The Duke of Windsor shook hands with Hitler.
So I don’t see what all the fuss is about re Adams.
The Monarchy has always been pragmatic both for its own and the establishment’s interests.
Seamus Tracey refused to swear an oath to Her Majesty to become a silk. Her Majesty is now pleased that he is one of her Judges, having sworn fealty.
Nothing is ever as it seems……
An attempt by the British State to get the peasants to forgive and forget
I see the Irish media is now speculating that Martin McGuinness will join Gerry Adams when he meets Prince Charles in Galway at a private encounter some time tomorrow.
How many, I wonder, of our esteemed television and newspaper correspondents will remind their viewers and readers that in August 1979, when Charles’ ‘Uncle Dickie’ was sent to his maker by an IRA bomb, that the man who gave the final order to kill him, the then Chief of Staff of the IRA, was none other than Martin McGuinness.
How much, dear reader, would you pay to be a fly on the wall at that gathering in Galway tomorrow?
Trevor Ringland’s essay on Special Branch, in the Newsletter on 14th May is worth a read.
Trevor, solicitor, British Lion and sometime unionist , while making valid points about the standard of BBC journalism and the use of victims on its programmes, is caught up in the idea that , like good sporting types , the British Establishment ought to have gone after the ‘cads”.
The inescapable fact is that the state , in pursuit of peace in the City of London and elsewhere in the Shires, perverted not only the stream of justice in our society but also society itself.
His naive view that there should have been “a very active investigation” into such chaps is risible to anyone who has the least grasp of the last forty years.
The murder of “Jock” Davison, while hardly the saddest thing to happen this year, exposes again the double think in this society.
Despite being a terrorist, a member of northern command and no doubt a multiple murderer the Belfast Telegraph described him as “a former IRA ‘OC’ for Belfast and the BBC “the prominent republican”. You would have to look hard to find him described as a terrorist or a murderer.
Imagine a headline “Joe Bloggs, the well known rapist and child molester died today”.
Imagine the howls of outrage from the Sisters, Liberals and others, wanting to know why Joe had not been ‘brought to justice’.
The point is that Northern Ireland’s “free press” is in thrall to the Northern Ireland Office. Giving the Shinners a kicking via Mairia Cahill is good for the establishment , particularly in Dublin but don’t mention the war.
There once was a fellow called Rex
who’d a diminutive organ of sex.
When had up for exposure, he replied with composure
De minimis non curat lex
It is reported that Chief Supt. Nigel Grimshaw told the AGM of the Superintendents’ Association of NI that “we need to see the full implementation of strategies and policies which deal with those issues which continue to haunt us, parades , identities and in particular the past.”
He and his bosses would do the community and the past a great service by opening up the secret Special Branch files and confessing as to what is in them.
The concept that the identity or safety of paramilitary touts trumps the prosecution of those who should stand trial for the murder of innocent civilians is deeply wrong.
Of course the state could order the opening of the files or some Special Branch man, luxuriating in his Patton pension, topped up with further state work, could salve his conscience by telling the truth.
Come to think of it, there must be a few Branch men still left in the current PSNI high command, if Marty is right.
All lawyers, beware!
I can’t now remember the precise date but it would have been some time after the Good Friday deal had been struck when the phone rang in my Belfast home cum office and Michael Gove was at the other end.
A few years later Gove would become an MP and then a member of the set that congregated around Tory party leader David Cameron, but back then he was a leader writer for The Times newspaper, charged with writing editorials about issues of topical concern.
Michael Gove – an idiot with power
The matter he wanted to talk to me about was the peace process in Northern Ireland and specifically Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader and principal republican architect of the peace strategy. What I didn’t know at the time was that Gove was not looking for background for a Times‘ editorial but material for, ‘The Price of…
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…….His wonders to perform….
After Hymn singing in Ballymena and poor manners exhibited by Robinson in East Belfast, I wonder why God deserted the DUP in South Antrum?
I suspect that the answer is that reasonably liberal unionists wanted the same and a man who showed some personal interest in the constituency.
Onwards now with Danny, not an intellectual giant but a decent man. Willie will have more time for pastoring and singing.
Onwards too with the final push for justice for my parents and for compensation for hundreds of families affected by Libyan Semtex.
Meanwhile in Frazerworld, not a sign of a document from the ROI or an inquest, just the same old bigotry.
What footballing boy, in the 1960s, before George Best appeared, did not want to be Greaves in his local game?
Greaves did not play in the World Cup final. His non selection was controversial . More so when Hurst scored three.
One is reminded of Ecclesiastes Chapter 9 verse 11.
Bernard Montgomery , regarded as the greatest British General of the Second World War [among all the Irish generals of that war] was not the first pick for the Eighth Army . General Gott was first choice, even of Brooke, a fellow Mick. Gott was killed in an air crash. The rest is history.
One is remind also of the Elegy.
“Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood”
To paraphrase. Anyone could be Lord Chief Justice. It just depends on time and chance.
In South Antrim , voters have only two serious candidates for Westminster. The Reverend Doctor William McCrea, politician, blow in from Mid Ulster, pastor, singer and invisible man.
The other is Daniel de Burgh Kinahan, Big House Unionist.
McCrea, in my personal experience , has done nothing for victims and precious little for anyone else.
Empey got within 1183 votes of him the last time.
Kinahan appears to have been a busy MLA. He voted for same sex marriage though his response to me on abortion was vague and evasive.
It’s dispiriting that in the twenty first century , choices are still as limited as fifty years ago.
So, with not a pro-union left wing candidate in contention, it’s Castle Upton for me, rather than Clan McCrea.
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