I have deliberately held back this blog until my anger subsided to the point that I could focus on what was important and relevant.
I had originally written a blog in response to the killings in Antrim.
Then two good young men lay dead.
Then came Craigavon.
Now three good men are dead who should be alive.
The people who planned and executed these operations clearly have a high degree of technical proficiency.
The security forces on both sides of the border are, as these words blink to life, hunting for them
I know where they reside.
I know where they are hiding.
They are inside a delusional bubble.
They know they are correct. The rest of us on this island are wrong, but they are right, damn right.
Damn them.
On this site there is a piece I wrote for Magill in 2002 after the first decommissioning event.
It is entitled “Ricochets of history.”
In article I detailed my own family’s history in the IRA during the War of Independence.
I remain hugely proud of the struggle that my family took part in.
Like most people in nationalist Ireland I consider cogadh na saoirse to have been just and worthwhile, but that was 1920.
Context is everything. Absolutely everything.
Only those in the hermetically sealed belief system of the nutter cannot see that.
Imperial Britain held my father’s Mayo as part of their first colony.
It was an Ireland where the people starved outside the walls of the big house.
For the most part the native people, where they could, resisted by peaceful means.
It is the county of Ireland that gave a new word to the English language.
The “Boycott”.
However there was, morally and justifiably, a place in the world for physical resistance.
Only the colonialist or the lackey could see it otherwise.
These days representatives, both civic and military, of the British government, attend the commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising.
It is redolent of the cenotaph of Remembrance Sunday.
The ex-colonial power now pays homage to the insurgents of 1916 at the building where Padraig Pearse read out the Proclamation.
One of the classic processes of anti-separatist insurgency is the “asset to liability shift”.
The rationale is that the territory has been seized by the outside power for some benefit-perhaps raw materials, access to a port etc.
The insurgents, by their asymmetrical warfare, then turn that imperial asset into a colonial money pit and, perhaps, an embarrassment on the world stage.
Only a member of the Flat Earth Society (Marxist Leninist wing) could see Northern Ireland as anything other than a grotesque fiscal liability to the British state.
Among the mandarins of Whitehall the easiest way to get them gnashing their teeth, I am reliably informed by a fellow journalist in London, is to mention the problematic province to them.
Quite frankly the people who run the British state destest the place.
Asset?
Northern Ireland?
Yeah me neither.
Subsequently, there is nothing that these tiny delusional groups could do that would make Northern Ireland any more of a liability to Britain than it already is.
Finally the idea that nationalists in the North are in 2009 in any way “oppressed” by the local state is laughable.
This is 2009 not 1969.
