It has been a strange week watching the folk in Britain make the amazing discovery that they live in a rogue state.
The Secretary of State for the confected Six County statelet admitted at the dispatch box that the British Government were knowingly proposing to break international law with the new Internal Market Bill.
For the uninitiated, this legislation will tear up an agreement that the Brits agreed and signed with the European Union less than a year ago.
Is this bill goes through the British Parliament then it brings back the prospect of a hard border on this island.
The Northern Ireland Protocol in the Withdrawal Agreement is there to prevent such a problematic frontier.
One of the definitions of a rogue state is a polity which flouts international law.
Dear reader, for the avoidance of doubt, your humble correspondent has known this about the Brits for the past half-century.
Moreover, the culture I was reared in had it as more an article faith than just a working assumption.
I recall my Mayo grandmother telling me of Tan atrocities in the summer of 1971 when I was 13.
My mother and I had travelled the from Larne to Dublin via on a Doig’s tour bus.
She had reckoned that it would be better to go on a Monday as it would be quieter going through the North.
That was Monday, August 9th, 1971.
Bad planning Mammy!
By the time, the coach with the tricolour on the side arrived in Béal Feirste the Brit scoop up had already happened and the place was in flames.
The 13-year-old me was excited as I looked out of the window and I was a bit tickled that the adults were on the bus were inexplicably terrified.
In 1971 locking up people without due process had a long history on this island.
Here is an excellent book on the subject from that period.
Mammy and me got to Dublin in one piece and boarded the rickety CIE train for Westport at Seán Heuston station.
When my grandfather Joe was arriving at that railway a century ago it was called Kingsbridge by the Brits.
I prefer the current name.
During the martial law period, he was carrying IRA dispatches for GHQ.
Utilising his job as a guard on the trains, he carried out his duties without incident.
With his quiet, diffident manner about him, he did all of this under the noses of his enemy.
During that vacation in 1971, I learned everything that had happened from the disaster of the Kilmeena Ambush to the victory over the Tans only weeks later at Carrowkennedy.
History remembered is a weapon.
In the centenary year of the Rising, I got my hands on this fine piece of work.
Ransacking my memory of that summer in 1971, I was amazed at how accurate my grandmother’s recollection had been half a century after the fact.
History forgotten is a betrayal.
The events in the Six Counties that week in 1971 awoke many in the 26 counties from a Partition induced slumber.
Of course, there were many people still alive who could recall the days of their youth when British atrocities were happening on THEIR streets.
My grandmother Julia was one of them.
Her brother Michael had been in Frongoch, and her husband was on the Brigade staff.
She knew that they were facing a state that was criminal to its core.
Somehow, she had got it into her Mayo head that I was getting a Land of Hope and Glory education in a West of Scotland mining village.
Jaysus…
However, she needn’t have worried as my paternal grandfather who reared me had been born in Fair Caledonia when anti-Irish racism not just mainstream but obligatory.
His parents, both from County Carlow, were in a country and didn’t really want them as anything other than despised Gastarbeiters.
However, I was the beneficiary of two grandparents, one determinedly ensconced in the Wesht and another who had experienced life I the most culturally oppressed part of the Irish diaspora.
Between them, I had no problem believing that the Brits were never not at it.
Of the men scooped up in the early days of Internment in 1971, 14 of them were used as Guinea pigs in a cruel experiment.
Apart from abusing human rights, the Brits also mistreat their language.
According to the British Army, these innocent Irishmen were not tortured but merely subjected to “deep interrogation”.
Of course, the world did not know about these human rights abuses at the time.
However, my grandmother was full of memories about what the Tans did to any of our lads who they captured.
Rogue states torture people as a matter of course.
For the British people awakening from their cosy slumber about their country, then they could do a lot worse than read this fine piece of work.
The year after that summer in Mayo what I had learned at my grandmother’s hedge school was rammed home on the street of Derry.
Another indication that you’re dealing with a rogue state is when it kills its own citizens with impunity.
Therefore, I’m happy to see some British folk finally come to the fantastic realisation that the state which created the first trans-global imperium just might be the bad guys after all.
Just like in days of the Rising, we have our gallant allies in Europe.
The only intelligent response from the people on this island to the duplicitous machinations of our rogue neighbour is a 32 County solution.
That was true when I was a child, and it is true now.
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Phil, your hatred of all things British is well documented and in certain respects justified.
Through the centuries we have been involved in various things in many countries that we would all regret and would agree that an apology would be merited.
Having said that we were also involved in and instigated many things in many countries that were welcome and continue to influence modern affluence and benefit. I have had the pleasure of speaking to a few people that were the beneficiaries of British influence in India and Africa that paint a picture vastly different from the anti British propaganda.
That aside my argument with your continued UK bashing is specifically that the UK is not the only country that has dabbled in Empire and your continued use of the term ‘our gallant allies in Europe’ is starting to grate on me.
Your Expose on the misdeeds of our Foreign exploits seems to me to overlook the misdeeds of your new bosses in the EU.
Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scandinavia……. perhaps an expose of your gallant allies would be interesting to your readers and don’t even start me on Germany and their misdemeanours!
I understand your hatred but perhaps a level playing field would supply perspective.
God bless
“…the UK is not the only country that has dabbled in Empire…”
Dabbled?
Oh dear.
Your inaugural comment here wins you a prize for historical illiteracy.
Dabbled! That is your answer.
A turn of phrase is your defence?
Perhaps an expose of your masters, sorry allies would be appropriate.
God Bless.
Centuries of deliberate genocidal plunder.
Your historical illiteracy proves Shashi Tharoor’s point about colonial amnesia rather well.
Watch and learn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-VK2sDZCQw
Phil, my historical literacy is actually quite good.
You seem to be missing the point.
How is your historical literacy concerning your Gallant EU allies?
If you were historically literate you would not have submitted this:
Phil, your hatred of all things British is well documented and in certain respects justified.
Through the centuries we have been involved in various things in many countries that we would all regret and would agree that an apology would be merited.
Having said that we were also involved in and instigated many things in many countries that were welcome and continue to influence modern affluence and benefit. I have had the pleasure of speaking to a few people that were the beneficiaries of British influence in India and Africa that paint a picture vastly different from the anti British propaganda.
That aside my argument with your continued UK bashing is specifically that the UK is not the only country that has dabbled in Empire and your continued use of the term ‘our gallant allies in Europe’ is starting to grate on me.
Your Expose on the misdeeds of our Foreign exploits seems to me to overlook the misdeeds of your new bosses in the EU.
Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scandinavia……. perhaps an expose of your gallant allies would be interesting to your readers and don’t even start me on Germany and their misdemeanours!
I understand your hatred but perhaps a level playing field would supply perspective.
God bless
The term “our gallant allies in Europe” has historic resonance here in Ireland.
That reference probably passed you by that because you’re historically illiterate.
Most Brits are when it comes to their ex-colonies.
I don’t have the patience or time to be your tutor.
However, you definitely need one.
Watch Shashi Tharoor in those clips.
It will be a start for you.
A shameful history of genocidal “dabbling”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1giYXrofZYo&t=284s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-VK2sDZCQw
Phil, there is some irony in rightly advancing a free 32 County state, whilst at the same time lambasting a British government, advancing their own sovereignty against the encroaching and suffocating bureaucracy of Brussels.
Cheers.
As far as I can see the only ones who are insisting on a hard border within Ireland is the EU
It is Brexit that has created this not the EU, no one in Eire of modicum discernment is of the opinion that the EU would like, or would like to create a hard border in EIRE.
The propaganda from “La parfade Albion” may be having an adverse affect upon you comrade.
HH
Really? Then you need to look more closely.
The hard border became a necessity with the Brexit vote.
I was stunned to hear a Tory minister state on a radio interview only days after the vote that, “no one had actually thought of that.”
My old mother, born in Donegal and who recently passed away, was 89 at the time of the vote. The first thing she said on hearing the result of the vote was, “Well that’s the border back.”
And no one among these Eton and Oxbridge educated elitists thought about it!!!
The little Englanders who voted for Brexit didn’t think about it. If they had it still wouldn’t have mattered. They would neither have cared nor understood the significance of it. It was all about taking control of their borders. Negotiating their own trade deals. Freeing themselves from European rules. Waving the Union flag and ruling the seas – with their one aircraft carrier that they don’t actually have any planes for.
Less than a year after signing an international treaty they’ve announced publicly that they intend to renege on it. No shame. No embarrassment. They’re just going to do it.
Well good luck with negotiating your next agreement. Who’s going to trust a word you say when a signed agreement means nothing to you. No honour. No integrity. No honesty.
Ah well, what was it Napoleon said: “perfidious Albion”. True then and true now.
Was it Napoleon?
I thought it may have been Marquis de Ximenes 1726–1817!
I think it is of French origin “La parfade Albion”
Definitely describing a rouge state, not to be trusted.
HH