists at that time were students. I need only mention Bernadette Devlin, Michael Farrell and Eamonn McCann. Student opinion was naturally deeply divided. There were those who were set not only on Civil Rights and alterations in the present administration, but on more revolutionary change, and had as their ideal the Workers’ Republic as envisaged by James Connolly before the 1916 Rising. There was a much larger number of those who were from a Nationalist background who did believe in change, but did not believe in, or want, violence. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Those I was in touch with were for the most part from the Unionist tradition. Most of them were deeply perplexed and shaken by what was happening, as they had hitherto little idea of how their fellow students of a the Catholic-Nationalist tradition felt. Many of the more thoughtful were deeply disturbed when they because aware of the various forms of discrimination and indeed took part in the early Civil Rights marches. <u>As the situation developed and hardened they realised that much more than civil rights were involved; in fact it implied a United Ireland, and this was in complete opposition to their whole outlook and background."</u></b></blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-74140590258101929872019-01-06T20:03:00.000+00:002019-01-06T20:03:19.929+00:00Ireland was never united<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia_pwCMesETo5qCW_OMlBbKRe8d5ncjtV4SnSkvqAEbigYv8ojtcwtWIdVrm1WVDJtXHmjwyEI4SCayBPspOf8xiIjWTyRmH_ltgV9HQ3cWBFBumA-qDoH5E377-PkYXDgYSqAkVIUTt4/s1600/foundingfathers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="269" data-original-width="350" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia_pwCMesETo5qCW_OMlBbKRe8d5ncjtV4SnSkvqAEbigYv8ojtcwtWIdVrm1WVDJtXHmjwyEI4SCayBPspOf8xiIjWTyRmH_ltgV9HQ3cWBFBumA-qDoH5E377-PkYXDgYSqAkVIUTt4/s320/foundingfathers.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
It was <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/106261663903/the-division-and-troubles-in-pre-plantation">written</a> in 1913:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Celtic Church no doubt had its golden age. It produced saints and men of learning. It sent out its missionaries to the heathen beyond the seas. So famous were its schools that students came to them from distant lands. But centuries before the Normans appeared in Ireland the salt had lost its savour. The Celtic Church had sunk into being a mere appendage of the wild tribes it had once tried to tame. The chiefs of one tribe would sack the colleges and shrines of another tribe as freely as they would sack any of their other possessions. For instance, the annals tell us that in the year 1100 the men of the south made a raid into Connaught and burned many churches; in 1113 Munster tribe burned many churches in Meath, one of them being full of people; in 1128 the septs of Leitrim and Cavan plundered and slew the retinue of the Bishop of Armagh; in the same year the men of Tyrone raided Down and a great number of people suffered martyrdom; four years later Kildare was invaded by raiders from Wexford, the church was burnt and many men slain; and so on with dreary monotony. Bishops and abbots fought in the incessant tribal wars as keenly as laymen. Worse still, it was not infrequent for one band of clergy to make war on another. In the ninth century, Phelim, who claimed to be both Bishop and King of Leinster, ravaged Ulster and murdered its monks and clergy. In the eleventh century the annals give an account of a fierce battle between the Bishop of Armagh and the Bishop of Clonard. Nor did time work any improvement; we read of bloody conflicts between abbots and bishops as late as the middle of the fifteenth century. What influence for good could such a church have had upon the mass of the people?"</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-30114895411078625182018-12-05T11:13:00.001+00:002019-03-27T22:18:37.114+00:00"Look to Belfast and be a repealer if you can..."<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwnpRGFoGm4nXJ6DHACpnljfDpxCrTuQ3s_pKH3F7flHS3dQ68q2-StiMUvS1Ki6AHpj0v0rVpsQYAd6l0y20oZP8gfTIJmm2lvVZGwg_ertZYR7-jVO0BLfuL_c2f1ox9ibxOEPYAj4M/s1600/Repelling-the-Repealer-William-McComb%25E2%2580%2599s-caricatures-of-Daniel-O%25E2%2580%2599Connell-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="439" data-original-width="280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwnpRGFoGm4nXJ6DHACpnljfDpxCrTuQ3s_pKH3F7flHS3dQ68q2-StiMUvS1Ki6AHpj0v0rVpsQYAd6l0y20oZP8gfTIJmm2lvVZGwg_ertZYR7-jVO0BLfuL_c2f1ox9ibxOEPYAj4M/s320/Repelling-the-Repealer-William-McComb%25E2%2580%2599s-caricatures-of-Daniel-O%25E2%2580%2599Connell-1.jpg" width="204" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Illustration depicting Cooke’s Challenge to O’Connell within the context of the Union.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<br /></div>
Henry Cooke <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/180823761413/look-at-belfast-a-glorious-sight-the-masted">issued</a> this challenged to Daniel O’Connell when the latter came to Belfast in January 1841:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Look at Belfast, a glorious sight, the masted groves in the harbour, the mighty warehouse, the giant manufactories, the rapidly growing streets, all owed to the Union. Look to Belfast and be a repealer if you can."</blockquote>
<div>
<a name='more'></a>Edward Carson <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/183139526023/the-men-who-made-belfast-which-was-a-town-of">said</a> in 1911:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The men who made Belfast, which was a town of 12,000 when the Act of Union [1801] was passed, and now has something like 400,000 people, do you think they will accept notice to quit?"</blockquote>
Edward Carson <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/138889509468/that-minority-which-is-there-gives-an-answer-to">said</a> in 1912:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"That minority which is there gives an answer to the argument of the failure of the rule of the United Kingdom Parliament in Ireland. <b>The success of Belfast, which has grown from 15,000 or 16,000 people before the Union to a population of 400,000 or thereabouts, the success of the surrounding counties, not at all the most prolific or the most fertile in Ireland, give the lie to those who say that it is English misrule in Ireland, as they call it</b>—though why it should be called English I do not know—that has prevented the other parts of Ireland attaining a similar state of prosperity. Those are the men at all events that I represent here—the men whom you invited into your Parliament when Pitt passed his Bill."</blockquote>
It was <a href="http://www.arts.ulster.ac.uk/ulsterscots/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/UNIT-15-A-Level-History-Daniel-OConnells-Visit-to-Belfast.pdf">written</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"William McComb, a Belfast Presbyterian, was first a schoolmaster. He became a bookseller and publisher and released<i> The Repealer Repulsed</i> following O’Connell’s visit to Belfast. With Cooke he had edited the Orthodox Presbyterian, and attacked the politically liberal Belfast newspaper the Northern Whig. He wrote a moving <a href="http://www.arts.ulster.ac.uk/ulsterscots/usep_pdf/Final%20English%20Texts/Lyttle,%20Wesley%20Guard.%20Betsy%20Gray%20%20or,%20the%20hearts%20of%20Down.%20A%20tale%20of%20ninety-eight.%20(Bangor,%201888).pdf">ballad about Betsy Gray</a>, the murdered County Down Presbyterian heroine of the 1798 Rebellion. In the poem he deplores what he considers the foolishness of the ’98 insurgents and stresses the advantages of Union. McComb greatly admired Cooke. Maume suggests he saw him as a modern John Knox – the formidable founder of the Presbyterian church in Scotland."</blockquote>
It was also <a href="http://www.arts.ulster.ac.uk/ulsterscots/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/UNIT-15-A-Level-History-Daniel-OConnells-Visit-to-Belfast.pdf">written</a> that <i>'"The Repealer Repulsed</i>' has been described as a ‘foundation text of Ulster Unionism’. Several pieces employ Scots language or references to Ulster’s Scottish links. Later in the<br />
century northern opponents of Home Rule would directly reference the importance of the<br />
close Ulster-Scotland connection as they campaigned to maintain the Union."<br />
<div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivTEURY-IK99vDkR2NvQR3eQFOqMsMsyctsE1KpAjqG_jp4jGQ7AMeFQWu0Y44fNyPR7nVeJr7hItR1PeaUr0PrIYQxtdGCdY3NNjKfApPA3MgU3wxGLgk9bU_n0R5VlqKSLRTVqhF2qw/s1600/10_O%2527Connell_driving_the_foreign_toads_and_vipers_from_the_land.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="563" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivTEURY-IK99vDkR2NvQR3eQFOqMsMsyctsE1KpAjqG_jp4jGQ7AMeFQWu0Y44fNyPR7nVeJr7hItR1PeaUr0PrIYQxtdGCdY3NNjKfApPA3MgU3wxGLgk9bU_n0R5VlqKSLRTVqhF2qw/s320/10_O%2527Connell_driving_the_foreign_toads_and_vipers_from_the_land.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">"O'Connell driving the foreign toads and vipers from the land", William Tell, Dublin, 1844</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">O'Connell is the new St Patrick driving out Ireland's enemies; Wellington and Peel at the bottom with Archbishop Whately representing the 'endless plunder' of the Church of Ireland; 'Either-side Graham' and Scorpion Stanley' (deserters from the Whigs in 1834-5; a flying TBC Smith clutching his '60 names', trailing conspiracy and accompanied by a 'bad judge'; and the Times, singled out for its vituperative coverage of the state trials.</span></td></tr>
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<br />Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-38493930726983764692018-12-03T19:18:00.001+00:002018-12-03T19:18:32.680+00:00"This everlasting teaching of hatred of England..."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo6ZTGlxL1ooa1swXfHaQJMcJgyfWfjfCYuXWmf3vOgLqvwpKSKAt-ZqJ21EuqDOj6Cu0AaBqTF6yo2FuIizhxpAf_WALWdwEzuKi7ktgNw2d7JGveaQW7RAxxMXLIj1An_Olve27Pohw/s1600/Edward+Carson+-+David+Low+%25288%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="482" data-original-width="361" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo6ZTGlxL1ooa1swXfHaQJMcJgyfWfjfCYuXWmf3vOgLqvwpKSKAt-ZqJ21EuqDOj6Cu0AaBqTF6yo2FuIizhxpAf_WALWdwEzuKi7ktgNw2d7JGveaQW7RAxxMXLIj1An_Olve27Pohw/s320/Edward+Carson+-+David+Low+%25288%2529.jpg" width="238" /></a></div>
<br />
Edna Longley <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/126506552428/michael-collins-a-hero-to-irish-catholics-a">observed</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Irish Catholics and Ulster protestants not only tend to remember different things, but remember them in different ways."</blockquote>
Fiona Kennedy <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/155384059928/when-i-was-a-child-i-learned-from-my-grandmother">wrote</a> in the Irish Times:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"When I was a child I learned from my grandmother that the Protestant heathens who lived next door had plundered and tortured us, ruined our language and culture and divided our country."</blockquote>
<br />
<a name='more'></a>The UUP Report ‘<i>Northern Ireland Fact and Falsehood - A frank look at the present and the past’ </i>(1968) <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/146313028183/a-frequently-repeated-allegation-is-that-northern">stated</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"A frequently repeated allegation is that Northern Ireland is an artificial creation, brought into being by a callous British partition of Ireland, without regard to the wishes of the inhabitants, and maintained ever since by questionable and even fraudulent means." </blockquote>
Jennie Erdal <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/120647114353/louise-richardson-on-the-1916-leaders">wrote</a> about Irish-born Louise Richardson in the FT:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The young Louise Richardson had kept scrapbooks with newspaper cuttings of the Bloody Sunday atrocities, filling diaries with invectives against the occupying army. At her convent school, she and her classmates prayed beneath a statue of the crucified Christ. Beside the statue was the framed text of the Proclamation of Independence, with photographs of seven men executed for their part in the 1916 Easter Rising. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Their photographs were as familiar to me as the images of America’s founding fathers are to my children." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The crucifixion and the proclamation gave the same message: that the good are often persecuted, that you suffer for your beliefs, that in time truth will triumph"."</blockquote>
Northern Irish poet Nick Laird <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/87036610998/growing-up-in-cookstown-in-county-tyrone-i-would">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Growing up in Cookstown in County Tyrone, I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to be Martin McGuinness’s son. He was infamous for being Sinn Féin’s number two, and for being the officer commanding of the Derry brigade of the IRA, a position he assumed, as he recently admitted, in February 1972. He was born the same year as my mother, and my parents used to live in Londonderry. If instead of meeting my dad at a dance in Dublin, she had met a young butcher called Martin from the Bogside, maybe I would be Martin Jr. There was an Oedipal twist to my unlikely fantasy, because <b>I also used to imagine killing him. And it wasn’t just me. At lunch in the school canteen, between telling stories about armalites or girls, exit wounds or telly programmes, we’d all go on about how much we’d love to fucking kill McGuinness. To blow him up. To gun him down. To do to him what his crowd had done, and was doing, to other people, to people we knew. </b>Then, in the 1997 general election, after I had left home and gone to university in England, Martin McGuinness became our MP."</blockquote>
Edward Carson <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/138980952333/it-is-sufficient-to-say-that-this-conflict-the">said</a> in 1912:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It is sufficient to say that this conflict [the land war] was ended, for the time at least, by the passing of <b>Mr. Wyndham’s Land Act</b>. We look forward in perfect confidence to the time when that great measure <b>shall achieve its full result in wiping out the memory of many centuries of discord and hatred."</b></blockquote>
Edward Carson <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/74838702869/there-is-no-one-in-the-world-who-would-be-more">said</a> in January 1921:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"There is no one in the world who would be more pleased to see an absolute unity in Ireland than I would, and it could be purchased tomorrow, at what does not seem to me a very big price. If the South and West of Ireland came forward tomorrow to Ulster and said – “Look here, we have to run our old island, and we have to run her together, and <b>we will give up all this everlasting teaching of hatred of England, and we will shake hands with you, and you and we together</b>, within the Empire, doing our best for ourselves and the United Kingdom, and for all His Majesty’s Dominion will join together”, I will undertake that we would accept the handshake."</blockquote>
He also <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/145955235023/protestantism-has-in-history-been-looked-upon-as">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Protestantism has in history been looked upon as the British occupation in Ireland."</blockquote>
<div>
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Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-7405783382897723032018-11-19T16:40:00.001+00:002018-11-19T16:56:33.298+00:00American independence was England's second civil war<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ340hkRJyZJ-OxzG5vBTzlKjBNCS6b-ugG_l6NSxwkQfORVPRWt8LAeqtpzQm2dIgCnAA88SHyyXQgqXFz1YUaC-XfWVu8cBrVnI720vsLyIEZ3eMAlPfhyXfb1Vqzvfe4ul-hAZwFnY/s1600/American+Independence+cartoon.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="641" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ340hkRJyZJ-OxzG5vBTzlKjBNCS6b-ugG_l6NSxwkQfORVPRWt8LAeqtpzQm2dIgCnAA88SHyyXQgqXFz1YUaC-XfWVu8cBrVnI720vsLyIEZ3eMAlPfhyXfb1Vqzvfe4ul-hAZwFnY/s320/American+Independence+cartoon.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poor old England endeavoring to reclaim his wicked american children. And therefore is England maimed & forc'd to go with a staff</td></tr>
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</b></blockquote>
<div>
<div>
Christopher Hitchens <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/103213286108/i-would-like-to-claim-the-american-revolution-as">wrote</a>:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I would like to claim the American Revolution as part of an English revolution all the same,<b> it was basically a revolution of highly educated English people against a German monarchy and its German surrogate forces in America.</b> The sad thing to me is that the German monarchy still remains in England."</blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>The American War of Independence was a civil war between Anglicans and Presbyterians. Kevin Whelan <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139350200468/the-american-war-of-independence-was-a-civil-war">wrote</a> in his essay on the United Irishmen, ‘Three Revolutions and a Failure’:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Presbyterians [in Ireland] were keenly aware of the great victory achieved by American dissenters in establishing the separation of church and state in the American institution. This was a tremendous victory for them over the Anglicans, and in one point of view, <b>the American War of Independence can be viewed as a civil war between Anglicans and Presbyterians."</b></blockquote>
</div>
Jeremy Black <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139350200468/the-american-war-of-independence-was-a-civil-war">said</a> on Radio 4, ‘The Prime Ministers - William Pitt the Younger’:<br />
<br />
"The American war of independence was not some distant war of choice <b>this was a civil war in the empire. A war between cousins and brothers which had gone completely pear shaped</b>, which had left the king threatening abdication, the political system in ruins and the country in an unprecedented debt."<br />
<br />
Niall Ferguson <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139350200468/the-american-war-of-independence-was-a-civil-war">wrote</a> in the FT:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I have written with irony about the way Americans misremember <b>the second British civil war</b>, which they prefer to call their war of independence."</blockquote>
Charles Cooke <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/79777684528/you-have-this-revolution-in-america-in-which-the">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"You have <b>this revolution in America in which the British fight the British and then they codify classical liberal values into a Constitution and it’s great</b>. That’s not how it goes down normally… Especially in the Middle East, what they want to replace their dictatorship with, if you look at the polling, is Sharia law."</blockquote>
Gabriella Swerling <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/135974817703/the-church-of-scotlands-governing-system-is">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Church of Scotland’s governing system is Presbyterian, whereas the Church of England is Anglican. Although unimaginable today, the rift between Anglicanism and Presbyterianism was once one of the most deadly in British history and fuelled civil war in the 1640s."</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-5058071187506507312018-11-19T15:36:00.000+00:002018-11-20T13:45:24.200+00:00Neither in Welsh nor in Irish did a word exist for ‘republic’<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj__-sxke2dQblvsloZUEoCVxMUOyv0Xjtfvmw6m0Sh5j48_8BVt5RiH0B4XWauIlkt6SU5VxMmuqQlcIHpfmn2w5-gfpe6BTXuNppA3qi6fOnTRMaZJRlChFB0MxPIDnTuTIZxyIMID2o/s1600/tumblr_oco5say86o1s186yoo1_640.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="596" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj__-sxke2dQblvsloZUEoCVxMUOyv0Xjtfvmw6m0Sh5j48_8BVt5RiH0B4XWauIlkt6SU5VxMmuqQlcIHpfmn2w5-gfpe6BTXuNppA3qi6fOnTRMaZJRlChFB0MxPIDnTuTIZxyIMID2o/s320/tumblr_oco5say86o1s186yoo1_640.jpg" width="270" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">‘David Lloyd George blessing James Craig’, by Shemus</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Kenneth O Morgan in the No 10 guest historian series, 'Prime Ministers and No. 10', <a href="https://history.blog.gov.uk/2012/05/01/number-10-under-lloyd-george-1916-1922/">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"He held a series of talks with the Sinn Fein leader, Eamon De Valera, at Downing Street in July 1921, at which key issues in Ireland’s proposed new relationship with the UK, were discussed. Lloyd George, who made a point of speaking in Welsh to his Secretary, Thomas Jones, in the presence of De Valera, successfully argued that <b>neither in Welsh nor in Irish did a word exist for ‘republic’."</b></blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Republic">Wikipedia</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"In English, the revolutionary state was to be known as the "Irish Republic". Two different Irish language titles were used: Poblacht na hÉireann and Saorstát Éireann, based on two alternative Irish translations of the word republic. The word "poblacht" was a new word, coined by the writers of the Easter Proclamation in 1916. Saorstát was a compound word, based on the Irish words saor ("free") and stát ("state"). Its literal translation was "free state". The term Poblacht na hÉireann is the one used in the Proclamation of 1916, but the Declaration of Independence and other documents adopted in 1919 used Saorstát Éireann. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Saorstát Éireann was adopted as the official Irish title of the Irish Free State when it was established at the end of the Irish War of Independence, although this Free State was not a republic but a form of constitutional monarchy within the British Empire. Since then, the word saorstát has fallen out of use as a translation of republic. After the Irish state had changed its name to "Ireland", in 1949 the description of the state was declared "Republic of Ireland", while in Irish it was translated as Poblacht na hÉireann. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In The Aftermath, Winston Churchill gives an account of the first meeting of Éamon de Valera with David Lloyd George on 14 July 1921, at which he was present. Lloyd George was a native speaker of Welsh and a noted Welsh linguist and as such was interested in the literal meaning of 'Saorstát'. De Valera replied that it meant 'Free State'. <b>Lloyd George asked '... what is your Irish word for Republic?' After some delay and no reply,</b> <b>Lloyd George commented: 'Must we not admit that the Celts never were Republicans and have no native word for such an idea?' </b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Lord Longford gives a different account in Peace by Ordeal: "The only doubt in de Valera's mind, as he explained to Lloyd George, arose from the current dispute among Gaelic purists whether the idea Republic was better conveyed by the broader ‘Saorstát’ or the more abstract ‘Poblacht’"."</blockquote>
Michael Collins <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/126852220858/michael-collins-we-would-have-repudiated-the">wrote</a> in Part 6 of his book, ‘<i>The Path to Freedom</i>’:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The British form of government was monarchical. In order to express clearly our <b>desire to depart from all British forms</b>, we declared a Republic. <b>We repudiated the British form of government, not because it was monarchical, but because it was British</b>. We would have repudiated the claim of a British Republic to rule over us as definitely as we repudiated the claim of the British monarchy. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our claim was to govern ourselves, and the expression of the form of government was an answer to the British lie that Ireland was a domestic question. It was a gesture to the world that there could be no confusion about. It was an emphasis of our separate nationhood and a declaration that our ultimate goal was and would continue to be complete independence."</blockquote>
Though Fintan O'Toole <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/101201676488/fintan-otoole-fotoole-ireland-had-a">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Perhaps due to the Civil War, which followed our declaration, the national movement was very divided at the beginning. It had a particularly tough birth and then <b>we basically adopted British institutions and never really went through the process of thinking for ourselves and about what way we wanted to govern ourselves. The political system [in Ireland] pre-dates the state…</b> What happened was we had different people, but we were operating under the same system. The machine is very out-dated and very anti-republican. The whole basis is we as a people, are not entitled to anything. We are told – you are a client for me, the middle man and I will get stuff for you in return for your vote."</blockquote>
William Steel Dickson <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/130130857513/the-difference-between-a-limited-monarchy-and-a">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The difference between a <b>limited monarchy</b> and a <b>well constituted republic</b> is rather <b>in name than reality</b>."</blockquote>
Interestingly, Garrett Fitzgerald <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/138284436863/arthur-griffiths-the-founder-of-sinn-fein-had">wrote</a> in '<i>Ireland in the World - Further Reflections</i>':<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Arthur Griffiths, the founder of Sinn Fein… Had always been a monarchist and had no time for an Irish Republic."</blockquote>
Eoghan Harris rightly <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/136668716878/the-ireland1916-relatives-now-occupy-a-position">pointed out</a> that the relatives of the 1916 rebels now occupy a position of privilege.<br />
<br />
In 2013 Vox.com writer Dylan Matthews <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/146893413903/is-the-british-monarchy-a-grotesque-relic-of-a">wrote</a> ‘Shut up, royal baby haters. Monarchy is awesome.’<br />
<br />
Stephen Fry <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/168356814868/absolute-clear-thinking-which-is-a-phrase-that-as">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Countries that have kings and queens which are rationally stupid, weird ideas, are empirically freer and more socially just than countries that don’t. Consider that. Look at the world now, look at social justice happiness freedom and equality in the world, and you’re thinking Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Benelux countries, and Britain - which does have very high levels of social justice - and Holland and these countries have kings and queens and they had constitutional monarchies. So that’s what I mean by being empirical. I’m not saying therefore you must have a king and queen in order to be free but all I’m saying is you having one doesn’t stop you from being freer from being opener. I mean these are very open societies Denmark and Sweden and annoying particularly open society."</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-15371488823196023562018-11-06T15:30:00.000+00:002019-11-08T18:04:15.578+00:00Britain and Ireland, archipelagic peoples<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1cdpuml0Hs1yMN7jIGCLM3YC-J4-u0mCDeNDL_R6kZ-DcpMtbpINxrdK4id4vvwX0ZkL3fQclbDvr1AjxhvS-hRVcO4Ehz5XpQN_6PlwZ9i9HKgtEvdlQDoMzA6LNqOCpR5osoKtqAmI/s640/blogger-image--1253317399.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1cdpuml0Hs1yMN7jIGCLM3YC-J4-u0mCDeNDL_R6kZ-DcpMtbpINxrdK4id4vvwX0ZkL3fQclbDvr1AjxhvS-hRVcO4Ehz5XpQN_6PlwZ9i9HKgtEvdlQDoMzA6LNqOCpR5osoKtqAmI/s400/blogger-image--1253317399.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The one characteristic that has marked Ireland and Britain from time immemorial is proximity and propinquity. During the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago, the British Isles were one island (see <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/138573426573/britain-and-ireland-were-once-one-island-via-the">here</a>), yet for many, to this day they remain one. </div>
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<a name='more'></a><b>A.T.Q. Stewart</b> in, <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139628833953/incredible-as-it-now-seems-hundreds-of-ordinary">‘The Narrow Ground - Aspects of Ulster, 1609-1969’</a></i>, <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139628833953/incredible-as-it-now-seems-hundreds-of-ordinary">wrote</a>:<br />
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"Incredible as it now seems, hundreds of ordinary people who had been deprived of their ministers<b> rowed across the North Channel to Scotland on Sunday afternoons to take communion, and returned the same day.</b> Livingstone records that on one occasion "over 500 persons from Co. Down crossed the sea to receive the sacrament at Stranraer."</blockquote>
Frank Frankfort Moore (1855–1931) was born to Presbyterian parents in Limerick. He was a brother-in-law of Bram Stoker and prolific writer. He was educated at Inst in Belfast and became a journalist with the Belfast News Letter. He wrote in ‘<i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/137146474023/theres-a-hidden-scotland-in-anyone-who-speaks-the">Truth About Ulster</a></i>’ observations about Ulster life, and <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/137146474023/theres-a-hidden-scotland-in-anyone-who-speaks-the">this remark</a> is particularly interesting:<br />
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<b>"We reckoned it no feat to cross that narrow channel</b>, and to watch the Galloway hills, already seen to be green by anyone looking out from Donaghadee or Ballywalter, become clearer and brighter with every hour’s sailing, until the beautiful undulations of the shores of Lough Ryan were on each side of us, and we could run our boat comfortably into a natural harbour with a sandy ground to drop our anchor into. And when we hailed one of the fishermen outside his own cottage, we found him and his people speaking exactly the same dialect as was spoken on the Irish coast which we had left a few hours before; for the Scotch of the County Down coast from Bangor to Portaferry, is the Scotch of the coast of Galloway.”</blockquote>
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Sean McDermott, one of the Rising’s executed leaders <a href="https://www.bookwitty.com/text/56f2d398acd0d05476f098f6">wrote</a>:</div>
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"The Irish patriotic spirit will die forever unless a blood sacrifice is made in the next few years. It will be necessary for some of us to offer ourselves as martyrs if nothing better can be done to preserve the national Irish spirit’."</blockquote>
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Another, Desmond Fitzgerald, who survived, <a href="https://www.bookwitty.com/text/56f2d398acd0d05476f098f6">wrote </a>that if things continued as they were, "it would be futile to talk of ourselves other than as inhabitants of that part of England that used to be called Ireland. In that state of mind I had decided that extreme action must be taken."</div>
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Seamus Heaney <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/137146474023/theres-a-hidden-scotland-in-anyone-who-speaks-the">said</a>: </div>
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"There’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor."</blockquote>
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<b>John Stuart Mill</b> <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139630166608/john-stuart-mill-the-mere-geographical-situation">wrote</a> in 1868, <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139630166608/john-stuart-mill-the-mere-geographical-situation">‘England and Ireland’</a></i>:</div>
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"The mere geographical situation of the two countries makes them far more fit to exist as one nation than as two. Not only are they more powerful for defence against a foreign enemy combined than separate, but, if separate, they would be a standing menace to one another... Ireland is marked out for union with England, if only by this, that nothing important can take place in the one without making its effects felt in the other."</blockquote>
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<b>Edmund Burke</b> was called the "ornament of Ireland" by the Irish Magazine in 1808. He called the United Irishmen <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/from-united-irishmen-to-unionists.html">"that unwise body"</a>. Edmund Burke, who opposed the ancien regime in America but supported it in Ireland, published his pamphlet <i>'Reflections on the Revolution in France'</i> on November 1 1790 (Thomas Paine replied with <i>'The Rights of Man'</i>, published on 13 March 1791). Edmund Burke <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/from-united-irishmen-to-unionists.html">wrote</a> in a November 17 1796 letter to John Keogh:<b></b><br />
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"I can not conceive that a man can be a genuine Englishman without being a true Irishman… I think the same sentiments ought to be reciprocal on the part of Ireland, and, if possible, with much stronger reason."</blockquote>
He wrote <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/from-united-irishmen-to-unionists.html">elsewhere</a>:<br />
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"The closest connection between Great Britain and Ireland is essential to the well-being, I had almost said to the very being of the two kingdoms... By separation Ireland would be the most completely undone country in the world, the most wretched, the most distracted and the most desolate part of the inhabitable globe."</blockquote>
Speaking in the House of Commons in May 1819 <b>Henry Grattan</b> <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/140382872593/henry-grattan-that-silken-bond-of-social-union">spoke</a> of <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/140382872593/henry-grattan-that-silken-bond-of-social-union">"that silken bond of social union"</a> between Britain and Ireland. He also <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/140384620818/i-never-used-the-word-foreign-country-as-applied">said</a> in February 1813:<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"></span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"I never used the word ‘foreign country’ as applied to England. I said 'another country,’ which I conceived to be a true description, as they are distinct countries, although united under one empire."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Roy Foster <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139900566013/there-was-a-sense-indeed-in-which-some-of-the">wrote</a> in <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139900566013/there-was-a-sense-indeed-in-which-some-of-the">‘Modern Ireland: 1600-1972’</a></i>:</span></div>
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"There was a sense, indeed, in which some of the province was “planted” already; <b>Scots had been spilling back and forth across the narrow straits since time immemorial, and Antrim and Down were densely Scottish in population.</b> In many ways the Antrim coast was closer to the Scottish mainland than to its own hinterland. From the time of James’s accession to this process was further formalised by the settlements privately instituted by Hugh Montgomery and James Hamilton. A more formal and centralised plan for hitherto Gaelic Ulster was to follow."</blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He also <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/138534348713/the-halting-and-contentious-nature-of#_=_">wrote</a>:</span></div>
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"The halting and contentious nature of government-planned colonisation adds weight to the argument that the "real” Ulster plantation was that carried out “invisibly” by the Scots, both before the initiatives of 1609-10 and later in the century. This would later provide <b>an argument used by the unionists: that Ulster’s different nature is immemorial and uncontrollable and stems from something more basic than English government policy. </b></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">None the less, what must be grasped from the early seventeenth century is the importance of<b> the plantation idea, with its emphasis on segregation and on native unreliability. These attitudes helped Ulster solidify into a different mould... </b></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">Intellectually, this insecurity was expressed in <b>the mentality of settler radicalism… </b></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">Ulster people believed they lived permanently on the edge of persecution."</span></blockquote>
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However, in <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/106888679948/vs-pritchett-among-the-irish">‘Midnight Oil’</a></i> V.S. Pritchett, who had been sent by the Christian Science Monitor to Ireland early in 1923 to write about the Irish civil war, <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/106888679948/vs-pritchett-among-the-irish">said</a>:<br />
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<b>"In this short trip I had easily rid myself of the common English idea that Ireland was a piece of England that for some reason or other would not settle down and had run to seed. I had heard at school of “the curse of Cromwell.” </b>I ardently identified Irish freedom with my own personal freedom which had been hard to come by. A revolutionary break? I was for it. Until you are free you do not know who you are. It was a basic belief of the Twenties, it permeated all young minds, and though we became puritanically drastic, gauche, and insensitive in our rebellions against everything we called Victorianism, we were elated."</blockquote>
Edward Carson said:<br />
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"They [the people of Northern Ireland] regard themselves as a branch of the British oak but off that branch and not only will the branch itself wither, but the tree will be left mutilated and weakened."</blockquote>
Like George Bernard Shaw, my forebears came from England. Like Shaw, I also grew up aware of an <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/120964968568/as-an-irishman-i-have-been-familiar-with-irish" style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">axiomatic antipathy</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> to England and Britain, and an Irishness defined by how one is “Not British”.</span><br />
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Fintan O'Toole <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/122665675768/fintan-otoole-our-species-began-its-mass">said</a>:</div>
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"It has always happened and it always will: our species began its mass movement out of Africa at least 60,000 years ago and large groups have been migrating ever since."</blockquote>
Since the 1950s about <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/121057220458/2013-ons-report-showing-irish-emigration-to">500,000 Irish people per decade</a> have emigrated from Ireland to Britain.<br />
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But in Ireland being Irish was about being not British. Call it Anglophobia. In many ways it was a condition which existed side by side with very close social and economic bonds between the two islands. The Irish represent Britain’s biggest ethnic group and vice-versa. Britain is Ireland’s biggest trading partner and Ireland is Britain’s fifth largest export market. But it was still a debilitating and regrettable state.<br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/being-of-planter-stock.html" style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m a Planter</a> in Pearse’s Ireland, carrying the planter’s burden. Yet there follows three points, as I made on <a href="http://eamonnmallie.com/2015/06/my-burden-of-history-by-brian-spencer/">EamonnMallie.com</a>:</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">One, as much as Ireland has been planted, the Irish have planted themselves around the world which has included the <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/irish-americans-looked-and-sounded-like.html" style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">oppression, aggression and dispossession of others</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Two, those who have left Ireland have quite happily put themselves under the British crown. Not just Britain, think the Commonwealth realms of Australia, New Zealand and Canada – all full of Irish. Even when they have gone to America, they are living in an imperialistic republic; that character trait of the British the Irish hate so irreducibly.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Three, the Irish-born and Irish-descended in Britain and the Commonwealth realms – who vastly outnumber those on the mother island – appear perfectly able to accommodate themselves to life under British culture or the direct result of British colonialism. The anti-Britishness is suddenly soluble.</span></div>
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George Orwell wrote in <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/124826438453/an-archipelagic-people-ctd">‘England your England’</a></i>:</div>
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"It is very rare to meet a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English and Scots or even English and Irish."</blockquote>
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And also <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/124826438453/an-archipelagic-people-ctd">said</a>:</div>
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"I have spoken all the while of ‘the nation’, ‘England’, ‘Britain’, as though forty-five million souls could somehow be treated as a unit… A Scotsman does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and south England loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European."</blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Patrick Kavanagh <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/106791217508/patrick-kavanagh-the-fathers-of-irish-wit-and">said</a>:</span></div>
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"It is not without point that the fathers of “Irish wit and humour” (more inverted commas) have nearly all been Protestants."</blockquote>
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Geographically Ireland is part of the British isles. Dan Hannan <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/105129347193/daniel-hannan-very-few-british-people-think-of">wrote</a> in 2011 in the Irish Independent:</div>
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"How easily our differences are forgotten. <b>Very few British people think of the Irish as properly foreign.</b> We are aware, of course, that there are two states in the British Isles, but we don’t place the Irish in the same mental category as we do the Italians, Finns or Poles. <b>It is perhaps this proximity of outlook and habit, of blood and speech, that once made our quarrels so venomous: civil wars have a peculiar nastiness. </b></blockquote>
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Politically and institutionally, the two states drifted apart after 1921. Ireland passed from autonomy to formal independence, breaking its links with the Crown and, in due course, withdrawing from the Commonwealth. Yet <b>this sundering of states never implied a sundering of peoples. </b></blockquote>
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While Eamon de Valera pursued his quixotic schemes to cut Eire’s economic ties with the United Kingdom, replace the English language with Gaelic and ally with any cause, however vile, provided it was sufficiently Anglophobic, the two islands continued their habits of intermixture and intermarriage. They followed the same football teams, watched the same television stations, shopped at the same chains."</blockquote>
Daniel Hannan <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/140389986928/daniel-hannan-ireland-is-a-separate-country-but">wrote</a> in February 2012 in the Telegraph that <b>Ireland "is a separate country but that it's not really foreign"</b>:<br />
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"Like most British people, I love Ireland. It’s a separate country, but it’s not really foreign. The Irish talk as we talk, dress as we dress, eat as we eat (and, tragically, drink as we drink). We watch the same television programmes, follow the same football teams, shop at the same chains. We share that half-humorous, half-cynical mode of conversation that sets us apart even from other Anglosphere nations. <b> In fact, Britain and Ireland are joined by pretty much everything except politics: history and geography, habit and outlook, commerce and settlement, blood and speech.</b> It’s significant that you usually hear Irish words in the context of some state office or government function: while our people have carried on their custom of intermarriage and intermixture, the two governments have remained stubbornly apart. </blockquote>
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Perhaps it was inevitable, at least at first. The early Irish leaders were, if not always anti-British, at least <b>determined to flaunt their separateness by distancing themselves from whatever Britain was doing</b> (though, during the Second World War,<b> many Irish citizens felt differently, and rushed to enlist in the British Army, winning 780 decorations including seven Victoria Crosses</b>). I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Irish politicians were initially attracted to the EU partly because the Brits disliked it – though it wasn’t long before, like all politicians, they also acquired a personal stake in the system. </blockquote>
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Yet, almost overnight, the old antagonisms have been wiped away. The euro crisis pushed the two kindred nations together, and the Queen’s visit sealed their alliance. At dinner in Dublin at the weekend, most of the people I spoke to started from the premise that the EU was a disaster, and that Britain and Ireland should forge a closer relationship within the Anglosphere. One questioner asked about joining sterling, another about forging a joint foreign policy. A man who described himself as a lifelong republican wondered whether, if Alex Salmond succeeded in securing a ‘devo max’ settlement, it might not become the basis of a confederation throughout the British Isles."</blockquote>
He also <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/140389829193/daniel-hannan-on-home-rule-and-the-1916-rebellion">wrote</a>:<br />
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<b>"Whenever I read the history of Britain’s relations with Ireland, I want to weep at the missed opportunities</b>. Almost any of the Liberal Home Rule Bills could have averted partition, and the horrors that followed. Even as late as 1916, the blood-dimmed tide might have been stopped up. <b>Had the government not responded with such unconscionable brutality, the Easter Rising might now be remembered as a slightly opéra bouffe episode</b>, backed only by a few fanatics: more Southern Irish Catholics died in British uniform on the first day of the Somme offensive than participated in it. I don’t think it’s fanciful to imagine Ireland having evolved into a self-governing Dominion in the way that, say, New Zealand did. </blockquote>
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‘Was it needless death after all?’ asked Yeats. Probably. But how last-century it all now seems. Ireland has become Britain’s closest ally in the EU. All changed, changed utterly."</blockquote>
Hannan <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/140390742018/a-federalised-uk-with-the-irish-republic">wrote</a> in June 2015:<br />
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"Now, to put this as gently as I can, I don’t think the SNP can rely on anything as dramatic as the First World War or the Easter Rising intervening in their favour. The equivalent of Home Rule nowadays is Devo Max: internal autonomy for Scotland, including in most fiscal matters. This would necessarily imply equivalent autonomy in other parts of the UK, and perhaps a formal move toward federation. Westminster MPs would be left with far fewer powers than now, mainly overseeing defence, foreign affairs, immigration policy and one or two taxation issues. Domestic issues would be dealt with at a more local level. Members of Parliament could become part-time, and be paid accordingly. </blockquote>
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You know what? We might even, as a goodwill gesture, ask the Irish Republic whether it would like to get involved again; it seems only polite after everything we’ve been through together. If SNP MPs wanted to applaud the return of Southern Irish representatives to a federal Parliament of the Isles, that’d be fine by me."</blockquote>
UKIP Member of Parliament Douglas Carswell <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/23/ireland-must-decouple-and-default">wrote</a> in the Guardian in 2010:<br />
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"There is scarcely a street in Britain in which family ties do not bind the fate of our two islands."</blockquote>
Mark Reckless, Hannan's best man and vice-versa, whose grandather, Henry McDevitt, was a Fianna Fáil TD for Donegal East in Dáil Éireann <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/140389338438/the-irish-in-britain-are-not-immigrants-i-dont">said</a> to the Irish Post:<br />
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"[The Irish in Britain are] not immigrants. I don’t consider myself to have an immigrant background. I don’t see my Irish mother as an immigrant any more than I see my Scottish wife as one."</blockquote>
Reckless <a href="https://tmblr.co/ZTxVUt22lsTKG">argued</a> in 2010 that ireland should rejoin the sterling and commissioned a Red C poll that <a href="http://markreckless.com/2010/12/05/over-a-third-of-irish-want-to-leave-euro-for-pound/">found</a> a third of Irish people agreed with such a path. <br />
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Professor Liam Kennedy <a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_2144577664"></span>wrote<span id="goog_2144577665"></span></a>:<br />
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"Far from being a colony, <b>Ireland was an integral part of the British polity and was overrepresented relative to its size of population at the Westminster parliament.</b> It was this status and its fractious but intimate relationships with British society which facilitated the outcome. The impressive organisational achievements of Sinn Fein in creating the structures of an alternative state in Ireland and the force of the I.R.A.’s argument must be acknowledged. But it was liberal opinion in Britain, disdaining to use the massive coercive force available to it, which was the key element in securing political independence for (most) Irish nationalists. Had Ireland been a colonial possession the nature of the fighting would have been very different, the ratio between guerrilla and security forces’ deaths would have been much higher, and the overall casualties immeasurably higher. Ironically, the decisive element in the drive for secession and the realisation of an Irish free state was not the flying column but British public opinion."</blockquote>
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">George Bernard shaw <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/108446362568/the-war-is-a-combing-demonstration-of-the-futility">wrote</a> in the New York Times in April 1916, </span><i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/108446362568/the-war-is-a-combing-demonstration-of-the-futility">‘Irish Nonsense About Ireland’</a>:</i></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"The war is a combing demonstration of the futility of the notion that the Irish and English people are natural enemies. <b>They are, on the contrary, natural allies</b>. The whole case for Home Rule stands on that truth, and the case against it, on the contrary, falsehood."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1966 Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote a polemic on 1916 for the New Left, <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/121756124173/conor-cruise-obrien-the-embers-of-easter">‘The Embers of Easter 1916-1966’</a></i>. He <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/121756124173/conor-cruise-obrien-the-embers-of-easter">wrote</a> that t</span>he Irish state is culturally part of Britain:</div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"The Irish state is culturally part of Britain, distinguished from the rest of the archipelago mainly by its practice of a puritanical form of the Roman Catholic religion and by marked deference to ecclesiastical authority."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">On February 6 1933 the Taoiseach Eamon de Valera officially opened the new high-powered RTÉ radio station located at Athlone in the centre of the country, he <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/102094769823/eamon-de-valera-speech-among-the-nations">said</a> in his speech, <i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/102094769823/eamon-de-valera-speech-among-the-nations">‘Among the Nations’</a></i>:</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Anglo-Irish literature, though far less characteristic of the nation than that produced in the Irish language, includes much that is of lasting worth. Ireland has produced in Dean Swift perhaps the greatest satirist in the English language; in Edmund Burke probably the greatest writer on politics; in William Carleton a novelist of the first rank; in Oliver Goldsmith a poet of rare merit. Henry Grattan was one of the most eloquent orators of his time – the golden age of oratory in the English language. Theobald Wolfe Tone has left us one of the most delightful autobiographies in literature. Several recent or still living Irish novelists and poets have produced work which is likely to stand the test of time. The Irish theatre movement has given us the finest school of acting of the present day, and some plays of high quality."</blockquote>
When the Irish Ambassador to Britain Dan Mulhall appeared before the House of Lords EU committee on October 27 2015, he <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/132073743118/archipelagic-peoples-ctd">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-top: 1em;">
"Whatever happens, we would want that <b>unique relationship</b> to continue and we would want <b>the common travel area, which predates our EU membership by decades</b>, whatever happens, we would want those provisions to be respected.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-top: 1em;">
So I would expect that, whatever happens, we would seek to continue to have the same relationship with Britain, economically and politically, and for Ireland’s people living in Britain and working here or coming here to work."</blockquote>
<div style="margin-top: 1em;">
He <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/132073743118/archipelagic-peoples-ctd">added</a>:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-top: 1em;">
<b>"Among the EU member states, we have probably the most intensive, multistranded relationship with you. </b>We are the only country with a land border with the UK and have extensive, mutually beneficial economic links, with large flows of trade, investment and tourism between our two countries. Naturally, we would be concerned about a UK exit from the EU and its potential implications for British-Irish relations, which have never been better than they are today, and for Northern Ireland."</blockquote>
<div style="margin-top: 1em;">
Terry Wogan <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/138472663538/im-an-effete-urban-irishman-i-was-an-avid-radio">said</a> in a 2007 interview with the Times:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Despite what people think Ireland is a bit like England. We felt that when we wanted to be in Ireland, places like Kenmare, West Cork, south Kerry and Clare, we would want to be in our garden at home."</blockquote>
He also said:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I’m an effete, urban Irishman. I was an avid radio listener as a boy, but it was the BBC, not RTÉ. I was a West Brit from the start. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Although born in Limerick, I’m a kind of child of the Pale. I think Gay was able to communicate better with the country people than I would be. I’m too metropolitan. I think I was born to succeed here, I have much more freedom than I had in Ireland."</blockquote>
Alex Massie, Scottish editor of the Spectator <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/87093972258/the-english-are-not-an-alien-people-but-then">wrote</a>:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The English are not an alien people. But then neither are the Scots. Nor the Irish either. They may do things differently in the different parts of this rainy archipelago but no part of it is truly “foreign” to any other. Whether we call it such or not it is – and will remain – a Commonwealth."</blockquote>
V.S. Pritchett <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/106893792523/like-many-english-people-i-loved-being-in-ireland">said</a> in 1985:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Like many English people I loved being in Ireland, and the British and the Irish privately got on enormously well together, and that was quite a revelation to me."</blockquote>
<div>
Kevin Myers <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/81173584605/visitors-to-this-archipelago-britain-and-ireland">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Visitors to this archipelago [Britain and Ireland] are baffled by the differences that are so passionately cherished: for what they usually perceive are similar hedgerows, Georgian architecture, endless rain, common law, wigged judges, unarmed police officers, right-hand drive, a mysteriously ubiquitous brown sauce, tea, fish and chips, and midnight drunks seeking to reduce complete strangers to smears of DNA."</blockquote>
John Oliver <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/115931630873/modern-britain">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"[The UK is] an archipelagic supergroup comprised of four variously willing members."</blockquote>
Andrew Sullivan <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/115931630873/modern-britain">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Britishness surpasses nationalism as a kind of supra-nationalism. It leaves space for the other; it is a rubric – largely defined as well by the Crown – that has more virtues than might immediately appear."</blockquote>
Gordon Brown <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/115931630873/modern-britain">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The UK already looks more like a constitutional partnership of equals in what is in essence a voluntary multinational association."</blockquote>
Madeleine Bunting <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/135011084413/being-irish-and-british-the-way-norwegians-and">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Repeatedly, Scottish yes voters insisted they would remain British. The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole agreed: Ireland was still British. The point made was that <b>when Norway split from Sweden in 1905, Scandinavia emerged as a powerful common identity.</b> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This definition of Britishness is about a shared history and language, and the common reference points of culture and ideas that provides. We are all part of the British Isles, and nothing is going to change that rich interdependency as we continue to fall in love, make babies, make friends, exchange ideas, trade, and visit each other. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As an Atlantic archipelago of islands on the edge of Europe, we have far more in common with each other than not, and do not necessarily need a political union to make that a reality. What we will need is new institutions of collaboration across the nations and regions of the isles."</blockquote>
Read my post <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/116389738823/most-of-irelands-leading-writers-and-artists-are">here</a> where I remarked that many of Ireland's leading writers have been protestant, establishment and even unionist.</div>
</div>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-36147566296628670972018-10-11T18:00:00.001+01:002019-11-08T17:48:55.300+00:00Ed Moloney - The IRA set out in Spring and early Summer of 1971 to exploit circumstances and to force the British into a premature and ill-prepared internment swoop<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSZ-zeLy5hFbwxhuaIxmzF1_mBK28IAlYDtfR-Ebdopt8kPzwURFg-4k9Aj31fADtgJse9YdecMy7TZCudfRZ22kT4D5bcYFWHVQNiwdfbCIAbWs7Gdz7uWCbIZFFQXiyT_RxikuvTo5s/s1600/Brian+Faulkner+cartoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="571" data-original-width="375" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSZ-zeLy5hFbwxhuaIxmzF1_mBK28IAlYDtfR-Ebdopt8kPzwURFg-4k9Aj31fADtgJse9YdecMy7TZCudfRZ22kT4D5bcYFWHVQNiwdfbCIAbWs7Gdz7uWCbIZFFQXiyT_RxikuvTo5s/s320/Brian+Faulkner+cartoon.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
<br />
Operation Demetrius involved the location, arrest and internment of 342 people in three days. These arrests sparked protests and riots in several Catholic areas across Northern Ireland. The worst of the rioting broke out in Ballymurphy in west Belfast. Only hours into Operation Demetrius British paratroopers went into Ballymurphy to arrest suspected IRA volunteers. On their entry into the estate the soldiers opened fire, claiming later that they had come under attack from IRA snipers. Six civilians were shot and killed that day.<br />
<br />
Fintan O'Toole <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2016/07/america-land-of-planters.html">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"This belief encouraged the IRA republicans to adopt in the 1970s a classic terrorist position that violence would produce a reaction which would display the state in its true, fascistic colors. Instead of trying to alleviate the suffering of ordinary Catholics, <b>the IRA was intent on destroying rational reform and provoking repression...</b> A defense of the IRA’s bombing campaign written in 1976 and published in its own newspaper was entirely explicit about this."</blockquote>
Ed Moloney <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/178951713418/in-early-1971-the-provisional-ira-was-growing">wrote </a>in 2015:<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"In early 1971, the Provisional IRA was growing, but only slowly and hardly at all outside of Belfast. What military success it did enjoy was down to the fact that its ranks were being filled by young men and women with no family record of involvement in republicanism and therefore no police file. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is easily forgotten now, but the IRA of the 1950’s and 1960’s was largely shunned by Northern Ireland’s Catholics, primarily because to do so risked the unwelcome and hostile attention of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and could lead to problems at work, like being sacked. The IRA was small and its membership well known to the Special Branch. As long as it stayed like that it posed no real threat to the state. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But the Loyalist-led, attempted pogrom of August 1969 in West and North Belfast in response to the civil rights marches had attracted a new generation of Catholic recruits, driven by the imperative to defend their areas rather than ideology and who were largely unknown to the RUC. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The old, pre-1969 IRA could be neutralised in a couple of well-directed internment swoops, as had happened in almost every decade since the foundation of the state; but not the new Provisional IRA, whose make-up was largely a blank sheet of paper to the RUC. </b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This was a great advantage to the IRA but some of its leaders in Belfast knew this was a likely temporary advantage. Eventually the Special Branch, augmented now by British military intelligence, would get their act together and the post-1969 IRA would become known and therefore vulnerable at some point in the not too distant future. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The Belfast leadership knew that internment would come – but it calculated that the sooner this happened, the better. A plan was laid to force the British into a premature and ill-prepared strike, carried out before the IRA became exposed; but its success was entirely dependent upon the IRA’s opponents reacting in a predictably intemperate fashion. </b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In 1971, Northern Ireland was still governed from Stormont by a Unionist-dominated parliament and government. Led by Brian Faulkner, the Unionist cabinet was under intense pressure from its own right-wing and from a rabble-rousing Ian Paisley. IRA violence and concessions to the civil rights campaign had unnerved the Unionist grassroots, demands to resist Nationalist encroachment were growing and Faulkner’s political survival was questionable. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
While the British government in London had final responsibility for Northern Ireland it was desperate to avoid a closer entanglement. Direct Rule from London was the only alternative to Stormont, but while it was easy to begin, it would be devilishly difficult to end. It was therefore an option to avoid, if possible. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The British government’s priority then was to prop up Faulkner, even if that meant bending to his right-wing and embracing security measures that might be distasteful and controversial. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Fully aware of all these pressure points and knowing that the circumstances could not be more propitious,<b> the IRA in Belfast set out in the Spring and early Summer of 1971 to exploit them to the full and force the British into a premature and ill-prepared internment swoop. </b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>And so, spurred on by a strategically gifted, 23-year-old commander of the Second Belfast Battalion called Gerry Adams, the IRA began a destructive economic bombing campaign in Belfast that soon had Unionists screaming for internment. </b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The high point of the campaign, if such it can be called, was a provocative series of bombs along the route of the Twelfth Orange parade that exploded the night before. Belfast Orangemen marching to the field at Finaghy that July 12th morning, had to walk past devastated store fronts, the twisted remnants of car bombs, and wrecked buildings, all testament to this new threat to their supremacy. </b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And so, internment without trial was introduced within weeks. Old RUC Special Branch records were scoured for lists of suspects and, as Adams and his allies predicted, the new Provisional IRA escaped largely unscathed when the troops raided homes in Belfast and elsewhere. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Meanwhile the one-sided nature of the internment operation – only Republicans and Nationalists were targeted – combined with the reality that largely innocent or no longer involved people had been targeted, served to deepen Catholic anger and in protest a wide spectrum of that community withdrew almost wholesale from public life. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is now a generally accepted truth that the internment operation of August 1971 was a major turning point in the Troubles. Not only did the communal anger in Catholic districts boost recruitment to the IRA in Belfast and in rural areas where previously it barely existed – and arguably laid the foundations for the subsequent political strength of Sinn Fein – it also marked a point at which the Nationalist population as a whole signaled that there could never be a return to the Northern Ireland of old. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But all of this was only made possible because the British gave into the demand from Unionists for a response to match the IRA’s violence. Or, to put it another way, the IRA had laid a trap and the Unionists and British had walked right into it."</blockquote>
He <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/178951767778/two-months-before-on-the-advice-and-urging-of-the">wrote </a>in 2018:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Two months before, on the advice and urging of the Stormont prime minister, Brian Faulkner, the British Army had rounded up hundreds of alleged IRA suspects from Nationalist areas of the North with a view to interning them. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Faulkner had assured the British that internment had worked when he was Home Affairs minister in 1956 and it would work again. Internment had killed off the IRA’s Border campaign and it would do the same to the new Provisionals. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He was wrong. The British Army had moved against the IRA before intelligence on the new Provisional organisation was fit for purpose – a strategem credited by the late Brendan Hughes to Gerry Adams in confidential interviews for ‘A Secret History of the IRA’. <b>Adams had advocated an intensification of bombings in the early months of 1971, thereby causing a clamor for action from angry Unionists and an intemperate response from the British. </b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And the operation was so one-sided, completely ignoring Loyalist violence, that the effect was to alienate almost the entire Catholic population, leading to resignations from public office and withdrawals from public bodies. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The SDLP, Britain’s sole hope of Nationalist moderation, was swept along by the wave of anger and vowed not to engage the British until internment was ended. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Worst of all the violence had not abated, as was evident daily, especially in Belfast where shootings, bombings, killings and attacks on the military and police had escalated alarmingly. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The purpose of the meeting was to agree on the cabinet’s attitude towards Faulkner, who ministers were painfully aware was the only person standing between the Stormont government and the perilous, uncharted waters of direct rule."</blockquote>
The Economist <a href="https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/188881813363/the-inquest-in-gibraltar-into-the-killing-of-three">wrote</a> in 1988:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The inquest in Gibraltar into the killing of three IRA terrorists by British soldiers is expected to help: the soldiers’ clinical accounts of the shootings will recycle nicely among Northern Catholics as anti-British propaganda. Foment enough violence, and the British may be pushed into reintroducing internment. So the terrorists hope; but British ministers remember, just as well as the IRA, that when internment was last used, between 1971 and 1975, the rate of violence trebled. Loyalist guns and bombs responded to Republican terror tactics, and sometimes went beyond them."</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-57958940822776067752018-08-22T15:13:00.001+01:002018-08-22T15:13:25.646+01:00George Bernard Shaw wrote - Am I not a protestant to the very narrow of my bones?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
George Bernard Shaw <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/124089670833/am-i-not-a-protestant-to-the-very-narrow-of-my">wrote</a>, "Am I not a protestant to the very narrow of my bones?" And he also said: "My own family and antecedents are ultra-Protestant; and I am a bit to the left of Protestantism myself."<br />
<br />
George Bernard Shaw <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/124089448538/ulster-children-still-repeat-the-derisive">wrote</a> elsewhere:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Ulster children still repeat the derisive doggerel, "Sleether slaughter, holy wather”; and the adults are determined as ever that ‘the Protestant boys shall carry the drum’. As a Protestant myself (and a little to spare), I am highly susceptible to the spirit these war cries express."</blockquote>
<br />
<br />Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-4585104533731512322018-07-31T14:56:00.001+01:002018-07-31T14:56:33.343+01:00Sinn Fein abstained from the vote on the Good Friday Agreement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRigDQmGdlfuZS3X_FWsn1_XIiOUYooczMmG0QD1Th_FiIrmwmAS4w1rKhHzW9UW1yvV9HIA64g4gnUAp6VV5nQetns59eSwBWx68lEkSq6H5n5LZzG56lYNE8JMVSsJOeQy7ESH_KGJc/s1600/gerald+scarfe+gerry+adams+and+ian+paisley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRigDQmGdlfuZS3X_FWsn1_XIiOUYooczMmG0QD1Th_FiIrmwmAS4w1rKhHzW9UW1yvV9HIA64g4gnUAp6VV5nQetns59eSwBWx68lEkSq6H5n5LZzG56lYNE8JMVSsJOeQy7ESH_KGJc/s1600/gerald+scarfe+gerry+adams+and+ian+paisley.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
David Trimble <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/129231548723/david-trimble-sinn-fein-didnt-want-stormont">said</a> to Alex Kane:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Sinn Fein were heavily opposed to a Northern Ireland Assembly. In December 1997 it was proving almost impossible to get them to even agree to put an Assembly on the agenda. The SDLP wanted it on the agenda but they weren’t prepared to face down Sinn Fein at that stage."</blockquote>
<br />
<a name='more'></a>He <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/129231548723/david-trimble-sinn-fein-didnt-want-stormont">continued</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“It became clear very early on in the referendum campaign that there was going to be a massive vote among nationalists in favour of the agreement. And when the Shinners realised that, they did the quickest U-turn you have ever seen. And I’m quite sure that during the negotiations and during that last night, even on the day on which the agreement was voted through, they abstained. And the reason they abstained was their hostility to Stormont. They didn’t want Stormont: but it was what they got and what the people voted for and they proceeded to make the best of that situation."</blockquote>
<br />
Sean McDougall from the Institute of Contemporary British History <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/87052957613/garret-fitzgerald-says-that-without-the-provision">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Garret FitzGerald says that ‘without the provision which postponed the start of decommissioning, the IRA would not have allowed the Sinn Fein leadership to sign the Agreement’ (LRB, 2 September). In fact, Sinn Fein did not sign the Agreement – nobody did, as it was accepted on a vote. Moreover, in that vote Sinn Fein abstained, establishing for itself a unique position among those who subsequently campaigned for a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum."</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-24588695210558227432018-03-27T09:17:00.001+01:002018-03-27T09:17:51.983+01:00The Scots Irish<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Ireland's Taoiseach Leo Varadkar <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/171860327833/ulster-scots-protestants-are-as-much-a-part-of-the">said</a> on St Patrick's Day 2018:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Ulster-Scots Protestants are as much a part of the history of the Irish in America as the Irish Catholics are. In the same way, they are an integral, respected and valued part of the history - and the future - of the island of Ireland."</blockquote>
John Hume <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/172096659228/the-unionist-people-have-a-long-and-strong">wrote</a> in 1989:<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Unionist people have a long and strong tradition in Ireland. They have a rich Protestant heritage and a great pride in their tradition. They have pride in their service to the Crown, pride in their contribution to the United States, in their spirit of industry and achievement, in their work ethic and in their faith. Their special metttle is believed by many of them to be expressed in victories in battles long ago, battles regularly commemorated. But that pride is expressed in an archaic supremacism and in a desperate fear that they could not survive in accommodation with other traditions. They must live apart. Living apart may have been acceptable as long as their hold on power was underpinned by successive British goverments: but that is no longer the case."</blockquote>
Edward Carson <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/unionists-and-nationalists-write-to-us.html?m=1">wrote</a> in a letter to Woodrow Wilson in 1918:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Nationalist Party have based their claim to American sympathy on the historic appeal addressed to Irishmen by the British colonists who fought for independence in America a hundred and fifty years ago. By no Irishmen was that appeal received with a more lively sympathy than by the Protestants of Ulster, the ancestors of those for whom we speak to-day—a fact that was not surprising in view of the circumstance that more than one-sixth part of the entire colonial population in America at the time of the Declaration of Independence consisted of emigrants from Ulster. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Ulstermen of to-day, forming as they do the chief industrial community in Ireland, are as devoted adherents to the cause of democratic freedom as were their forefathers in the eighteenth century. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But the experience of a century of social and economic progress under the legislative Union with Great Britain has convinced them that under no other system of government could more complete liberty be enjoyed by the Irish people."</blockquote>
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-56646783045138016062018-03-05T11:15:00.002+00:002018-03-05T11:15:44.219+00:00Religious apartheid in 1940s southern Ireland<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
As has been a recent theme on this blog, I've been a little alarmed at the growing narrative that only protestants and unionists are bigoted, something Sinn Fein and republicans appear to be promoting.<br />
<br />
As Jenny McCartney <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/171551158938/jenny-mccartney-it-is-pure-dishonesty-however">wrote</a> in 2004 following the complete exit of protestants from a catholic estate in Belfast:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Mr Eoin O'Broin - steeped so long in Sinn Fein’s myth that Northern Ireland’s Catholics must always be oppressed and Protestants the oppressors - simply cannot bear to admit the truth about the intense anti-Protestant bigotry in many working-class Catholic areas... It is pure dishonesty, however, for anyone to pretend that the sectarianism flows in only one direction."</blockquote>
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Douglas Hyde was an Irish language activist and Ireland's first President, and he was a Protestant. When he died in 1949 the rules of the Roman Catholic Church were such that the members of the Irish government meant they could not attend the service, as this would involve entering a Protestant building. Instead they waited outside and did not join into the ceremonies until the funeral procession had left the Cathedral on its way to the graveyard.<br />
<br />
Patsy McGarry <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/171552215748/douglas-hydes-funeral-patsy-mcgarry-wrote-in-the">wrote</a> about the infamous event in the Irish Times in 1999:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Douglas Hyde’s funeral service provided one of the sharpest illustrations of the cultural exclusivity which marked this island for so much of the 20th century. It took place at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and was attended by just two Catholics, the French ambassador and poet Austin Clarke. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Clarke remembered the occasion caustically in his poem Burial of an Irish President: </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"… . at the last bench/Two Catholics, the French/Ambassador and I, kneltdown./The Vergers waited. Outside/ The hush of Dublin town./Professors of cap and gown,/ Costello, his Cabinet,/In Government cars, hiding/Around a corner, ready/Tall hat in hand, dreading/ `Our Father’ in English. Better/ Not hear that `which’ for `who’/and risk eternal doom …" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was then a reserved sin in most Catholic dioceses, pardonable only by a bishop, for a Catholic to attend an Anglican/ Protestant service. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Fianna Fail was represented at Dr Hyde’s funeral by Mr Erskine Childers, a member of the Church of Ireland. The party leader, Mr de Valera, attended the burial at Portahard, Co Roscommon, with the president, Sean T. O Ceallaigh. Both stayed in the graveyard "right to the end of the service”, The Irish Times noted. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The same religious apartheid operated at Hyde’s inauguration in 1938. The ceremony itself was preceded by two religious services: one at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, attended by the then Taoiseach, Mr de Valera, his government, the Opposition, the diplomatic corps, and other State representatives, and the other at St Patrick’s Cathedral attended by Dr Hyde and some fellow Church of Ireland members. All later attended the same reception in Dublin Castle, which was hailed as a great advance."</blockquote>
In <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/171551613233/both-sir-edward-carson-the-then-unionist-leader">contrast</a> both Sir Edward Carson, the then unionist leader, and James Craig, his immediate successor, attended John Redmond’s requiem mass in Westminster Cathedral in March 1918. Likewise John Miller Andrews, Craig’s eventual successor as leader and prime minister in 1940, was present at the requiem mass for Joe Devlin in 1934 and that for TJ Campbell in 1946.<br />
Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-6446379386080543492018-02-22T14:56:00.000+00:002020-02-29T07:46:06.659+00:00Yes James Craig said Northern Ireland was a "Protestant State", but why do we forget de Valera said that Ireland was "a Catholic nation"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNr9vFruRlT_clDYrO2dQu2i3Vfcs2L32_z4trRgA24b2JuTFQTMJhtyyTe708cCv-30YYD0B4a2NYsT_Sy2e3v-dw90WFVFVHGLxq9rqkBZLOYAiLx99QzpHuSfY2OIMFGhuVAWAyF-k/s1600/de+Valera+and+James+Craig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="347" data-original-width="482" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNr9vFruRlT_clDYrO2dQu2i3Vfcs2L32_z4trRgA24b2JuTFQTMJhtyyTe708cCv-30YYD0B4a2NYsT_Sy2e3v-dw90WFVFVHGLxq9rqkBZLOYAiLx99QzpHuSfY2OIMFGhuVAWAyF-k/s320/de+Valera+and+James+Craig.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
John Draper <a href="https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/a-protestant-parliament-for-a-protestant-people/">wrote</a> in History Ireland:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Did the Unionist leader James Craig really describe Stormont as a ‘Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’, as quoted by Tony Canavan in ‘A papist painting for a Protestant parliament’ (HI 16.1, Jan./Feb. 2008)? This is at variance with the version given by Craig’s biographer, Patrick Buckland (James Craig, Gill and Macmillan, 1980). Citing Northern Ireland House of Commons records, Buckland says that Craig was making a comparison between the north and the south. Craig is recorded as saying that southerners had boasted and ‘. . . still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State.’ Note that in this version there is no reference to the northern state and parliament being ‘for a Protestant people’. Critics may draw that inference, but that does not mean that the prime minister uttered those words. <a name='more'></a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Mr Canavan conjoins his version of that quotation with another comment he says Craig made about his membership of the Orange Order: ‘I am an Orangeman first and a Protestant and a member of parliament afterwards’. There may be a slip of the pen (or typo) here, but, as it stands, this too conflicts with Buckland’s account. Again he quotes Craig from parliamentary records: ‘I am an Orangeman first, and a politician and Member of this Parliament afterwards’ (my italics). Buckland’s highly critical biography generously says that Craig was no bigot and never endorsed the Order’s more extreme sentiments. His controversial remarks about the Protestant nature of the northern state, says his biographer, were made ‘in the heat of debate’ and can be explained as a rhetorical response to events in the south. Nevertheless, Buckland says that these remarks reflect the influence of the Order and the extent to which Craig totally identified with the Protestant/unionist position, and used the power of the state to advance it."</blockquote>
History Ireland <a href="https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/a-protestant-parliament-for-a-protestant-people/">noted</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"We are grateful to Graham Walker for pointing out (correctly) that James Craig did not utter his ‘Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’ remarks in the context of the painting controversy and to John Draper for pointing out that he never uttered them at all! Like Humphrey Bogart’s ‘Play it again Sam!’ or Jack Lynch’s ‘standing idly by’, it is an interesting contrast between what we think or assume people said and what’s actually on the record."</blockquote>
Steven King, then an Ulster Unionist Party special adviser, <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/not-fair-to-orangemen-1.210221">wrote</a> in the Irish Times in July 1999:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Yes, James Craig did boast that Northern Ireland was <b>"a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State"</b> - not "a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people" as Haddick-Flynn misquotes - but it was in direct response to de Valera's pretension that Ireland was "a Catholic nation." </blockquote>
<br />
Patricia Craig, editor of the 'Oxford Book of Ireland', <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review-rights-of-the-soil-and-sky-1102454.html">wrote</a> in 1999:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>"The Irish nationalist perception of bigotry as a Protestant phenomenon has been widely accepted by the world at large</b>, though the Catholic Church was never behindhand when it came to imposing a sectarian outlook... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
No one remembers Edward Carson's advice to the Ulster Unionist Council, after Partition, to make it very clear that "the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from the Protestant majority". <b>Yet everyone remembers Sir James Craig's comment in 1932, defining the North as a Protestant state and a Protestant people</b> -"</blockquote>
And most importantly, she notes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>"but not that it was a riposte to de Valera's boasts about Southern Ireland being a Catholic state for a Catholic people."</b></blockquote>
She continued:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Competing bigotries, you might say, shaped the two halves of Ireland in their earliest political incarnations. It's true that the Ulster Unionist Council did not exactly act on Carson's advice, that one-party government was never a recipe for democracy, and that egregious injustices were enacted. But <b>ordinary decent Unionists and Orangemen (no less than ordinary decent nationalists) had no wish to live in anything other than amity with their fellow citizens, and many achieved this desirably undramatic state of affairs."</b></blockquote>
Writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, George Boyce <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/100740980718/george-boyce-the-james-craig-statement-in-1934">said </a>of James Craig (Lord Craigavon):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>"[James Craig’s] statement in 1934 that he stood for ‘a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state’ must be seen in the context of de Valera’s claim that ‘we are a Catholic nation’ (Buckland, Factory of Grievances, 72), and indeed Craig’s whole career can be regarded as reactive, fashioned in opposition to the claims of Irish nationalism. </b>Yet Craig was on good terms with individual nationalists, and he was punctilious in his dealings with the Roman Catholic hierarchy. But he did little to meet Catholic complaints about discrimination, and by the time of his death there were few Catholics in administrative posts, and fewer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary than there had been in 1922."</blockquote>
Jeffrey Dudgeon had a letter <a href="https://queerarchive.net/download/Northern%20Ireland%20political%20issues/Protestant%20Parliament%20for%20a%20Protestant%20People%20-%20News%20Letter%20letter%205%20December%202011.doc">published</a> in News Letter, 5 December 2011, <i>'Setting Craig's words in context of the time'</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Dear Editor, </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Nick Garbutt in his article 'A courageous brand of unionism' (1 December) contrasts Peter Robinson's conference speech with the famous remark of Sir James Craig, "All I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is unfair to Craig not to put his somewhat contradictory, and unfortunate phrasing in the context of the time. Here are the full set of remarks he made in a Stormont debate of 24 April 1934 on the rights of the minority, and how Catholics had fared since partition. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Craig denied their conditions had deteriorated, ending his speech, "Since we took up office we have tried to be absolutely fair towards all the citizens of Northern Ireland. Actually, on an Orange platform, I, myself, laid down the principle, to which I still adhere, that I was Prime Minister not of one section of the community but of all, and that as far as I possibly could I was going to see that fair play was meted out to all classes and creeds without any favour whatever on my part." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>A nationalist MP interjected "What about your Protestant Parliament?", to which Sir James replied, "The hon. Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State.</b> It would be rather interesting for historians of the future to compare a Catholic State launched in the South with a Protestant State launched in the North and to see which gets on the better and prospers the more. It is most interesting for me at the moment to watch how they are progressing. I am doing my best always to top the bill and to be ahead of the South." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Another contextual aspect is <b>Eamon de Valera’s statement in 1932</b> welcoming the Papal Legate, "It is most fitting that the Irish Government should not only assist in every way the great and solemn function of the Eucharistic Congress here in Ireland, but also should take their due part and place in its proceedings", and <b>his later remarks: "Since the coming of St Patrick 1500 years ago Ireland has been a Christian and a Catholic nation. She remains a Catholic nation."</b></blockquote>
Ian Adamson <a href="http://www.ianadamson.net/2010/11/23/criagavon-ulsterman-part-2/">wrote </a>in 2010:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"De Valera’s basic Catholic Nationalism was highlighted at a Dublin election meeting in February 1932, when he said:”The majority of the people of Ireland are Catholic and we believe in Catholic principles. And as the majority are Catholics it is right and natural that the principles to be applied by us will be principles consistent with Catholicity.” In October 1933 his deputy premier, Sean T O’Kelly declared that “the Free State Government was inspired in its every administrative action by Catholic principles and doctrine”. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Unfortunately Craigavon allowed himself to be affected by these statements when he should have ignored them and he said in parliament in April 1934: “In the South, they boast of a Catholic state. They still boast of southern Ireland being a Catholic state. All I boast is that we are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state”. And this is the statement which is remembered most today, as the recent rancorous debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly demonstrated. It was also particularly unfortunate that Craigavon, who was first and foremost an Orangeman, failed to obtain from the lesser men who were subordinate to him that conciliatory and understanding attitude towards the new Catholic minority in Northern Ireland which was natural to him. If he had done so, he would have better served the Protestants of Ulster by leaving them a State fortified with a lasting spirit of tolerance and social justice. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
De Valera’s basic Catholic nationalism was further highlighted by a radio broadcast on St Patrick’s Day 1935 when he said “since the coming of St Patrick, Ireland has been a Christian and a Catholic nation, she remains a Catholic nation.” This statement demonstrates, according to Conor Cruise O’Brien the peculiar nature of Irish Nationalism, as it is actually felt, not as it is rhetorically expressed. The nation is felt to be the Gaelic nation, Catholic in religion. Protestants are welcome to join this nation. If they do, they may or may not retain their religious profession, but they become as it were, Catholic by nationality. In 1937, de Valera was thus able to produce a new constitution, which was in essence a documentation of contemporary Roman Catholic social theory."</blockquote>
The Ulster-Scots Agency <a href="http://www.ulster-scots.com/uploads/USCNCovenantVol2.pdf">noted</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"This extract is frequently cited to Craig disadvantage. The passage was immediately preceded by Craig asking Northern Ireland's critics to 'remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic state'. Craig was specifically referring to Eamon de Valera's assertion that Ireland was a 'Catholic nation'. De Valera is rarely quoted to his disadvantage."</blockquote>
Craig's <a href="https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/opinion/we-must-push-back-those-who-repeatedly-misrepresent-northern-ireland-contrived-sectarian-statelet-338980">full statement</a> uttered in a 1934 Stormont debate on the rights of the Catholic minority:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Since we took up office we have tried to be absolutely fair towards all the citizens of Northern Ireland. Actually, on an Orange platform, I, myself, laid down the principle, to which I still adhere, that I was prime minister not of one section of the community but of all, and that as far as I possibly could I was going to see that fair play was meted out to all classes and creeds without any favour whatever on my part." </blockquote>
Another politician said: "What about your Protestant Parliament?" Craig <a href="https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/opinion/we-must-push-back-those-who-repeatedly-misrepresent-northern-ireland-contrived-sectarian-statelet-338980">replied</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The hon. Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State."</blockquote>
Taoiseach Éamon de Valera <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/saint-patricks-day-we-need-to-end.html">said</a> in 1951:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I am an Irishman second: I am a Catholic first and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong."</blockquote>
<br />Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-51809691257386173182018-02-22T13:47:00.000+00:002018-03-02T15:19:10.718+00:00Having to speak to republicans like they're a child<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7B84jNWm9NsF1sAoiIsFCjT888PlvoqZxTBeYEtjQtSRcMOwYJktafR3z10dn7kvhhy1qkELQ5eUKzch18KdxCdGBtJ3qdfrdjHSyer4qOU5Cn3aRXz1mnoCFF1E27XKaovdzi8PuTpU/s1600/The+Ulster+Question+-+David+Low.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="482" data-original-width="419" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7B84jNWm9NsF1sAoiIsFCjT888PlvoqZxTBeYEtjQtSRcMOwYJktafR3z10dn7kvhhy1qkELQ5eUKzch18KdxCdGBtJ3qdfrdjHSyer4qOU5Cn3aRXz1mnoCFF1E27XKaovdzi8PuTpU/s320/The+Ulster+Question+-+David+Low.jpg" width="276" /></a></div>
<br />
James Stephens <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/115778165823/james-stephens-on-unionism-1916">said</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It is too generally conceived among Nationalists that the attitude of Ulster towards Ireland is rooted in ignorance and bigotry."</blockquote>
John Hume said that being pro-Union does not make you a bigot. He <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/the-abstentionism-of-catholics-from.html">wrote </a>in his famous 1964 letters for the Irish Times:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Another positive step towards easing community tensions and towards removing what bigotry exists among Catholics would be to recognize that the Protestant tradition in the North is as strong and as legitimate as our own. Such recognition is our first step towards better relations. We must be prepared to accept this and to realize that the fact that a man wishes Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom does not necessarily make him a bigot or a discriminator. Which leads me to the constitutional question."</blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>It is quite extraordinary that such a simple concept has to be explained. Pete Shirlow had to say the very same thing in 2017. He <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/167900965563/my-forebears-were-anti-sectarian-but-they-were">said </a>to the annual Sinn Fein Ard Fheis:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"My forebears were anti-sectarian, but they were pro-union. The idea that being pro-union is inherently sectarian is not only wrong it is inherently sectarian."</blockquote>
Cardinal O'Fiaich famously <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/171163240408/the-protestant-people-are-90-per-cent-religious">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Protestant people are 90 per cent religious bigots and the Catholic population are 90 per cent political bigots."</blockquote>
Ruth Dudley Edwards <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/trimble-s-oslo-speech-unmasks-the-nationalist-bigots-1.227752">wrote </a>in 1998:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I've often discussed bigotry with Ulster Protestants and I've never met one that insisted he was free of it. Almost all Ulster Catholics, however, even if they dislike Protestants intensely, will tell you bigotry is a uniquely Protestant condition. Every week the pages of An Phoblacht/ Republican News spew out hatred of Protestants but cloak it in impeccable non-sectarian rhetoric. Republicans do not hate Protestants, you understand, they hate the bigotry of Orange triumphalists. They do not hate David Trimble. They hate his bigotry."</blockquote>
Regular moderate nationalists still and always have considered Northern Ireland a "contrivance" and a colony. But following the first World War the whole of Europe was divided up into new nation states according to ethnic grouping.Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3436843264927951165.post-32327296899329067932018-01-27T17:18:00.003+00:002018-01-27T17:18:55.879+00:00Sinn Fein is "the Irish for John Bull"<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrnoLv02gFB7CcX0WeDj4XOmsKDkP8jWS3vah6o__Z32NvwtFXdn2NV3R4C-FERPcewgHpdtmzHULj9Pma5H_QgmYc3lD2dcqghsTMbHcVSpHT-C6g7xHcwOhgSUYkdrn-N0j4MSFVtes/s1600/Morten+Morland%252C+Sinn+Fein.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="359" data-original-width="482" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrnoLv02gFB7CcX0WeDj4XOmsKDkP8jWS3vah6o__Z32NvwtFXdn2NV3R4C-FERPcewgHpdtmzHULj9Pma5H_QgmYc3lD2dcqghsTMbHcVSpHT-C6g7xHcwOhgSUYkdrn-N0j4MSFVtes/s320/Morten+Morland%252C+Sinn+Fein.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cartoon by Morten Morland (2003), via the British Cartoon Archive</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Presently in Northern Ireland Sinn Fein has worked to make itself synonymous with progress and positive. They have done this to the detriment of Unionism and the wider protestant culture, both of which are perceived as cold and narrow minded.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Sinn Fein and the wider Catholic population are associated with Ireland and virtue; while unionism and wider Protestant culture are associated with Britain, wrongdoing and intolerance.<br />
<br />
We're nearly at the point that if you oppose Sinn Fein you are a bigot.<br />
<br />
I simply don't agree with this. In fact there's a mirror relationship between the two radical Irish fringes - The Irish unionist and loyalist (Not an Inch Carsonism and Paisleyism on one side, and on the other the Irish republican armed separatist, Sinn Fein. Opposite and equals in their fixed narrowness. Alex Kane <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/120342033008/george-bernard-shaw-the-ulster-variety-of-sinn">said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The most ironic thing about Sinn Fein is that they are the worst possible advertisement for Irish unity. Indeed, they are the exact mirror image of that element of unionism/loyalism that is the worst possible advertisement for the Union."</blockquote>
George Bernard Shaw <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/120348166278/when-people-ask-me-what-sinn-fein-means-i-reply">wrote</a> about Sinn Fein in 1917:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"When people ask me what Sinn Fein means, I reply that it is the Irish for John Bull."</blockquote>
He also <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/120342752423/i-shall-therefore-begin-by-demonstrating-to-the">wrote</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I shall therefore begin by demonstrating to the entire satisfaction of Ulster that the Sinn Feiners are idiots. I shall then demonstrate to the satisfaction of Sinn Fein that the Ulster Impossibilists are idiots.</blockquote>
Further he wrote:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Ulster talk and the Sinn Fein talk are both mostly baby talk."</blockquote>
I <a href="http://eamonnmallie.com/2015/10/travellers-are-fine-but-not-outside-my-house-is-that-how-you-think-by-brian-spencer/">wrote</a> the following on <a href="http://eamonnmallie.com/2015/10/travellers-are-fine-but-not-outside-my-house-is-that-how-you-think-by-brian-spencer/">EamonnMallie.com</a>:<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"An <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/poll-majority-against-taking-in-fleeing-migrants-1.2217564">Ipsos MORI poll</a> found that that while 61% of Fine Gael voters favour resettling migrants from the sub-Sahara, <b>70% of Sinn Féin voters are opposed to welcoming fleeing migrants. </b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It would be useful to remember this next time there’s a racism scandal coming from a loyalist estate. As Kevin Myers <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/tagged/ANC">said</a>: </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“While Shinner leaders speak fluent ANC, their followers think like embattled Voortrekkers.”</blockquote>
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A <a href="http://t.co/AUSHoEGo7Z">report</a> on the Republic of Ireland found that migrants to Ireland face discrimination and assault. As 2016 fast approaches and people talk of the “ideals” of the men of 1916 we should look at the writing on the movement people by one of the main men, James Connolly. The Marxist wrote in early 1916 a three part series entitled, ‘<a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/104086297423/james-connolly-the-slackers-i-ii-and-iii">Slackers</a>‘. </blockquote>
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In <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/104086297423/james-connolly-the-slackers-i-ii-and-iii">Part I</a>, published February 5 1916, Ireland’s venerated martyr Connolly <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/104086297423/james-connolly-the-slackers-i-ii-and-iii">called</a> migrants to Ireland “<a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/104086297423/james-connolly-the-slackers-i-ii-and-iii">hordes</a>” and a “<a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/104086297423/james-connolly-the-slackers-i-ii-and-iii">swarm of locusts</a>“, “<a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/104086297423/james-connolly-the-slackers-i-ii-and-iii">boys of the bull-dog breed</a>” and “<a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/104086297423/james-connolly-the-slackers-i-ii-and-iii">Brit-Huns</a>”."</blockquote>
Pete Shirlow <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1agBwNHy1g">said </a>in his address to the 2017 Sinn Fein Ard Fheis:<br />
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"We do studies at the University of Liverpool on the electorate. The majority of protestants support equal marriage. If you look at that data, and I presented that data to the British-Irish parliamentary group, a unionist MLA went "nonsense! nonsense! nonsense! nonsense! That is not true! The protestant people do not support equal marriage." A Sinn Fein person turned round to me like Victor Meldrew and went, "I don't believe it." Why would you not believe that? Because things are changing. That same data tells us something very important. <b>Protestants under the age of 40 are pro-Union, they are more pro-choice, more equal marriage, more mixed marriage, and more supportive of integrated schools than Sinn Fein voters.</b> If that comes as a surprise to you, you must ask the question, "why?" </blockquote>
He also <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/167900965563/my-forebears-were-anti-sectarian-but-they-were">said</a>:<br />
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"The idea that being pro-union is inherently sectarian is not only wrong it is inherently sectarian."</blockquote>
John Hume <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-northern-catholic-i-john-hume-in.html">said</a> the same thing in 1964:<br />
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"We must be prepared to accept this and to realize that the fact that a man wishes Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom does not necessarily make him a bigot or a discriminator."</blockquote>
Conor Cruise O'Brien <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/130263019258/conor-cruise-obrien-southern-catholics">wrote</a> in his autobiography, ‘<i><a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/130263019258/conor-cruise-obrien-southern-catholics">Memoir: My Life and Themes</a></i>’:<br />
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"I didn’t in fact think that the unionists in Northern Ireland were any more bigoted than nationalists. But because for historical reasons unionists’ bigotry tended to be uninhibitedly expressed, while nationalist bigotry tended to be covered over with layers of pseudo-ecumenical rhetoric, outsiders - British, American and other - tended to find nationalists nicer and more "reasonable” than unionists, a perception which has been greatly to the advantage of the former."</blockquote>
He <a href="http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/71660132300/i-feel-that-unionists-are-essentially-besieged">wrote</a> in the Irish Times in 1996:<br />
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"I feel that unionists are essentially besieged. They’re under a pan-nationalist siege, of which the main stimulus is being supplied by Sinn Fein. So I don’t see it as my job to get out and annoy unionists. I think they’re been annoyed quite enough."</blockquote>
Also, to say that a Catholic has a better sense of fairness and justice is simply wrong. Look at at the conservatism and even intolerance of Catholics throughout history and presently in other countries. It is easy to be for equality when you're a Catholic and in the minority, but examples of Catholic majoritarianism has shown that Catholic does not mean fairness and equality.Brian John Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17143967182793063989noreply@blogger.com0